Questions of Value

Making Art – Episode 07

Questions of Value

Episode Released 7th October 2018

The speed and perceived complexity of life in the modern world appears to be forcing a number of our time honoured clichés into retirement. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” faces an uncertain future in our fast paced world where the idea of spending time catching birds in bushes is looked upon as just plain silly. And “Too many cooks spoil the broth” is teetering on the brink of extinction in the face of Uber Eats, prepackaged dinners and a generation of people who look at you with an expression that says “What is a broth anyway? In the creative world of course we like to think we have the greatest of all the clichés, the dog eared and dusty “Art mirrors life”.

But beyond the apparent glibness of that particular phrase there lies, as there does with stitches and time, a number of simple truths. For example it is true to say that when we read a book, look at a picture, watch a play or listen to a piece of music from a particular period we can be, if we choose, transported to that certain time and begin to understand, in a profoundly nuanced way, something of the politics, ideas and social climate that led to its creation. In this way the art in question becomes the mirror through which we gain a wonderfully complex and deeply human insight into the lives of those in our past.

Ray Lawler’s great Australian play The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a classic example. When it was premiered by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1955 it offered up, for the first time, a theatrical work that was unashamedly Australian. A play that was not only spoken in the Australian vernacular but one that was set in an Australian city in a house populated by Australian people. Not clichés but everyday Australians as we were.
Prior to The Doll, as it has become affectionately known, Australian plays had largely tended toward the fraudulently British. Strained drawing room comedies or genial, bucolic clunkers that were apologetically small in scope. Plays to be tolerated, curiosities, inferior copies of “real theatre” which came principally from Britain.

Lawler’s play represents a seismic shift in Australian theatre that was an expression of, or perhaps a precursor to, a seismic shift in Australian identity. Rather than display a continued acceptance of the notion that we were just British people living a long way from home, Lawler put Australia on stage, not just in the language but also in the exploration of big themes that reflected the reality of an endemically Australian life, ideas that were closer in scope and energy to those explored by Tennessee Williams than they were to reproduction English farce.

What The Doll reflected was a dramatic change in the way we were coming to see ourselves, a theatrical expression of the birth of a people, an artistic mirror in which we can observe our forebears coming to terms with the notion that they were no longer deferential inhabitants of a far flung British dominion but instead an independent people living in an different nation with thoughts and ideas about themselves that were their own. And that the play was a critical and box office triumph attests to a growing confidence amongst Australians to take hold of those ideas and publically express them.

Born out of a connected relationship between a group of artists and the society they inhabited, The Doll was a fundamental part of a national conversation that resulted in massive social change that saw Australia and Australians define and pursue a very particular cultural imagining for themselves that by the mid 1970’s had become a vibrant reality.

Cut to contemporary Australia where for many years we have been in the thrall of an ideology that has had a reductive effect on public discourse. No longer do we talk in big ideas about who or what we are, of nationhood or wh