An interview with the author of
Enough Blue Sky: the autobiography of an unknown well-known playwright
Mona Brand
Tell me how you sell the book you've just self-published?
Well, to whomever asks for it. I had a bit of help from people at Sydney
University, or at least from one particular friend, in the History Department,
whom I hadn't really known until this book was first thought about.
She asked me to take part in a big conference, Women and Labour, held at
Macquarie University. When she heard about the book, she said, Oh I can
arrange a flyer for you. So she did.
I think the biggest impetus was when I launched it, because I launched it
at Sydney's New Theatre. I had had it in mind to ask them if I could hire
it for the afternoon. I told them I was launching it for my eightieth birthday.
They said, Oh well launch it and give you a birthday party. So I sold sixty
there.
Some people couldn't come and they apologised and sent cheques later.
Then some friends suggested I should get it into bookshops, but I didn't
think that was likely as it was self-published. A friend took it to the
Public Library and they took three. Some other friends took it to Gleebooks
and they took five, and another friend in Queensland took it to Booknook
and they took four. I got an order from James Bennett - they get orders
from libraries. Right up until Christmas, I seemed to get an order about
every day.
Anyway three hundred were printed and I've got about fifty left.
It is a bit hard. I've never been very good at selling myself, I'm afraid.
I was lucky to get a review in The Australian but the strange thing about
that was, well not so strange because no address was included, so I should
have got some out of that but I only got two. And I should know because
I've got the stock, unless some people bought it from a bookshop. I suppose
it's usual to not include an address, because people usually contact the
publisher, and it is usually a known publisher.
There's a weekly newspaper called Green Left. It's about the only socialist
paper that's left. They did quite a good review in their current issue and
they printed enough information so that if people want to get in touch with
me they can. They sent me a copy and I rang and asked for three copies of
the newspaper and they said certainly. But that was only Thursday.
Back in November I was interviewed on ABC Radio National on Arts Today and
that led to about four or five copies being sold.
I sent out twenty four flyers to various drama departments in Universities
around Australia. I only sent those at the end of January because I was
told they don't get around to ordering anything until about March, after
the new academic year has started.
Playworks said very nice things. One of the girls from Playworks was at
my party. I had met her at a Playwrites Conference about 1980. I met her
again at a Currency Press launch around about last October and told her
I had written my autobiography and was planning on launching it for my birthday.
She asked to come and I sent her an invitation. I didn't realise then she
was involved with Playworks. I had been involved with Playworks when it
first started. They used to send me all their stuff. Anyway, Alison Lisser
was the girl who came and they gave me a very nice piece. As far as I know
I haven't had anything from that.
I noticed how often your name was mentioned in Playing with
Time, how often people would say in those days no-one was published except
of course Mona Brand.
Well I have had some published and I call being published being performed.
And I've had stuff on radio which is professional in Australia. But otherwise
I've mostly had my work performed professionally in foreign countries. But
I'm always hoping for a professional production of one of my plays while
I'm still around.
What made you think about writing an autobiography?
Well it was mostly women graduates coming to interview me for their theses
and saying why didn't I write my autobiography. I'd say well I've often
thought about but I never seem to get around to it. So after a while I thought
I suppose I really ought to because I had read some of the material that
some of them had been writing about me, because they showed it to me or
because I read it after it was printed and it's so easy for things to get
distorted.
And I thought well I should get that right and it was alright if I had a
chance, if it hadn't already been printed. So I thought I really ought to
do and get the facts straight as I know them and if they want to know anything
else they can always refer to the book rather than give a not very accurate
account. Some of them were okay but every now and then I'd read something
and think oh dear, I never knew I'd done that. So that was one of the main
reasons. The writing I suppose I spent a year on.
I don't type much now because I've got arthritis, particularly in this hand,
but it doesn't stop me writing long hand. So I did all in long hand. I was
put in touch with a typist and what I did was speak it into tapes and she
would give it to me chapter by chapter, or tape by tape really and then
I would correct it. In a sense that was more difficult than typing it myself,
because sometimes the words weren't heard quite correctly and when I was
editing it, I might miss something because I would expect it to be right
and it wasn't. I don't think there are many mistakes in it though.
Did you find it a difficult process, writing about something
that is so obviously personal and much of it quite difficult, such as your
childhood?
No, I didn't. I sent out letters to four publishers enclosing excerpts asking
if they would like to read it. Only one of them - Allen & Unwin - said
they would like to read it. When they read it and I got the reply, I thought
oh good they want to publish, but then the letter went on: However, I've
decided not to publish it, you haven't talked enough about adolescence,
boyfriends and that kind of thing. He meant it wasn't personal enough and
of course again in the review in The Australian there was this comment that
she is very coy about her personal life. I think they must expect you to
take them into the bedroom with you when you're writing - I don't know what
they want.
University of Queensland Press wrote after about twelve months apologising
that my letter had been caught up with other material but they didn't say
well let's have a look at it. By that time I had pretty well made up my
mind, it was nearly my eightieth birthday and I thought how many more years
have I got to wait for these people to say no. So I just felt it was something
I had to do.
I thought Leslie Rees wrote a very interesting foreward.
Is he the Leslie Rees who wrote Shy The Platypus and Digit Dick?
Yes, yes. For a long time he was head of ABC Radio Drama. There was no television
when he got started. He's written his own autobiography, Hold Fast To Dreams.
It might be a bit hard to get hold of now because the publishers have gone
out of business.
He celebrated his ninetieth birthday not long ago. He had a celebration
at the library. His books on Australian drama I would say they were almost
the first to be comprehensive. He did one that led up to the seventies,
History of Drama, and then another one. Although he was involved in radio
drama he was a person who loved the stage so he was one of the first people
to notice me.
I submitted two plays to Currency Press, two that had been performed and
they just sent them back. I haven't really tried since then.
You've had a rather singular career as a playwrite in this
country with so much of your work performed internationally and so little
locally.
Yes well several people have commented on this. And all I say now to anyone
who will listen is all I want to see is one of my plays performed professionally
here. It's good to have work performed by a theatre as important as New
Theatre but its audiences aren't vast.
They do have a fair season. They run for about eight weeks but they only
perform Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. So a season is about twenty four
performances and its maximum capacity is about 160 people. So work that
out and it's not a lot of people. Your name gets around a bit. But as I
mentioned in the book, it could be very embarrassing, I would be introduced
as a well-known playwrite but no-one would have seen a production of my
work.
I don't mind not being well-known. I do mind my plays not being well-known.
There's a big difference.
Do you think you have experienced much discrimination either
because of being a woman or because of your politics?
Politically more than as a woman. But all women are discriminated against
in the theatre. There was a big discussion on radio's Arts Today recently
with a number of women writers all complaining. The Sydney Theatre Company
and similar companies just seem to pass over women writers. I've given up
now. And I know them all. When I see them they fall all over me. People
like Richard Wherrett and Wayne Harrison. I haven't seen Michael Gow since
we met at a conference in Canberra and after my play he rushed up to me
and said wonderful wonderful and that was that. I remind them afterwards
that the plays are available.
Looking at the figures these days women are well represented
in community and amateur theatre but on the main stages it is only a couple
of people whose work is seen, people like Katherine Thompson and Hannie
Rayson.
That's how it is. In Melbourne, there's a much more lively community theatre
than there is in Sydney. I was quite struck by it. There's a group called
the Mitcham Repertory Company who have been in existence for forty years.
By chance their director got hold of a copy of my play Here Under Heaven
and he was really enthusiastic about it. It had first been performed in
1948.
He wrote asking if he could stage it and he has now done three of my plays.
I went down last year when he did my most recent play which is a domestic
comedy. It got some very generous crits in some of the magazines, like Stage
Whispers and Theatre Craft, that review all the plays on the main stages
but include the major community theatre productions. I was really impressed.
I don't know of any similar magazines here. 3CR was also generous. So Victoria
is much more generous to non-professional theatre.
But politically it was being associated with New Theatre. When 1970 came
and you get the Nimrod Theatre and the Pram Factory in Melbourne, I rather
innocently thought well here's my chance, I thought this is me, this is
the kind of theatre I was doing and the kind of theatre New Theatre was
doing, but all I got was blank blank blank.
And all I could get out of that was that, this was during the Cold War period,
keep away. It didn't mean don't go and see work at New Theatre because in
fact they did. In fact one of their plays was so like one New Theatre had
done in structure. In those days we had a little theatre down in William
Street and that was The Legend of King O'Malley and it had a lot in it that
was structurally the same and they got all the kudos for breaking new ground.
And we'd broken it well and truly by then but no-one gave us any credit
for it.
Well Nimrod was seen as new and exciting and the New Theatre
had been in existence for a long time.
Yes, and a lot of people had a lot of ideas about it without ever having
seen anything. I think in the public mind it was seen as the theatre that
put on a lot of heavy political stuff. If they'd looked through a list of
the stuff the New Theatre had done since it started they would have seen
we had been doing the classics, we had done things like The Crucible. New
Theatre was the first theatre in Australia to do The Crucible. Bertold Brecht's
name appears in the thirties. But in people's minds we just done one sort
of thing.
I think a lot of people at that time thought the New Theatre
would present work that was didactic and political and that Nimrod would
present work that was lightly political but more overtly entertaining.
Well maybe, but the word didactic is often misused. What we are talking
about is perceptions. You can say to someone, what's didactic about that,
well it's got a message. Well what play hasn't? If a play doesn't have a
message, what's the point? Message was the word that was misused until people
came up with the notion of political correctness. The way the concept of
political correctness is now being used is becoming quite dangerous. If
you have a play that is dealing with issues that are relevant to the times,
it can be dismissed as being politically correct just because it is confronting
issues of Aboriginality or whatever. The important thing is how it deals
with its subject matter, not what it is dealing with.
I heard an interview on radio with David Williamson about one of his recent
plays in which he was asked whether his play had a message. And he said,
no it doesn't have a message, none of the best plays have messages, you
take Shakespeare or Bernard Shaw and I nearly fell off my chair. If ever
a play had a message it would be a Bernard Shaw play. And David Williamson
plays have a message.
But I don't blame them for saying they don't because the word has been so
abused. But if you don't have to something, what's the point? During the
cold war period it was always called a message. It didn't have to be pro-left
wing, but if it had something to say about something that could be described
as an issue, for instance being part of the environment, it was described
as a play with a message. And the word becomes a way to dismiss or undermine
the value of what is being said. It's an example of how a the meaning of
a word can be changed and the outcome is dangerous.
So if you asked a writer what was the message of their play, they would
say, no there's no message. Oh well then, what's it about and they would
tell you what it was about, that would be fine. And of course what they
would tell you would be the message.
You are a writer who has used plays as a vehicle through
which to explore something you believe in passionately.
I hope, and I might be wrong about one or two of them, that I have done
so entertainingly. I'm pretty sure I did so far as our audiences were concerned
but some would say we were preaching to the converted without being allowed
to preach to anyone else or speak to anyone else for a long time.
It doesn't apply to all my plays. My most recent one is a comedy about how
a grandmother can be put upon by all her offspring who want her to mind
all the children. Well's that has something to say and is a comedy at the
same time. It's easy to become labelled.
What do you think of the state of theatre in Australia now?
Well the last few years have seen the emergence of gay theatre and that's
alright. I'm fairly ignorant except for what I read in the reviews because
I don't go very much anymore. Len can't hear so well anymore and what he
does hear he tends to get a bit irritated with!
I go to all the New Theatre productions because I'm a life member and I
have friends who take me. That's a problem, getting around. The expense
is another consideration. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy to wait
for films to come onto television rather than go out to see them but of
course that doesn't happen with stage plays. The cost of plays is a problem.
It has an impact on what you can write because you have to think about limiting
the size of the cast.
One of things I'm sad about with my plays not being on main stages is that
many of them have really good strong roles for women. One of the complaints
you often hear about plays in Australia is that there are not enough good
roles for women and yet my plays certainly have good female roles. Most
of the plays that are staged professionally are written by men and selected
by men and don't have many good female roles.
There was a time when companies like the STC would consider unsolicited
material but nowadays they only look at solicited plays. This I feel cuts
women off because the theatre remains a male stronghold.
This must be really depressing for you who have fought for
change for so long. Do you have a sense of there having been much change?
No I think it's just gone along logically. If you look at radio, before,
during and after the war years, it employed probably more women writers
than male and the women were paid very little but were happy to do it. But
as soon as the payment became worth having the men popped in. And you can't
blame them, I suppose they all had families to support. In my opinion that
had a lot to do with it and I shouldn't complain because it happened because
organisations like the Australian Writers Guild fought for better rates
and I was one of the earliest members and supported what they were doing.
But as rates for writers kept improving men were finally attracted. I think
it's just part of our whole economic set-up.
Do you see any hope of change?
Yes, I'm always optimistic. I don't always have any idea of what will happen
but I always hope. I think what women are doing themselves and amongst themselves
are good. For instance the International Women Playwrites Conference in
Adelaide, Playworks and so on all assist women to realise that they are
not getting the best deal. These kinds of ventures all help.
But I don't think big change will happen without something dramatic happening.
That might be a play that no-one but no-one can ignore.
Well you can look at Diving for Pearls and Hotel Sorrento
with Katherine Thompson and Hannie Rayson and that has resulted in them
carving a niche in the market for themselves but it doesn't appear to have
opened up wider opportunities for other women.
No, that's true and I would agree and I can't explain that.
Women seem to be making bigger inroads as directors than they do as writers
with people like Gael Edwards. But it is still true that women do extremely
well in the non-professional areas of theatre and are only just beginning
to break through on the main stages in any numbers.
I don't know how it's going to change. But I'm not depressed about it, I'm
really not. It's because I really believe it will change. Maybe not in my
day.
Let's talk about your involvement with the Communist Party.
My feeling is that the party did a lot of pioneering work and although the
party no longer exists as the communist party some of the people, so long
as they are not too old or dying off, are still doing or taking part in
the sorts of things they were doing before.
There are several women who are still members of Women's International League
for Peace and Friendship. As a matter of fact, I didn't go, but a woman
I know who regularly goes along, sold twelve of my books there. The Left
Book Club sold seventeen. I didn't ask them to but they took some.
A lot of these people who were actively involved were mostly involved in
some particular area, peace, the environment, women's movement and they
continued that way and encouraged younger people to come along and be involved.
I think I mentioned in the book, some of the younger ones when they came
along, didn't want to do it is exactly the same way as their parents or
grandparents, in fact they were very much against organisations, and not
too keen on meetings and not too keen on too much organised discussion,
but were keen to do it their way.
But I think a lot of this humanism has spread quite widely and is now taken
for granted. Like when we were talking about political correctness, a lot
of things that are being done and some of the things that are being accused
of political correctness are in these various areas, forestry, childcare,
work among Aboriginal people.
It is true that we and many of our friends involved in these sort of areas
and I see this group of pioneers for much of it. I don't think the Communist
Party should take all of the credit. People have sometimes said to me you
were ahead of your time in many things and I have said I wasn't ahead of
my time I was amongst a whole group of people who were ahead of their time,
I was just one of them. But because I was writing and because a lot of my
stuff was being seen on stage it might have looked as though I was ahead
of my time. But I couldn't have written Here Under Heaven which was my first
play in 1948 if I hadn't written some of the people I had who were discussing
these kinds of issues because I didn't have a clue. I got it from them.
Reading about your life in your late teens and early twenties
you were thinking that way then.
Well I was moving that way and I had done a lot of reading. When war first
started I wasn't all for rushing into it. I was really disillusioned, I
thought oh my god here we go again, when will they ever learn. Because the
more books written about World War I that were deeply moving in my opinion
about World War II, but gradually things came out. Trench warfare was something
that we knew and read a lot about.
People did see that World War I could have been avoidable but eventually
World War II was unavoidable. At one stage it could have been avoided, at
one time in the thirties. There were definite attempts by people in some
of the western countries to try and form some sort of a national front with
the Soviet Union and the Soviets at that stage were pretty keen about it
too, but it was continually being blocked by the right in the western countries,
oh no we can't get into bed with them.
I think if there had been more realisation that Germany was going to be
as powerful and dangerous something could have been done. They should have,
they knew Germany was not supposed to rearm. I suppose it's also because
it could have been avoided much earlier at the Versailles Treaty. You could
understand the German people looking for something. But it was revenge and
punishment in that treaty. So you pay later. I think America must wonder
what they had given birth to.
What do you see yourself doing next? More plays?
Since I finished writing the book, I have written a radio play which I have
only recently submitted to the ABC. I gave it to David Marr when I went
to do my interview. And now I'm rewriting something I've done before.
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Blue Sky.
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