The idea of ‘going
north’ is firmly rooted in the Australian psyche. Analogous perhaps with the great
(American) road trip and the immense body of literature that has spawned from
it, from Kerouac’s On The Road and
Nabokov’s Lolita, to home-grown
classics such as Michael Gow’s The Kid
and Ray Lawler’s Summer of the
Seventeenth Doll (albeit partly in reverse), as well as the life-affirming Bran Nue Dae. There is the myth of the
bush, the untameable wetlands and inhospitable red desert; the cattle-owners,
the crocodile wrestlers, “the serial killers, salt-of-the-earth stalwarts,
bigots [and] drag queens,” as Ailsa Piper writes in the program. Simply put, “the
north is epic,” just as its allure is irresistible, and not just in a physical literal
sense of ‘going north’.
The road trip has
long been associated with coming-of-age stories and journeys of self-discovery.
So it is in David Williamson’s Travelling
North, presented here by Sydney Theatre Company. And while Williamson’s
protagonists might be a generation or two older than most other literary
road-trippers, the process of change and discovery, of soul-searching and
path-finding, of going deeper in and further up, still speaks to our restless
twenty-first century mindset as much as it did in 1979 when it premiered.
