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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

[Note accompanying an early version of Jack Winter’s Dream]

[Note accompanying an early version of Jack Winter’s Dream]

This play was written for the speaking and the singing voice, and for radio. I had in mind a form midway between the campfire or bar room yarn and the objectified drama of the stage. The debt to Dylan Thomas is obvious enough; less obvious, but equally real, is the debt owing to my father for many fertile conversations on every subject from alluvial gold mining to demonology. Is the play meant to be historically real? God forbid. But there is one notion that lies behind the play; and in a sense accounts for it: that the shedding of blood christens a place, makes it part of the soul and imagination of man; that the natural world shares in our guilt, agony and perhaps redemption.

1956 (151)