A slice of realist drama that explores the link between the right to vote and feminist politics, The Apple impressed audiences between 1909 and 1913 during the peak of the English movement for women’s suffrage and equality.

Published in Tremendous Worlds: Australian Women's Drama 1890–1960.

'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.

The two plays are compelling for their dramatic styles and for their insight into the novels which followed: Coonardoo and Intimate Strangers. And both had to wait more than forty years for their first production.

A social-realist play dealing with racial prejudice set in a country milk bar. Suggested by the promotion of the Aboriginal actor Ngarla Kunoth, who played the title role in Charles Chauvel's Jedda, the play explores a town divided over a new housing develoment for the Aboriginal population. Passions are stirred by press interest in Peggy, an Aboriginal girl who has won brief fame as a film actress; entrenched pastoral interests; envy and racism; and perceived Aboriginal fecklessness. Despite the intercessions of a local black lawyer and Joe, the 'dago' cafe owner, the summer heat busts into violence.

Published in Plays of the 60s Volume 1

White examines what he called ‘the sin of goodness’ in his relentlessly cheerful character, Miss Docker.

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.

Edited by Eric Irvin.

A one-act play first produced in Hobart in 1943 in which tension develops between a timid woman and her landlady.

Published in Playing the Past: Three Plays by Australian Women

First staged in 1955, no play has been more important to the history of Australian theatre than Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Twenty years later, Lawler returned to his lovable Carlton household and created two more plays: Kid Stakes and Other Times. He also revised Summer of the Seventeenth Doll to create a definitive version of the text. Together these plays tell the full story of a seventeen-year romance which ends in tragic disillusion.

The original 1956 version of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is published in a separate volume.

A surreal, sharp and comic social critique of male possessiveness and its impact on the lives of independent women.

Published in Playing the Past: Three Plays by Australian Women.