Review: Play sets out to veil and unveil truth

Reviewed Work(s): Radiance by Louis Nowra

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Wayne State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Antipodes

This content downloaded from 182.65.224.172 on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 08:44:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Play sets out to veil and unveil truth DRAMA
Louis Nowra. Radiance. Sydney: Currency Press,
1993. 54 pages.

Alexandra Cromwell
New York Life, biography, or the poems?
Dorothy Hewett. Peninsula. Fremantle: Fremantle Ar
The placeplaceconception
in 1987 oninthe1987
mudonflats
of Louis the Beach,
of Kinka mud Nowra's
on the flats of play Kinka Radiance Beach, took on Centre Press, 1994. 144 pages. A$16.95.
northern Queensland coast. The flats became visible at eight
Bruce Bennett, editor. Dorothy Hewett: Selected
o'clock in the morning as the tide went out and Nowra
Critical Essays. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre
found them "desolate and yet entrancing." Revealed and con-
Press, 1995. 296 pages. A$19.95.
cealed by the ebbing and flowing sea, the flats were to be
not only one of the play's locations but also a symbol of
Manly Johnson
the veiling and unveiling of truth through which Radiance
is structured. Tulsa, Oklahoma
Nowra always intended that the play be about three half
sisters, daughters of one mother and three fathers. By 1992,
when he set to work in earnest, he knew that he wanted The included checklist
included in the involume
the ofofworks
criticalvolume
essaysbyruns
of toandnearly
critical about essays Dorothy runs Hewett to nearly
forty pages. In the introduction Bruce Bennett explains the
three Aboriginal actresses, Rachael Maza, Lydia Miller, and
high degree of interest in a writer of Hewett's problematic
Rhoda Roberts, to play his characters. Developed partly in
reputation as a product of the theatrical tendency in all her
discussion with them, Radiance explores siblinghood in a
family so fractured by the pressures brought to bear upon
work (plays, poems, novels, autobiography, essays, film
scripts, short stories) and the contentious issue in academic
Aboriginal families that the fact that the sisters can find
criticism over the use of literary biography in evaluating a
meaning in sisterhood is a radiant assertion of self and life.
writer's work.
Nowra uses one of the most stock of plots - disunited
Bennett remarks on the general recognition of Hewett's
siblings return to the family house to bury their parents;
dissatisfaction with limits - in her life as well as in her
there, they learn more about each other, their family, and
writing - and her commitment to cultural nationalism:
themselves. None of the children knows her father, but they
Australian land, ways, language, and customs.
all believe that they know who was their mother; as it turns
out, one of them is mistaken even in this. Hie essays do not, as Bennett observes, give a complete
account of her writings. They do, however, provide a num-
An audience that is more or less ignorant of such matters
(and most are) learns even more than the characters do, ber of approaches adequate for a deeper understanding of the
range of poetry represented in Peninsula - of the title, for
learns, in fact, what the characters know only too well -
that the Australian government's (now discredited) policy of instance, in its sexual and topographic significance within
taking Aboriginal children away from their parents and plac- the larger philosophical implications concerning humankind
and nature.
ing them in boarding schools has prevented the sisters from
Bennett's initial essay explores Hewett's imagery of
sharing their childhood, while the breaking up of Aborigi-
nal tribal and family life has exposed Aboriginal women to place in city and country as these images go into creating
the casual and (often) brutal contacts with men that have her personal mythology. Reading such poems as "Yearling
resulted in the half-siblinghood of Nowra's characters. in the Mind" and "Poddies," with their sharply observed
The play begins with a funeral and ends with a fire - not details of paddock and corrugated town, one is struck by the
the fire of the oven in which the sisters' mother is cremated, endings, which evoke transcendencies - Sparta, colliding
stars, and the transfigurations through time of nature and
but a funeral pyre without a corpse, the conflagration that
individual life.
destroys the family house, started by two of the sisters.
John McLaren's essay takes up the connections between
Nowra has written of his fear of being burned to death in
her childhood and her social and political passions, finding
a bush fire, but also of the "terrible majesty" of fires that
that the "wholeness of childhood provides the goal of
boys would set in the paddocks near Nowra's boyhood
Hewett's politics," but that the principle of oscillation
home, one of which he conflated with the drama of a televi-
between "male and female, night and day, wisdom and
sion screening of Cyrano de Bergerac.
ferocity" does not allow for retention of the mythical qual-
The fire in Radiance is positive, radiant. It consumes the
ity from early life. McLaren concludes that although a calm
house that should have belonged to the sisters after their
is reached in the peninsula poems from 1988 on, there is
mother's death, but is, in fact, the property of the biggest
"continuing torment."
sugar grower in the area. The sisters' mother was his mis-
Divided allegiances give her no rest. These are repre-
tress and he had often promised to marry her, but never kept
sented not only in the poems, as in "Pet Lamb," about a
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 un-
happy ghosts of their past. They also destroy a symbol of
the power and privilege that has bred their unhappiness. ■
CRITICISM

166 • DECEMBER 1995

This content downloaded from 182.65.224.172 on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 08:44:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms