Daybreak is a 1938 Australian play by Catherine Shepherd.^[2][3]

It won the Melbourne National Theatre Movement’s Australia-wide three-act play competition, and is on the Playwrights’ Advisory Board’s list of recommended plays.^[4]

The play was published in 1942 at a time when that was rare for Australian plays. It was one of the most successful plays to come from a Tasmanian author.^[5][6]

Leslie Rees wrote of the play in his history of Australian drama, calling it "Catherine Shepherd’s most considerable “Australian” drama... Perhaps Daybreak lacks the scope of a “full-length” play and has a certain starchiness, along with its fine feeling, but is a worthy conception, a criticism of smug inflexible authority rather than of deliberate tyranny."^[7]

One critic felt it was "heavily indebted" to The Barretts of Wimpole Street.^[8]

Adaptations

The play was adapted into a 60 minute version for radio in 1938 (as part of the ABC's Australian Radio Drama Week^[9]), 1939, 1940,^[10] 1944 (when it was the first play broadcast by the ABC from Newcastle^[11] 1948 and 1951.^[12]

Premise

In colonial Hobart, harsh Simon Martel is the father of two girls, Caroline and Jeanne. They revolt against him and Jeanne runs off with an English idealist man called Francis, who is determined to build a utopia with some convicts. Francis dies and Simon is killed by a convict.^[13]

References