Contextualising Our Country's Good.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Contextualising Our Country's Good.

The historical context of this play is most key, in that the play it's self is based on the past.

In mid seventeenth century there was a fear within the middle and upper classes of the raising crime rate, largely due to an increasing population and high unemployment figures. The chosen solution to this problem was the transportation of convicts to Australia, where they could be used as slaves to build a naval outpost.

The writer Timberlake Wertenbaker was born in the United States, and also lived in France. Shortly after moving to London she became a play write, and is said to have produced her best work, including Our Country's Good, during the 1980's. She wrote the play after she had read up on the history of the transportation of convicts from England to Australia. To do so she used resources such as the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally, and journals of marines sent to Australia. Through these journals she could get a useful insight into what life for convict was really like. She could learn of the marine's frustration that they had been sent to