Burke and Wills (radio play)

Buke and Wills is a 1949 Australian radio play by Colin Thiele about the Burke and Wills expedition.

The play was first performed at the Adelaide Drama Festival 1949. This production was broadcast from a studio in Hindmarsh Square to the nation. According to one papre "at the conclusion of the play... Mr. Thiele was accorded an enthusiastic ovation".

It was a verse drama. According to Leslie Rees, the play "strongly influenced by The Fire on the Snow, uses the survivor King as a narrator speaking remarkably fine verse, while the characters address one another in prose."

The play was published in several collections of writings, including The Golden Lighting (1951), Colin Thiele, Selected Verse (Rigby, Adelaide, 1970) and On The Air: Five Radio and Television Plays (Angus & Robertson, 1959).

The ABC produced the play again in 1951 and 1955.

Premise
According to ABC Weekly the play "retells the tragic story of the first explorers to cross Australia from south to north. The scenes mostly concern the fateful last weeks of the expedition, when first Gray, then Wills, then Burke died, leaving only King to tell the tale."

Reception
According to Smith's Weekly: "I had expected that the story of Burke and Wills would be a story of rugged courage. I expected, at the very least, that Messrs. B. and W. would be projected in a setting of sandflies and spinifex. Instead, I heard Mr. Burke and Mr. Wills flowering exquisitely amid wreaths of pallid poesy. I was asked to believe that Mr. Burke referred to the cramps as 'the wincing grip of a vice,' and that Mr. Wills casually talked about a sore leg as 'Red shafts of pain, nailing him, nailing him.' Whenever Mr. B. or Mr. W. ran out of similes and metaphors, a narrator rushed in with lush, beautiful expressions, like: 'Now fortune is hanging in the balance... as the brittle skeletons... caught in a web woven by Spider Fate.' I wish Spider Fate had bitten Colin Thiele before he ever took it into his head to write about such men as though they were male mannequins." According to The Bulletin "the real merit of the piece was not in the occasional effective images of dust and death but in the play as a whole: though it was somewhat derivative it moved, and it was moving; and the harsh verse suited the theme. "