What's a man to do? Images of rural Australian Masculinities in three plays of the 1950's: Reedy River, The Bastard Country and Lola Montez

Abstract

In terms of Australian notions of identity, the bush has conventionally been regarded as a place of authenticity, especially for men. It is where they are thought to be free to act in traditional ways, less confined and constrained than their city-dwelling counterparts, and where relationships between men, and those between men and women, are less distorted by "artificial" external pressures. This article examines these patterns of social interaction and gender relations in three important plays from the 1950s set in rural Australia. While the 1950s was a time in which masculinity was in radical transition, there was a strong and widely-recognised consensus at the time about what it meant in practice, and therefore about what men could and could not acceptably do if they wished to qualify for the status of masculinity. The article examines the features of masculinity as they appear in these plays, and discusses the uses to which these depictions are put. Its aims are in part dramaturgical: to think about the relationship between the scripts of the plays and the time in which they were first performed, and to ask questions about how these plays worked in relation to changing possibilities for the performance of gender.