The portrayal of Australia in Away is as ironic as the title of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Gow’s characters are imprisoned in a world in which their worth as human beings is measured in the cost of their holidays. To preserve a way of life means sending their sons to fight America’s war in Vietnam; to celebrate Christmas means hot dinners and plastic trees; the aim is to be the same as everyone else, as long as that means to be better than one’s neighbour. Gwen’s attitude to life echoes Girlie Pogson in Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla: ‘I like a hat to look different so long as it’s what the others are wearing.’ But, like all works which have an endearing quality, Gow’s play dramatises a universal world through one which is limited by time and space. And like many recent Australian plays, such as Patrick White’s Shepherd on the Rocks, David Malouf’s Blood Relations and Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age, Away is about reconciliation and the power of healing through love and compassion.

Away is historical in the sense that it places its characters and themes within a particular society and draws on the mood and spirit of a particular era to portray a larger world. It is a play about families – the young generation and their parents – and a play about the world we live in. The three families go away on their annual holidays, but their journey becomes a theatrical metaphor for a spiritual quest. As in classical Greek and Shakespearean drama, the purpose of the quest is to gain self knowledge. Thus Away is essentially about coming home, or undertaking a journey from ignorance to knowledge; from blindness to insight. At the end, the characters have a new understanding of the world around them because they have accepted the motives, ambitions, hopes and fears which determine their actions. This journey is embedded in the character of Coral, who links the school play with a Shakespearean world of distortion, the tragedy of lost hopes and the possibility of restoring order through love. She sees the darkness within Tom, the bruises of his illness and the image of death behind his vitality.