The play was one of a series of radio dramas by Park about European exploration of Australia, others being Stormy Was the Weather (on James Cook) and I'll Meet You in Botany Bay on (Governor Phillip). According to Leslie Rees these plays:
Formed an eloquent and fine-tempered reverse sequence bearing on the theme of discovery. They combined the presentation of factual incidents with a keen imaginative perception of character under stress, an ironical feeling for the forlornness, anguish or disillusionment of persons born to a place in history, an appreciation of pioneering courage and achievement set against the failure of private life to fulfil its expectations. These plays had the salt tang of the sea, the roll or pitch of wooden ships breasting through uncharted waters, as well as vivid or bitter personal emotions.[7]
Reception
Reviewing the 1951 production The Age said the play "has a good deal of. strength in the telling, and suggests a certain amount of authenticity as to fact, but it ends
unsatisfactorily In that it brands him as a failure after his first voyage for not having discovered the Great South Land." However the critic specified "As a piece of dramatic writing" the play "is well contrived. The dialogue is crisp and there is little confusion in separating the characters."[8]
Reviewing the 1953 production the Adelaide Advertiser called it a "self-conscious attempt to draw a heavily realistic portrait, and that in striving for imaginative accuracy the writer had fallen into the pit of deliberate debunking... It was almost as though we were being asked to forget the great discoverer and to remember the weaknesses of the man."[9]
Premise
"At the dawn of the sixteenth century Abel Tasman set sail from Batavia in his fragile but swift-sailing ship, Zeeliaen. He had been commissioned to And the mysterious continent Terra Australis, the mythical land of fabulous wealth, and claim it for Holland."[10][11]
^"The Week in Wireless". The Age. No. 29, 881. Victoria, Australia. 3 February 1951. p. 10. Retrieved 1 February 2024 – via National Library of Australia.
