The Dingo (radio play)

The Dingo is a 1940 Australian radio play by Vance Palmer based on his short story of the same name.[1]

Wireless Weekly 13 April 1940

Leslie Rees wrote the play "has much of Vance Palmer’s characteristic skill in dual plot- weaving, all his precise knowledge of people and places, his ability to avoid an obvious denouement, along with what some would say is a temperamental swerving from direfct conflict. Itis a play of symbol, a story-telling technique that the author has mastered."[2]

Wireless Weekly said "Only once in a while comes a play as arresting and unusual as Vance Palmer’s “The Dingo,’’... Without flagrantly departing from orthodox play-form, it suggests something new in drama. It suggests that life itself can be drama, without laborious machinations and exploitation of the long arm of coincidence... A brief gem of a play."[3]

The play was popular and was produced again in 1944. It was one of several Palmer stories set in Queensland.[4]

Premise

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"Olsen, a lighthouse-keeper on the Queensland coast has been waiting up for his daughter. His dog sleeps at his feet. In the distance is a faint, dreamy boom of breakers on the river-bar, but gradually, penetrating this background of dull sound, comes the mournful howl of a dingo. In those few words, one has the chief symbols of the story, which parallels the behaviour of the dingo and Conolly, boat-owner and betrayer of women."[5]

References

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  1. ^ ""THE DINGO"". The Northern Champion. Vol. 28. New South Wales, Australia. 30 March 1940. p. 7. Retrieved 19 February 2024 – via National Library of Australia.
  2. ^ "PLAYS OF THE AIR "THE DINGO" Vance Palmer's Tale of the Queensland Coast", ABC weekly, Sydney: ABC, 13 April 1940, retrieved 19 February 2024 – via Trove
  3. ^ "New Fare By Palmer", The Wireless Weekly: The Hundred per Cent Australian Radio Journal, Sydney: Wireless Press, April 27, 1940, nla.obj-718436727, retrieved 19 February 2024 – via Trove
  4. ^ "Plays of the Air— FOUR AUSTRALIAN PLAYS", ABC weekly, Sydney: ABC, 9 November 1940, retrieved 19 February 2024 – via Trove
  5. ^ "WEDNESDAY—April 17", ABC weekly, Sydney: ABC, 13 April 1940, nla.obj-1368232961, retrieved 19 February 2024 – via Trove