Is there life after fifty? David Williamson’s newest play wittily affirms that love, adventure, and increasing self-knowledge are not the exclusive preserves of the young. Frank, seventy-five, retired engineer and ex-communist, is no spring chicken but neither is he ‘defunct in the physical area’. With his fifty-five-year-old lover, Frances, he sets off in his campervan to fulfil the dream of affluent Victorians to retire to the indolent pleasures of life in the tropical north. Through the course of the play Frank’s heart grows steadily weaker, his sight and hearing begin to fail. He dies with his remaining faculties very much intact, enjoying life to the full, his cynical wit and acerbic intelligence as powerful as ever.

Travelling North is not concerned with offering glib panaceas to hopeful geriatrics or illusory prospects of perennial Indian summers for the elderly. It is a very original play, not merely in its plotting but with the revelation of its principal characters and with its overriding interest in the changing relationship between them. An important underlying theme is the conflict of responsibility with personal desire. Frank is a pragmatist, egocentric, loving mankind in general but thoughtless about those nearest to him until Frances, exasperated, calls him ‘a rude, arrogant, despotic old bully’. He was carelessly unfaithful and denigrating to his wife, perfunctory and dismissive with his children. He still cannot understand why his son hasn’t spoken to him for fifteen years and why his daughter avoids marriage and motherhood.

Frances, Williamson’s most convincingly well-rounded female character to date, exudes an underlying tension and anxiety caused by the guilt she feels at leaving her married daughters in Melbourne against their disapproval and living with Frank outside marriage. Through the play she is torn between her responsibilities to them and to Frank until, at the play’s close, she assumes responsibility for herself alone. Her daughters use her as a pawn in a power struggle to achieve the suburban ideal of the built-in babysitter, playing on the guilt she feels at not having provided them with a perfect childhood. Until he comes to realise his imperfections, Frank plays on her uncertainty, turning her love for him into guilt and making her his slave instead of his com­panion.

An ironic sidelight, on the masculine view of love and responsibility, comes from Saul, Frank’s doctor, and Freddie, a friendly neighbour, who both indicate their willingness to come to Frances’s aid should anything happen to Frank, implying that either would be willing to take over his role in her life. Both, for all their affection for Frank, have few scruples about bidding for what they see as his most desirable chattel.

The play is built up of twenty scenes balancing and interacting with each other to reveal the complex relationships between the characters. The writing is extraordinarily economical, always advancing the forward movement of the play and at the same time inviting the range of emotional responses from sorrow to laughter that we encounter in the real world which this play so convincingly reflects.

We Australians, in common with everyone else on this planet, live in a very scary world. The survival of the human race is at risk with the threat of Russian/American nuclear war, with the threat of pollution, overpopulation, energy depletion and the risks of nucleology. We are at risk because of the problems created by the dependence of the world economy on continuous economic growth in both the capitalist and communist worlds. Associated with the problems created by economic growth are the ones mentioned above, as well as the base materialism and consumerism which Australia’s transformation from a sheep­walk into a quarry brings, together with it large scale, permanent unemployment. Especially for school leavers. These are what might be termed, the materials problems.

The non-material problems are related to the material ones, and are often fed, worsened or exploited by those with a vested interest in intensifying or maintaining alienation and racial prejudice and other forms of inequality.

None of the writers who emerged from the Australian bush has dealt as powerfully with its horror as Barbara Baynton, yet she is probably mainly known only for the two anthologised short stories, ‘Scrammy ’And’ and ‘Squeaker’s Mate’, the latter of which has been made into an excellent short film by David Baker.

The six tales in Bush Studies were reissued in paperback by Angus and Robertson in 1972, but her novel, Human Toll, has not been reprinted since its first publication in 1907. Now this new collection enables us to see her work as a whole.

As well as the stories from Bush Studies and the novel, this edition contains four later stories, a selection from her letters and non-fiction prose, eleven undistinguished poems, and a critical and biographical introduction by the editors, together with an extensive if select bibliography. The bibliography, incidentally, places ‘Squeaker’s Mate’ instead of ‘Scrammy ’And’ in the Murdoch and Drake-Brockman Australian Short Stories (OUP).

It is five years since Rowbotham’s Selected Poems, one of that extraordinary number of summing-up volumes that has been, perhaps, last decade’s most telling and characteristic factor. The need to gauge one’s own work (and focus) from some working perspective has always been the basis of a living poet’s Selected Poems. But this decade’s perspective makers have, almost without exception, shared an additional, if implied, purpose: their selections point to a stocktaking rather than a summarising intention.

It has been a decade of challenge, change, and consolidation. Certainly, the sense of self-scrutiny, self-evaluation and self-conscious insistence on ‘being counted’ is new. And the most exciting corollary has been the thrust put on the succeeding performance: already the ‘successor’ volumes by Bruce Beaver, David Campbell, John Blight, Rodney Hall, and Robert Adamson have considerably enlarged our perspectives on these writers: their most recent collections have not so much made the Selecteds out-of-date but have forced any evaluation of their achievements to omit them at great risk. Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole The Funeral could be similarly described, though perhaps it more properly crystallises certain elements rather than (as with the others listed) moves beyond them. The test for any poet, then, after a Selected Poems, is that the successor volume must in some way move out of the shadow of that defining book, either to crystallise or to transcend it. Or to spring off into a new direction.