Deckchair
Theatre
Written by
Ingle Knight
Directed by
Chris Bendall
Designed by Fiona Bruce
Featuring
Steve Turner, Geoff Kelso, Ben D’Addario, Igor Sas, Christie Sistrunk and James
Hagen
PICA
Until
August 5
 |
| John Curtin |
I hope the
teaching of Australian history has improved since my schooldays. Back then,
after laborious lists of the early explorers and governors and hoary tales of
squatters, shearers and swaggies (all the better for making sense of Waltzing
Matilda, I suppose), the narrative all but collapsed.
Apart from
the disgraceful marginalisation of Aboriginal history and the lives of women,
perhaps the greatest tragedy was the paucity of our Twentieth Century
political history. The mighty battles over free trade, the franchise and
industrial relations, conscription, the banks and the communist party were a
passing blur, and the great figures who fought them, Deakin, Barton, Fisher and
Hughes, Theodore and Lang, Lyons, Chifley, Evatt and even the never-ending
Menzies were derelict sketches without personality or insight.
With so
little to spark our imagination, it’s hardly surprising that political
biographies other than those of current or recent figures are so rare in print, on
film or on stage. All the more reason to welcome Ingle Knight’s examination of
the pivotal years in the career of perhaps our greatest, certainly our most
intriguing, leader, John Curtin.
