OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD
You got your quietly courageous pedagogue; your motley bunch of uneducables; your repressive pecking order, enforced by bullies and prigs. You got your tortuous climb toward self-respect. At the end, you got your glimpse of new horizons for the uneducables, your gestures of love and gratitude for the teacher, your fits of apoplexy for the prigs. Gabe Kaplan would recognize the pattern immediately.
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If the piece doesn’t come across like “The Sweathogs Meet Mr. Chips Down Under,” it’s mostly because Wertenbaker’s done her best to render her scenario in the grittiest possible terms. Our Country’s Good opens with a flogging, followed by a grim fuck between two convicts in a ship’s hold. From there it’s on to more sex and torture–as well as alcohol and madness, death, hunger, humiliation, loneliness, exploitation, constant filth, and even anti-Semitism–as Wertenbaker tells her tale of life and art among the unwilling pioneers of Australia: several hundred English convicts and their keepers, sent in 1787 around the cape and across the Indian Ocean to found the settlement that became Sydney.
It happens along about act two, after the would-be actors have developed some sense of unity. Simply, smartly, Wertenbaker shows how Clark’s production assumes a different meaning for each faction in settlement society. How what starts out as a classically bourgeois reformist gesture–the enlightened captain’s attempt to acculturate and co-opt (i.e., “rehabilitate”) his prisoners by exposing them to art–reads as a threat to those charged with keeping the prisoners in line, and as an opportunity for resistance to the prisoners themselves. In Marat/Sade, the good directors of the Charenton mental hospital try to showcase their progressive approach to madness, only to find themselves subverted by their madmen. Something similar happens in Our Country’s Good.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Steve Leonard.
