Nationalism, Drama and the Baz Luhrman film

In Michelene Wandor's recent tome, The Art of Writing Drama, she highlights the emergence in the 1970s of the 'new writing' scene as something that occurred within a political context: for Britons in the '70s, you had the rise of identity politics, of second-wave feminism, of gay and lesbian movements, conflated with an interest in 'creativity' disciplines. You get Cloud Nine out of this confluence. You get Top Girls in its aftermath. Wandor argues, I think very successfully, that much of what we take for 'new writing' in Britain's theatre is coloured within these political lines.

Similarly, Australia's theatre in the 1970s coincided with a newly reinforced nationalism, in part provoked by the UK's economic abandonment of the Commonwealth countries in order to enter the European Economic Community as much as by the 'It's Time' hopes running alongside the election of a Whitlam Labor government of 1972. It was also partly provoked by ongoing struggles around Australia's role in the Vietnam War. The New Wave drama of 1970s Australia alongside the techniques that Britain's new writing theatre developed and also imported from the US has meant that when we speak of newly written drama in Australia, we speak only of Australian drama, i.e. the 'new Australian play' rather than the 'new play'. Every 'new' play (plays are called 'new plays' rather than just 'plays') is conceptually slotted into a map of contested nationalism, in the way that plays in Britain seem to get slotted into those of identity and/or sexual politics. As much as Michael Billington tries to see Britain's theatre through a filter of nation - as the title of his recent history, "State of the Nation", shows - it is in Australia where this has developed as more than a habit or a practice but as an embodied reflex.

Of course, this has shaped what I have written. I grew up in a theatrical context where the institutional theatre was carrying out national colouring-in projects. Playbox, for instance, had a slogan of 'contemporary Australian drama' on all of its stationery. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll when resuscitated was not as a drama but as a national event. The work of Lawler's contemporaries such as Oriel Gray's got neglected. As did Katherine Susannah Pritchard's. Too hard to fit those works within the lines. Australia's nationalist outline is a masculine silhouette.

This all means that when I write plays set in Australia, I am inclined - quite naturally and unconsciously - to write plays 'about' Australia. What I have noticed after nearly four years away is this: set a play in London (as I have before) and it does not become 'about' London or 'about' the UK. The ideas driving it come from a different engine of concern.

The exciting thing for me right now in writing plays where I am is that I feel less and less restricted by a national imperative, or by a menu of national concerns that must be checked off in the script one by one. If 'nation' comes into it at all, it is because 'nation' is a shorthand for some of my characters' concrete hopes, much the way I might approach writing about a person if I was writing an historical essay. When my characters now think or talk about nation, they are often longing for things that never were, fantasies transformed into assumed fact. That's an interesting facet of character, but it's not the whole show or structure.

This is why, however good it might actually be, I want to do everything I can to avoid the new Baz Luhrman film, AUSTRALIA. The New Wave in Australian drama accompanied a similar movement in film, out of the same political-funding context. Interestingly, Luhrman began in the theatre - or at least Strictly Ballroom began there. I have fantasized over the last few months that Luhrman's project is a subversive one, to destroy the last remnants of the art object as nationalist agenda, but I fear that it equates its own characters' hopes, its own thematic concerns with the concerns and hopes of a political continent's. (In terms of living in the UK, it just means that I'll have to put up with being treated as a stereotype by strangers even more than I am - with my home government's money supporting those stereotypes!) Story-wise, it may be set in World War 2, but it is a contemporary tale: a checklist of special concerns woven into an overarching love story. I wonder whether the ending was re-written or re-cut not because of test audiences but because of the open-ended nature of this nationalist project: from day to day it changes depending on our emotions. It may have been impossible to write an ending for even if this (hardly) bizarre confluence of drama and nationalism was acknowledged and understood by its producers. Good luck to it, but I hope it gives the rest of us a chance to vacuum up our own messes.