The New Wave was a collection of Australian writers, actors and directors whose work was recognised and validated as aggressively and distinctly Australian in the early 1970s.
It included the work of writers such as David Williamson, Alex Buzo, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril. The style of performance was often exuberant and the work was marked by the use of Australian idiom and like The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll much of the work was set in an urban environment. The New Wave work found a ready audience and reflected and was part of a time of social change, social change that was both nationalist and internationalist in its focus. The work was developed and produced by companies such as the Australian Performing Group (APG) in Melbourne and Nimrod in Sydney.
Some of the characteristics of the New Wave writers include:
Expressions of male ritual (eg social habits of males in bar rooms, at football clubs, the deification of mateship and cars and general misogyny)
Confrontation in social relations (many plays explore confrontational situations and relationships with friends, families, co-workers and strangers)
The use of the vernacular, including swearing and abusive language
Introduced or centred a new dominant stereotype. (the larrikin, hard drinking, tough talking ocker.)
The New Wave was received from the beginning as distinctly Australian. In a retrospective of Australian theatre published in the Australian in 1971 Katharine Brisbane stated that the early 1970s witnessed discussions of the Australian environment that resulted in the production of theatre that represented ‘a new and more realistic look into our beginnings as a nation'. According to Brisbane ‘the audience [responded] in recognition of that view'. The resulting work as produced primarily by Nimrod, LaMama and the APG was ‘broad, loud, extremely agile [with an] all enveloping theatricality'. In terms of the style of work this type of description recurs in most discussions of the type of work undertaken within the alternative theatres. Leonard Radic a Melbourne theatre critic describes the work as ‘rough, poor and improvised... fast-paced exuberant, and frequently vulgar'. As examples both Radic and Brisbane cite The Legend of King O'Malley by Michael Boddy and John Ellis at Jane St in Sydney which led to the establishment of Nimrod and Marvellous Melbourne by Hibberd and Romeril one of the first shows at the Pram Factory in Melbourne. These pieces were described as ‘impressionistic writing which depends much more on rhythms - the rhythms of Australian life and its speech'. In Brisbane's series of articles examining the theatre in the early 1970s, she argued that it was ‘the intensely colloquial nature' of the work that marked it as reflecting Australian culture. At the time in Brisbane's article and in more recent writings such as Radic's it is accepted that the major preoccupations of the work were ‘the Australian identity, Australian behaviour and Australian character'. However, this ‘Australian' was specific to one grouping. The Australian under inspection and given voice was almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon heterosexual middle class urban male. There were some exceptions; these included Celtic males and occasionally working class males and, even less often, female voices.