Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

general. The central signifier is a broken down Holden placed centre-stage which, together with the
shack, a municipal rubbish bin and a pile of logs symbolically lighting the showground setting
throughout the play, makes a fixed 'décor'. The dying vernacular of the country folk also anchors the
play in an Australian cultural context. The closure of the opening scene is brought about by extending
the play's political discourse to another frequent theme of Hewett, that of environment or, rather, of
nature. Some four decades ago, at the time when Hewett decided to return to the 'country of the
imagination', Carl Jung warned in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that to say: 'We have conquered
nature is a mere slogan. In reality we are confronted with anxious questions, the answers to which seem
nowhere in sight.' The daunting one peculiar to Australians is associated with Snow: almost fifty years
on he is still portrayed as being 'frightened of the wide open spaces.'
Nowhere begins on an early winter's morning that reflects Josh's age, but also points in the direction of
yet another literary reference, that of 'The Winter of Our Discontent.' The playwright's discourse with
the Western literary heritage defines both her style of expression and her aesthetic. Hewett's individual
oeuvre can be viewed as a unity; it goes on exploring the same sites of meaning, with womanhood
among her most important concerns. Significantly, when Vonnie, 'a twenty-year-old former hooker
running from drugs and Bull, her brutal pimp in the city', enters and is asked where she is going, she
answers casually: 'Nowhere.' Therefore it matters not whether she relies on her own resources and goes
away, or stays under the protection of men. In Vonnie's character, we recognise the rebellious traits of
Hewett's former heroines struggling against an aggregate of social ills inside themselves and the society
at large. Aboriginality, femininity and drug dependence are all condensed in the story of Vonnie's
childhood and her social and psychological conditioning..
Dreams and humour are the two stylistic elements that pervade Nowhere. They appear as nightmares,
symbolic visions, and cherished or torturous memories that change shapes. And they give expression to
both social concerns and personal yearnings. Josh, for instance, dreams of the river that once was,
symbolized by the Dry Torrent that the country town on whose edge he is now living has become.
Formerly called The Torrent, it evokes all the harnessed rivers in Australia that are drying out or
becoming infested with algae. Water, age-old symbol of a life source, becomes the play's overarching
paradigm: it links the controversial regional issue with the global problem and, at the same time, serves
as an aesthetic tool that brings upon the reader the sense of nostalgia – subverted all the time, however,
by humorous overtones. Thus Vonnie, in one of the longest scenes in the play, acts out precious
moments from both Josh's and Snow's sentimental lives in what is a mixture of documentarism,
nostalgia and irony. While Vonnie - as an uneducated young woman - would be unaware of the
theorising of therapeutic effects that an enactment and the consequent venting of one's emotions can
have on individuals, this 'play within a play', or meta-theatre, is an attempt 'to bring it [all] out in the
open' and release the two men from grief buried inside them for years. Meta-theatre, ever since The
Man from Mukinupin, has been one of Hewett's favourite techniques and psychological motivation of
her characters' actions is her trademark. She recurs to psychoanalysis whenever she wants to 'put flesh
on the bones of her characters' without succumbing to the dominant discourse of 'holistic' naturalistic
representations, but alternating instead between realism and abstraction. In using water as the central
symbol related to Josh, Hewett goes even further and reaches out towards her characters' archetypal
being. Like Jung and Freud, Hewett sees the unconscious as the deposit of the remnants of the past; and
she draws on Adler in her interpretations of will for power as much as on Marxism.
Consequently, Hewett's most potent signifier is her poetic language. Around and by it she weaves her
characteristic texture of exuberant theatricality. Her favourite companion along the avenue of literary
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