AustLit

Contemporary drama loosely based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel.

The Times gives the following description:

Keith Mitchell [sic] and, more subdued, Alan White were enthralling as the two brothers trying, as the cattle died on them, to keep their remote ranch solvent–the one restless and sex-starved in his awareness of the big cities, the other gentler and wise in the way of books.

Kain, suspecting his brother of bedding with the black servant girl, but more likely from jealousy, killed him in a fevered frenzy, only to learn that a police officer was the father of the girl's child, put to death as a half-cast [sic] at a tribal ritual.

The rest, in almost poetic terms at times, depicted Kain torn by remorse and his love for Inala, who helped run the store at the nearest settlement with her main eye on marriage, a part played with a perceptive range of feeling by Audine Leith. She would not let go when Kain left her at the altar, a delightful scene of a mission chapel, with little black children singing hymns; not even when he told her that he had killed his brother, a crime accepted by the authorities as an accident.

Kain's great fear was that he might harm her, a problem left unresolved as he walked into a dust storm, with Inala's voice calling his name in the background.'

Source:

'Drama of the Outback', The Times, 18 April 1967, p.6.