There has been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since then. There are still shearers and miners, but I sense that these are men of a different cast: serious, provident men, efficient and far-sighted, often more so than their employers, men who are sometimes flown in and out of their distant work places, and spend each third week at home with their wives and children. You won’t see too many of them with a pick or shovel or any other old-fashioned implement. The sugar industry, like the great Australian sheep flocks, has shrunk. Yet none of us ever imagined that a time would come when the sugar industry would be deregulated and Australia would cease to ride on the backs of the merino.

There was a magic about the Doll in the 1950s which I doubted could be replicated in the computer age. My doubts were ill-founded. At first I wondered whether this was because of what I had picked up over the years. I was not to know back then that one day I would come to learn quite a deal about the Queensland sugar industry.

In 1969 I was retained by the Queensland Canegrowers’ Council as junior counsel to Gerrard Brennan QC. It was a retainer that I was to hold for the next twenty-nine years. No politician, state or federal, Labor or Liberal, was prepared to mess with the sugar industry of Queensland, the only place, it was claimed, in which sugar cane was grown and cut by Caucasian labour. The hundred or so cane farmers in Northern New South Wales were treated as honorary Queenslanders for the purpose of the industry. Their production, like the whole of Queensland’s, was acquired and sold by the Queensland government. Much of it was exported on favourable terms to the United Kingdom. Australians sugared their tea – there wasn’t much coffee drunk in those days – exclusively with the Queensland product sold at high fixed prices. Populate the north or perish, the politicians said: the sugar industry, a Caucasian sugar industry, made sure there was no northern vacuum to be filled by cheap Asian labour.

You needed to have a strong constitution to live in the north. These were the days before the luxury hotels and championship golf courses. It was an ideal place for immigrants, usually from the Mediterranean. They were prepared to work hard and didn’t seem to mind the heat and humidity. The millers, especially the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, were of a patrician mould. Their managers lived in grand old timber houses with high ceilings and broad verandahs – it was said of one milling company that the qualification for a cadetship was to have failed the Leaving examination at a certain expensive Great Public School in Sydney. Not long after Brennan, later chief justice of the High Court, and I appeared against that company, the manager of its sugar division told us that their counsel always ended up on the Supreme Court bench. He made it clear that we would be unwise to have any such aspirations.

The social division between mill management and growers in some districts was as rigid as the division between an estate manager and an under-gardener in an Edwardian household in Buckinghamshire. Often there was the same insensitivity in the business dealings between the two, although many growers were far richer than the managers of the mills. The millers called their middle managers cane inspectors. Some of them, attired in pith helmets and khaki drills, had the demeanour of provincial governors on the subcontinent in 1925. So far as they were concerned, cane-cutters were almost as low as untouchables. It was an irony that many of the prosperous cane farmers had started their working lives as cane-cutters.

By 1969 there were still a few cane-cutters left. I saw a gang at work near Nambour, their bodies and faces as black as the Jackie Howe singlets encasing their muscular chests. The blackness was from the burnt cane, ignited in the early evening the day before, reddening the horizon with a fiery second sunset. Growers prided themselves on the surgical precision with which they measured the fire to exactly the number of rakes of cane they intended to harvest the next day.

Almost every aspect of the industry was regulated. Each farm was assigned to a particular mill. There were thirty or so of these in Queensland, stretching from Mosman beyond Cairns to Rocky Point, just north of Surfers Paradise. A grower could sell his cane only to the mill to which his farm was assigned. If the price was not agreed, it would be fixed by a quasi-judicial panel whose chairman was traditionally a Supreme Court judge. Judges jostled for the position. This was, after all, a very important industry. It had been so since Captain Louis Hope built the first mill near Brisbane in the 1860s. How it was to be regulated and expanded occupied much of a Queensland politician’s time. Sir Harry Gibbs, another Queensland chief justice of the High Court, conducted a Royal Commission into these matters in the 1960s.

The growers and the millers relished their fights, conducted by their proxies, Queen’s Counsel and juniors from Brisbane, arguments about a $40 deduction for ‘dirty cane’, or an allowance of a few cents a tonne for compensation for the haulage of cane to a pick-up point for the miniature trains that brought the cane from the fields to the mill. The arguments were conducted before the panel, quaintly called the Central Sugar Cane Prices Board, and must have cost infinitely more than the amounts in issue. If there were any agreement between growers and millers, it was that there was always a principle involved.

The Colonial Sugar Refining Company was the power in the industry. In addition to its mills, and cane plantations around them, and its sugar refineries in Brisbane and Sydney, it was the selling agent for the Queensland government of all sugar not committed under the various state-party agreements. Such was the regulation of the industry that the approval of the panel was required for almost any alteration in the area or boundaries of an assignment, growers’ quotas, even the price at which a farm could be sold. It was a further irony that in many places the cane could not have been cultivated at all but for the back-breaking work of South Pacific Islanders, long since sent back to their birthplaces, and whose presence and repatriation were a source of political controversy before Federation.

The importance of their work was graphically brought home to me in the mid-1970s when the growers in the Rocky Point area united to challenge the unimproved values of their lands set by the Queensland government for rating and like purposes. We were able to obtain copies of the early explorers’ and surveyors’ maps and notes to prove that the area had originally been a miasma of swamps and brackish creeks overgrown with massive cabbage tree palms with roots like the tentacles of some giant primeval octopus. The incontestable material showed that the area had been cleared, drained, raised and levelled by ‘Kanaka labour’, as the officials described it. Of course, value doesn’t necessarily equate with cost. It was unlikely that, even with modern machinery, the work would have been worth doing in modern times. But because the panel controlled the price of the cane lands, and a net of regulations ensured their continued use for sugar cane cultivation, the land had enhanced value, from which the combined cost of the works could be calculated and deducted to establish an unimproved rateable value, to the great advantage of the farmers.

Last week I read that seven hundred cane farmers had accepted financial incentives from the Commonwealth to leave their lands and forgo their quotas. Much has changed in the last half century; and not just in the sugar industry. Only last year I saw, in the West End, a revival of John Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon (1958). It has not travelled well over the decades. Perhaps the Doll, first performed on 28 November 1955, would prove to be no more than a sad anachronism, which even the novelty of a production in the round could make neither novel nor relevant.

I was wrong about that. But the mise en scène needs to be recalled. Ray Lawler wrote Summer of the Seventeenth Doll before 15 September 1956, the date on which Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was first produced. It was of the realist kitchen sink genre, a far departure from the elegant plays of Oscar Wilde and Terence Rattigan. The Doll, at the time, was thought by some to be our version of kitchen sink. In those days, professional theatre in Australia tended to be what J.C. Williamson chose to give us. It was not necessarily bad on that account or any other. I saw Vivien Leigh in 1948 and Katharine Hepburn in 1955 in Shakespeare, on tours by the Old Vic, and Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson in The Chalk Garden in Brisbane, as well as several entertaining if not particularly memorable plays starring Roger Livesey, Googie Withers and John McCallum. Since when did ‘entertaining’ become a dirty word? State theatre companies, with their rather Stalinist titles and occasionally politically motivated overtones, were unknown. Professional and semi-professional companies flourished, but their repertoires rarely included Australian works. The ambition of most Australian dramatists was to have a play presented on radio. Still, the country was nothing like the cultural desert that some today would say it was then. We were also well aware of new waves of theatre in the United States and the United Kingdom. We had even seen something of the Stanislavsky Method as interpreted by Marlon Brando in the film of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. We knew that raw naturalistic theatre, sans French windows, was coming. The times were right for the Doll.

And they are still right for it in 2008. Of course, it is not really a play about manual workers in the sugar industry. It has, like all good plays, universal themes: ageing, loss of prowess, change and self-realisation. It is only incidental that the prowess is physical.

The story, set in 1953, is a simple one. Two cane-cutters, Roo and Barney, make their pile during the season. Each year they return to Melbourne to rejoin their mistresses, both barmaids, in the same house, and Roo presents Olive with a tinsel fairground doll. This year, the doll is the seventeenth of its kind. But Barney’s mistress, Nancy, has left to marry someone else. Barney is devastated. The desertion calls into question his very manhood, a topic discussed later in the play. Olive has arranged for her would-be genteel friend Pearl to take Nancy’s place. Pearl is doubtful and Roo is inexplicably edgy. It turns out that his back is failing, and he has been bested by a younger cane-cutter, Johnnie. Olive’s mother, who makes periodic entrances, exits and wisecracks, supplies light relief. Bubba, the girl next door, now grown up and a shop assistant, romanticises the relationship between Roo and Olive. Johnnie arrives and after being turned away is allowed to court Bubba.

Roo, to Olive’s surprise and Barney’s disgust, takes a regular job in a paint factory. Eventually, Olive learns why Roo is not returning to the cane fields. Pearl doesn’t want to take on Barney. She decides to leave, realising that there will be no eighteenth doll, that their colourful way of life was always impermanent and illusory. She smashes the dolls. Different readings of the ending are possible. Mine was a pessimistic one in 1956. In 2008, it was pessimistic, better informed and inevitable.

John McCallum, in Companion to Theatre in Australia (1995), asserts that since the 1980s Olive and Pearl have come to be seen as more interesting characters than Roo and Barney. I tend to be suspicious of the passive voice: ‘come to be seen’ by whom? This view is well in step with contemporary feminism. It is not one that I would take myself, even though on the night, Caroline Kennison got as much out of the part of Olive as anyone possibly could. This is not to say that Olive and Pearl are not interesting characters, although Pearl’s lines are sometimes a little predictable.

I think that the more natural reading is also the truer and better one, of a formerly proud physical man in decline. I doubt whether Lawler could have known that within a couple of decades cane-cutters would be replaced by machines. That they did gives even more depth to the play for me. An era in which strong men could always find work, often for good pay, was almost over, although few knew that then. Of course, ageing and supplantation by rising stars are not unique to manual workers. It happens to everyone, from movie queens and matinée idols to computer programmers, boxers and barristers. Shakespeare, as usual, said it earlier and best, ‘Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers come to dust’. It has special poignancy for manual workers though. For them, physical strength and capacity meant almost everything. They couldn’t, as workers who rely on their education for their livelihood, fake it as they grew older.

It is probably a mark of the play’s enduring quality that it succeeds in the round. It was not written to that end. Theatre in the round requires consistently good voice projection. Actors have to be conscious that they are at all times visible in three dimensions. The design of a set, particularly a naturalistic one, can be problematic for the same reason.

These difficulties were all overcome in the La Boite production, directed by Sean Mee. The props were authentically worn, from the timber kitchen table and the old couch to the Bakelite wireless. The production looked right. My only criticism is a small one; Roo in a pair of thongs in 1955 struck a discordant note.

Peter Marshall was thoroughly convincing as Roo, struggling, sometimes inarticulately, sometimes loudly, to accept and adjust to a future bound by dependence and decline. Caroline Kennison’s performance got better and better as the night wore on. She conveyed beautifully the growing realisation of a deluded past and an empty future. Laura Keneally was more than adequate as Pearl, a less attractive, harder role than Olive’s, and the weakest part in the play. Jonathan Brand looked and sounded perfect as Barney, both drunk and sober. He injected the right note of pathos into his lines. Candice Storey as Bubba was as innocent and naïve as the author could have intended. Perhaps Kay Stevenson tried a little too hard as Olive’s mother, Emma, but there is a stock character feel about some of her speeches which might have tempted her to overplay her hand occasionally. She certainly supplied the relief that this otherwise intensely serious play needs from time to time. I wonder how many people in the audience knew what she was talking about when the others teased her about her community singing, another relic of the war and immediate postwar years. In those days there used to be community singing, as I recall, at the City Hall in Brisbane.

The Doll remains an outstanding and enduring play. La Boite did it full justice this year. I cannot help asking, however, whether its success had some unfortunate, unintended consequences. The good consequences were obvious enough; an assurance that there were Australian playwrights of the first rank, encouragement of other Australian writers to write new plays set in Australia, and a willingness of local audiences to give them a hearing.

Over time, however, these, and an incessantly aggressive parochialism, led to a tendency to reject as unworthy and unpatriotic anything other than the home-grown. Appearances of great overseas actors and the works of contemporary foreign playwrights, especially British ones, were to become rarer and rarer. We seem to import famous divas, pop stars, musicians, orchestras and tennis players – and writers – for appearances readily enough: why not, at least occasionally, great actors, as we did in those years?