Mona Brand
Encyclopedia
Mona Brand was a twentieth-century Australia
n playwright, poet and freelance writer. She also wrote under the name Alexis Fox. In her own lifetime, she was more well-known in Europe than in Australia, so much so that Brand subtitled her 1995 autobiography, Enough Blue Sky, "The Autobiography of Mona Brand... an Unknown Well-Known Writer."
In the early 1930s, her father was second engineer on ship SS Cape Leeuwin servicing lighthouses and lightships between Brisbane and Darwin. There were literary influences in her family. In one letter to Brand, her father included an original poem The Carpentaria Lightship which she unsuccessfully attempted to have published in The Bulletin
.
Brand's mother, Violet Nixon, was the youngest daughter of journalist, government surveyor, architect and poet Francis Hodgson Nixon (1832-1883), whose collection of poetical pieces The Legends and Lays of Peter Perfume putatively 'collected, corrected and edited by Francis H' was published in Melbourne by F. F. Bailliere in 1865.
When Brand was seven years old, her mother died of a self-induced abortion, and she was sent to live with relatives in Rockhampton
, attending the Rockhampton Girl's Grammar School. At the age of eleven she moved back to Sydney, finishing her education at North Sydney Girls' High School.
Brand wrote of her childhood feelings of displacement in her autobiography, Enough Blue Sky, which she published in 1995. She often felt the disparity between her own treatment and the treatment her brothers received, and noticed other disparities in class and race from an early age. She believed this informed her later writing and opinions. When she was in high school she aspired to become a journalist.
in Sydney. During World War II
, she worked as a social worker and then as a research officer for the Department of Labour and National Service (1945-48). She worked in London between 1948 and 1954, originally as a typist for the BBC
, then in Hanoi
, Vietnam in 1956-57 as an English teacher, subsequently returning to Australia.
On 26 September 1955 Mona married Len Fox
, a journalist for the Communist Party, who was also a poet and fiction writer. Their marriage was, in the words of Brand's friends and herself, a "marriage of true minds". They remained together until his death in Sydney on 9 January 2004, aged 98.
from 1947 to 1970 "making a clear distinction that she was a member of the Australian Communist Party, not the Soviet Party." She was quoted as saying, "when I joined the Communist Party it was not so much because I agreed with Karl Marx (of whom I had read little) as because I felt he and his followers agreed with me." Mona Brand was noted in the translation of Better a Millstone as a "progressive Australian writer."
Much of Brand’s social activism was expressed through her work, and particularly through her relationship with New Theatre
. Most of her plays carry clear political messages.
One of her most popular plays, Here Comes Kisch, discusses the events of Egon Kisch's exclusion from Australia in 1935. Kisch, a communist and Anti-Nazi who was prohibited from entering Australia, is portrayed throughout the play as an intelligent, down to earth man, while the German officials are written as sycophants. Other notable political plays include Our 'Dear' Relations, a play which satirises the consumerism of Mother's Day
and discusses the disadvantage of the working class within the capitalist system, Better a Millstone, which concerns injustice in the criminal sentencing of youth in England and draws on the Derek Bentley case, and Here Under Heaven, a play about sexism and racism, both towards Asians and Aboriginals.
Brand was a prominent member of the NSW Branch of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and was a strong advocate of Aboriginal rights. With Fox, she campaigned for a 'yes' vote in the 1967 referendum to have Aboriginal Australians recognised in the Australian Constitution, as noted by Governor General, Sir William Deane at the Reconciliation Convention in 1997.
In 1956, Brand travelled to Vietnam to assist the Vietnamese revolution through her affiliations with the CPA. She assisted Radio Hanoi and the Voice of Vietnam, especially with English translations returning to Australia the following year.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
(ASIO) held a security file on Brand from 1950, detailing her movements and activities. The file was 379 pages long when it was released from closed access. Brand read the file herself, and expressed her distaste for ASIO's actions in a satirical piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002.
during the war years, discussing her early works with fellow writers Leonard Mann
, Frank Dalby Davison
, and Vance Palmer. After the war she joined the Melbourne Realist Writer's Group, where her first play Here Under Heaven was read. This group, which included writers such as Frank Hardy
and Eric Lambert, recommended the play to Melbourne New Theatre
and it was performed in 1948.
Mona Brand began writing theatre with a one act play for an evening aid event for the Red Cross. The plays needed to have women only casts because the event was being run and organised by the Presbyterian Ladies College, Sydney. Her cousin was part of the event and was given a play to perform which she didn’t like. Being roommates with Brand at the time she asked if Brank could write something better for her that weekend. Brand agreed and wrote her first one act play; a comedy about the learning curves of first aid treatments titled First Aid.
Brand travelled extensively overseas, going first to London
in 1948. She attempted to interest London theatre groups with her work but was told that London audiences would not be interested in plays about Australia. During the five and a half years she was in the UK (1948-1953) Brand was active in London's Unity Theatre
which shared common views with the New Theatre
in Australia . During this time away Brand wrote Strangers in the Land which was set in a Malayan bungalow. As this play dealt with the Malayan Emergency
, an issue of current interest at the time, Brand hoped that the British would be interested in it. It was produced by the Unity Theatre
in 1950 and then banned in the UK. It was later performed in Australia, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and India.
Better a Millstone is a notable social realist play. Written in 1953, the play was inspired by the Derek Bentley case, which saw a young, illiterate man hanged for being involved in a robbery that led to the murder of a policeman. Brand centres the play around the campaign for a posthumous pardon. She uses the play to consider issues of child abuse, commercial exploitation and the criminalisation of young people. The political nature of this play and the issues confronted are reflected in the title's biblical reference, "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." (Luke 17.2) Brand makes the point that while the world treated her character, 'Ronnie' (i.e. Derek), poorly as a child the world took no responsibility for him when things went wrong.
, was concerned with the development of Australian women playwrights in the mid 20th century and provided unique insights of war and isolation, presenting feminist cases of internationalism. New Theatre has defined their philosophy in several ways since its establishment in the 1930s: from the slogan Art is a Weapon to the more recent Theatre with a Purpose.
It has been suggested that one of the reasons for Mona Brand's artistic "isolation" from Australian Professional Theatre is due to her left-wing leanings and association with New Theatre
. While is is relateively under-recognised in Australian theatre history, she did, in fact, have more plays produced, world-wide, than many other well-known Australian playwrights, for example, David Williamson
. Unfortunately, within Australia, Brand had none of her plays professionally produced during her lifetime.
It is more likely that Brand's isolation from mainstream Australian theatre was due to the political and literary context of the period in which she wrote and to the wider treatment of progressive playwrights and writers in that period. With a conservative mainstream theatre industry dominant in Australia at the time, some moderately socialist or feminist playwrights such as Brand found an outlet in the New Theatre or repertory theatre movement which supported socialist and socially aware art movements. The flow-on effect of the lack of recognition in the mainstream was an increased association with the left and a further 'tainting' of these writers' reputations. During this period the New Theatre struggled for recognition, particularly in Sydney, as the commercial press did not publish reviews of their productions written for fifteen years. Brands works were, however, well-received in Britain, Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Rumania, Poland, Latvia and India.
Her involvement with New Theatre spanned more than three decades and allowed her to write more than twenty plays. She defined New Theatre productions as "either overtly or by implication suggesting that there were great weaknesses in capitalism and strengths to be found in socialism." Personally, she attempted to address humanitarian issues in preference to the ideas of feminism. This is obvious in her amateur play, In Search of Aphra, about which she said that she did not write the play as a consciously feminist work. Instead, she felt the injustice for the protagonist and wrote the work from a humanitarian point of view. Brand also regarded feminist literature at the time as a little irrational when words were simply changed to sound feminine rather than masculine. New Theatre is still running to this day.
Unperformed works include: 'The Silent People', 'Flood Tide', 'Pavement Oasis', 'Inbye', 'Koorie Song', 'Hammer and Stars' and Here Comes Kisch, which was performed as a reading at the Australian Playwrights Conference in 1982.
Works published in other countries include Here Under Heaven (1956) and Strangers in the Land (1961) in Russian as well as Better a Millstone (1957) and Strangers in the Land (1957) in Chinese.;
Her first published poem 'Shy as a Deer' appearing in The Australasian in 1928 when she was 12 years old. The poem was written for her father and speaks about her "shy as a deer" mother, Violet, who had died some years earlier. This Night, another early poem was inspired by the second line of Brand’s favourite Wordsworth’s sonnet: "This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon."
In the late 1930s, Mona Brand cancelled a planned overseas trip because of the outbreak of World War II. Her poetic focus during this period therefore was on the social and political environment in Australia as well as the unique Australian landscape and seascape. This also became a time for her development as a writer because she met Melbourne Workers' Educational Association
tutor, William Fearn Wannan, who influenced and taught her. She also became friends with a Brisbane poet, James Devaney
, who introduced her to John Shaw Neilson, who Brand thought was Australia's finest lyric poet.
During the 1960s, Brand began to write verse narration for Margaret Barr's dance dramas. At this period, Brand also collaborated with modern composer, John Antill
. Barr and Antill both insisted on free verse format, which changed Brand’s writing styles to some extent.
Mona Brand's friends voluntarily helped her to publish 500 copies of the collection. The forward was written by Dame Mary Gilmore
, who pointed out that Brand’s poetry was "direct and simple".
Contents: Homespun, Hyde Park Fountain, The Miser, Sequence, Sympathy (In Mid Winter), The Fashionable Hat, From A Station Bridge, Ageless, Vigil, Aspiration of An Earth Worm, Wander Through, Dream Garden, Shutters, The Queen’s Breakfast, Death, Translation of ODE VII BY Horace, Pround Chime, Easter Hymn, The Primrose Flower, Forgetting, Zinnias, Radio Greeting, Sad Tale of a Musical Dove, The Idle Roam, This Night, My Song, Going up, A Simple Lesson
The cover was designed by Albert Collins. "The fact that the fine pen and ink drawing depicted a popular tree suggests my continuing pre-occupation with non-indigenous landscape features."
Contents: Promise, Clues, Silver Singing, Man’s Destiny, Collins Street, The Civilised, The Blue Gum (Outside My Window), Twilight, Australian Christmas (Or Coming up to Scratch), The White Tree, Outside, Chintz, Panorama, At the Ballet, Eternity, The Idle Roam, The Miser, Zinnias, This Night, My Song, Hyde Park Fountain, Sequence, Going Up, Vigil.
The cover was designed by Mona Brand herself.
Contents: Lass in love, Young Mother, Sound and Sea, The Trust, Symphony of Man, Christmas Tree, Tomorrow, The Willow, Finale, Soundless, Cacophony, Instrument, All I Know, These Hands, To John (1940), Aconite ( Monk’s Hood), Seashore, Sale Ad, Parrots, “Where Are Those Thine Accusers?”, White Heels, To a Poet.
This collection includes “some previously unpublished pieces, as well as others that have appeared in the print media or have been performed in association with stage and television productions”.
Contents: Three secitons, organised by date of composition.
1928-1938: The Idle Roam, Zinnias, This Night, Hyde Park Fountain, My Song, The Miser, Forgetting, Ageless, Aspiration of an Earth Worm, Translation of Ode VII by Horace, Shy as a Deer, To A Fellow Poet.
1938-1946: These Hands, The Willow, Lass in Love, The White Tree, Soundless, All I Know, Cacophony, Instrument, Twilight, Man’s Destiny, Panorama, Collins Street, The Blue Gum, Promise, Seashore, Sound and Sea, Parrots, Aconite (Monk’s Hood), Sympathy, Silver Singing, Young Mother, The Civilised, Symphony of Man, Australian Christmas, At the Ballet, Eternity, The Trust, Clues, To John (1940), Sale Ad, Christmas Tree, Tomorrow.
Since 1946: Span, After Lunch, Snowy!, The Toast of Toorak, On our Blindness, Sonnet for Stream Street, Woolloomooloo, Middle Age, Highway, Ben Hai River, The Student, Halong Bay, Hai Thon, Song of Vietnam, Twenty Summers, Sonnet for a Sunday, Sonnet for Two Cities, How a Sound can Grow, Harbour Journey, Indian Ocean, Bombay Wharf, Therapy, Deep South Deep Freeze, Amarilla.
Mona Brand published the short story 'The Fairie’s Ladder' in Artesia on 16 January 1925, when she was 9 years old.
This collection contains short stories and poetry. The short stories in this collection are based on conversations between the author and Vietnamese women from a variety of backgrounds which she had while in North Vietnam. Brand wrote, "my husband [Len Fox] and I talked with women in various parts of North Vietnam - peasants in small cottages on the delta and at the seashore, miners at Hongay-Campha and the people belonging to the various national minorities in the new Thai-Meo autonomous region of the North West." Three of the stories "can more correctly be described as biographies because they describe events almost exactly as they took place, with the exception of the creation of a few minor characters." Other stories have been given a more fictional treatment.
Contents: Short Stories: Return to Life, The Little Messenger, Down Dragon, Voice in the Jungle, Once More Flowers Blossom. Poetry: The Sun Rises, Hai Thon, Halong Bay, The Student, Song of Vietnam.
, Brisbane
.
Brand died in Sydney on 1 August 2007.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n playwright, poet and freelance writer. She also wrote under the name Alexis Fox. In her own lifetime, she was more well-known in Europe than in Australia, so much so that Brand subtitled her 1995 autobiography, Enough Blue Sky, "The Autobiography of Mona Brand... an Unknown Well-Known Writer."
Early life
Mona Brand was born in Sydney on 22 October 1915, to Alexander and Violet Brand (nee Nixon). She had an older brother, John, and a younger, Deryck.In the early 1930s, her father was second engineer on ship SS Cape Leeuwin servicing lighthouses and lightships between Brisbane and Darwin. There were literary influences in her family. In one letter to Brand, her father included an original poem The Carpentaria Lightship which she unsuccessfully attempted to have published in The Bulletin
The Bulletin
The Bulletin was an Australian weekly magazine that was published in Sydney from 1880 until January 2008. It was influential in Australian culture and politics from about 1890 until World War I, the period when it was identified with the "Bulletin school" of Australian literature. Its influence...
.
Brand's mother, Violet Nixon, was the youngest daughter of journalist, government surveyor, architect and poet Francis Hodgson Nixon (1832-1883), whose collection of poetical pieces The Legends and Lays of Peter Perfume putatively 'collected, corrected and edited by Francis H' was published in Melbourne by F. F. Bailliere in 1865.
When Brand was seven years old, her mother died of a self-induced abortion, and she was sent to live with relatives in Rockhampton
Rockhampton
Rockhampton can refer to:* Rockhampton, Queensland is a city in Queensland, Australia* Rockhampton City, Queensland, a suburb of Rockhampton, Queensland* Electoral district of Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia...
, attending the Rockhampton Girl's Grammar School. At the age of eleven she moved back to Sydney, finishing her education at North Sydney Girls' High School.
Brand wrote of her childhood feelings of displacement in her autobiography, Enough Blue Sky, which she published in 1995. She often felt the disparity between her own treatment and the treatment her brothers received, and noticed other disparities in class and race from an early age. She believed this informed her later writing and opinions. When she was in high school she aspired to become a journalist.
Adult years
Mona Brand's first job was as a copy-writer with The SunThe Sun (Australia)
The Sun was an afternoon tabloid newspaper, first published in 1910, by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia as the afternoon companion to the The Sydney Morning Herald.It was last published in March, 1988...
in Sydney. During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, she worked as a social worker and then as a research officer for the Department of Labour and National Service (1945-48). She worked in London between 1948 and 1954, originally as a typist for the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, then in Hanoi
Hanoi
Hanoi , is the capital of Vietnam and the country's second largest city. Its population in 2009 was estimated at 2.6 million for urban districts, 6.5 million for the metropolitan jurisdiction. From 1010 until 1802, it was the most important political centre of Vietnam...
, Vietnam in 1956-57 as an English teacher, subsequently returning to Australia.
On 26 September 1955 Mona married Len Fox
Len Fox
Leonard Phillips Fox was an Australian author and painter, born in Melbourne.His uncle was the painter Emanuel Phillips Fox, who died when Len was 10. In 1984 he was to donate a painting Sunlight Effect painted by his uncle ca...
, a journalist for the Communist Party, who was also a poet and fiction writer. Their marriage was, in the words of Brand's friends and herself, a "marriage of true minds". They remained together until his death in Sydney on 9 January 2004, aged 98.
Political views
Mona Brand was a member of the Communist Party of AustraliaCommunist Party of Australia
The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991; it was succeeded by the Socialist Party of Australia, which then renamed itself, becoming the current Communist Party of Australia. The CPA achieved its greatest political strength in the 1940s and faced an attempted...
from 1947 to 1970 "making a clear distinction that she was a member of the Australian Communist Party, not the Soviet Party." She was quoted as saying, "when I joined the Communist Party it was not so much because I agreed with Karl Marx (of whom I had read little) as because I felt he and his followers agreed with me." Mona Brand was noted in the translation of Better a Millstone as a "progressive Australian writer."
Much of Brand’s social activism was expressed through her work, and particularly through her relationship with New Theatre
New Theatre (Newtown)
The New Theatre is an independent theatre company in the inner western Sydney suburb of Newtown, Australia. Established in October 1932, it is the oldest theatre company in continuous production in New South Wales...
. Most of her plays carry clear political messages.
One of her most popular plays, Here Comes Kisch, discusses the events of Egon Kisch's exclusion from Australia in 1935. Kisch, a communist and Anti-Nazi who was prohibited from entering Australia, is portrayed throughout the play as an intelligent, down to earth man, while the German officials are written as sycophants. Other notable political plays include Our 'Dear' Relations, a play which satirises the consumerism of Mother's Day
Mother's Day
Mother's Day is a celebration honoring mothers and celebrating motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence of mothers in society. It is celebrated on various days in many parts of the world, yet most commonly in March, April, or May...
and discusses the disadvantage of the working class within the capitalist system, Better a Millstone, which concerns injustice in the criminal sentencing of youth in England and draws on the Derek Bentley case, and Here Under Heaven, a play about sexism and racism, both towards Asians and Aboriginals.
Brand was a prominent member of the NSW Branch of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and was a strong advocate of Aboriginal rights. With Fox, she campaigned for a 'yes' vote in the 1967 referendum to have Aboriginal Australians recognised in the Australian Constitution, as noted by Governor General, Sir William Deane at the Reconciliation Convention in 1997.
In 1956, Brand travelled to Vietnam to assist the Vietnamese revolution through her affiliations with the CPA. She assisted Radio Hanoi and the Voice of Vietnam, especially with English translations returning to Australia the following year.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is Australia's national security service, which is responsible for the protection of the country and its citizens from espionage, sabotage, acts of foreign interference, politically-motivated violence, attacks on the Australian defence system, and...
(ASIO) held a security file on Brand from 1950, detailing her movements and activities. The file was 379 pages long when it was released from closed access. Brand read the file herself, and expressed her distaste for ASIO's actions in a satirical piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002.
Literary career
Mona Brand joined the Victorian Branch of the Fellowship of Australian WritersFellowship of Australian Writers
The Fellowship of Australian Writers, also known as FAW, was established in Sydney in 1928. Its aim is to bring writers together and promote their interests...
during the war years, discussing her early works with fellow writers Leonard Mann
Leonard Mann
-Life:He served in the Australian Imperial Force during World War I, and with the Department of Aircraft Production in World War II.-External links:*...
, Frank Dalby Davison
Frank Dalby Davison
Frank Dalby Davison , also known as F.D. Davison and Freddie Davison, was an Australian novelist and short story writer...
, and Vance Palmer. After the war she joined the Melbourne Realist Writer's Group, where her first play Here Under Heaven was read. This group, which included writers such as Frank Hardy
Frank Hardy
Francis Joseph Hardy, or Frank, was an Australian left-wing novelist and writer best known for his controversial novel Power Without Glory. He also was a political activist bringing the plight of Aboriginal Australians to international attention with the publication of his book, The Unlucky...
and Eric Lambert, recommended the play to Melbourne New Theatre
New Theatre (Newtown)
The New Theatre is an independent theatre company in the inner western Sydney suburb of Newtown, Australia. Established in October 1932, it is the oldest theatre company in continuous production in New South Wales...
and it was performed in 1948.
Mona Brand began writing theatre with a one act play for an evening aid event for the Red Cross. The plays needed to have women only casts because the event was being run and organised by the Presbyterian Ladies College, Sydney. Her cousin was part of the event and was given a play to perform which she didn’t like. Being roommates with Brand at the time she asked if Brank could write something better for her that weekend. Brand agreed and wrote her first one act play; a comedy about the learning curves of first aid treatments titled First Aid.
Brand travelled extensively overseas, going first to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1948. She attempted to interest London theatre groups with her work but was told that London audiences would not be interested in plays about Australia. During the five and a half years she was in the UK (1948-1953) Brand was active in London's Unity Theatre
Unity Theatre
-United Kingdom:In the United Kingdom, the Unity theatre movement developed from workers' drama groups in the 1930s, seeing itself as using theatre to highlight the issues of the working class being produced by and for working class audiences...
which shared common views with the New Theatre
New Theatre (Newtown)
The New Theatre is an independent theatre company in the inner western Sydney suburb of Newtown, Australia. Established in October 1932, it is the oldest theatre company in continuous production in New South Wales...
in Australia . During this time away Brand wrote Strangers in the Land which was set in a Malayan bungalow. As this play dealt with the Malayan Emergency
Malayan Emergency
The Malayan Emergency was a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army , the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party, from 1948 to 1960....
, an issue of current interest at the time, Brand hoped that the British would be interested in it. It was produced by the Unity Theatre
Unity Theatre
-United Kingdom:In the United Kingdom, the Unity theatre movement developed from workers' drama groups in the 1930s, seeing itself as using theatre to highlight the issues of the working class being produced by and for working class audiences...
in 1950 and then banned in the UK. It was later performed in Australia, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and India.
Better a Millstone is a notable social realist play. Written in 1953, the play was inspired by the Derek Bentley case, which saw a young, illiterate man hanged for being involved in a robbery that led to the murder of a policeman. Brand centres the play around the campaign for a posthumous pardon. She uses the play to consider issues of child abuse, commercial exploitation and the criminalisation of young people. The political nature of this play and the issues confronted are reflected in the title's biblical reference, "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." (Luke 17.2) Brand makes the point that while the world treated her character, 'Ronnie' (i.e. Derek), poorly as a child the world took no responsibility for him when things went wrong.
Associations with New Theatre
Sydney's New TheatreNew Theatre (Newtown)
The New Theatre is an independent theatre company in the inner western Sydney suburb of Newtown, Australia. Established in October 1932, it is the oldest theatre company in continuous production in New South Wales...
, was concerned with the development of Australian women playwrights in the mid 20th century and provided unique insights of war and isolation, presenting feminist cases of internationalism. New Theatre has defined their philosophy in several ways since its establishment in the 1930s: from the slogan Art is a Weapon to the more recent Theatre with a Purpose.
It has been suggested that one of the reasons for Mona Brand's artistic "isolation" from Australian Professional Theatre is due to her left-wing leanings and association with New Theatre
New Theatre (Newtown)
The New Theatre is an independent theatre company in the inner western Sydney suburb of Newtown, Australia. Established in October 1932, it is the oldest theatre company in continuous production in New South Wales...
. While is is relateively under-recognised in Australian theatre history, she did, in fact, have more plays produced, world-wide, than many other well-known Australian playwrights, for example, David Williamson
David Williamson
David Keith Williamson AO is one of Australia's best-known playwrights. He has also written screenplays and teleplays.-Biography:...
. Unfortunately, within Australia, Brand had none of her plays professionally produced during her lifetime.
It is more likely that Brand's isolation from mainstream Australian theatre was due to the political and literary context of the period in which she wrote and to the wider treatment of progressive playwrights and writers in that period. With a conservative mainstream theatre industry dominant in Australia at the time, some moderately socialist or feminist playwrights such as Brand found an outlet in the New Theatre or repertory theatre movement which supported socialist and socially aware art movements. The flow-on effect of the lack of recognition in the mainstream was an increased association with the left and a further 'tainting' of these writers' reputations. During this period the New Theatre struggled for recognition, particularly in Sydney, as the commercial press did not publish reviews of their productions written for fifteen years. Brands works were, however, well-received in Britain, Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Rumania, Poland, Latvia and India.
Her involvement with New Theatre spanned more than three decades and allowed her to write more than twenty plays. She defined New Theatre productions as "either overtly or by implication suggesting that there were great weaknesses in capitalism and strengths to be found in socialism." Personally, she attempted to address humanitarian issues in preference to the ideas of feminism. This is obvious in her amateur play, In Search of Aphra, about which she said that she did not write the play as a consciously feminist work. Instead, she felt the injustice for the protagonist and wrote the work from a humanitarian point of view. Brand also regarded feminist literature at the time as a little irrational when words were simply changed to sound feminine rather than masculine. New Theatre is still running to this day.
Plays
| Title | First Performed (when known)/awards | First Published (when known) |
|---|---|---|
| Strangers in the Land | 1950 - 21 November, Unity Theatre, London | 1954 – Two Plays about Malaya (London: Lawrence& Wishart), 13-55 |
| No Strings Attached | 1958 – 4 October, Sydney New Theatre | 1965 – Mona Brand – plays (Moscow: progress Pupl) |
| Better A Millstone | 1954 – 27 November, Sydney New Theatre | 1965 – Mona Brand – plays (Moscow: progress Pupl) |
| Here Under Heaven | 1948 – 29 May, Melbourne New Theatre | 1969 – Three Plays (Sydney: Wentworth Press, 137-188) |
| Barbara | 1966 – 20 August, Sydney New Theatre | 1969 – Three Plays (Sydney: Wentworth Press, 3-69) |
| Our 'Dear' Relations | 1963 – 25 May, Sydney New Theatre | 1969 – Three Plays (Sydney: Wentworth Press, 71-134) |
| Flying Saucery | 1970 – 20 June, Sydney New Theatre | 1973 – An Australian Space Fantasy for Children (Sydney, limited to 250 copies) |
| First Aid | 1940 – May 1940, Melbourne, Production awarded first prize by Brett Randall | - |
| Butcher's Hook | - | - |
| School For Thought | - | - |
| Out of Commission | 1955 – 26 March, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| Fission Chips | 1959 – 11 April, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| Hold the Line (aka The Land of Teletap) | 1960 – 25 November, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| Snowy! | 1963 – Broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Channel 2, 8th May | - |
| Come All Ye valiant Miners | 1965 – 5 June, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| You've Never Had It So Good | 1965 – 11 December, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| On Stage Vietnam (Co-author with Patrick Barrett) | 1967 – 10 June, Sydney New Theatre | 1967 - Self published |
| Going, Going, Gone | 1968 – 23 November, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| Hotel | 1968 – 26 July, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| Exposure 70 | 1970 – 15 May, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| One of Our Patients | 1970 – September, Second place in City of Sydney Eisteddfod | - |
| Bumps and Grinds | 1971 – 28 May, Physics Theatrette | - |
| Highway | 1971 – 9 September, Union Theatre | - |
| It's Time To Boil Billy | 1972 – 12 August, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| The Ghost of Grey Gables | 1973 – 15 December, The Holiday Theatre, Wesley Auditorium | - |
| And A Happy New Year | 1976 – 27 March, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| The Pirates of Pal Mal | 1977 – 3 December, Sydney New Theatre | - |
| Who'd Be A Shop Steward | 1979 – 20 April (first screened) | - |
Unperformed works include: 'The Silent People', 'Flood Tide', 'Pavement Oasis', 'Inbye', 'Koorie Song', 'Hammer and Stars' and Here Comes Kisch, which was performed as a reading at the Australian Playwrights Conference in 1982.
Works published in other countries include Here Under Heaven (1956) and Strangers in the Land (1961) in Russian as well as Better a Millstone (1957) and Strangers in the Land (1957) in Chinese.;
Poetry
Mona Brand had four collections of poetry published and had numerous individual poems published in newspapers and periodicals during her career.Her first published poem 'Shy as a Deer' appearing in The Australasian in 1928 when she was 12 years old. The poem was written for her father and speaks about her "shy as a deer" mother, Violet, who had died some years earlier. This Night, another early poem was inspired by the second line of Brand’s favourite Wordsworth’s sonnet: "This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon."
Influences
Brand early poetry was strongly influenced by English poets and are somewhat imitative of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la Mare and Edna St Vincent Millay. In her early work, she preferred a regular rhyme scheme to free verse although she adopted whichever suited the idea.In the late 1930s, Mona Brand cancelled a planned overseas trip because of the outbreak of World War II. Her poetic focus during this period therefore was on the social and political environment in Australia as well as the unique Australian landscape and seascape. This also became a time for her development as a writer because she met Melbourne Workers' Educational Association
Workers' Educational Association
The Workers’ Educational Association seeks to provide access to education and lifelong learning for adults from all backgrounds, and in particular those who have previously missed out on education. The International Federation of Workers Education Associations has consultative status to UNESCO...
tutor, William Fearn Wannan, who influenced and taught her. She also became friends with a Brisbane poet, James Devaney
James Devaney
James Martin Devaney was an Australian poet, novelist, and journalist.-Biography:Born in Bendigo, Victoria, Devaney attended St. Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, entering the Marist Brothers juniorate in 1904. He took his vows in 1915...
, who introduced her to John Shaw Neilson, who Brand thought was Australia's finest lyric poet.
During the 1960s, Brand began to write verse narration for Margaret Barr's dance dramas. At this period, Brand also collaborated with modern composer, John Antill
John Antill
John Henry Antill, CMG, OBE was an Australian composer best known for his ballet Corroboree.-Biography:Antill was born in Sydney in 1904, and was educated and trained in music at Trinity Grammar School, Sydney and St Andrew's Cathedral School. Upon leaving school in 1920 he became apprenticed to...
. Barr and Antill both insisted on free verse format, which changed Brand’s writing styles to some extent.
Poetry collections
- Wheel and Bobbin (1938)
Mona Brand's friends voluntarily helped her to publish 500 copies of the collection. The forward was written by Dame Mary Gilmore
Mary Gilmore
Dame Mary Gilmore DBE was a prominent Australian socialist poet and journalist.-Early life:Mary Jean Cameron was born on 16 August 1865 at Cotta Walla near Goulburn, New South Wales...
, who pointed out that Brand’s poetry was "direct and simple".
Contents: Homespun, Hyde Park Fountain, The Miser, Sequence, Sympathy (In Mid Winter), The Fashionable Hat, From A Station Bridge, Ageless, Vigil, Aspiration of An Earth Worm, Wander Through, Dream Garden, Shutters, The Queen’s Breakfast, Death, Translation of ODE VII BY Horace, Pround Chime, Easter Hymn, The Primrose Flower, Forgetting, Zinnias, Radio Greeting, Sad Tale of a Musical Dove, The Idle Roam, This Night, My Song, Going up, A Simple Lesson
- Silver Singing (1940)
The cover was designed by Albert Collins. "The fact that the fine pen and ink drawing depicted a popular tree suggests my continuing pre-occupation with non-indigenous landscape features."
Contents: Promise, Clues, Silver Singing, Man’s Destiny, Collins Street, The Civilised, The Blue Gum (Outside My Window), Twilight, Australian Christmas (Or Coming up to Scratch), The White Tree, Outside, Chintz, Panorama, At the Ballet, Eternity, The Idle Roam, The Miser, Zinnias, This Night, My Song, Hyde Park Fountain, Sequence, Going Up, Vigil.
- Lass in Love (1946)
The cover was designed by Mona Brand herself.
Contents: Lass in love, Young Mother, Sound and Sea, The Trust, Symphony of Man, Christmas Tree, Tomorrow, The Willow, Finale, Soundless, Cacophony, Instrument, All I Know, These Hands, To John (1940), Aconite ( Monk’s Hood), Seashore, Sale Ad, Parrots, “Where Are Those Thine Accusers?”, White Heels, To a Poet.
- Coloured Sounds (1997)
This collection includes “some previously unpublished pieces, as well as others that have appeared in the print media or have been performed in association with stage and television productions”.
Contents: Three secitons, organised by date of composition.
1928-1938: The Idle Roam, Zinnias, This Night, Hyde Park Fountain, My Song, The Miser, Forgetting, Ageless, Aspiration of an Earth Worm, Translation of Ode VII by Horace, Shy as a Deer, To A Fellow Poet.
1938-1946: These Hands, The Willow, Lass in Love, The White Tree, Soundless, All I Know, Cacophony, Instrument, Twilight, Man’s Destiny, Panorama, Collins Street, The Blue Gum, Promise, Seashore, Sound and Sea, Parrots, Aconite (Monk’s Hood), Sympathy, Silver Singing, Young Mother, The Civilised, Symphony of Man, Australian Christmas, At the Ballet, Eternity, The Trust, Clues, To John (1940), Sale Ad, Christmas Tree, Tomorrow.
Since 1946: Span, After Lunch, Snowy!, The Toast of Toorak, On our Blindness, Sonnet for Stream Street, Woolloomooloo, Middle Age, Highway, Ben Hai River, The Student, Halong Bay, Hai Thon, Song of Vietnam, Twenty Summers, Sonnet for a Sunday, Sonnet for Two Cities, How a Sound can Grow, Harbour Journey, Indian Ocean, Bombay Wharf, Therapy, Deep South Deep Freeze, Amarilla.
Short stories and other works
- The Fairie's Ladder (1925)
Mona Brand published the short story 'The Fairie’s Ladder' in Artesia on 16 January 1925, when she was 9 years old.
- Daughters of Vietnam (1958)
This collection contains short stories and poetry. The short stories in this collection are based on conversations between the author and Vietnamese women from a variety of backgrounds which she had while in North Vietnam. Brand wrote, "my husband [Len Fox] and I talked with women in various parts of North Vietnam - peasants in small cottages on the delta and at the seashore, miners at Hongay-Campha and the people belonging to the various national minorities in the new Thai-Meo autonomous region of the North West." Three of the stories "can more correctly be described as biographies because they describe events almost exactly as they took place, with the exception of the creation of a few minor characters." Other stories have been given a more fictional treatment.
Contents: Short Stories: Return to Life, The Little Messenger, Down Dragon, Voice in the Jungle, Once More Flowers Blossom. Poetry: The Sun Rises, Hai Thon, Halong Bay, The Student, Song of Vietnam.
- Twenty Summers - Lyrics for a song recorded by Gary ShearstonGary ShearstonGary Shearston is an Australian singer and songwriter who was a leading figure of the folk music revival of the 1960s. He is notable as a performer of Australian traditional folk songs in an authentic style...
- Enough Blue Sky: the Autobiography of Mona Brand, an Unknown Well-Known Playwright (1995) - Brand's self-published autobiography.
Later years and death
The second wave of feminism and the rise of the discipline of women's studies at universities in the 1980s, which frequently worked towards reclaiming women's history, saw an increased recognition of Brand's work and career in Australia. Although none of her plays were ever professionally produced in Australia, as a recognition of her important contribution to theatre in Australia, Christine M. Tilley undertook a detailed study in 1981 of Brand's plays and her political activism. Tilley collected many scripts and production details and as a result of her work, many of Brand's original manuscripts and letters are now held by the Fryer Library at the University of QueenslandUniversity of Queensland
The University of Queensland, also known as UQ, is a public university located in state of Queensland, Australia. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest and largest university in Queensland and the fifth oldest in the nation...
, Brisbane
Brisbane
Brisbane is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia. Brisbane's metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million, and the South East Queensland urban conurbation, centred around Brisbane, encompasses a population of...
.
Brand died in Sydney on 1 August 2007.
Recognition
- Our 'Dear' Relations won first prize in NSW Arts Council Drama Festival (1963)
- Christmas Goose won Moomba Prize for Children's Film Script (1972)
- For Richer For Poorer won Noosa Arts Theatre Prize (1985)
- Awarded life membership of New TheatreNew Theatre (Newtown)The New Theatre is an independent theatre company in the inner western Sydney suburb of Newtown, Australia. Established in October 1932, it is the oldest theatre company in continuous production in New South Wales...
- Awarded life membership of PENInternational PENPEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
- Lass in Love won James Picot Memorial Competition for 1945 conducted by Queensland Artists Association.
Sources
- Brand, Mona, Papers held at the Fryer Library at The University of Queensland. Finding aid available: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/fryer/ms/uqfl401.pdf
- Brand, Mona, Enough Blue Sky: the Autobiography of Mona Brand, an Unknown Well-Known Writer (Tawny Pipit: Sydney, 1995)
- Brand, Mona, Here Comes Kisch, (Montmorency, Victoria: Yackandanda Playscripts, 1983).
- Brand, Mona, Here Under Heaven : Three plays containing 'Barbara', 'Our 'dear' relations', 'Here under Heaven' (Sydney: Wentworth Press, 1969).
- Brand, Mona, Plays, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965).
- Brand, Mona, Coloured sounds : poems (Sydney: Tawny Pipit Press,1997).
- Brand, Mona Wheel and Bobbin (Sydney: Deaton and Spencer, 1938).
- Brand, Mona. Silver Singing (Sydney : Author, 1938).
- Brand, Mona. Daughters of Vietnam (Hanoi: Foreign Language Publications House, 1958).
- Brand, Mona. Lass in Love (Northcote: Cloister Press, 1946)
- Brand, Mona, 'The sometimes true story of ASIO, the cold war and me', Sydney Morning Herald, December 12, 2002. Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/16/1039656338512.html *Newsletter of the Australian Association for Marine History No. 83 June 2001 http://www.aamh.asn.au/news/0083.pdf
- Tilley, Christine M., 'Mona Brand: A Checklist, 1935-1980' Australian Literary Studies 10 (1981-2)
- Moore, Nicole, 'Art Makes the World' Overland, 01/12/2007, Issue 189, p93-94,
- Overington, Caroline, ‘Gallery rejects $400K from Communists,’ The Australian, March 29, 2010.
- New Theatre, The New Years 1932-, (Sydney: University Publishing Service, University of Sydney, 2007)
- Yu, Ouyang, 'A Century of Oz Lit in China', Antipodes, 25.1 (Jun 2011): 65-71. *Holder, J., Comrades Up the Cross – Len Fox. http://www.crossart.com.au/L_fox.html
- Sendy, J., Comrades Come Rally. (Nelson: Melbourne, 1978)
- Tompkins, Joanne and Julie Holledge, eds., Performing Women/Performing Feminisms: Interviews with International Women Playwrights, (Brisbane: Australasian Drama Studies Association, 1997)
- 'Australian Drama 1920-1955', (Papers presented to a conference on Australian drama, University of New England, Armidale, September 1-4, 1984).
- Pfisterer, Susan and Carolyn Pickett, Playing with ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the suffragettes to the sixties, (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999).
- New Theatre, http://newtheatre.org.au
- Hay, Ashley. ‘Mona Brand, 1915-2007.’ Sydney Pen Magazine (June 2008): 44
- AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource http://www.austlit.edu.au
- Who's Who of Australian Writers. Melbourne: Thorpe, 1991.