From Empathy to Sympathy: Staging Change and Conciliation in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good

Abstract

In 1788, Britain established a penal colony in New South Wales. By 1868, one hundred and sixty thousand convicts had been exiled to Australia. According to historical records, a few months after the first transportation arrived in the colony, a group of convicts was permitted to put on a play for the entertainment of the Marine officers in celebration of King George III’s birthday. The play they performed was George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, a popular Restoration comedy with which the officers were almost certainly familiar. Captain Watkin Tench recorded in his journal:

That every opportunity of escape from the dreariness and dejection of our situation should be eagerly embraced, will not be wondered at. The exhilarating effect of a splendid theater is well known: and I am not ashamed to confess that the proper distribution of three or four yards of stained paper, and a dozen farthing candles stuck around the mud walls of a convict hut, failed not to diffuse general complacency on the countenance of sixty persons, of various descriptions, who were assembled to applaud the representation. (Tench 1793: 26/152)

All the members of human society stand in need of each others assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy. All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common center of mutual good offices.

(Smith 1759 Part II II.iii.1)¹

Justice and humanness have never gone hand in hand. The law is not a sentimental comedy.

(Captain Watkin Tench, Country 3)