Radical Visions 1968-2008: The Impact of the Sixties on Australian Drama, by Denise Varney | Review By Julian Meyrick

Abstract

Radical Visions 1968-2008: The Impact of the Sixties on Australian Drama, by Denise Varney (Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2011) 

Summing up her penetrating and timely book, Denise Varney comments, ‘The politics of freedom, liberation and emancipation central to the social movements of the sixties and seventies flowed through the Australian Performing Group […] The mobile, educated, opinionated and confident group of artists who came together in Carlton, Melbourne […] were empowered by the youth effect and emboldened by collective action. Members enjoyed the heady feeling of being at the vanguard of a new modernity in Australian theatre and of taking a receptive public along for the ride’ (269). 

But when the heady moment is over, what then? How should we regard the New Wave now that it is neither new nor an extant formation? Venerable relic? Outmoded approach? Embarrassing silo of nationalism for a country grappling with the intercultural implications of ‘the Asian century’?