Alan Seymour

Roger Stubbs:
When Alan Seymour's play, The One Day of the Year, based on the celebration of ANZAC Day, was first performed in 1960, it caused great controversy for the way it seemed to denigrate a great tradition. As more Australians saw it performed, a more balanced view emerged. ... Alan did not have an easy start to life. He was the youngest child of nine, by fourteen years. His parents were elderly. At the age of seventy-one, his father, a waterside worker, was killed when struck by a sling load of timber. ... He attended East Fremantle State School from where he won a Secondary School Scholarship and was able to attend Perth Modern School ...

Wikipedia:
Seymour was born in Fremantle, Western Australia. His father was killed in a wharf accident when Alan was nine, and his mother, a Cockney from London, died a few months later. After that he was brought up by his sister May and her husband, Alfred Chester Cruthers. He was educated at Perth Modern School, leaving at 15 after failing to complete the Junior Certificate. He found work as a radio announcer in a commercial radio station 6PM. During his two years there he wrote a number of short radio plays that were broadcast live. In 1945 he moved to Sydney, New South Wales, where he worked as an advertising copy-writer with 2UE.
He returned to Perth after the war where he worked as a free-lance writer for ABC Radio. Seymour became ABC Radio's film critic. He joined a commercial radio station 6KY as an announcer and copy-writer and after six months was offered an announcing post at the ABC. In 1949 he met Ron Baddeley, a RAAF veteran, and they were to become life partners. Wikipedia.

Selected Works

The One Day of the Year (1958)

Tomorrow's Child (1957) - TV play

The Lark (1959) - TV play

One Bright Day (1959) - TV play

The Life and Death of King Richard II (1960) - TV play

The Runner (1965) - TV play

References and Links

Stubbs, Roger et al. 2016, A Celebration of Contribution: Tales of the Courage, Commitment and Creativity of Modernians 1911-1963, WA Dept of Education: 243-4.

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 20 October, 2017 and hosted at freotopia.org/authors/seymour.html (it was last updated on 26 October, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.