Oriel Gray is an award winning Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n dramatist and playwright who wrote from the 1940s to 1960's. The major themes of her work were "social and political issues such as the environment, Aborigines, assimilation and bush life".

Gray was born Oriel Bennett in Sydney

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

, New South Wales. She came from a politically active family and was herself a member of the Communist Party of Australia

Communist Party of Australia

The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991; it was succeeded by the Socialist Party of Australia, which then renamed itself, becoming the current Communist Party of Australia. The CPA achieved its greatest political strength in the 1940s and faced an attempted...

 from 1942 to 1950.

She married John Gray in 1940, an actor whom she met while at the Sydney New Theatre and they had a son, Stephen. By 1947 her marriage had broken down and she moved onto a long term relationship with John Hepworth with whom she had two more sons, Peter and Nicholas. Gray died from a heart attack, aged 83 in Heidelberg, Victoria

Heidelberg, Victoria

Heidelberg is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 11 km north-east from Melbourne's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the City of Banyule....

, on 30 June 2003.

Career

From 1937 to 1949 Gray wrote and acted for the Sydney New Theatre, and it was here that her first play Lawson, a play based on the short stories of Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest writer"...

, was performed in 1943. The Sydney New Theatre had the reputation of being left wing and avant garde and was modeled on the new radical and political theatre movement in the United States.

In 1942 Gray was appointed as the first paid Australian playwright-in-residence. She was commissioned to write a weekly radio segment for the New Theatre on 2KY.

In reviewing plays, L. L. Woolacott, critic and editor of the Sydney Triad magazine, described Gray as "one of the most significant and talented Australian playwrights whose work has so far been produced here".

The 1955 award by the Playwrights' Advisory Board for best play was given jointly to Gray's play The Torrents and to Ray Lawler

Ray Lawler

Raymond Evenor Lawler is an influential Australian actor, dramatist and producer. His most notable play was his tenth, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll , which had its premiere in Melbourne in 1955. The play changed the direction of Australian drama...

's play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a pioneering Australian play written by Ray Lawler and first performed at the Union Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, on 28 November 1955...

. Gray's play, with its themes of "feminism and the saving of the environment", did not have popular appeal in a very conservative era, and there was only one amateur performance recorded. It was not published until 1988 and did not have a proper release until 1996 at the Adelaide Festival of Arts

Adelaide Festival of Arts

The Adelaide Festival of Arts is an arts festival held biennially in the South Australian capital of Adelaide. Although locally considered to be one of the world's greatest celebrations of the arts, that is internationally renowned and the pre-eminent cultural event in Australia, it is actually...

. In the sixties the play was turned into a light-hearted musical, called A Bit O' Petticoat, with music composed by Peter Pinne

Peter Pinne

Peter Pinne is an Australian-born writer and composer.Pinne started working as a television executive for the Reg Grundy organisation. Firstly, as Head of Production from 1980, later rising to become a Senior Vice President of the company. During this period, he worked on numerous shows including...

.

Gray's play Burst of Summer won the 1959 J. C. Williamson

J. C. Williamson

James Cassius Williamson was an American actor and later Australia's foremost theatrical manager, founding J. C. Williamson Ltd....

 Theatre Guild Competition. The play explores the racial tensions that erupt in a small town when a young Aboriginal girl brief notability as a film actress. This story is based on real events when Charles Chauvel's film Jedda

Jedda

Jedda was the last movie made by the Australian filmmaker Charles Chauvel. The film is most notable for being the first to star two Aboriginal actors in the leading roles, and also to be the first Australian film shot in colour...

 made known the Aboriginal actor Ngarla Kunoth

Rosalie Kunoth-Monks

Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, also known as Ngarla Kunoth , is an Australian Aboriginal activist.-Early life and education:Rosalie Kunoth was born in 1937 at Utopia Cattle Station in the Northern Territory of Australia to parents of the Amatjere people...

, who played the title role.

Plays

• Lawson (1943)
• Westernlimit (1946)
• My Life is my Affair (1947)
• Had We But World Enough — first performed 1950
• "Sky without Birds" in Plays of the 50s (2007) — first performed in 1950
• The Belhe And The Bushranger
• Hewers Of Coal
• The King Who Wouldn't — first performed 1952
• Marx Of Time
• Milestones
• Royal Tour
• The Torrents (1996) — first performed in 1954
• Drive a Hard Bargain (1955) — first performed in Ballarat, October 1957
• "Burst of Summer" in Plays of the 60's, Vol. 1 (1997) — first performed in 1960
• The Man who Wanted to Murder Sherlock Holmes: A Play for Radio (1987)

Television writing

In 1975 a television series was proposed to be written by Australian woman writers. Grey wrote one episode of this television drama series: Quality of Mercy: We Should Have Had a Uniform (1975)

Gray wrote scripts for children's shows for the ABC

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...

. She was also one of the early writers for Bellbird

Bellbird (TV series)

Bellbird was an Australian soap opera set in a small Victorian rural township. The series was produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at its Ripponlea TV studios in Elsternwick, Melbourne, Victoria. The series was produced between 28 August 1967 and December 1977...

, a long running Australian television soap opera along with Judith Colquhon, Ray Kollie, Peter Pinne

Peter Pinne

Peter Pinne is an Australian-born writer and composer.Pinne started working as a television executive for the Reg Grundy organisation. Firstly, as Head of Production from 1980, later rising to become a Senior Vice President of the company. During this period, he worked on numerous shows including...

 and Don Battye

Don Battye

Donald "Don" Battye is an Australian born writer composer and television producer.-Life:He was a writer, script editor, and producer on several Australian television series for Crawford Productions including soap opera The Box in 1976 & 1977, The Sullivans and police procedural drama series...

.

Other writing

Gray published one novel: The Animal Shop (1990)

In 1985 Gray published her memoirs: Exit left: memoirs of a scarlet woman (Penguin, 1985)