'Man Alone and Men Together: Maurice Shadbolt, William Malone and Chunuk Bair'

Abstract

This article will consider the motivation behind, and timing of, Maurice Shadbolt's interventions as a writer between 1982 and 1988 to determine the extent to which cultural nationalist interpretations of Gallipoli resonated in the decade and how they came about. My argument will pivot around Shadbolt's powerful 1982 stage play (Once on Chunuk Bair), subsequently adapted as a low budget feature film (Chunuk Bair).

‘Breaking out of the nationalist/ic paradigm’: international screen texts on the 1915 Gallipoli campaign

“…Although far less influential, at almost exactly the same historical moment across the Tasman, novelist and occasional playwright Maurice Shadbolt was exploring the cultural resonances of the Gallipoli campaign for New Zealanders (the other Anzacs) in his dramatic stage play, Once on Chunuk Bair. The play was adapted a decade later as a lowbudget feature film, Chunuk Bair (Shadbolt 1982;Chunuk Bair 1991;Bennett 2012). Radical nationalist interpretations of Australian enmeshment in British wars produced by the post-imperial generation resonated powerfully with the national psyche, and this accounts for why the screen restaging of Australian Anzacs at war was both pervasive and enduring (Damousi 2010, 308 -309).…”