Dan does not begin to ‘see’, and as his physical sight deteriorates, and as the personal demands on him of his family accumulate, he finds words which express his growing doubts in the dogma of the Church, along with the one unshakable tenet of his faith which sustains him (p. 65). It is this firmly-held personal faith which makes Dan the refuge and comfort for his shiftless brothers, and his home becomes a haven in their lives as their own families disintegrate. Dan’s constant insistence on the sanctity of the family relationship, and his reiterated demand that Aggie forgive his brothers for their neglect during the hardships of the Depression, stamp him as the play’s only true example of the Christian ethic in practice.

It is the stability of Dan’s faith that permits Aggie to build her faith on him, still practising her religion, but regarding it in a detached, highly practical manner. The play abounds in Aggie’s off-hand gibes at Monica’s fanatical practice of her faith. When Paddy plans to flee to Monica after Sophie forces him out of their home, Aggie agrees that Monica is ‘a very holy woman’.

            AGGIE: Oh, yes, she’s that all right. You’d think she had a private telephone through to             the Holy Ghost.
            PADDY: Aggie, that’s blasphemous!
            AGGIE: It’s worse than that. It’s a damn nuisance (p. 46).

Later, when Monica attempts to hang a crucifix in the dining room, Aggie demurs:

             AGGIE: There’s a place for everything, Paddy. And a dining room is no place for a
             crucifix, except in monasteries. And this isn’t one of those.
             MONICA: I’m sorry you feel that way about it, Aggie. I hope Our Lord doesn’t say the
             same thing to you when you present yourself at the gates of heaven. It would be a
             terrible thing if he decides that wasn’t the place for you.
             AGGIE: Well, I’ll just have to depend on his idea of good taste, won’t I? (p. 54).

In his programme note for the Sydney season of The Cassidy Album in 1978, Kenna referred to

           the major drive which I believe motivates my every artistic gesture and which has,
           over the years, formed me into the type of writer I am: an inherited gift for yarn
           spinning and the desire to use yarns as an important part of my equipment in the
           making of plays ... The yarn is, after all, an integral part of our national culture. Surely
           no sophisticated society since the time of the Arabian Nights can have relied so heavily
           on yarns as an entertainment device. Together with dancing to the gum leaf it was
           practically the only social pleasure available to our early settlers imprisoned in their
           lonely wilderness ... I do not believe I am alone in my attempts to fuse this organic art
           form into the more rigid structure of the European play.

The use of these yarns in A Hard God and—in a more restricted way in The Slaughter of Saint Teresa’s Day —is a source of some of the structural originality at which Kenna’s critics have traditionally baulked. In Slaughter the playwright deliberately suspends the action of the play for the party scene in Act II. Although critics in 1959 saw this apparent hiatus in the flow of the narrative as a major flaw, the scene might now be thought to constitute one of the play’s more considerable achievements. For one thing, the party draws its vitality and authenticity from its roots in the author’s real experience:

          I went to at least a dozen parties like that one, where people (including my father) played          the spoons up and down their arms and legs—a girl stuck a carnation behind her ear and          did the hula —I sang. I remember particularly one party very like that one at the home of
          a Mrs Woolf, who lived in the same suburb as us—there were all sorts of Irish people
          there.18

The actual yarn which Paddy Maguire spins as his contribution to the entertainment is shown to have a kind of ritual significance. Most of the company has already heard it. Additionally, the resort to yarn-spinning in this play and in A Hard God seems to serve a therapeutic, perhaps anaesthetic, purpose for the characters involved. It is perhaps as though men like Paddy Maguire and Martin Cassidy find in the vigorous recollection of the past some kind of defence against the emotional assaults of the present. The actual models from which the yarns in the play have been taken had their origins in hardship. Recounting the history of the Kenna family in earlier years, the playwright has recalled:

        They eventually had some property up in the north of New South Wales and a great
        drought threw them off the land, and then the family split up and all the boys were forced         to move about the country. They were droving, fencing, and—a matter of fact—the family         was so totally split up that the didn’t really see each other until the Depression drove               three of the brothers to the city during the 1930s. And the stories that they told each other         of the time when they had been absent from each other were one of the great memories of         my childhood and indeed form the basis of a lot of A Hard God.19

The use of the integrated ‘yarn’ is far more marked in A Hard God. The author has remarked,
There are long stories all the way through A Hard God—much more than in Slaughter—but yet I dipped my toes into the water, as it were, in Slaughter, by having that long Irishman’s speech.20

In A Hard God the degree of integration is such that the action never seems suspended. There are three sections of dialogue in the play which might be classified as ‘yarns’: Paddy’s terrified account of Sophie’s ‘breaking out’ in Act I, his ruefully amusing account of life with Monica in Act II, and Dan’s breathless report on the three versions of Martin’s death which he received on his trip to Warragamba. Apart from these, there is a variety of monologues which might be more usefully considered as ‘arias’ —the word which Peter Kenna uses in reference to them.

These seem to be essential to the Australian character of his writing: a reflection of the story-telling propensity held to be an inherent part of the Australian (as well as the Irish) heritage. These ‘arias’ recurrently orchestrate the dialogue of A Hard God, and provide much of the lyricism which is a vital part of the play’s total impression. All but one of these arias are to be found in the major strand of the play: that which involves Aggie, Dan and Dan’s brothers. Each is a reminiscence, and each recounting can be seen as an attempt by the character speaking to come to terms with the hard (on occasions, comically hard) experience of the past.

When, in the minor skein of the play, Jack explains to Joe the circumstances of his mother’s death, the stage directions require that he ‘bursts into speech with the relief of uttering thoughts suppressed’ (p. 26). The older characters tend to reminisce with more serenity, but with an equal need to unburden themselves of some of the weight of the past. There is also, however, a clinging to these past experiences, which have become vital in the total fabric of each individual’s life, and a source of sustenance and justification in the troubled present. Before Aggie’s bitter recollection of Sophie’s unshared salmon lunch, Dan tells her ‘It’s the past, Aggie’, to be answered:

        Not for me it isn’t. Not while I have to look either of them in the face and smile and put a             meal on the table in front of them (p. 8).

Dan argues against Martin’s re-reading of the account of his son’s death—‘Why do you want to do that? That’s only upsetting yourself’—but for Martin this apparently maudlin obsession with the past is a means of keeping a grip on reality. He says of the clipping:

        I know it doesn’t help. It’s just that sometimes, I doubt it happened: then I’ve got it before         me in black and white. Then I’m sure (p. 15).

The final section of the major strand in Act I unites the Cassidy brothers for the only time in the action of the play. This reflective sequence follows Paddy’s yarn (prior to Martin’s waking) about Sophie’s violent gambling binge. Aggie is a silent listener for two pages of dialogue as the three brothers drift into a sustained reverie in which they ponder their religious heritage, and the destruction of their family unit and financial security by a three-year drought. The core of this scene is Martin’s account of his dream, in which the brothers—‘not young men like we were then. Middle-aged as we are now’—are again dislocated, forced off the land, by drought.

This lyrical aria—far from disrupting the development of the play—provides expository detail, and underlines one of the play’s major themes, what Katharine Brisbane in her introduction calls ‘the image of loss’ (p. xiv) and dislocation of the characters. Neither Paddy nor Martin is settled. Their only constant is found in the home for which Dan and Aggie have battled. Through their unsatisfactory marriages, Paddy and Martin have become victims of a continuing, spiritual drought, and the recollection of the past is used by both men as a refuge from this. Aggie’s memories of the Depression years, however, are not as rosy as those enjoyed by her brothers-in-law. A tense scene develops, and Dan is mediator as his brothers quarrel. Sophie pays a traumatic offstage visit to the house, and the brothers are reconciled. Martin, the most meditative of the play’s characters, proffers the view that their problems are concerned with the passage of time:

        I believe it’s like a germ we’re breathing continually. Like the ’flu. Except that everybody         catches it. And some catch it worse than others. And it affects them in different ways. (p.         35)