Objector (Australian Playhouse)
1966 film
"Objector" is the 25th television play episode of the first season of the Australian anthology television series Australian Playhouse. "Objector" was written by Tony Morphett and produced by Brian Faull and originally aired on ABC on 3 October 1966.
Morphett went on to become one of the leading writers in Australian television.
Plot
A man is conscripted to fight in Vietnam. He wants to go to court to argue against his conscription and his father, a war veteran, calls him a coward.
Cast
John Derum as the son
Syd Conabere as the father
Julie Costello as the girlfriend
Production
Morphett originally wrote the story as a short story for the Adelaide Festival Literary Contest. It was written soon after the Federal Government introduced conscription for Vietnam, but Morphett says it is not "a propagandist play."
It was filmed in Sydney.
Reception
The Bulletin TV critic said the "play kept wandering from prose poetry to plain Australian and back again, like a novice punter trying to pick a two-horse race without a form guide."
The Age said it was "a drama so true to life it hurt." A different critic from the same paper said it "wasn't really a play. It was merely sort of a visual illustration of a voice told by a narrative in the background. The viewer was supposed to exercise his imagination...
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q25136695. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Objector (Australian Playhouse)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.