Brumby Innes and Bid Me To Love: Two plays

Katharine Susannah Prichard

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781760622152
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

'I consider Brumby Innes to be in a class by itself' wrote theatre director Gregan McMahon in 1927. 'It is a very remarkable work, comparable to some of the best of Eugene O'Neill's, and it is, moreover, essentially Australian.'Written in the 1920s, Brumby Innes confronts the turbulent relations between the sexes and the races in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. It is published with another Prichard play from the 1920s, Bid Me To Love, set in fashionable white rich society in the lush hills outside Perth.The two plays are compelling for their dramatic styles and for their insight into the novels which followed: Coonardoo and Intimate Strangers.This new edition includes introductions from Maryrose Casey and Jacqueline Wright.

ACT TWO

The kitchen of BRUMBY INNES’ homestead, a long room of mud bricks with brushwood screen for a verandah. We see the brushwood of the verandah, and its long sapling posts through a wide–open door. Windows on either side, double the size of ordinary windows and without glass, show level, sun–blasted country stretching to a far horizon under the glimmer of dawn. Stars are still in the sky; a butcher bird fluting. (Two notes on the musical pipes and a short chromatic, give it.) The light grows quickly to the full, clear radiance of early morning.

BRUMBY is asleep, snoring heavily, in a bunk below the fireplace, left. A box against the end of the bunk serves as a seat. A rifle leans to the wall near the hearth. There are shelves and tins for flour, tea, sugar, jam, in the corner on the other side of the fireplace; two smoke–blackened kerosene buckets for water on the hearth; and a bench for dishes and cooking pots under the window, left of the door. A table stands out from the window on the right, a chair at either end; a bottle of whisky and a quart pot are on the table. The door to the storeroom opens below the table on the right. A case of whisky has been pushed against the wall. JACK CAREY, stirring the ashes of the fire, raises his head to listen, stands poised, his arm hung as he was going to throw wood on the fire. WYLBA, curled in a faded pale blue gina–gina, is sleeping like a dog on the floor beside the table.

WYLBA: [wailing in her sleep] Wiah! Wiah!

JACK: [cursing under his breath] Be quiet, can’t you?

He throws a branch on the fire. As the flames leap up, he turns quickly to face the door.

Who’s there?

POLLY, a tall gin in a long, straight, dark blue gina–gina, standing against the doorpost, pressed close to it so as not to be seen in the light of the doorway, edges herself into the room, left of the door. She stares at WYLBA, at BRUMBY asleep on the bunk; then her eyes go to JACK CAREY.

What is it, Polly?

POLLY: [in flat, steady tones] Boys comin’ … bump him.

JACK: They are, are they?

POLLY: Eeh–erm.

JACK: What do they think they’re goin’ to do?

POLLY: Beat’m.

JACK: You wongie them not to be damn fools, Polly. You know Brumby … You know he doesn’t care what he does when he’s mad. He’ll lay them all out soon as look at them.

POLLY: [morosely] Bin talkin’ all time.

JACK: No good?

POLLY: No good. Boys mad too.

JACK: Wylba’s Mickina’s woman, isn’t she?

POLLY: Father give’m Wylba when she baby.

WYLBA: [stirring sleepily] Mickina!

Waking, she looks about her.

JACK: He’s her noova—lover, eh?

POLLY: Wylba … weary–booger noova.

JACK: She’s got plenty of lovers? All the men in the camp want her?

POLLY: [with a backward glance] Boys comin’.

WYLBA: [jumping up and running to the door, peering out excitedly] Plenty boys … plenty sticks …

JACK: [trying to wake BRUMBY] Shake y’rself, Brum! [Shaking him roughly] Wake up. [As there is no response from the heavy sleeper] Wake up, you blasted idiot! [To POLLY] John Hallinan campin’ Sixty Mile?

POLLY: Eeh–erm.

JACK: Sent a boy along to say he’d be over when they was musterin’ the Sixty Mile, didn’t he?

POLLY: Munga.

BRUMBY: What … wa’sh that?

JACK: Wake up. There’s a mob comin’ up from the camp to lay you out.

BRUMBY: Mob … what? Aw, go to hell!

He turns over to sleep again.

POLLY: [looking from the doorway] Horse trough, Jack.

WYLBA withers away from her glance.

JACK: [pulling BRUMBY from the bunk] How many?

WYLBA: [excitedly] Uloo … all men in camp.

She shrinks away under POLLY’s glance.

JACK: [pitching BRUMBY to the floor] Wake up, blast you! [Kicking him] I’ve a good mind to let you take what’s comin’ to you. [Going to the table] If we weren’t the only two white men on the place …...