Diggers' Rest by Louis Esson

Edited and Introduction by John Senczuk

ISBN — 978-0-6451339-8-1

The Battler, a bush comedy in three acts, was Louis Esson’s follow up play to his political farce The Time is Not Yet Ripe (produced by Gregan McMahon in 1912). After a long development period, the play opened the season of his new formed provincial theatre company, The Pioneer Plays (a joint venture with Vance Palmer and Dr Stewart Macky), in May 1922. Set around a once thriving but now spent and languorous mining town in rural Victoria, the community is abruptly revitalised when George Ogilvie, one of the original fossickers during its glory days, returns from Western Australia and rediscovers the lost gold reef. While the basic plot references Esson’s preoccupation with Irish’s nationalist writer John Millington Synge—especially his Playboy of the Western World—the form explores a gently humoured Chekhovian evocation of the isolated townsfolk. This version—retitled Diggers’ Rest—represents Esson’s reworking of the script following its premiere production.

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