Shoulder the Sky

Shoulder the Sky is a 1945 Australian radio play by Dymphna Cusack, based on her stage play, about canteen workers in Newcastle.

Leslie Rees said the play "making a somewhat dangerous virtue of formlessness, has wit and bite and passion." He later called it " a trenchant, plotless, constantly unfolding view of the emotional and physical conditions brought by the war to our cities" adding: "There are Saroyanesque characters—drunks, outcasts, lost souls—as well as ordinary soldiers and girls. There are cynical-sentimental attitudes, forceful criticisms of the maladjustments of life, bitterness, mordancy, and despair, matched by optimism and faith in ordinary people. A long queue of characters jostle each other, make love, revile, drink, are sick and sorry, find the worst or best in themselves and in one another. Through it all the author seems to be pressing home the truth that the private muddle and turbulence produced by war on the home front is far from pretty, in fact ruthless and anti-social."

The play was adapted for ABC radio in 1945.

The play was published in 1950 in a collection of Cusack's plays.

The stage play appears have been written in the 1940s but seems to have been first performed on stage in Darwin in 1951.