- Title
- Man alone and men together: Maurice Shadbolt, William Malone and Chunuk Bair
- Creator
- Bennett, James
- Relation
- Journal of New Zealand Studies Issue 13, p. 46-61
- Relation
- https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/jnzs/article/view/1189
- Publisher
- Victoria University of Wellington
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- 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 that 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), and his later collection of oral histories. As Annabel Cooper points out, although a dramatic production Once on Chunuk Bair is a very conscious attempt to anchor a creative piece in history by drawing extensively on the work of historians to buttress the veracity of its interpretation of the event. To develop this line of argument further, Charlotte Caning has conceptualized performance on stage as a site for negotiation of the meaning of history by deliberately blurring the boundaries between historiography and dramaturgy. Although my principal cultural interest lies in history through film, the centrality of Shadbolt and his stage play to the Gallipoli debate in New Zealand necessarily broadens the scope of my discussion on cultural forms to include relevant stage plays as a supplementary interest to fiction feature films. The entwinement of New Zealand and Australian history on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915 - through the integrated command structure as well as interwoven historiographical narratives - also means that any analysis of this debate will benefit from transnational and comparative approaches. Accordingly, the article will also make strategic reference to the most influential contemporaneous Australian cultural nationalist text, Peter Weir's seminal 1981 feature film Gallipoli, to throw the particularity of New Zealand political and cultural circumstances of that era into sharper relief. As film - and theatre - is a cultural artefact of the period of its production, the discussion will alternate between two pasts, that is, the era of their production - the 1980s - and the moment in time that they represent artistically - 1915.
- Subject
- Maurice Shadbolt; William Malone; Chunuk Bair; Gallipoli
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1038436
- Identifier
- uon:13543
- Identifier
- ISSN:1176-306X
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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