The 1990s - War and Peace
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The decade began with NT’s affiliation with the Bring The Frigates Home Coalition opposed to a Gulf War. The New raised funds for the Care Australia Rwanda Appeal and East Timor, and in 1999 refugees from Kosovo attended a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A play about the British government’s pre-war program of taking Jewish children out of Austria and Germany was workshopped in 1997, its cast including Angela Bauer.
Alex Buzo’s Pacific Union, directed by Aarne Neeme, concerned the first conference of the United Nations in 1945 in San Francisco where Australia’s independent foreign policy was created in a hotel room.
Pacific Union, 1998
Nominally led by Deputy Prime Minister Francis Forde, the Australian delegation was dominated by Attorney General and Minister for External Affairs H V Evatt whose team included Paul Hasluck and Sam Atyeo.
Forde: All right, that’s enough of this political bickering, for God’s sake. We’re not here to solve the problems of the world.
Atyeo: We are, actually… ...
Evatt: This is not a peace conference, Mr Winchell. They had one of those in 1919 and look what happened. This is about world security, a pacific union of all nations for all time.
Brecht’s Mother Courage, first staged in 1966, was remounted in 1998 with Gertraud Ingeborg in the title role.
It was directed by David Ritchie, assisted by Damien Ryan, with an original score by Ann Carr-Boyd.
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