Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram
Kath Kenny
Order the winner of the best Victorian history publication at the VCHA 2023
Set against a backdrop of moratorium marches, inner-city share houses, the women’s movement, the counterculture and the push for sexual liberation, Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram, is the story of revolutionary times and a ground-breaking play called Betty Can Jump. Using revealing archives and candid interviews with Helen Garner, Kerry Dwyer, Micky Allan, Claire Dobbin, Laurel Frank, Evelyn Krape, Max Gillies, Bill Garner and many more, Kath Kenny weaves a tale that stretches across decades and finds echoes across feminist generations.
On the 50th anniversary of this show, performed at Carlton’s legendary Pram Factory theatre, Kenny considers its ongoing impact on Australian culture, and sets out her stake in this story, rethinking her own experience as a young feminist who clashed with Garner over the publication of The First Stone.
Winner, 2023 History Publication Award, Victorian Community History Awards.
Longlisted, 2023 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.
The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age ‘Best Reads of 2022’ list.
Orders available from the publisher Upswell.
For free postage use the code stagingfreepost in the coupon box at checkout
Testimonials
“What a riveting, energising read. Kenny’s meticulous research and extensive interviews with a who’s who of Australian cultural life from the 1960s and ’70s recreates so vividly the heady, hopeful, and often fraught times of Melbourne’s Pram Factory and the APG … Staging a Revolution is a stunning and stunningly important book.”
— Bernadette Brennan author, critic and literary award judge
“Staging a Revolution raises eternal questions about the relationship of politics to art and the possibilities of collaboration over individual achievement. It is a fascinating contribution to current reassessments of 1970s feminism, from Michelle Arrow’s history of The Seventies to TV series — Mrs America or the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, for example — that recreate the conflicts and debates of the period.”
— Susan Lever (Inside Story)
“Kath Kenny’s lovingly crafted chronicle of the play’s impact and the times – feminism, consciousness-raising groups and bad language, all in the context of the emergence of a truly Australian theatre – rings true.”
— Steven Carroll (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald)
“This book has much to commend it: its imaginative, playful and clever structure; its energetic prose; and its wide and varied range of sources. Kenny balances the complex issues and agendas of 1970s feminism against the backdrop of the independent theatre scene with all its own dramas and vulnerabilities.”
— Judges of the History Publication Prize, 2023 Victorian Community History Award