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Mary Lord

At seventy-one Judah Waten is not just another old soldier who refuses to fade away. Nor is he a man who keeps writing books out of habit. He is a born storyteller who writes when he has something to tell us. And the more he writes, the more powerful and persuasive his fictions become.

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ABR is very proud to present its readers with this special supplement in honour of the eightieth birthday of one of Australia's most significant writers, Christina Stead, whose birthday falls on July 17. I am particularly grateful for John McLaren for asking me to edit this supplement and for thus allowing me to be associated with this gesture of respect and esteem towards one whom I regard as a most valued friend.

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For those who think that opera in Australia only began to get off the ground this book will come as something of a shock. There was a time, over a hundred years ago, when enthusiastic audiences drawn from across the social spectrum supported ‘regular seasons of the world’s best musical theatre’ by a resident, commercial opera company which played in all the major capital cities.

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It seems that going to the theatre has always been a popular activity with Australians. Popular theatre during the period covered by this book (1834–1914) staged a remarkable variety of Australian plays: operettas, melodramas, burlesques, sensation plays, and extravaganzas. On Our Selection, the first play to be called ‘Australian through and through’, opened to an audience of more than a thousand and achieved tremendous popularity.

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Playlab Press is an offshoot of the Queensland Playwrights Laboratory which has the aim of assisting playwrights in the development of their craft through workshopping, production and possible publication of playscripts. It seems to be, with one exception, very much a regional enterprise and all the more admirable for it. The quality and number of these scripts culled, one assumes, from a much larger number of scripts submitted for selection, suggests a wealth of unpublished and unperformed theatrical material in the rest of Australia waiting for local groups as enterprising as the Queensland Playrights Laboratory.

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