The club
In his play The Club, David Williamson presents numerousAustralian attitudes of the 1970s. However, many of these attitudes arestill relevant and fairly accurate representations of Australian attitudesin the 1990s, although some of course have changed somewhat over the timesince the play was written nearly twenty years ago. Tradition plays avery important part in The Club. Each of the characters of course has hisown ideas and attitudes towards tradition, but there are some which aremore or less universal throughout the play. In The Club, tradition ismainly presented as the opposite to progress and success; that is, toachieve success in today's world, tradition must be abandoned. Forexample, Laurie (the coach) blames an old Club tradition for his failureto win a premiership, "You and your cronies wouldn't let me buy players." Jock (the vice-president) replies, "We were upholding an old tradition. It was wrong, but we believed in it." Then in the next line, Laurieaccuses Jock of supporting the rest of the committee in upholding thetradition not because he believed in it himself, but because he didn'twant Laurie to succeed, "They might have believed in it but the reason why
Gerry believes that, "Loyalty to any one individual is aluxury you can't afford in a business with a multi-million dollarturnover. " The attitudes expressed towards the extensivepolice corruption in The Removalists are quite realistic. Even the Australian OlympicTeam has received massive financial backing from sponsors, something whichis accepted and considered to be good by most people. For example, Gerry is able to skilfullymanipulate the other characters so he can accomplish his own hiddenagenda. These sorts ofcompetitive attitudes are realistic and still held in the 1990s. Simmonds knowsof a local prostitution ring, yet does nothing to bring those involved tojustice, "Well, there's a very attractive group of young girls a block ortwo from the station who, well the fact is they're very high class callgirls. Thisattitude presented by Williamson is probably even more widespread now inthe 1990s, as success is seen as being even more important today. " Simmonds takes the sociallyexpected attitude of disgust against Kenny, but in reality he has ulteriormotives for even aiding Fiona and Kate at all, and he also uses it as anexcuse to bash Kenny. Another,perhaps even more important issue explored in The Removalists is that ofpolice corruption. Although most men claim theywould never hit a woman and are disgusted at those who do, the rate ofdomestic violence shows that not enough is being done to change trueattitudes towards violence against women. In addition tocompeting for power amongst themselves, the characters of The Club arealso fiercely competitive with the other football clubs in the league. Loyalty is also animportant issue in The Club, although each of the characters is loyal invery different degrees and ways. Part B The second Williamson play I chose wasThe Removalists. Victims still do not speak out, forfear of further harassment, which has recently been shown by shown bytestimony to the Royal Commission into Police Corruption.
Common topics in this essay:
David Williamson,
Club Ted,
Police Corruption,
Super League,
Fiona Kate,
Royal Commission,
Geoff Hayward,
Captain Geoff,
Laurie Jock,
Club Gerry,
domestic violence,
police corruption,
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police brutality,
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buy players,
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accurate representations,
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nearly twenty ago,
written nearly twenty,
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play written nearly,
explored removalists police,
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Acceptance Essays
