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ART MAKES THE WORLD

NICOLE MOORE REMEMBERS MONA BRAND, 1915-2007.

ASIO’S 379-page file on Mona Brand will be a rich resource for cultural historians of the Left. In her article in Overland 171 in 2003, her last publication before she died, she described her shock at the extent of the surveillance to which she had been subject – an ASIO agent had even accompanied Brand and her husband, communist historian and writer Len Fox, on their honeymoon. A radical playwright, activist and poet, with a strong grasp of political theory and a rigorous approach to the conflicts of Australian history, Brand was a figure consistently ahead of her time, even as she lived a life that stretched across much of the twentieth century.
     Her father, Alexander Brand, was a marine engineer and her mother, Violet Nixon, died as a consequence of a self-administered abortion when Mona was seven years old.
     Brand was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1947, the Realist Writers groups in Melbourne and Sydney, and associated with the New Theatre in Sydney for most of her writing career. From Here Under Heaven in 1948, exposing the racist land grabs underpinning a prosperous squattocracy, to Here Comes Kisch! from 1970, an experimental piece in the mode of the living newspaper about the infamous Dictation Test used to exclude Czech journalist and agitator Egon Kisch in the 1930s, Brand’s thirty-nine theatre scripts were all politically engaged, though she complained later in life that the idea that theatre should have a ‘message’ had been misunderstood.
     The strong presence of women characters, women’s concerns and a politics influenced by socialist critiques of western imperialism inform much of her work in all genres. Pioneering experiments with form, and a lively and courageous use of social satire, are also features of her career. On Stage Vietnam! from 1967, inspired by her travels with Fox in Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was a breakthrough piece in the development of ‘total theatre’, with bold multimedia production design pre-dating the innovations of the Pram Factory or Nimrod. Her theatre was performed and published in England, the USSR, China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Rumania and India.
     Despite this, as Mona reminded interviewers, none of her plays received a full professional production in Australia. Her self-published autobiography, Enough Blue Sky, was subtitled The Autobiography of Mona Brand, an Unknown Well-known Playwright.
     She published short stories, history, critical work, writing for young people and had radio, film and television scripts as well as many revue sketches produced. The first of her four poetry collections was prefaced by Mary Gilmore in 1937, while other poems were included in the Jindyworobak collections of the late 1940s. As a representative of the Society of Women Writers, she co-edited Monica Clare’s posthumous novel Karobran in 1978, often regarded as the first novel published by an Aboriginal woman in Australia. She has been remembered as one of the few realist, Leftist writers to defend Patrick White, in a piece dissenting from the critique of his ‘decadence’, published in the Realist Writer in 1963.
     Recent closer attention to the history of women’s theatre in Australia meant a higher profile for Mona’s work in the last years of her life, including readings at playwrights conferences and at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney, discussions of her work at the International Women Playwrights Conference in Adelaide and the fifth Women and Labour conference in 1995, as well as critical articles in Australasian Theatre Studies and Australian Feminist Studies. She launched Michelle Arrow’s Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last, which centrally includes her own story, in 2002, and the New Theatre celebrated her ninetieth birthday with a lively pastiche of her revue sketches and musical pieces bringing the satire in her work to life.
     Brand shared a long life of engaged cultural work with Len Fox and, from their narrow, book-filled terrace in Darlinghurst in Sydney, she remained a voice for art as a force for social change.