Inheritance

Hannie Rayson

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781760620561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In the Mallee country, a family gathers to celebrate the 80th birthdays of twin sisters Dibs and Girlie. But these have been heartbreak years in the bush and the cracks are beginning to show. All have a claim to the land, but which claim will prevail and who will lose out? A powerful family saga dealing with divisions between the city and the bush, black and white, and duty and freedom.

PROLOGUE

Sunset in the Mallee. The sky is streaked with orange and red. Darkness is approaching. In the backyard of the Myrtle family farm, the water tank is in silhouette. There are rusty forty-four-gallon drums lying around. The yard is littered with old farm junk and various members of the Myrtle family, neighbours and friends. Birds are calling. Dogs bark.

It is December 1934.

As the audience take their seats, the actors gaze into the auditorium, quiet and impassive, as though watching strangers coming into town.

NORM MYRTLE (the patriarch) plays the piano on the verandah. WORMIE McCALLUM is accompanying him on the mouth organ.

Suddenly night falls. A big spotlight, made from a roo spotter, falls on NORM. He is holding a trophy made from a sheep’s skull with a blue ribbon rosette.

NORM: Ladies and gentlemen, a big, warm welcome to our first act of the evening. Competing for the 1934 Norm Myrtle Memorial Trophy, please put your hands together for our very own ‘Darlings of the Mallee’—my two favourite girls—the Myrtle Twins.

The spotlight is directed at two towels hanging from a clothes line, making a circle of light.

Dibs and Girlie Myrtle.

NORM strikes up the music. Two fourteen-year-old girls, dressed in blue, burst through ‘the curtains’ to sing ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’. (Melody and text by Charles Graham, 1893.)

DIBS & GIRLIE: [together, singing]

An old man gazed on a photograph

In a locket he’d worn for years;

His nephew then asked him the reason why

That picture had caused him tears.

‘Come listen,’ he said, ‘I will tell you, lad,

A story that’s strange, but true!

Your father and I, at the school one day,

Met two little girls in blue.

REFRAIN:

Two little girls in blue, lad,

Two little girls in blue.

They were sisters, we were brothers

And learned to love the two.

And one little girl in blue, lad,

Who won your father’s heart,

Became your mother. I married the other,

Till destiny drew us apart.

But freedom and happiness filled our life,

A life that was fair and true—

For two better girls never lived than they,

Those two little girls in blue.’

The assembled crowd clap and whistle.

NORM: Ladies and gentlemen. The prima donnas of Allandale. Our very own queens of song, Dibs and Girlie Myrtle.

ACT ONE

SCENE ONE

Midday in the Mallee. A country road.

There is an almighty explosion. A Toyota Corolla shudders to a halt. Smoke pours from the engine.

The driver is a woman in her forties, JULIA. The passenger is her son, FELIX. They are clearly inner-city folk.

JULIA: Fuck. [Pause.] Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

They get out. As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Playwright’s Biography
• Foreword
• Speaking Truth to Power: Hannie Rayson’s Inheritance
• Director’s Note
• Dedication
• First Production
• Characters
• Inheritance
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Copyright Details