Nick Enright wrote more than fifty plays for the stage, television and radio, translated and adapted plays, and taught acting to students in varied settings both in Australia and the United States. His repertoire included comedy, social realism, farce, fantasy and the musical. In addition to his prodigious contribution to all of these genres, he was a passionate advocate for the actor and the theatre in contemporary society. This chapter summarises Nick Enright's career in theatre and serves to introduce the essays in this volume by locating them in relation to that career.

In August this year an Australian woman visiting the United States found herself in trouble after she answered an air steward with the words "fair dinkum". The young woman was responding to the steward's statement that there were no pretzels. After uttering the phrase, Sophie Reynolds of Queanbeyan in New South Wales, was ordered to hand over her passport to the SkyWest Airlines staff and was told that she might be charged with committing a federal offence. When she disembarked at Pittsburgh, Ms Reynolds was met by three uniformed officers who said: "You swore at the hostess and there are federal rules against that." Reynolds replied: "I did not swear at the hostess, I just said fair dinkum" (Australian, 11 August 2007, p. 5).

Nick Enright was one of Australia's most significant and most successful playwrights. AS a writer, director, actor, and teacher, Enright influenced theater in Australia for more than twenty-five years. He wrote more than fifty plays (for theater, television, and radio), translated and adapted plays, and taught acting to students in varied settings both in Australia and in the United States. Enright's repertoire included comedy, social realism, farce, fantasy, and the musical. Moreover, he was a passionate advocate for the actor and the theater in contemporary society.

This lecture provides a detailed analysis of the way in which the world-renowned Australian satirist Barry Humphries created a series of performances in a variety of genres and modes that lampooned the idea of Empire and Britishness over a 30-year period, with origins in the Menzies era, and evolving through to Thatcher's Britain and beyond. The Keith Cameron Lecture in Australian Studies is an invited public lecture delivered annually by a distinguished international scholar at the School of History and Archives, University College, Dublin. A large audience of students and staff of University College Dublin, and the Australian Ambassador to Ireland, attended the lecture on 30 September 2009. This lecture took place in conjunction with the James Joyce award given to Barry Humphries on the same day by students of the Literary and Historical Society of UCD.

Christina Stead was writing her final novel I'm Dying Laughing on and off for nearly thirty years. She began work on the book in the 1940s but when she presented the completed manuscript to her publishers in 1966 she was confronted with a barrage of criticism. Stead's agent, both her American and English publishers, and her friend and editor Stanley Burnshaw all instructed her to make substantial changes to the manuscript. In particular they asked her to add more detail about the politics of the 1930s and 1940s in the United States. Reluctantly, Stead began a difficult revision process that never ended. After Stead's death in 1983 her literary trustee Ron Geering (1918-2002) spent three years working on the many drafts of I'm Dying Laughing that were left to him, in order to construct a publishable version which appeared in 1986.Recently, a friend of Stead's showed me an extensive collection of manuscript pages of I'm Dying Laughing. This manuscript material was kept separate from the manuscript in Geering's possession and therefore was not available to him when he was working on the text. The discovery of this new collection represents a very significant development in the history of I'm Dying Laughing, Stead's most radical novel. The collection contains parts of the story that do not appear in the published book, and these sections therefore fill some of the puzzling gaps in the text. Moreover, a reading of the new collection alongside the material used by Geering reveals that the punished book uses only a fraction of Stead's drafts. This raises a number of questions about the published text: how faithful it is to Stead's text or texts, and to her overall 'purpose' in writing and re-writing this extraordinary novel? It also raises the tantalising question of whether another edition of I'm Dying Laughing should be published.

What is a typical Australian death? In this compelling history of death, grief and mourning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century in Australia, Pat Jalland focuses on a subject that has not been widely researched. In the introduction to her study Jalland explains that her emphasis on examining records of death at sea during the voyage to Australia, and her work dealing with death in the bush as well as death and destitute members of society, yielded distinctively Australian experiences that demonstrate very little continuity with European cultural norms. Moreover, as Jalland reveals in her final chapter of this book, the experience of the Great War of 1914–18 brought about a massive change in attitudes to death in Australia. It ruptured the traditionally held Christian culture of death that had dominated in Australia and it led to a decline in Christian mourning rituals. These rituals were already in decline, which Jalland partly attributes to the secularizing influence of rituals surrounding death in the bush.

At an art exhibition in London in 1937, the dealer whispered to Anna Wickham's friend Oswell Blakeston that he should take Wickham out of the building, because of her loudly expressed scorn for the paintings. The statuesque Wickham stood up and exclaimed, "You'd better retract, my good man. I may be a minor poet, but I'm a major woman!". Blakeston himself described Anna Wickham as "Olympian" in personality. But the question of Wickham's status as a poet and as a woman, and particularly as a woman poet, dogged her all her life, and simply won't go away.Germaine Greer noted in 1995 that all the things that were said of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were also said about Anna Wickham. Strangely, Greer seems to find nothing interesting about the fact that Wickham was writing confessional poetry several decades before the term was coined, and castigates Wickham for what she identifies as her propensity for "cultivating pain". This seems a misrepresentation of Wickham as a poet. In addition to her confessional mode, she wrote both lyrical and polemical pieces; her verse is both delicate and exploratory, direct and musical, elegant and androgynous. Some of her most powerful poems were written in response to her four children. "Song to the Young John" (1915) opens with these lines: "The apple-blossomy king / Is Lord of this new Spring". "The Faithful Mother" (1916) declares "I am here in bondage, to these, little, little hands". In the "The Angry Woman" (1916), the speaker discourses in free verse on "the sexless part of me that is my mind".

In this volume of essays and recollections, scholars, actors, directors, and acting teachers explore Nick Enright's contribution to theatre. The book is designed to explain, illuminate and debate Enright's plays, television and film scripts, his directing style and his approach to acting. Enright's drama is frequently studied by students at high school and at university. The essays and recollections included in this book will inspire and inform students, teachers, scholars and theatre enthusiasts. Part One opens with an overview of Enright's career in theatre followed by an essay by Peter Fitzpatrick about one of Enright's most well-known works, The Boy from Oz, in order to give readers, including those based overseas, an immediate sense of the important achievements of Enright's career which include musicals, film and theatre. The ensuing chapters are arranged to convey the full extent of his remarkable oeuvre, followed by chapters with detailed textual analysis of Enright's plays. Part Two consists of moving tributes from artistic collaborators. These recollections serve to document Enright's approaches to writing and teaching acting, and his attitudes to theatre, as well as celebrating the warmth and love that this man extended to those with whom he worked.

Anna Wickham was a poet, singer, social worker and feminist activist. The American scholar Jennifer Vaughan Jones published, a biography in 2003, a book which reveals a great deal about Wickham s struggle as a poet but which is not widely held in Australia. (1) But Jones shies away from a full analysis of the poetry, and there are almost no recent essays on Wickham's work. (2) In spite of the critical neglect, Anna Wickham's poetry is widely anthologised in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, and her distinctive modernist poetic voice deserves close attention. (3) One of the attractions of her poetry is its blend of strength and accessibility, its firmness of tone and conviction. At its best it is tight and highly charged; another feature is its range, the poems being by turns provocative, combative, merry and sensual. Most importantly, it offers an enduring aesthetic purity and resonance, in combination with a questing feminist intelligence. In this essay I want to consider the breadth and achievements of Wickham's published and unpublished writing, particularly in the context of Germaine Greer's criticism of her and her work. (4)