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The Man from Mukinupin teachers`
notes
Contents
1
The play
3
2
Women in Hewett’s Plays
4
3.
World War One and its effects
5
4
Country life in a harsh landscape
6
5
Aboriginality and racism
7
6
Glossary/concepts in the play
8
6.1
JC Williamson
8
6.2
Touch of the Tar
8
6.3
Rabbit Proof Fence
8
6.4
Acid Drop
8
6.5
La Dame aux Camelias – (French)
8
6.6
Archduke Ferdinand and Sarajevo
8
6.7
Armistice
8
6.8
Escutcheon
8
6.9
Hobby Horse
9
6.10
Barcoo Rot
9
6.11
Nil desperandum – (Latin).
9
6.12
Laconic
9
6.13
Platonic
9
6.14
Albany Doctor
9
6.15
Victoria Cross
9
6.16
Lillian Russell (1861-1922)
9
6.17
Ben Hur
10
7
Australian drama- links to the syllabus
11
8
Further reading
12
9
Works cited
13
1 The play
Set in the fictional small town of Mukinupin, the play tells the story of Polly Perkins and her love for
Jack Tuesday, the grocer's boy - a match seen as ‘most unsuitable' by her parents. The course of
true love never does run smooth and Jack has a rival in Cecil Brunner, a much older travelling
salesman who is infatuated with Polly and believes he would make her a much better husband! The
whole proceedings are watched over by Clemmy and Clarrie Hummer, two elderly spinster sisters
who are ‘not backward in coming forward' in their views about the town and its gossip.
The play was commissioned by Perth's National Theatre at the Playhouse as a festival occasional
piece to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Western Australia. As Katherine Brisbane states in the
preface to the Currency publication of the play: "Only Dorothy could conceive of such a harvest
festival in a town where the orchards are dying, the salt is rising and it is 114 (F) degrees in the
shade" (vii).
On the surface, this play suggests a light-hearted musical romp through only happy memories of
‘the good old days'. There are simple boy-meets-girl stories and happy-ever-after endings, all of
which are never really united with the harsh rural landscape. This underlying contradiction is a
formidable theme throughout the play as the mirroring and contrast between day and night, white
and black, innocence and sin, celebration and hame, honesty and deceit are embodied in the
several sets of identical twins in the characters. In all cases, one twin represents an upstanding
member of the community (Polly, Jack and Eek) whilst their other twin belong to the ‘wrong end of
town' or are considered derelict (Lily, Harry and Zeek). Hewett uses the sets of twins and other
theatrical doubling to highlight the complex nature of personality: the surface and what lies beneath
it (Hopkins 80-82). Hewett uses this metaphor to give the play a sense that Mukinupin has
a secret which everyone tries to avoid: the respectable Eek Perkins led a mass slaughter of
Aboriginal locals in the creekbed, and this creates a fraudulent righteousness not only out
of Eek, but the rest of the ‘upstanding' members of the community. This may force the audience to
squirm in recognition of the double-standards and the ‘secrets' that quite often inspire the myths that
abound Australian country towns.
Hewett indeed tells it like it is, and this play and the director of this USQ production, Jennifer
Flowers, has used a piece of Dorothy Hewett's poetry (for which she won the ABC National Poetry
competition at the age of 22) entitled Legend of The Green Country as insight into the world of small
town Western Australia.
September …
…a dangerous month: but I count on an abacus as befits a shopkeeper's daughter.
I never could keep count by modern methods, the ring of the till
Is profit and loss, the ledger, hasped with gold, sits in its heavy dust
On the counter, out front of the shopkeeper's sign hangs loose and bangs in the wind,
The name is obliterated; the dog swells and stinks in the gutter,
The golden smell of the beer does not run in the one street, like water,
The windmill head hangs, broken-necked, flapping like a great plain turkey
As the wind rises … this was my country, here I go back for nurture
To the dry soaks, to the creeks running salt through the timber,
To the ghosts of the sandalwood cutters, and the blue breath of their fires,
To the navvies in dark blue singlets laying rails in the scrub. (Stanza I, 72)
There is no doubt to the autobiographical references that Hewett uses here, but what is most
authentic and engaging is her description of the landscape which is harsh and intimidating, yet she
refers to it as her country where she returns for ‘nurture'. The little town of Mukinupin is illustrated in
this poem, so too is the life of the young Polly Perkins: the town's ‘beauty' and the shopkeeper's
daughter.
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2 Women in Hewett’s Plays
Polly and Lily Perkins are twins and the two sides to the same coin. Like most of the women in
Hewett's plays, they reveal both the sexual and repressed side to the Australian female. Hewett
hints at her own mother's likeness to both Lily and Polly in her poem:
My mother was a dark round girl in a country town,
With down on her lip, her white cambric blouse
Smelt of roses and starch, she was beautiful,
Warm, and frigid in a world of dried-up women…
…She wept in the tin humpy at the back of the store,
For the mother who hated the father who drank
And loved her; then, sadly, she fell in love
And kissed the young accountant who kept the books,
Behind the ledgers, the summer dust on the counters. (Stanza III, 74-75)
All the main characters in Hewett's plays are female: they are the prime protagonists who
simultaneously drive and focus the tensions in the play. But Hewett's characters have not always
pleased feminist thinkers in Australia mainly because of her propensity to ‘tell it like it is'. Her women
have faults and they are not always aware of their oppression by male characters and many of them
remain unaware of their exploitation throughout the plays.
Many of Hewetts' plays have critical and hostile audiences because of her uncompromising honesty
that represents both the lyrical and the grotesqueries of female life. Her explicit referral to taboo
female subjects such as menstruation, abortion, menopause, domestic and sexual violence, and
drunkenness are used to contrast with the ‘freewheeling' musical and humorous style of her plays.
This technique goes a long way to blurring characterisation in favour of showing the audience
contradiction and complexity which is, ironically, more true to life. The audience is always invited to
watch the consequences of their individual and collective actions (Williams 272).
Hewett's women range from eccentric old-timers, pious upstanding women, drunken obsessive
mothers, and angry young women who are all actively involved in telling their stories. Yet in all
her plays, Hewett's honesty radiates with love for her female characters because she is telling their
stories, not in order to emancipate them, but to celebrate their sublime and grotesque female
attributes. Polly and Lily, Clemmy and Clarry, Widow Tuesday and Edie all have secrets and
passions that might be considered ‘dangerous' in a town that gossips like Mukinupin, and yet they
are battlers with their men and the landscape; they may well be the link that joins the two.
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3. World War One and its effects
There is a sense in this play that the town of Mukinupin is, for the first time in its settled history,
affected by the outside world. The world war takes away the young and resilient landscapehardened men, and returns them changed and foreign to the town. Hewett reminds us that
Australian white men for the first time probably began to understand heir strangeness to places like
the Somme or Gallipoli and their involvement in these battles for the Empire put them at odds to
their Anglo ancestry. Through the character of Harry, Hewett reveals to the audience the sort of
horrific impact that war had on the psyche of the young men who sent off to fight on the other side of
the globe:
Eek: Where is …Harry?
Jack: Jumped ship at Albany, deserted and went bush. But I wouldn't bother about getting' out the
red carpet for Harry. He's shell-shocked, off his chump, takes fits and dribbles. Balmy Harry, they
calls ‘im. (68)
Hewett uses the medium of playwriting in order to voice her own opinions as to the horrors of
warfare. Through the use of sarcasm she is able to critique the senseless violence that occurred in
World War One, which was fought ironically, to end all wars.
Eek: After five years of the most dreaded war the world has ever known; the fearful horrors of trench
warfare, a Europe drenched in gore; we stand here to welcome home
our returning hero'. (67)
Although the concerns about the impact of war highlighted in this play are touched upon very briefly
by the playwright. However, they still influence the overall atmosphere of the play and establish a
clear historic framework for the action. Furthermore, Hewett manages to use the text to combine
thematic notions that connect Australia's emerging nationhood with the metaphor of young men's
journeys into manhood under the mantle of war.
Eek: It is true that not the faintest breath of these horrors ravaged our fair young shores, but we
gave our sons to face the test of manhood, and, in the grey light of early dawn, leap out upon
unknown shores to dare, endure and die. (67)
Later in his monologue Eek ties in the notions of Australia's emerging nationhood, mentioned above,
with the soldiers who fought in World War One.
Eek: Yes, Australia was there, and Mukinupin was there, to crush Germany and re-divide the world.
At one stride our young Commonwealth put on the toga of nationhood, vindicated the rights of man,
and maintained the moral order of the universe. Let us pray. (67)
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4 Country life in a harsh landscape
Hewett grew up ‘on the land', the daughter of a wealthy farming family, and this gave her a strong
feeling for Australian regionalism, but also a respect for the harshness of the landscape. Throughout
The Man from Mukinupin, all the characters are waiting for rain as the dust, flies and heat are
oppressive and ever-present. There is a foreboding about the landscape: a warning that was
ignored and so the white people seem to be punished for living there, although they are determined
and proud. For Clemmy and Clarry who watch the daily events of Mukinupin from their porch, the
town is a "living death, a place of exile, a cage" (Hopkins 94). Almost none of the women characters
in this play have any rapport with the land – even though the landscape is viewed as a powerful
‘female' force: one that cannot be dominated. Mad Harry Perkins' quote in Act Two attests to this:
She is my bitter heritage,
She is my darling one
She drowns me in the winter
And breaks me in the sun. (102)
Harry is talking about the landscape, but he is also lamenting the wild Touch of Tar (Lily) who, like
the landscape is at odds with the white settlers in the town. The first stanza of the poem Legend of
the Green Country immediately reveals the way in which the landscape seems to undermine the
presence of white people in its midst. The broken windmill, the dust encroaching in the shop, dry/wet
creekbeds, and the ghosts of those who tried to ‘tame' the land are lamentable and yet indelible on
the mind of Dorothy Hewett.
My father was a black-browed man who rode like an Abo [sic].
The neighbours gossiped, ‘A touch of the tarbrush there.'
He built the farm from his sweat, it lay in the elbow
Of two creeks, thick with wattle and white tea-tree. (Stanza III, 74)
Hewett recounts the harshness that got under people's skins: those who were sunburnt by the
aching sun - touched by the untameable natural elements – were placed in the same category as
the local black indigenous people. Of the twin patriarchs whom Hewett describes in this play, Eek
Perkins represents the ‘daytime' characters who are metaphors for control, order, and who seem to
impose themselves on the landscape yet fail to have effective communication with one another. The
‘daytime' world is delineated by commerce and courtship: the ‘light heartedness of musical comedy'
(Williams, 339). While his brother Zeek Perkins represents the ‘night-time' characters who rely on
instinct and psychic forces in the dark surreal dream-world of the night. Zeek is a water diviner and
star gazer who allies himself to the black culture of the landscape. The sounds of Aboriginal tapping
sticks and bullroarers accompany the night-time scenes which seem to be when the landscape is its
most mischievous and the outcast characters clearly communicate about the ‘truths' of the town
(Hopkins 94-95).
Even the liberal quoting from Shakespeare and Tennyson throughout the play, as well as the
importation of Anglo rural traditions such as the hobby-horse and morris dancing are transplanted in
the harsh Mukinupin setting in order to civilise the landscape. Again they seem oddly nontransferable from their Anglo roots. In doing so, Hewett asks the audience the question: is our Anglo
literary heritage of any consequence to us at all in Australia? What are your thoughts after seeing
this play?
Mukinupin is fictionally situated east of the rabbit-proof fence (see websites in reference list for
information about the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence) and the landscape that surrounds the town
dominates: it is the strongest and most malevolent character in the play. How do you think the
designer has used this in the production?
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5 Aboriginality and racism
Although not of Aboriginal decent, Hewett was sympathetic to the treatment of indigenous people in
rural centres. There is a sense in The Man from Mukinupin that the unsavoury past: the unspoken
massacre and alleged rapes of Aboriginal people in the creek drifts above the action – as a spectre
of the past. The secrets of how humans can live in such hostile landscapes died in the genocide,
and the ghosts of the indigenous people cannot help but continually remind the white inhabitants
that they are colonisers who will always be at odds with the bush.
Lily seems to be their only link with Mukinupin, and her lot in life is miserable as she is the shamed
‘touch of the tar' from her father's wilful taking of unnamed Aboriginal women/woman. She is a
constant reminder of his and the town's ‘sin' against Aboriginal people, and she's hated for it. Yet,
she is the only one who has an affinity with the land as she also will not be tamed'. She knows the
rain is coming because she has a connection with ‘country' and has seen the black cockatoos fly
over head. She is a night-time character who lives on the outskirts and displays a dishevelled
existence in order to survive, but for her the harsh landscape is not in the dust or the heat, but in the
town that is at odds with its surroundings. She yearns to escape it, and she eventually does ‘go
bush' with Harry in the final scene of the play. Using Lily, Hewett, manages to "turn on its head the
conventional view of the civilising impact of Anglo culture on the indigenous Aboriginal Culture"
(Hopkins 95) and thus expose the myth of many ‘battler' stories from the bush.
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6 Glossary/concepts in the play
6.1 JC Williamson
An American actor who arrived in Australia in 1874. He and his wife Maggie Moore, both actormanagers, established The Firm, an extraordinarily successful entertainment business. The Firm,
dominated the Australian entertainment industry for almost one hundred years.
6.2 Touch of the Tar
A racist slur that means someone who has both Aboriginal and European heritage. It denotes
someone who has some black colouring in his or her skin. It possibly stems from the saying ‘All
tarred with the same brush', which alludes to darkness as being less desirable than white.
6.3 Rabbit Proof Fence
In the early years of the century, the state government, created a series of rabbit proof fences
running thousands of kilometres from the north coast of Western Australia right through to the south.
These fences were of course, unsuccessful in keeping the rabbit populations at bay, but they help to
provide us with a sense of orientation for the play. The setting ‘East of the rabbit proof fence'
ensures that the plays action occurs deep in the heart of Western Australia.
6.4 Acid Drop
A boiled sweet made of sugar and tartaric acid. It has bitter, sharp taste, hence its name.
6.5 La Dame aux Camelias – (French)
Translates to ‘The woman of the Camellias'. There is a play of the same name which famously
starred Sarah Bernhardt, 'the Divine Sarah' mentioned in the play, in the title role.
A Camellia is a white, pink, red or variegated waxy roselike flower from a tree or shrub that is native
to Asia.
6.6 Archduke Ferdinand and Sarajevo
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Ferdinand (heir to the Hapsburg throne) and his wife were
assassinated in Sarajevo. At this time, Sarajevo was part of a country known as Austria-Hungary.
The neighbouring country of Serbia was blamed for complicity with his murder, and on 28 July 1914,
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. From this declaration of war, Germany joined with AustriaHungary; and Russia, France, and later Britain and Australia joined forces with Serbia. It is often
argued by historians then, that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife was the single
incident that sparked the fuse that began World War One.
6.7 Armistice
This was the unconditional surrender of the Germans signalling the end of World War One. All
fighting ceased at 11.00 am on 11 November 1918.
6.8 Escutcheon
An escutcheon is a shield on which armorial bearings are inscribed. It is similar to a coat of arms. To
bare a ‘blot on one's escutcheon' means that a person's reputation/honour is at stake or in question.
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6.9 Hobby Horse
Considered a pagan ritual, the rearing horse (a man dressed as a horse) represents a fertility rite
that appeared as certain seasons throughout the year. Throughout England, Ireland and Europe, the
ancient hobby-horse continues to appear at weddings, village fairs, midsummer celebrations, etc to
tease, nudge and chase the women (Cavendish 1226). The primitive skull-and-pole horse with glass
bottles of eyes which Harry uses in the play is a powerful sexual menace that terrifies the innocent
Polly. As Clemmy says in Act One: Polly Perkins, you've strayed down the wrong end of town after
dark, so now you're going to get more than you bargained for (49). We presume that the ‘carousel'
that is sung about in the final stages of the play might also be a merry-go-round of horses which
symbolises both the celebration and the unknown of the ‘dark places' in the drama:
Take a whirl on the carousel,
Into the dark on a carousel,
Desert and stars have served us well,
So let's all ride on a carousel (122).
6.10 Barcoo Rot
This is a type of skin disease (Chronic Streptococcal). The origin of the term ‘Barcoo Rot' can be
traced to the Barcoo River in Queensland.
6.11 Nil desperandum – (Latin).
It literally means ‘never despair'.
6.12 Laconic
Someone who is laconic is able to express themselves in just a few words. They can be perceived
as being concise.
6.13 Platonic
Someone who has a non-sexual relationship with another. It implies a spiritual connection between
two people rather than a sexual one. The term itself is derived from The Symposium, a work written
by the ancient Greek philosopher ‘Plato' in the 4th Century BCE.
6.14 Albany Doctor
The name given to a strong, cool wind that blows in from the ocean onto a town in Western
Australia, after a hot day.
6.15 Victoria Cross
A military award given by Britain for ‘conspicuous bravery in the presence of the enemy'. It is the most
prestigious award and was instituted by Queen Victoria in 1856. The award itself depicts a Maltese
Cross, Royal Crown and a Lion under which is an inscription reading ‘For Valour'.
6.16 Lillian Russell (1861-1922)
Lillian Russell encapsulated the ideal of feminine beauty in the latter part of the 19th Century. She
was an actress and singer from the United States of America who performed in musicals such as
HMS Pinafore.
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6.17 Ben Hur
An historical novel written in 1880 by Lewis Wallace, from the United States. The novel depicts the
development of Christianity through the eyes of its eponymous protagonist, Ben Hur, a high-ranking
soldier in the Roman Army. The film version of Ben Hur won an Academy Award for best picture in
1959.
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7 Australian drama- links to the syllabus
Regional Australia ‘myths'
Spirituality of the land
Rituals of marriage and survival
Eradication and assimilation of Aboriginal and white cultures
Early 20th century history - World War One
Musical Theatre
Political theatre – how black and white Australians understand ‘country'
Cross-culture casting
Australian folk drama
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8 Further reading
More about The Man from Mukinupin:


http://www.ausstage.edu.au
http://users.mcmedia.com.au/~jayereid/mfm.htm
The Rabbit-Proof Fence:

http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/interviews/r/rabbit_proof_fence_2002.shtml
Australians in World War One:

http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/ww1.htm
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9 Works cited
Cavendish, Richard (ed). 'Hobby-Horse'. Man, Myth and Magic: The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of
Mythology, Religion and the Unknown. Marshall Cavendish Corporation: New York. 1225-1226.
Hewett, Dorothy. The Man from Mukinupin. Currency Press: Sydney, 1979.
Hewett, Dorothy. Legend of the Green County. Dorothy Hewett Collected Poems William Grono
(ed). Freemantle Art Centre Press: Freemantle, WA, 1995. Pp 72-70
Hopkins, Leckie. Language, Culture, and Landscape in The Man from Mukinupin. Australasian
Drama Studies, No 10, April 1987. Pp 80-91.
Williams, Margaret. 'Dorothy Hewett' and 'The Man from Mukinupin'. Companion to the Theatre in
Australia. Philip Parsons (ed). Currency Press: Sydney, 1995. Pp 271-272 and 339.
"Dorothy Hewett". "Obituary" The Times (UK). Sept 10, 2002. Ebschohost Database. Online 4 May
2004.
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