Oriel Gray’s 1955 play The Torrents is a historical curio. Its claim to fame is that it won the same playwriting competition that Ray Lawler’s landmark Summer of the Seventeenth Doll did. The Elizabethan Theatre Trust chose to support Lawler’s work, not Gray’s, and the rest is history. Although Black Swan artistic director Clare Watson claims that The Torrents remains relevant today – and there are certainly interesting echoes across the years regarding women in the workplace and some of the more crazy dreams to supply water in West Australia – what is most striking about the play is how it subtly presents an alternative model of what might make Australia a mature nation.

Luke Carroll, Celia Pacquola and Tony Cogin in The Torrents. All photos © Philip Gostelow

Set in a thinly disguised Kalgoorlie (here “Koolgalla”) during the 1890s gold rush, the action focusses on the sparring between the town’s two main patriarchs, newspaper manager Rufus Torrent (played by Tony Cogin, who sports a wonderful period-style beard) and mining magnate John Manson (Steve Rodgers). Torrent is persuaded to support an agricultural irrigation scheme that could benefit the whole region, while Manson insists...