Away Study guide Background to Michael Gow Michael Gow was born in Sydney in 1955, He went to ‘a pretty rough school and at the age of 14 participated in workshops at Australian Theatre for Young people as both an actor and a writer. Gow’s plays have been popular with both critics and audiences alike. Away was produced several times throughout Australia after its initial presentation in 1986. Away is typical of Gow’s work in that it is rich in literary allusion. The quotes from Shakespeare mingle with numerous references to more modern culture. His style juxtaposes contemporary realistic situations with non-naturalistic theatrical elements. The plays explore lower-middle-class family life in Australia since the Second World War. Humorous sequences are mingled with painful situations often involving illness and death. These themes are always dramatized in the social context. Conflict between generations is a reoccurring them, typically involving the clash between attitudes formed through the Depression and Second World War and the changing values engendered by post-war prosperity. This conflict is more harmoniously resolved in Away than anywhere else. Gow says that the Sydney suburbs and the beaches of northern New South Wales are important settings for his play because that’s where he spent his childhood, and idealized versions of these places are in the background of his imagination. In the plays these settings are transformed into places representing more universal ideas. For example, the beach in Away is an almost abstract place where people can be transformed because they are free of their everyday lives; Gow feels that he is writing for and about his own generation.

Themes
Australian culture in the 1960s
The 1960s were a time of change in all areas of society. During this decade Australia’s support of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was provoked a passionate anti-war movement system. This introduction of the contraceptive pill facilitated the so-called sexual revolution. The horrors of the two world wars had stimulated a growing loss of Christian Faith, while economic prosperity enabled Australian to take advantage of new technological developments, mostly in the form of consumer good, such as televisions, cars and household ‘labor-saving devices’. This is the cultural backdrop for Away.

Coping with grief and loss
The premature death of two young men underlies the drama of Away. Roy and Coral son has been killed in Vietnam and their differing responses to the loss cause conflict. Vic and Harry’s son Tom is about to die from cancer. This threats beings them together as a loving unit and their acceptance of the inevitability of death serves as a healing inspiration to other character.
Reconciliation
The conflicts between generations and partners are resolved optimistically in this play. Through developing understand and forgiveness the characters are reconciled. Since these personal conflicts represent wider social conflicts the principle of reconciliation is a powerful motif. The theme is evident in a lightly different sense, too, in that character must reconcile themselves to change and mortality

Relationships
Relationships between husbands and wives, boys and girls, and between generations form the structure through which Away explores ideas of social change and development of self-awareness.

Reference Guide

Theme | Event/Quote | Perspective | Australian culture in the 1960s | Roy: Mrs. Papa… Papalapa… Papalax... oh well, I’m sure she knows who I mean, ha ha ha, for making the outfits | Roy is demonstrating the patronizing attitude towards migrants that was common at the time, Such an attitude today would be considered insulting and even racist. | Australian culture in the 1960s | Meg: Fancy doing it night after night like in America. Plays go on for years there. London too. | Due to the small population, as well as the long distance between Australia and Europe or America, the theatre here was not developed as in those other countries. It was often felt that Australia was an isolated cultural backwater. This has changed markedly with our burgeoning population and the ease of modern transport, as well as the sophistication of electronic communication such as television | Australian culture in the 1960s | Gwen: They both work don’t they? In a factory, isn’t it? I’m sure that’s what I heard. A lean-to. They shouldn’t be going on a holiday if they can’t afford it | Throughout the 1950s and 60s it was considered wrong for a woman to go out to work. She was expected to stay home and mind the house and children. Compare this with today’s attitude when many mothers return to work quiet soon after their children are born. | Australian culture in the 1960s | They have no special privileges. No-ones asked them to come out to this country. They have no right to behave differently. | Despite the fact that Australian government policy encouraged migration from Europe (whilst discouraging migration from Asia and Africa through the White Australian Policy) a common attitude was one of hostility to wards migrants. At the least the majority of ‘old’ Australians believed migrants should assimilate into Anglo-Celtic culture as soon as possible. Today the policy of multiculturalism has changed attitudes to vale cultural difference. | Australian culture in the 1960s | Gwen: I’ll have a Bex before bed | Gwen is typical of housewives at the time whose unpaid domestic labour and lack of outlet for creative or intellectual impulses caused ‘neurotic’ symptoms such as persistent headaches, which were treated by non-prescription drugs, like Bex powders or prescription tranquilisers such as Valium. | Australian culture in the 1960s | Roy: We’re living in a country with one of the highest standards of living on earth and we have shown our selves willing to defend that standard | By sending troops to the war in Vietnam, Australia was supporting an alliance with America, which also had trade implications. Australia’s prosperity was thought by some to rely heavily on friendly relations which America and allowing Australian men to die for that alliance was seen to be part of the ‘deal’. | Australian culture in the 1960s | Campers: There’s also a beautification plan under way. We want to remove- all those trees! They pose a serious threat in any sort of wind. A branch from one of those could put a nasty hole in a caravan… A car parking area right down on the rock platform would be a good idea too. | The environment conservation movement that had its origins in the 1960s was a response to anti- wilderness attitudes that had been dominant among while Australians since settlement reaching a peak of intensity during the immediate post war period. The rock platform where the campers want to put a car park may well be the one where is a 5000-year-old Aboriginal carving. Today such desecration of natural heritage is strictly controlled. | Coping with grief and loss | Coral: All these children having fun, playing and me sitting in the dark wiping away tears. I could hardly watch them. | Coral is unable to contain her grief and participate in life at this stage of the play. This is her inner conflict that leads to her conflict with Roy. | Coping with grief and loss | Roy: there is a time for being grief-stricken, there’s a time for weeping and wailing and carrying on and beating your breast, but it comes to an end. It has to Otherwise the whole world would simply stop. | Roy does not understand that the grieving process will take different courses and last for a different period for each individual. He is ready to get back into life and go back to work, and can’t see why coral doesn’t feel the same. One difference for coral is that she doesn’t have a job; her job was always a housewife and mother, a role that is diminished now she no longer has a son. | Coping with grief and loss | Coral: You’re still alive. You’re still alive and talking and laughing. | Coral responds this way to ricks question, ‘why do you want to see me?’ She is making him a substitute for her dead son, imagining how he would perhaps be like Rick if he were alive. | Coping with grief and loss | Jim: We lived in rubbish tips. We shared rooms with other people. Everyone did. And we all planned. We planned out time. We waited. We stuck to our plan like the bible And we’re getting there. | Jim explains to meg how much he and Gwen had lost trough their poverty in the Depression. Their way of coping was to imagine a better future and to work towards it The problem for them is that their daughter doesn’t see the same future for herself. | Coping with grief and loss | Harry: we have no regrets. We don’t get homesick. Only once a year. We book a telephone call to or old street. In Nottingham. We get out the photo album. Remember for a while. But we have no regrets. | Harry and Vic and Vic have lost their past, their connections with their homeland. Their way of coping is to be grateful for what they have and to be consciously positive about the present, telling them they made the right decision. | Coping with grief and loss | Harry: But we don’t look forward. We haven’t given up, no, no. That would be a mistake. We have this boy and we won’t have him for long. And whatever he does, that will have to be enough. | Harry and Vic have lost hopes for their son’s future. Their response is to emphasis the positive and enjoys what Tom brings them in the present. They employ the same optimism that they bring to bear on their feelings of loss about their friends and family in Britain. | Coping with grief and loss | TOM: What shall I do? Return to human life again? Or enter heaven and end this endless wandering torture? No. It is my love that must be saved. | As the sailor, Tom expresses his own real situation. Being ‘in remission’ but knowing his illness will come back is like being in limbo for him. His main concern is to help the other people whom he loves by showing them how they can go on with productive lives even when they have lost their loved ones. | Reconciliation | Gwen: Let’s walk. Come on, down to the water. The waters so warm. | Gwen is offering to share some thing with Jim. For the first time she is calm and relaxed as Jim and Meg have wanted her to be. She opens herself to dialogue and symbolically the warm water that they will ‘paddle’ in is a medium of redemption and reconciliation. | Reconciliation | (Stage direction) Gwen turns to go but stops. Jim comes in with the cardboard carton. He takes out a parcel and hands it to her. She unwraps it. It is a pair of slippers. She looks at them, then at him and walks, away a bit overcome. Jim goes to her and they embrace. | Gwen and Jim silently act out of the resolution of their conflict. He offers her his gift and she accepts it with humility. Their embrace shows them to be completely reconciled | Reconciliation | (Stage direction) Megs come in and pick up the carton and take it off | The fact that Meg and Gwen are not seen together on the stage after their intense conflict in Act 3, Scene 2 indicated that they have reached no resolution. In this scene without dialogue where Gwen is shown to be reconciled with Jim, no such reconciliation is seen between her and Meg | Reconciliation | (Stage direction) Coral comes in carrying her hat upside down. She approaches Roy cautiously. When he sees her he is confused. She approaches him and offers him the hat. He takes it. She digs her hands into the crown of the hat and lifts out a handful of shells. She lets them run through her fingers. She lifts them out again; Roy leans towards them and buries his face in the shells in coral’s hands. She lets them go again and picks them up. He kisses the shells and her hands. | After having left Roy and reconciled herself to the death of her son, Coral is able to approach him again and offer to be reconciled with him. He accepts the offer affectionately. | Relationships | Vic: Where is he? There you are. Ahhhhh, well dine. There’s my boy. Weren’t you marvelous? You were marvelous. | The two examples of parent/child relationships are quiet contrasting. Tom and his parents have very loving and considerate relationships. In this quote Vic expresses warmth and pride towards her son. Gwen is only critical and aggressive towards meg and although Jim is less so, he is not effusive in showing affection for Meg. | Relationships | Gwen: Why don’t you go live with your friend for a while, then, if you want to have fun all the time? They look like they always have fun. | Gwen can only be negative about her daughter’s friends. It is clear that her behavior toward Meg will drive her away rather than hold her within the family relationship, which is what Gwen really wants. | Relationships | Meg: When you’re married to someone, do you ever wish they were dead?... If you spend a long time with one person don’t you ever wish you could be rid of them? | Meg is questioning the appeal of marriage as it was in the 1960s. At that time people married young, often without a lot of consideration, and usually stayed in marriage, ‘till death part’, even if they were unhappy. People of Meg’s generation were much more inclined to live together before marriage or separate or divorce if they found themselves in an unhappy marriage. | Relationships | Rick: Then when I go back she want to go out and I don’t. I just feel like sitting and drinking. She gets upset and sulks again. I should tell her where I’m going. | Rick describes his new marriage. This relationship is not going well as he and his wife, Susie, do not communicate and have not agreed on mutual expectations. Rick has jumped into marriage because it is what people are ‘supposed’ to do but he ‘can’t’ remember why’. | Relationships | Tom: Then he went very quiet, leant over the desk, practically whispering how if I knew a girl it’d be good for me to do it, to try it. ‘It’, he kept calling it. It, it. I put him on the spot. What? Name it. Give it a name. He cleared his throat. ‘Sexual intercourse. | Tom uses his doctors orders to try to persuade Meg to have sex with him. It is clear that their friendship is a latently sexual relationship but Meg is a typical girl of the 1960s who has been taught that it is important to preserve her virginity. What the doctor says to Tom, Whom he related to meg, indicated the more relaxed attitude to sexual relationships that was developing in the 1960s. | Characters Analysis

Gwen * Three major physical journey’s- each of them changing her life * Supervises every detail of the preparation for the family trip * Her pride and joy ‘the caravan’ is destroyed in a storm half way through her journey * Most intense character in the play * Hold the most extreme view and undergoes the most radical change through what she experiences on her journey * Complains and whines about everything, criticizes and finds fault with everyone, and could be described as a misanthrope- someone who detest other people in general. * Central to Gwen’s character is the shaping experience of the physical journey she took as a young woman fleeing from the home she grew up in * The story has become a family legend to meg (her daughter)- signifying, as it does, her mother capacity to act decisively and take risks * Has a necessity of living life from day to day, constantly on the move, struggling to survive, living in squalor and not knowing where the next meal would come from, has resulted in Gwen’s obsessive need for order and planning * Her alienation from her mother, father and brothers and sisters has left her in position where all her needs for love, intimacy and familial bonds must be supplied by her ‘new’ family- Jim and Meg * Represents Australian conservatism of the 1950s in conflict with the radicalism of the 1960s represented by Meg, Gwen’s attitudes are bound to change * Actual moment of Gwen’s change happens offstage (in Act Four, Scene One) and the woman who returns with Vic is quite a different person from the one who left a short time earlier * The new Gwen has expressed emotion through crying rather than shouting angrily * She is able to ‘support’ Vic, the Australian who has taken the risky journey of the migrant and who refuses to see herself as an exile from and old home but rather as a settler in a new one * She is able to accept the support the Vic * In contrast, she is quiet unable to say what she thinks or feels. For the time she is concerned about what other (specifically Jim) think of her: ‘what do you think of me? Why do you still bother?’ (Pg 46) * This new Gwen is finally able to say I’m sorry and open herself to a new kind of relationship with Jim and as she says, ‘And not just you. Everybody’

Coral * Physical journey begin as one which is taken through no independence action of her own and ends as a solitary flight, to escape Roy’s threat to have her locked up and given shock treatment * Her disengagement is a representation of her sons death, sent as a conscription to the war in Vietnam * Coral whole existence is suffused with the sadness of her loss. It is the only thing she sees as worth talking about, but she has no one to talk about it with * Her final journey is one represented metaphorically in the play the stranger on the shore. This time, as the mermaid she is cast adrift’ forever in the darkness of the sea I follow my beloved… So far from home * This endless journey is one of great suffering for her but she is afraid to detach herself from her dead lover, the sailor, just as in her actual existence * Coral is afraid to abandon the memory of her dead son * Tom, as the sailor, shows coral as the mermaid how to walk just as In their actual lives Toms acceptance of he own death shows coral how to accept that of her son * In this way the two physical journey coral takes leads her first into a situation of crisis then into an unknown territory where she ultimately finds salvation

Vic * One of the 10 pound migrants who made the physical journey from Britain to Australia in the 1950s to establish a better life for their children * In making this journey from the Old World to the new, Vic has learned how to close one chapter of life and move on, with optimism, to the next one * Vic journey from her homeland is like a larger scale version of that which Gwen took her family home in the country town * Vic is positive and has a cheerful outlook * The beach that Vic rapturously describes in the opening Act four is a Metaphor for the landscape of her life * There are dark and dangerous places, like the cave, where she might fear to go, ut she has faced fears of what might lurking in rock pools and can explore this one * The seven mile long expanse of sand presents an image of the way Vic and her family are on their journey together: ‘You get halfway along and look back and there are just three lines of footprints trailing away into the distance * This image suggests that her family has no other support but themselves and their warm feelings for each other * That Vic can ‘just swim about like a fish’ pg. 42 naked in the water demonstrates her sense of being at one with nature, unafraid to experience what it offers * It is Vic who leads Gwen to this warm water- a metaphor for emotional place

The play, “Stranger on the shore”
In this play Tom plays a sailor in the ‘heartwarming drama’ the stranger on the shore. Tom narrate a tale about a drunken sailor who falls overboard from his ship and drown. The sailor is too drunk to admit into heaven and is condemned to continue journey. The notion of an endless journey is used here a metaphor for eternal suffering. Coral enters the play as a strange women ‘whom the sailor meets at the port of Rotterdam. The two fall in love, despite the fact he is a ghost and she is a living human. He tries to escape the painful situation by embarking on another dramatic journey, but as the woman swims after his ship she is turned into a mermaid so that she can follow him. Her desperation hints at Corals own desperation in the aftermaths of her sons death- she follows the sailor even though he is no longer alive.
The God of the sea gives the sailor a wish, which he uses up, in an act of selfless love, by turning the mermaid back into a human. She is at first unwilling to leave him in his world of death nut eventually he helps her to walk on land again and coral voice takes over form her characters as she repeats the words, I’m walking I’m walking I’m walking. The use of Mendelsohn’s music links to the opening scene of Away and to storm scene and we can see how far Coral has come in her journey. Now, instead of flying to the gold coast with Roy or hitchhiking in someone else car, coral can walk on her own. This symbolically dramatizes the way tom has helped coral pass through her grief and return to a life focused on life rather than death
The imagery and dialogue is full of the sort of dramatic and comic touches we might expect in amateur theatrics. The inclusion of ‘slow moving coelacanths’ provokes a question from Jim, and the combination of colloquial speech and melodrama indicate that various parts might be performed for humorous effects.
At the end of this ‘play within a play’ the stage directions that ‘The applause is led thunderously by Gwen’. This suggest that Gwen has understood the significance of the moment for coral as well as for herself. She too can walk on her own journey.
The final image is a red glow offstage that signifies a celebratory bonfire on the beach. Vic and Harry ‘leave the stage in another direction’ indicating that their own journey is a different one and will take them in a different direction.

Conceptual Focus
Self- Discovery * Notions of discovery are embedded in the plays evocative, single word title which physically, emotionally and psychologically draws the characters ‘away’ from the current world into another one that triggers new experiences and understanding and healing relationships * The pays introductions describes the characters as ‘imprisoned in a world in which there worth as human beings is measured In the cost of their holidays’. * By the end, societal imprisonment has been exchanged for the enlivening forces of emancipation (process of being set free) and renewal * The inferred return linked to any leave-taking is metaphorically stressed in the play by the transformative process that is experienced by these holidaymakers. * They return to their lives as changed people, empowered b

Practice Essay- Away

‘At times everything seemed to be changing’. Discuss ways in which Away presents ides about change. Refer to other related texts.

Although it was written and is set in a period of radical change in Australian lifestyles and values, the end of the decade of the 1960s, Away makes little direct reference to these wide ranging social changes. Instead it dramatizes more intimate developments within families and within individuals. As a snapshot of an historical moment, the play can be interpreted as an allegory of changing Australia, even while it stands as an account of the drama of change in particular lives.

Opening on the last day of the school year in 1967 and closing of the first day of the next school year, the play spans only a few short weeks in the lives of its characters and yet their perspectives and understandings have changed radically over that time. Possibly the character who experienced the most profound change is Gwen. Through the intensity of the emotional conflict she encounters, she has had to acknowledge the inevitability of change in life and has adjusted her expectations accordingly. This change of perspective over time can be compared to the reminiscing of Hannah Robert, in her story ‘Sky High’, where the older narrator looks back on a lighter, less burdened childhood.

Structurally quiet central to the play is the storm scene (Act 3, Scene 4), which marks an intense moment of upheaval for Gwen. It is during this storm that the material possession she has set so much store by are crushed and swept away through the force of nature. Gwen has been a woman who has defined herself through her role as Jim’s wife and Meg’s mother. She is an ‘old’ Australian for whom the memory of poverty she endured during the Depression in the 1930’s has motivated a powerful desire to ensure a secure position of material comfort for herself and her family. She typifies the conservatism described in Australia then and now I being restful of the change being made in Australian society through post-war migration from continental Europe.

Gwen has been quite successful in creating her suburban dream. Her husband is a white-collar worker earning enough that she can stay in the home as a full-time housewife mother. Not only is the family able to live well throughout the year by they have enough disposable income to enable them to take a holiday each Christmas in their own comfortable caravan, and on top of that they have a boat. This is exactly the scenario of prosperity that Betty Friedan describes in the feminine Mystique as underlying the problem that became known in the 1960s as ‘housewife syndrome’ and indeed Gwen exhibits all the symptoms. She is neurotically devoted to her material possession and cleaning she is thoroughly practical, eschewing anything frivolous or ‘fun’. She is fastidiously bound to routine, having surprises. As Jim says, she sticks to her plan ‘like the Bible’ and she irrationally angry and hostile towards her family. She also suffers from crushing headaches.
The storm that demolishes Gwen’s physical security has followed on immediately from the storm of argument she has with Meg that has demolished her emotional security. Her tightly- planned world of the nuclear family idea has been shaken by Meg’s obvious attraction to something outside this structure. Gwen fears Meg’s association with Tom, a boy she considers unworthy as his parents are migrants from England and not only is his father a ‘blue collar’ worker but his mother also works in a factory. The association raises possibility that Gwen’s world will change through her daughter leaving the family and brings on the crisis for her. The Bob Dylan song the times they are a-changin’ has been around since 1963 and whilst it is hard to imagine Gwen would have listened to it, she would have has some inkling that the new era was marked by the idea that ‘your sons and your daughters are beyond your command’. Meg’s direction challenge to her mother over the carton of Christmas presents signifies her willingness to forge a new pathway for herself as others around her were doing, and indeed, as her mother herself had done the same when she was young. That Meg is seen to pick up the carton, the symbol of conflict and challenge, and walk if the stage with in Act 5 scene 1, leaves us with an idea that she will go on to become part of the protest movement that swept Australia in the late 1960s and early 70s, protesting against old values that had led inequality, environmental destruction and war.

In the face of this threat to her center of security Gwen retreats into hysterical prejudices against the people she associate with chaos. She is reminiscent of Alf the One Day of the Year in her wild lashing out against ‘Mad people, weird sick, sordid people’ and such febrile ranting is like the eruption if a volcano. It does indeed prove to be cathartic moment for Gwen who is next, seen having been in tears, searching for the words to describe her new emotions which seems to be more attuned to her situation. She can finally apologies and acknowledge empathic emotions for her fellows. What seems to have made a difference for Gwen is the news that Tom is terminally ill and that his parents have not responded with complaints and self-pity tirades, as Gwen herself might have. Instead, Vic and harry maintain an optimistic and cheerful demeanor in the face of the most painful blow a parent could imagine.

Gwen is quiet changed. The wife we see embracing her husband in Act 5, scene 1 can at last express emotion honestly and we feel has experienced a shift in her values. No longer, perhaps, is her middle-class security the most important objective of her life, but now we hope she can focus on the strength of the human relationships she has left, principally that with Jim, her partner who shares her hopes and fears.

Gwen’s difficult emergence from the 1950s suburban dream into the more enlightened 1960’s mindset that embraced the idea of change and risk-taking, mirrors the same painful transition in the community at large. The security and prosperity of the post-war period had been swept away in a storm of protest and challenge to old certainties (such as women’s place is in the home) and for the better or for the worse Australia was forced to acknowledge its place in changing world. The ‘new’ world is represented in Away by the beach where Gwen’s and Vis’s families meet after the obscured and there is a new scene is bathed in sunlight so nothing is community, but underlying it always is the uncertainty of the future.

Everything must change. Nothing stays the same’. To what extend is changing inevitable part of life? In your answer refer to both away and other related text

The most significant change in life is the end of it, death. Every individual is motivated to some extent by apprehension of the inevitability of their own death and that of others around them. Central to away is a character who is suffering a terminal illness. Tom opens the play as Puck and closes it as Lear and so is a focus structurally imminence of Tom’s death changed them in significant ways. The two characters who have most resisted change, Gwen and Coral, both find inspiration in the way Tom and his parents come to terms with his illness and are able to change the direction of their own lives away from the preoccupations that have kept them trapped in negative and destructive frames of thinking.

Tom’s parents, Vic and Harry, have actively incorporated change into their lives years before when they decided to migrate to Australia from England and change their material conditions of life. Having successfully negotiated this experience they are ready to deal with the devastating changes that the loss of their son will be. Unlike Vic and Harry, Coral has lost her son precipitously and for most of the play is unable to cope with the change this has brought to her life. At the beginning of the play she appears but does not speak, almost as though she is rendered mute by trauma. Her first speech is a soliloquy, full of despairing longing for things to be unchanged and as they were before her son died. She wonders if it might be better for children to die ‘looking like gods’, before life has brought the changes of ageing.

Coral has retreated into herself and resist Roy’s demand to ‘come back to reality’, saying she ‘mightn’t like it there’. Reality for him is a place for continuous change where the cycle of life includes the reality of death. He tells coral that if people can’t move on through their grief then everything ‘would simply stop’. Hr sees history as a continuous process of people ‘going on’. Despite this apparent acceptance of the human condition, Roy does want to return to a past that no longer exist. In his appeal to coral to be ‘like you were’ he exposes and inability to truly accept the change that was overtaken them.

Coral is fixated on the things she associates with her son’s death- ‘helicopters, or jungles or mines;. This personal tragedy is acted out in the context of precipitous change in Australian society of the government implemented in order to gather an army to send to the war in Vietnam, an event central to a radical transformation in our culture. In this account of the period, A time of hope: Australia 1966-72, Donald Horne, describes the development of the movement again conscription of the Vietnam war and places it within a general shifting of values and lifestyle from the conservatism of the “menzies era’ of the 1950s to the radicalism of the later sixties, generation and as he escaped the ‘nasho’ and lived she can think of him as a substitute of her son. He is an icon she can fix on in her attempt to deny the changed past. He represents 1950s thinking in that he was questioningly followed the conventional path if a working class Australian- qualified in a trade, married and taken a mortgage. Despite his terror in the face of the possibility of being ‘called up’ he is a docile participant, escaping only through the luck of the draw. A few years later many young men like Rick were refusing to register and even going to jail rather than present for a war they changed radically when it erupted into the streets with the Vietnam moratoriums.

Coral condition of statis is disrupted through the conflict she cannot avoid with Roy. The play is set during an era when it was unusual and difficult for women to leave her husband. Since the feminist movement of the 1970s Australians have become accustomed to the notion that if in the 1960s, to leave was much more radical move as Betty Friedan describes in The feminine Mystique. It is a natural phenomenon that if pressure builds to a certain point, then something must ‘give’, which is what happens for Coral. Unable to remain in her cocoon of misery because of Roy’s constant provocation, she can only leave.

Tom assists coral’s final transformation. Through his acceptance of the great change that is to come for him (his dead) and through his acceptance and caring for her, he is able to show coral how to ‘walk’ again. The play they devise together, strangers on the shore allegory of or the process by which Coral’s transformation takes place. As a mermaid she moves through the water with ease to emerge as a walking woman, as though the water with ease rebirth. She is now able to approach Roy with love again and move on into, changed as that life without her son.

As with any process of change this is a painful and difficult one for Coral, and for Roy. No less painful was broader social change of the time to find new ways for men and women to relate. As documented in Anne Crawford article the nuclear family which was dominant in the fifties now constitutes only 19% of Australian households. Whilst most people would not want to return to that past ideal, which was oppressive to many women, the transformation, like coral’s, implied a loss, the loss of comforting illusion that life could go on without change.

Exam Questions

How was your understanding of the significance of the physical journey developed through the techniques used by various composers? Physical journeys away from home may be taken to expand a traveller’s experience and knowledge of other places, or to escape intolerable living conditions in hope of finding a new place in which to settle can call home. Several characters in Michael Gow’s play Away have earlier experienced journeys that have shaped their worldviews and left them in situations of conflict. The central action of the paly dramatizes the brief holiday journeys of three different families who leave home with expectation of returning soon, after a period of rest and recuperation. For two of these families, the journeys take unforeseen turns and the three journeys intersect in a way that leaves the traveller with new perspectives to help them deal with the conflicts they have left home with. The significance of the physically journey in gaining new experience is also demonstrated