'I consider Brumby Innes to be in a class by itself' wrote theatre director Gregan McMahon in 1927, 'It is a very remarkable work, comparable to some of the best of Eugene O'Neill's, and it is, moreover, essentially Australian.'

Written in the 1920s, Brumby Innes confronts the turbulent relations between the sexes and the races in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. It is published with another Prichard play from the 1920s, Bid Me To Love which, by contrast, is set among the fashionable rich in the lush hills outside Perth.

Acclaimed by the Sydney Morning Herald at its premiere in 1868 as 'the most successful colonial play produced on the Sydney boards', Walter Cooper's second play was notable for local colour and for integrating familiar colonial types into a comedy of Australian manners.

The miserly Matthew Grudge is attempting to swindle his nephew and marry his heiress niece to his jackeroo son. His plans are complicated by the wily Captain Versatile Fluent, an Irish fortune hunter, and eventually foiled by his clerk, the faithful Peter Shrivel. A sub-plot involves the merry baiting of a pair of new chums in search of 'colonial experience'. The play has been revived several times since it was published in 1979.

‘At last Australian drama has been born’, exclaimed a critic at the premiere of The Touch of Silk in 1928.

A poignant drama centred on Jeanne, a homesick French war bride and her shell-shocked husband battling hardship and prejudice in a drought-stricken Mallee town. Roland later revised the play, but the original version, which captures the period flavour of rural life in the 1920s, is published here.