Our Country's Good Play Analysis

Timberlake Wertenbaker's 1986 play Our Country's Good follows the first colony in Australia as they struggle to form a community. She uses both comedy and tragedy to illustrate how people adapt to new situations and overcome difficulties. The colonists adapt to their new home and the many changes, the officers adapt their views on punishment, and various characters devolve and evolve, this all leads to the evolution of hierarchy within the colony.

Comedy and tragedy in Our Country's Good are deeply intertwined, following the developments within the colony. The convicts, upon arriving, may have entertained brief hopes that their future may be somewhat brighter in this new and unknown world, that justice may be more humane, that it would

This is made easier by the fact that Dorothy Handland only appears at this point in the play, the news of her death is the only time we hear of her and so as a reader and as an audience we are not given the chance to form enough of an emotional bond with her character in order for the tragedy of her death to overcome the comedy of Collins' black humour. Concerning convicts, we are not given much information about their settling in to their new home, however what we are told is mostly

The officers representing outdated views on punishment are, however, mostly shown in a negative way, with fierce opposition to any suggestion that redemption might work better than punishment, and where there is comedy in these scenes, it is often crude and dark. These differences in portrayal between old and new views on punishment highly favour redemption over punishment, as does the overall progression of the play where the supporters of punishment are the sole antagonists. Given these different portrayals of punishment and redemption, it is clear throughout the play that punishment is associated with tragedy and redemption with comedy; the the convicts are not crushed into submission, but raise themselves in society in order to achieve happiness. From this point of view, the progression of the play is comedic overall, though with tragic elements introduced by the antagonists, both of which are overcome by