Remember Me

LIZ's background is taken straight from my Mum's life. Though all the dialogue is inevitably fictionalized. I only ever knew my grandfather as a rather stiff figure in sepia photographs. Still he did farm in the Adelaide hills before moving to Boobarowie in the mid north. Interestingly the "bloat" problem turned out to be a simple salt deficiency and easily cured. But that was not discovered until some years after the family had moved north. My Mum was a nurse. She trained at Kapunda and the Royal Adelaide Hospital and during the war did serve at Katherine and later in Borneo.

JOE's early history reflects my fathers. Dad worked on a drilling team for a bloke called Campbell in outback Queensland and the attitudes he learnt from Campbell he carried all his life and are reflected here. When Dad left to join the airforce Campbell did give him a water colour sketch which I still have.

It’s interesting to note how much more complex the real person is than the normal stereotyped image we have of a bushie. Campbell was a fiercely independent anti-unionist at a time when the union movement was reaching its full flower. He was also a battler, and a good watercolourist. My dad was a battler. He worked in the cane fields. He was a welder and rigger. He built his first car from scrap pieces he collected from the dump. He designed a machine to harvest sugar cane years before the first sugar cane harvester was built, but he lacked any business sense and never patented his idea. He wrote poetry,

JOE's Crete experience is all invention. My dad was in the RAAF and was drilling wells across the top end for the airforce when he met mum. JOE reflects family history to that extent. The Japanese pilot is pure invention. But the story of the sister on the Vyner Brooke is true. My aunt. She just won’t talk about her experiences at all.

The play was written for a competition in 1995 to remember 50th anniversary of the end of the war. It didn't win, but it was short listed.