LOUIS NOWRA

The Playwright Born to Shock

 Louis Nowra
1950-
Leading Australian Playwright
Has written film scripts,
telemovies, radio scripts, novels
(Young Adult novels too), non-
fiction, memoirs
Has won the Prix Italia and the
Australia/Canada Award for his
works
Has composed opera libretti,
translated and adapted non-
English language works, and
Life
■ Born in Melbourne, Nowra lives in Kings Cross with his wife,
Mandy Sayer, a writer, and Coco, their chihuahua who has
appeared in magazines, newspapers and on television
■ He spent his childhood in the shadow of a dominating, emotionally
abusive mother
■ When aged 11, Nowra suffered a serious head injury that required
him to learn again how to read and write
■ He overcame this setback sufficiently to attend La Trobe
University in Bundoa, where he studied English
■ However, he never completed a degree and for several years
worked at a variety of odd jobs
A Bizarre Childhood

■ On what was to be the date of his birthday, a few years before he

was born, Louis’ mother shot dead her own father. He always
wondered why she was especially moody on his special day; when
he turned 21 in 1970, she told him about it.
■ By then both his grandmothers were insane, and institutionalised in
an asylum.
 Recent Australian Drama
■ The last two-and-a-half decades saw the quest for cultural definition, characterised
by a strong reaction against the received values of the "parent" culture
■ There is the creation, through a complex set of factors, of a theatrical mainstream
confirmed by the repertoire of the establishment theatre and by publication; and
there is the reaction, once that mainstream has been identified, of those
antiestablishment interests which would subvert it as it once subverted the colonial
power.
■ Observers still occasionally wonder whether the strength and momentum that
marked Australian theatre in the early 1970s has petered out, as so many promising
movements did before; but what has been evident in the last fifteen years has been a
series of quiet but significant little revolutions.
 Recent Australian Drama
■ It took a depressingly long time before the Australian theatre could
lay claim to a tradition in local drama that was lively, distinctive, and
lasting. (imported plays were appreciated – the cultural cringe)
■ Two important elements coincided in the late 1960s to create the
revolution that began at the alternative seasons at the Jane Street
Theatre in Sydney and, especially, at the La Mama Theatre and the
Pram Factory in Melbourne, which was quickly dubbed the "New
Wave" of Australian theatre.
■ One was the opportunity for writers to work closely with a
performance company, which the playwrights of previous decades
had mostly lacked.
■ The other new factor was the very noisy arrival of the ocker.
The ‘New Wave’ Theatre – preoccupation with
locating the elusive national identity
■ The ocker (the urban counterpart of the bushman-hero) rode in on
the back of the breakthroughs in censorship that occurred in
Australia and elsewhere in the late 1960s.
■ He was brash, crude, and a violator of all decorums, big in his talk
and his drinking, and --- by his own graphic but questionable
account --- an accomplished sexual performer as well.
■ He was mostly young and middle-class, and he was, always, self-
advertisingly male.
■ His particular attraction for the 'New Wave' theatre lay not only in
his uncouthness and comic vigour, but in his complexity as a
speaker (satirical).
 Disdain for the exploration of surfaces

■ Nowra argues that the comic vernacular that was the staple of the
'New Wave' theatre of the 1970s was 'male-centred' and 'a thorough
camouflage for sensitivity, compassion and understanding’ (social
realism via satiric caricature)
■ But Jack Davis – Australia’s most widely performed Aboriginal
playwright – combined domestic naturalistic interplay with
perceptions that could only be communicated in verse, music and
dance (appropriation)
■ Later 20th century theatre saw an increase in theatre by and
essentially about women; also reflected multiculturalism (Asian,
Greek, Chinese)
Themes in Nowra’s Plays

■ Nowra wrote about the human capacity to inflict and suffer cruelty. His plays were
very distinctively organized in terms of a series of indelible visual images/telling
non-verbal emblems
■ Known for his experimental style (skilful mingling of literary techniques and
genres in works comprising myth, history, farce and music) and his searing
political criticism
■ With candour and fierce comedy, Nowra confronted painful political subjects as
the Aborigines' displacement, cultural assimilation, inequality and racism,
Australia's legacy of white settlement (exposing its dominance as ultimately
superficial and vulnerable) and Australia's participation in imperialistic wars.
Themes in Nowra’s Plays
■ Madness and amnesia, both personal and national, and the outsider, whether
sexual, racial, immigrant or fringe-dweller, were to become big themes for
Nowra. Since childhood, he has despised all racism and all group think. Nowra
has given voice to characters from all sectors of society, including gays and
lesbians, non-English-speaking ethnic groups, and the poor.
■ “I think you become aware of people, their strength and weaknesses, as you get
older. And with plays moving to smaller casts (for economic reasons), I become
more interested in their psychology.”
■ “And I began to find I was warmer to human beings. From the age of seven, I’d
always disliked them: adults were monsters … violent and cruel to one another.
And so with Aliens and Cosi, I began to see a warmth that in a play like
Radiance really shone through.”
“Play sets out to veil and unveil truth” –
Review by Alexander Cromwell
Mud Flats
 A Play about 3 Half-sisters
■ Nowra wanted three Aboriginal actresses, Rachael Maza, Lydia
Miller, and Rhoda Roberts, to play his characters.

■ Developed partly in discussion with them, Radiance explores

siblinghood in a family so fractured by the pressures brought to bear
upon Aboriginal families that the fact that the sisters can find
meaning in sisterhood is a radiant assertion of self and life.
 Psychological Drama in a Specific Context
■ The Australian government's (now discredited) policy of taking Aboriginal
children away from their parents and placing them in boarding schools has
prevented the sisters from sharing their childhood, while the breaking up of
Aboriginal tribal and family life has exposed Aboriginal women to the
casual and (often) brutal contacts with men that have resulted in the half-
siblinghood of Nowra's characters.
■ The play begins with a funeral/cremation and ends with a fire – a funeral
pyre without a corpse, the conflagration that destroys the family house,
started by two of the sisters.
 The Fire – associated with sisterhood (“a
radiant assertion of self and life”)
■ The fire in Radiance is positive, radiant. It consumes the house that should have
belonged to the sisters after their mother's death, but is, in fact, the property of the
biggest sugar grower in the area.
■ The sisters' mother was his mistress and he had often promised to marry her, but
never kept his promise. Nor did he ever give her the holiday shack in which he let
her live; the sisters have received notice to quit.
■ In setting fire to it, they symbolically destroy the unhappy ghosts of their past. They
also destroy a symbol of the power and privilege that has bred their unhappiness.
■ On the other hand, the tin containing the liquorice brand, Radiance, loses its sweet
smell/charm when Cressie tells Nona that her father abused their mother. (the
superiority/charm of the male/father – white/otherwise [double colonization])
 ■ The ostensible content of a play can be different
On 'Radiance', by from its emotional substance, or the impact it has
when performed live on stage by actors capable
Louis Nowra - of realising its deepest reverberations. A simple
Julian Meyrick example in Radiance is that at no point do the
words ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’ appear in the
text. As Louis Nowra explains in his
introduction:
■ During rehearsals the three actresses determined
that Radiance should not be seen as ‘an
“DRAMA IS NOT about Aboriginal play’. In other words, they didn’t
want an issue-based play.
what gets said and done but
■ Although the characters were obviously
what gets understood.” Aboriginal, the most important thing was the
emotional narrative. The play centres on three
family members who are strangers. It deals with
their efforts to come to terms with each other and
with the devastating consequences of family
secrets.
 Plot
– It is simple, and fits the
unifying parameters of
■ The sisters each had separate fathers
classical drama laid out by
Aristotle in his Poetics
■ It has one primary location, unfolds
over a short period of time, and deals
with the consequences of a single
‘inciting incident’: the death of Mary
McKenna, mother of Mae, Nona and
Cressy, who must come north to
tropical Queensland to bury her and
deal with the dilapidated wooden
beach house in which she lived.
and it is their different childhoods,
and their different perceptions
looking back as adults, that provide
the stuff of the plot.
 ■ It includes not only the conversational traffic as the sisters, by

The Narrative turns, support each other, torment each other, and reveal –
like patients coughing up blood – their conflicted pasts, but
also the eerie mood that envelops the action like moonlight
on the mudflats of the receding tide outside.
■ Cressie’s memories of the convent, her hatred of her mother,
her somnambulism and her double violation (by her mother’s
boyfriend and her mother), having a baby at 12, naming Nona
the only right given to her – her yearning for self-respect and
dignity & metaphorical blindfolding of knowledge from the
child reflected in the opera Madame Butterfly
■ Mae’s “criminal” past – stealing money to gift a Doctor she
More complex and loved; her rage at her mother who gave them away to
disconcerting convents; not knowing who her father is, not getting her
mother’s love; her mother’s premature senility and fits of
rage; having to tie up her mother with ropes
■ Nona’s abusive relationships, labelling herself and her mother
as a “slut”; mentioning with pride that she didn’t have sex for
money– her associations of sex with love, happiness and her
father, the Black Prince
■ It is in this sense that we can talk about Radiance as being
‘character based’ rather than ‘plot driven’
The Mother & ■ In Radiance, Mary is more than a figure
from the past, she is the past, and though
the Beach she is dead before the action begins, she
leaves behind a Gothic symbol of her
House residual presence: the wooden beach house.
■ In the play, this is one of only two locations,
the major one. It, more than Mary, becomes
the target of the sisters’ memories – raucous,
nostalgic, hate-filled. It is the objective
correlative of the ‘secret’ that underscores
the play as a whole. And it is the house that
attracts sanctifying fire when, towards the
end, and for different reasons, the three
sisters decide to burn it to the ground.

The Fire – An Act
of Liberation –
An Image of
Hope
Cressy’s memory of her double
violation (first at the hands of her
abuser, later by the disbelief of her
mother) is metaphorically trapped
in the cellar below the house.
■ Despite Radiance’s louring mood and the
fact that the sisters’ lives are so
confronting, the final image of the play is
one of hope.
■ An act of destruction, the burning of
Mary’s house – which turns out not to be
hers after all, but a white lover’s who
won’t acknowledge her (Harry Wells) – is
also an act of liberation.
■ Later productions have shown the sisters
scattering Mary’s ashes to the night wind,
the remains of the house and the remains
of their mother comingling and blowing
away over the mudflats beyond (in the
play, Nona takes the ashes to Nora Island).
 Though Nowra insists he was not interested in
writing a play about ‘white guilt, black victimhood
Radiance –A and so forth’, it is remarkable how many larger
Foreshadowing of problems are evoked in the unbundling of the
sisters’ lives. The play, first staged in 1993 at
Later Reports Belvoir Street Theatre – a crucible of new
Australian drama – was prescient.
■ In 1995, Aboriginal activist Rob Riley
published Telling Our Story, a report spreading
awareness about the government policies that
forcibly removed thousands of Aboriginal
children from their families.
■ In 1996, the Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission set up the National
Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Children from their
Families, and in 1997 its official report,
Bringing Them Home, was released.
 ■ It does not deal directly with any issue because
the sisters’ uncontainable lives are not reducible
Personal & to ‘issues’.
Political – ■ Nevertheless, Mary’s hectic love life – at once
deplorable and free – symbolizes many of the
Psychological & things that have poisoned, and continue to
Issue-driven poison, relations between white and black
Australians.
■ This is reflected in her song, which, ironically,
is the only thing that she taught all three of her
daughters, and which becomes a common bond
that unites them.
■ The sisters are not mouthpieces for social
problems. Like Nona, they can be
superciliously indifferent to politics. But
chronic abuse has defined their lives
nevertheless, imparting a legacy of damaged
energy each must manage in her own way.
 ■ A crucial job is performed by humour.
And not just mild jokes and asides of the
Humour sort that decorate all living-room dramas,
but outrageous, gob-smacking comedy
that turns the pain of the sisters’ lives on
its head. (Nona’s dresses and wigs, her
behaviour on stage and off it, the incident
with the priest)
■ Also present is gallows humour.
Radiance’s comedy presses outwards, a
countervailing force against the tragedy
within, keeping the play buoyant and
tripping forward. (the laughter over the
scattered ashes, Mary’s song, the opera
mimicked by Nona)
 ■ Nona tries to get her mother’s ashes back
“home” – Nora island – from where her
The Ending - ancestors were removed, invaded first by
European settlers and later by the Japanese.
The Mud Flats She speaks about how in future too the sisters
would have to do the same for each other.
■ That central image — three women standing
at low tide on the mudflats between the house
they were born into (not their own) and the
island their ancestors lost — is one of the
strongest in Australian drama.
■ By the end this liminal space, between two
places both now gone, becomes a kind of
transitional home.
Thank You