Cold Light

Adapted from the novel by Frank Moorehouse

Frank Moorhouse, Alana Valentine, Alana Valentine

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781760621186
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Here comes Edith Campbell Berry, fresh from International acclaim at the League of Nations, handsome British diplomatic husband in tow. Look out 1950s Canberra, she's on her way to the top. Or is she? The League was after all a failure, and hubby dear is a secret cross dresser and her long lost brother is a Communist agitator watched by a fledgling ASIO. Maybe those dreams of renewed diplomatic honour might take longer than she thinks to materialise. A lot longer. And so to be 'acceptable' she consults the Book of Crossroads, bungles her inner life, remarries badly, and compromises her career options. An epic story of national significance, Cold Light surveys the transformation of Australia from the post-WWII Menzies era to the mid-1970s Whitlam government and asks timely questions about Australia's relationship to women of vision and people of difference.

ACT TWO

SCENE TEN: THE RADICALISM OF ITS TIME

Berry cemetery. There are two seashell-covered graves on stage. GEORGE MCDOWELL stands next to them, dressed in a dark suit with brown shoes and an elaborate mayoral chain.

EDITH, JANICE and FRED enter.

EDITH: George. This is my brother Frederick and his friend Miss Linnett.

JANICE: Janice.

EDITH: This is George McDowell who is the local mayor and who gave the eulogy at our father’s funeral.

GEORGE: Call me T. George. Everyone does.

FRED: Like T. rex.

GEORGE: What’s that?

FRED: Nothing. A dinosaur fossil. Please go on, George.

GEORGE: T. George.

Beat.

You will see they are in the Old Section. They shouldn’t be there but there was nowhere else.

EDITH: No rationalist section.

GEORGE: No. And there weren’t a lot of epitaphs that the mason could do. Your father chose ‘At rest—life’s journey o’er’ for your mother so we did that for your father too. He had wanted a longer statement but it wouldn’t fit and the mason thought it might be controversial.

FRED: And we can’t have that in the Berry cemetery.

GEORGE: I couldn’t find an order of service to be held for relatives visiting a burial site so long after the burial.

EDITH: It never crossed my mind that there would be.

GEORGE: So I worked one up myself.

EDITH looks at JANICE.

JANICE: Let’s have a glass of wine before we begin.

JANICE goes to a picnic basket and pours wine for all of them.

GEORGE takes a small felt-covered box and places it next to the graves. He looks up at the sky.

GEORGE: We have assembled to bid a kind and solemn farewell to our dear friends and mother and father of Edith Alison Campbell Berry and Frederick David Campbell Berry.

Cecelia Gladys Thomas, a rationalist and reform organiser was born on 17 March 1880 at Albury, New South Wales. Her father was a sheriff’s officer and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Governor King. As a young woman she visited the prisons with her father. The family moved to Melbourne and she studied Charles Darwin, Thomas Paine and Edward Bellamy with a tutor at home. She attempted an elopement with the tutor at the age of fifteen which did not last more than a month or so …

EDITH: What? [Laughing] I’ve never heard this. Did you know this?

FRED: [also suppressing laughter] No.

GEORGE: You are not worried by this information? You shouldn’t be. It is a rather poetic act of passion, I would’ve thought, for a young person. Romeo and Juliet.

EDITH: Depends on the age of the tutor.

FRED now laughs out loud.

GEORGE frowns but continues.

GEORGE: She had a fine contralto voice and she performed with the Metropolitan Lieder …

He struggles.

EDITH & FRED: [in unison] Liedertafel.

GEORGE: She told me that to pay for her musical training she started a poultry farm at Deepdene, building the poultry sheds from scrap timber. By 1900 she was a poultry expert as well as a teacher of singing and voice production.

EDITH and FRED are still laughing and now JANICE joins them.

As you both remember, your mother refused to wear a wedding ring on the grounds that it symbolised servitude to a spo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Cold Light
• Act One
• Act Two
• Other Titles by Alana Valentine
• Copyright Details