Chapter Two the Australian Performing Group and Its Legacy, 1968–2008

Chapter Two The Australian Performing Group and Its Legacy, 1968–2008 In 1970, a group of actors, writers and directors formed the Australian Performing Group (APG) in a disused pram factory building in inner- city Melbourne. Where the original site of theatrical activity in sixties Melbourne was the tiny La Mama Café,1 the formation of the APG signified an expanded vision of theatre that would produce large-scale, group-devised performance, new drama, political cabarets and reviews, outdoor agit-prop and small, experimental pieces. The Pram Factory was also a multi-purpose workshop space and venue for outside drama groups, concerts, rock bands and art and craft markets. Later, the APG evolved into a structure that commissioned new plays by emerging playwrights and performance practitioners from around the country. These aspects of the APG identify it as a local instance of both the “daring and extravagance” and internationalism of the vision prevalent in the sixties and a manifestation of the radical combination of theatrical innovation and left-wing politics. In keeping with leftist style, the APG produced manifestos, proposals and multiple position statements that were debated, passed or voted down in committees and general meetings (www.pramfactory.com). An “alternative”, anti- authoritarian and anti-hierarchical ethos was enshrined in processes of collective decision-making on creative and administrative matters and the sharing of responsibilities among members (Milne 2004: 132). The collective was subsidised throughout its life by the newly established Australia Council for the Arts that provided a small income for its members (Brisbane 2005: 131). This chapter situates the formation and activities of the APG within the period of the sixties and the wider historical and cultural sphere in which it evolved. In tracing the cultural flows from international sites of cultural radicalism and theatrical innovation to a local site – the APG in the late sixties and seventies – I argue that APG playwrights and actors took the idea of political protest and 58 Radical Visions 1968–2008: The Impact of the Sixties on Australian Drama cultural radicalism and applied it to local culture and politics. Of these, the perceived absence of an innovative and local theatre culture and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War came together as powerful mobilising forces. The first part of the discussion draws connections between the generation of 1968 whose interest in theatre and politics was the constitutive energy within La Mama and the APG and the international social, cultural and political movements discussed in the previous chapter. The second part revises some of the prevailing views of Australian New Wave theatre and argues that it was more international than nationalist in orientation and posed a challenge to the entrenched provincialism of local culture. A 1968 generation in Australia The formation of the APG is entwined with the history of Australian activism and opposition to the war in Vietnam. Australian artists and activists were part of “the broad cluster of social, cultural and political movements” that constituted the sixties and who responded to international events as well as forces within Australian society (Alomes 1983: 29). As a broad movement, that which Alomes refers to as “sixties radicalism” – fuelled as it was by ideas of peace, liberation, equality and an end to racial discrimination – ran counter to the anti-intellectualism and provincialism of Australia’s ruling establishment (1983: 31). As a background to the discussion of sixties radicalism in Australia, it is worth emphasising that as with its counterparts in Europe and America, the Australian generation of 1968 grew up in a conservative post-war era. Since 1949, Australian society had been shaped and governed by the socially conservative, pro-monarchist, farming- and business-friendly Liberal–Country Party coalition under the self-consciously august leadership of Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Although Menzies retired in 1966 at the age of seventy-two, the coalition held office until 1972 under a succession of prime ministers including Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon. Those artists and activists who turned to left-wing politics were reacting against a long period of conservative rule that brought prosperity but also an unwanted involvement in military actions in Korea (1950–53) and then Vietnam (1965–72). In 1965, Menzies sent a battalion of Australian combat troops to the war in Vietnam. The commitment was announced in parliament in .

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