by Alan Seymour
It is Anzac Day. Alf Cook, a Sydney lift driver who calls himself one of the few “dinkum Australians” left, lives for the one day a year when he marches, drinks with his mates and remembers. His son Hughie, the first in the family to reach university, plans with his middle-class girlfriend Jan to run an article and photographs in the student paper attacking Anzac Day as a drunken celebration of a military defeat. The play follows their collision across the holiday, drawing in Alf's worn-down wife Dot and his old friend Wacka, a real Gallipoli veteran who will barely speak of it.
The play was itself a provocation: the Adelaide Festival dropped it in 1960 amid RSL outrage and bomb threats. It remains a national argument in miniature (about what Anzac Day is for, who owns it, and whether loving your country means honouring its myths or questioning them), wrapped inside a painful, tender drama about a father and son who cannot talk without wounding each other.
Is the day about sacrifice, mateship, a pointless slaughter, or an excuse to drink? Seymour puts every view on stage and refuses to hand the audience a verdict.
Where to look: Alf's speeches about “the diggers' day”; Hughie's article; Wacka's silence; the closing march.
Hughie's education has made him a stranger in his own home. Alf feels betrayed and belittled; both men love each other and cannot say it without it coming out as an attack.
Where to look: the Act 1 kitchen arguments; “you're ashamed of your own father”; the guarded ending.
The scholarship boy is caught between worlds. Jan's easy middle-class confidence rubs against the Cooks' pride and defensiveness; Alf half-suspects that “college” is a form of desertion.
Where to look: Jan's visit to the house; Alf on university; Dot's hopes for Hughie.
Alf's whole identity is being a “dinkum Aussie” bloke: the pub, the march, the mates. The play honours the warmth in that and shows its cost — drink, bluster, an inability to feel out loud.
Where to look: Alf and Wacka together; the drinking through Act 2; Alf's bravado about his war.
Wacka actually landed at Gallipoli and will not romanticise it. Alf, who was too young for that war, mythologises it hardest. The real veteran is the quiet one.
Where to look: Wacka's few lines about the landing; the contrast with Alf's stories.
Hughie must choose between publishing what he believes and not publicly humiliating his father. The article becomes a test of what he owes his family and what he owes the truth.
Where to look: Hughie and Jan over the photographs; the decision about the student paper.
“I'm a bloody Australian and I'll always stand up for bloody Australia.”
Alf Cook
Alan Seymour (1927–2015) was born in Perth, orphaned young and raised by older sisters. He worked as a freelance writer in Sydney and, soon after this play's success, emigrated to London. He said the play grew out of watching drunk veterans in the streets of Summer Hill on Anzac Day, 1955, and that he came to respect the older generation even as he questioned the mythology.
The Adelaide Festival's board withdrew the play before its scheduled premiere, fearing it would offend returned servicemen. The ban became national news; an amateur production went ahead in Adelaide, and the professional Sydney premiere on 26 April 1961 proceeded despite bomb threats.
By the late 1950s Anzac Day was a solemn national institution, but also, visibly, a day of heavy public drinking and two-up. To criticise it at all was widely felt to insult the dead. The play was one of the first mainstream Australian works to say so out loud.
Rising university access was beginning to move working-class children into the professions — and, often, out of their parents' world. The Cooks' anxiety about Hughie is the era's anxiety in one kitchen.
The argument has not gone away. Debate about the scale of Anzac commemoration (the cost of the centenary, what the day now means) keeps the play current.
Loud, proud, disappointed — his own ambitions came to nothing. Anzac Day is the one day he feels he matters. Loves Hughie fiercely and cannot show it except as anger.
Torn between contempt for the Anzac “booze-up” and love for his father. His article forces him to decide which loyalty wins.
Keeps the peace and the house. Proud of Hughie's education but frightened it is taking him away from them; the emotional shock-absorber between father and son.
Old, gentle, nearly silent. The one man who was actually there, and the one who says least about it. The play's moral centre.
Confident, educated, middle-class. Drives the newspaper project and, in doing so, exposes the class distance between Hughie and both his family and her.
Alf explains why the day matters to him — the march, the mates, being, for once, somebody. Establishes what Hughie's article will be attacking.
The middle-class girlfriend in the working-class kitchen. Politeness stretched thin; class made suddenly visible on both sides.
Hughie and Jan plan the piece; Hughie starts to grasp that the target is not an abstraction — it is his father.
Hughie watches the march at home with Dot and Wacka, “torn between outrage at the display and love for his father”.
The day's drinking ends in Alf maudlin, boastful and wounded. The confrontation with Hughie turns ugly and personal.
Pressed about Gallipoli, Wacka offers almost nothing. His restraint is the play's strongest comment on Alf's noise.
The article's fate is settled and Jan and Hughie's relationship does not survive it. Father and son are left in an exhausted, wordless truce — no reconciliation, but not quite a rupture.
“War's such a dirty thing I'd have thought as soon as it's over you'd want to forget it.”
Hughie Cook
Page numbers refer to the standard Currency/A&R playtext; check against your edition.
Page numbers refer to the standard Currency / A&R playtext; the rest is a finding map — a marker plus the act — so you can copy the exact line from your edition.
“I'm a bloody Australian and I'll always stand up for bloody Australia.”Alf — Act 1
“It's Anzac Day this week, that's my day, that's the old diggers' day.”Alf — Act 1
Alf on the march and the reunion as the one day he is “someone” — not just a lift driver.Alf — Act 1 & Act 2
Alf's account of his own war service — and the gap between the story and what Wacka knows.Alf — Act 2
Alf's shame and fury when he learns what Hughie's article says — “me own son”.Alf — Act 2
the drinking — stage directions and others' lines tracking how much and how often.throughout
“War's such a dirty thing I'd have thought as soon as it's over you'd want to forget it.”Hughie — Act 2 (p. 85)
Hughie calling Anzac Day a day of “national drunkenness” / booze and mates rather than remembrance.Hughie — Act 1 & Act 2
Hughie on being the first in the family at university — and the distance it has opened.Hughie — Act 1
his retreat at the end — agreeing not to publish, the act of loyalty that is also a defeat.Hughie — Act 2, closing scenes
Hughie and Alf both wanting the other's respect and unable to say so.Hughie & Alf — Act 2
Wacka's few, flat sentences about Gallipoli — note how little he claims and what he omits.Wacka — Act 2
Wacka as the only actual Anzac in the play — and the quietest man in it.Wacka — throughout
Wacka's line about being alone / having no family — the cost the myth doesn't mention.Wacka — Act 2
his steadying presence between Alf and Hughie — where he sides, and where he won't.Wacka — Act 2
Dot's pride in Hughie's scholarship spoken in the same breath as her fear of losing him.Dot — Acts 1–2
Dot keeping the peace — her lines that smooth over what Alf and Hughie say.Dot — throughout
Jan's comfortable North Shore background — her photo-essay treating the Cooks as a subject.Jan — Act 1
the moment Jan's sympathy runs out — where she and Hughie split over his family.Jan & Hughie — Act 2
the flat, the lift, the beer, the framed photos — the set as a statement about class.stage directions — Act 1 opening
arguments over what Anzac Day is — sacrifice and remembrance, or myth and excuse.Alf vs Hughie — Acts 1–2
the radio broadcast of the dawn service and the march — the official version playing under the family row.Act 2
the ending — the day survives, the family holds, but nothing is resolved.Act 2, final scene
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