AN AUSTRALIAN DRAMA

Southland Times, Issue 22999, 19 September 1936, Page 13

AN AUSTRALIAN DRAMA

“The Emancipist”

“The Emancipist.” An historical drama in three acts and 13 scenes by Major-General John Macquarie Antill and Rose Antill de Warren. Angus and Robertson, Sydney. 3/6. Reviewed by A. R. DUNLOP.

Australia is fortunate—and remarkable—in having left behind her literary growing pains more quickly, and more completely than any other community established by English-speaking people. Her relatively small population is possessed of a virility of imagination and creativeness which have found a definitely characteristic expression in poetry, prose and painting; all of which is redolent of the established national cast of thought and is inherent of the very soil which gives her people their life. And now, in “The Emancipist” comes an addition to the drama. No longer is Australian work so grim, so earnest and striving—those hall-marks of a young and new artistic endeavour so devastatingly determined to make its mark. After some 20 years of realism, naturalism and brutalism in English letters generally during which our writers of all types scarcely seemed to know where they stood or what they believed, it is refreshing to find in this Australian play, a gusto, a belief in an ideal, and some vision of life in the main adequately expressed, and stoutly upheld. The publishers say that “The Emancipist” enjoys the unique distinction of being the first Australian historical play to be published in book form. The subject is worthy of drama on a big scale, and the authors, in the face of all the difficulties of such a work, have certainly succeeded in making the Governor Lachlan Macquarie period live again. The drama is written round the lives of Surgeon William Redfern and Macquarie, who succeeded Bligh (of the Bounty) as Governor of New South Wales. Appointed D.H.M.S. Standard at