The monodrama A Stretch of the Imagination, an acknowledged classic of Australian drama, was first performed at the Pram Factory in 1972, with the distinguished actor Peter Cummins playing Monk O’Neil. Margaret Williams, in her Introduction to the Currency Press edition of the play, described it as ‘a brilliant piece of verbal, political and poetical juggling, a fireworks display of evocations and allusions sparked off by the central theme of death’. The play was performed twice in London and memorably in a Mandarin translation in Beijing, where more people saw it than have done so in Australia.

Jack Hibberd (courtesy of La Mama)

If the numbers are down for Stretch, not so for his wedding reception play, Dimboola, first performed at La Mama in Carlton in 1969. It ran for an Australian record of two and a half years at Sydney’s Bonaparte Theatre Restaurant and was performed in myriad country towns across Australia. More than 1.4 million people have attended performances of Dimboola.

Hibberd’s first play was White With Wire Wheels, written in 1967 and performed that year at the University of Melbourne, which also hosted two of his shorter works in a season entitled Brain Rot. When Betty Burstall decided to turn the old Carlton shirt factory she had rented into La Mama in 1967, it was Hibberd to whom she turned for the opening play, Three Old Friends, which was acted and directed by Graham Blundell, Bruce Knappett, and David Kendall.

From that small beginning, a new wave of Australian drama took off at La Mama, with contributions from Barry Oakley, David Williamson, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, Barry Dickins, and Tim Robertson all adding to Hibberd’s opening gambit. His subsequent plays included One of Nature’s Gentlemen (1967), The Les Darcy Show (1974), Peggy Sue (1975), A Toast to Melba (1975), The Overcoat (1977), and, only a few months ago, Killing Time, which he was able to see.

Joined by Nimrod in Sydney, the Australian Performing Group at the Pram challenged conventional repertory theatre concerned mainly with English dramas and Shakespeare. During the eleven years of its existence, the Pram Factory hosted 140 new Australian plays. Prior to that, Ray Lawler’ s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) was almost alone in carrying the banner of Australian dramaturgy.

Hibberd was honoured by the Australian government in 2018 when he became a member of the Order of Australia (AM). At his funeral in Springvale, the Bendigo Marist Brothers boy arrived in a splendid Rolls Royce hearse, from which four men wearing hats trundled his modest coffin graveside in the Jewish section. As we threw clay clods upon the lowered coffin, I recalled Monk O’Neil generously asking two minutes’ silence for his friend and enemy Mort, ‘a man who was once the life of the party, a digger who has ceased to shovel, an Einstein of the stab pass and brindle chuck, old silver tongue, a man’s man, the first off Gallipoli, one of nature’s policeman. Mate.’