The play Don’s Party premiered on August 11 1971 at Carlton’s Pram Factory, home to the radical theatre ensemble, the Australian Performing Arts Group.
Established four years earlier in 1967, the group would nurture some of the most passionate Australian voices of a generation, including Max Gillies, John Romeril, Kerry Walker, Geoffrey Milne and Jenny Kemp.
Until this point, there was very little original Australian theatre. With the exception of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), Australian stages were dominated by scripts imported from the UK and America.
This new generation was interested in creating a muscular, fiercely nationalistic form of theatre preoccupied with “staging the nation”.