"First published in 1957, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is Ray Lawler's celebrated Australian drama and a landmark of the nation's theatre. Set in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton, the play follows Queensland cane-cutters Roo and Barney, who have spent sixteen consecutive lay-off seasons living and celebrating with barmaids Olive and Nancy. Each year Roo brings Olive a kewpie doll as a token of their enduring arrangement, but the seventeenth summer arrives with Nancy newly married, Roo troubled by failure and the group's carefully preserved way of life beginning to unravel.
Lawler combines humour, warmth and mounting tragedy in a perceptive examination of ageing, loyalty, pride and disappointed expectations. Olive remains devoted to an idealised memory of earlier summers, while the practical Pearl—invited to replace Nancy—sees the arrangement with less romantic eyes. As reality intrudes upon ritual, the characters are forced to confront the difference between the lives they imagined and the lives they have actually built. Its distinctly Australian speech, working-class setting and emotional honesty helped establish the play as one of the defining works of modern Australian drama.
This is the scarce 1957 first edition, published by Angus & Robertson for its London, Sydney, Melbourne and Wellington offices, and explicitly identified as "First Edition" upon the title page. The play is dedicated to director John Sumner and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, whose production carried it from Melbourne to London. Particularly desirable in its original unclipped 15-shilling dustjacket, this copy also retains a period Melbourne bookseller's ticket and a contemporary ownership inscription dated June 1958."
