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This study analyses the role of the family as a metaphorical, thematic and structural device within the field of recent Australian drama. The family, as presented by Australian dramatists, is fragmented and incoherent. The impossibility to forge coherence is linked directly to the circumstances of contemporary Australia’s genesis as a colonial and postcolonial society, and the subsequent encouragement of a monolithic national culture through the conscious and unconscious suppression of alternative voices and histories. As a site of hierarchical power, the family supplies a convenient trope for the justification of particular paradigms of cultural dominance. At the same time, however, family is also a potent source of identity, and therefore becomes an important site of cultural recuperation as well. Consequently, it is a central assumption of this thesis that the familial context, as deployed by Australian dramatists, is both ambivalent and politically freighted. Performance plays a critical role in ‘liberating’ occluded and pathologised subjectivities from ideological exile and challenging embedded power structures. By its very nature, performance resists conscription into the totalising project that aims to validate the dominant culture’s hegemonic position. By embodying and reclaiming experience, all performance becomes political to some extent, and therefore intrinsically subversive; the resultant enactment of alternative histories not only serves to interrogate the hegemonic culture, but also empowers those ‘communities of silence’ rendered powerless under its discursive weight. The notion of family carries with it numerous attendant images including those of ‘home’ and ‘the child’. The fragmentary nature of the Australian dramatic family both complicates, and is complicated by, notions of home. So too do issues of familial succession and national capital surface to problematise concepts of childhood and establish it as a site of deep social and cultural anxiety. While this study is primarily concerned with the broader topic of family in recent Australian drama, it is the recurring figure of the child as the focus of the family, along with connected concepts of home and nation – family’s discursive parallel – that ultimately provides this study’s unifying thrust. This study covers the approximate period from 1975 to 2005, from the commencement of what is often termed the ‘New Wave’ of Australian drama, when smaller local companies and emerging dramatists began to gain an artistic credibility and popularity that would influence the conception and reception of subsequent drama. Some twenty-three works are considered in depth in this study, spread across four specific foci that contextualise the family thematic: ‘big house’ drama, which encompasses plays by Alex Buzo, Louis Nowra, Stephen Sewell and Beatrix Christian; Aboriginal theatre, which includes works by Robert Merritt, Jack Davis, Jane Harrison, Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, and Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell; the drama of abject and appropriated youth, which examines selected works by Matt Cameron, Alison Lyssa, Michael Gow and Nick Enright; and the theatre of the displaced, which focuses on plays by Tes Lyssiotis, Ben Ellis and Christine Evans, as well as ‘autobiographical’ stories written and performed by Dina Panozzo and Anna Yen and ‘verbatim’ pieces dramatised by the activist theatre companies Sidetrack and version 1.0. The works considered in this study therefore represent a range of performance styles, forms and methodologies, in keeping with the overall dramatic tenor of the period.

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