Currency Press is the oldest, independently owned, active Australian publisher. It is a unique institution in Australia and a rare one in world publishing: a publishing house that subsists principally on the work of the local performing arts. As a specialist company the great bulk of its sales occur within Australia—and with a population of twenty-eight million Currency’s persistence to this point as a small commercial company has been remarkable.
With the advent of digital technology, Currency is expanding its reach, making Australian drama available in print throughout Europe, the UK and the US, and in digital form across the world.
Currency Press was incorporated in 1971 at a time of high nationalistic fervour. Just as the student revolution of the 1960s led to major social changes in Europe and North America, so it was in Australia. Until this time Australia had thought of herself as a junior partner, first of Britain, who had colonised her, and later of the USA. In the 1950s the Suez crisis and its economic aftermath had broken the bonds of dependence on Britain. In the 1960s Australia participated in the Vietnam War as an ally of the United States, and it was opposition to this war that led young white Australians to discard American imperialism and young black Australians to launch a civil rights movement.
In that new spirit Australia began afresh to examine its origins, its character, its language and accent and way of life. And from this derived an appetite for all things Australian—especially books which reinterpreted the past with a local perspective and gave voice to the rapidly-changing present. The young playwrights then emerging became leaders in this movement. Their work, like the student revolution itself, was iconoclastic, bombastic and attention-seeking.
Along with the Vietnam moratorium marches in the late 1960s came radical changes of another kind, with young artists at the fore. These included a freeing-up of outdated censorship laws; the establishment of the Federal funding body, the Australian (now Australia) Council for the Arts; the rebirth of the film industry; anti-uranium mining, land rights for Aboriginal people and environmental movements; and the setting up of major regionally funded theatre companies. By 1971, the Australian playwright had a voice, a stage and a public for the first time since the days of the old purveyors of melodrama at the turn of the twentieth century.
Currency Press was launched in response to all these changes. At the time Dr Philip Parsons was a drama academic at the University of New South Wales, Sydney; his wife Katharine Brisbane was national theatre critic of The Australian newspaper.
Events moved faster than they anticipated. The first play Currency Press published in 1971 was Macquarie by Alex Buzo. One of the first writers to call on them was David Williamson with three manuscripts: The Coming of Stork, The Removalists and Don’s Party. The Removalists, after opening at La Mama (a tiny Melbourne experimental venue), was taken up in Sydney by the Nimrod Street Theatre (now the Stables Theatre, home to Griffin Theatre) a theatre for new writers, and then transferred to a commercial venue. This was the first play by the new generation to be bought by a commercial producer. In 1973 it went on to the Royal Court Theatre in London, where it won for Williamson the Evening Standard Award for the most promising playwright of the year.
Currency Press published The Removalists in 1972. It was an immediate success, and for many years its best seller; over 50 years later it still sells consistently. It balances horror and humour, full of sharp observations about Australia’s attitude to authority, domestic conflict and violence. It was a timely play that shocked audiences into recognising—even celebrating—some uglier aspects of urban Australia that, until then, were unfamiliar to the stage.
In 1973 Don’s Party, which captured Australia’s changing politics, followed The Removalists into the commercial theatre. Since then Williamson’s popularity, both on stage and on film, has never waned. His plays include The Club, Travelling North, Emerald City, Money and Friends, Brilliant Lies, Dead White Males, The Jack Manning Trilogy, Cruise Control and Family Values, to name a handful.
Despite its early success, Currency’s position was not secure. For ten years Currency was run from the Parsons’ house at 87 Jersey Road, Woollahra, and for the first seven the company was subsidised by the founders with salaries from other sources. Early assistance came from Associated Book Publishers (then owners of the Methuen imprint) with whom Currency had a three-year partnership, during which Katharine and Philip created a list of Australian titles that, they felt, could support the study of Australian drama.
Gradually the plays crept into literature and other courses. Over the next five years Currency Press, a company begun in the back room of a Sydney terrace with little capital and no publishing experience, became a major force in Australia’s performing arts. Currency and Methuen parted in 1976 after a restructuring of the larger firm, and the Parsons, together with their long-standing associate Jean Cooney, began to rebuild the company. In 1977 Cambridge University Press in Australia became Currency’s distributor and by 1978 a market survey revealed that there was no tertiary institution in Australia which did not have one of Currency’s books on a course somewhere.
In 1982, after a brief period of extension to 89 Jersey Road, a legacy enabled the purchase of a three-storey former draper’s premises at 330 Oxford Street, in nearby Paddington, that finally moved the business away from the family home.
1993 brought a personal grief with the death of Philip Parsons on 20 June. To the end he devoted his attention and energies to the completion of his magnum opus, A Companion to Theatre in Australia. In the last week of his life, following a submission from writers and theatre practitioners from around Australia, he and Katharine were awarded the AM in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for the work of Currency Press. A further blow came at the end of 1995 with the untimely death of the company’s executive director, Sandra Gorman.
In 1998 the company moved to larger premises at 201 Cleveland Street, Redfern, and in 2001 Katharine Brisbane retired from Currency Press, and turned her energies to a non-profit association, Currency House, incorporated with the aim of providing a network among workers in the arts, encouraging research and raising the standard of informed debate in public policy-making. When Katharine finally withdrew from working life in 2020, aged 88, Currency House continued under the chairmanship of her daughter, Harriet Parsons. In 2024 Currency Press moved to its current premises at Suite 310, 46-56 Kippax Street, Surry Hills.
Today Currency has over 500 titles in print. Currency also distributes Nick Hern Books in Australia. Nick Hern is a London-based independent performing arts publisher.
Unlike publishers in other countries, who can often rely on a deep history of autochthonal written drama, Currency has built its success on a rapidly expanding list of contemporary Australian writers, and only secondarily on a handful of plays from the colonial period and the first half of the twentieth century, the latter invariably written for amateur performance when professional theatre was overwhelmingly dominated by American and British plays and musicals. Currency continues to promote the study of contemporary playwrights, not because of the weight of received opinion but because they have something to say, to the current generation at least, about what it means to be Australian. In the 1960s writers like Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo and John Romeril created aggressive works full of colourful vernacular; the 1970s was a period of domestic examination which saw the rise of Williamson and more mature works like Peter Kenna’s A Hard God; the 1980s took a freer, more poetic look at the roots of our psyche through the works of Dorothy Hewett, Louis Nowra, Stephen Sewell and, in a return to the stage, Patrick White. More recently women writers have found a more equal place in the canon, including the works of Patricia Cornelius, Suzie Miller, Joanna Murray-Smith, Hannie Rayson and Katherine Thomson, as well as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) writers such as Noëlle Janaczewska, Donna Abela, Samah Sabawi, Michelle Law and S. Shakthidharan. And Currency has continued to support a series of brilliant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, starting in 1974 with Robert Merritt and continuing with Eva Johnson, Jack Davis, Jane Harrison, David Milroy, Wesley Enoch, Dallas Winmar, Andrea James, Nakkiah Lui, Leah Purcell, Meyne Wyatt and Kodie Bedford, to name a few.
The most recent generation of writers such as Angela Betzien, Mary Anne Butler, Tom Holloway, Kate Mulvany, Tommy Murphy and Emily Sheehan have also made their mark and may, in time, define a new phase of Australian drama.
With the exception of the Current Theatre Series (of which more later), Currency does not accept plays for publication until they have been refined by at least one professional stage production. This doesn’t mean, however, that the play must be a popular success or have sold the film rights; there may also be a market for a play with a more modest record. The first questions that we ask of a manuscript are: Does it perform well in the theatre? Does it have something to say to the reader today? Is there five years of life in it?
Currency’s biggest and most reliable market is educational. A play may be set on a secondary or tertiary course in theatre / drama or literature if the author’s previous work is well known, if the play has been well exposed in the theatre, or if the play deals graphically with a subject of current concern. Subjects in this latter category include, for example, race, gender and family, technology and adolescent issues. Among bestselling titles in recent years include No Sugar by Jack Davis, a historical drama; Boy Overboard, adapted by Patricia Cornelius from Morris Gleitzman’s novel, a play for teenagers that follows refugees on a journey from Afghanistan to Australia, blending themes of war, hope and soccer; and The Drover’s Wife by Leah Purcell, a reimagining of Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story, incorporating Indigenous perspectives and colonial history.
Currency’s overriding purpose in promoting work of this kind is to demonstrate that the creative writer is not only an entertainer but also a keen social observer and critic.
If a play fits our criteria, it is usually printed in a small run of around 500 copies and promoted to teachers. The secondary school curricula are the biggest target and if a play is set on the syllabus, it can mean a steady flow of sales over many years. Some of Currency’s titles have been reprinted almost every year since publication.
One example is Away, the third play by Sydney writer Michael Gow. Away is about three Australian families on a summer holiday in the 1960s, but the story parallels Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was first performed in 1986 in a small Sydney theatre where its instant appeal earned it productions in other cities and a more glamorous revival at home. In 1989 it was set on the New South Wales Higher School Certificate English course and sold 10,000 copies. Since then it has been reprinted annually and sales are now in the hundreds of thousands. Few education systems in the world would endorse an author so rapidly.
The design of the book is largely determined by Currency’s perception of the market. With a complex format like a play, which involves a variety of type forms, special care is taken with the layout of the play. The idea of reading a play can intimidate some readers, and the aim is to make the books as friendly as possible.
Currency’s most adventurous list is the Current Theatre Series. These are simple format theatre programmes that include the entire text of the play; they are produced upon request for any theatre mounting an Australian play prepared to buy at cost between 300 and 1,000 copies. The book becomes part of the theatre’s promotion, and the programme information is included in it. The author may revise the text up to three weeks before opening night. The whole print run is available to the theatre for the length of the run and what remains unsold is then supplied to bookshops. This way the theatre shares the risk of publishing a new work and receives continuing recognition through publication. If at the end of the print run the play has demonstrated a continuing life, then the definitive text is published in a standard Currency Press edition. Away is the product of this process.
As a performing arts publisher, Currency’s list is not restricted purely to plays. It includes screenplays like Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Looking for Alibrandi and Rabbit Proof Fence, a selection of critical studies on theatre and film like Australia in 50 Plays and Remembered Presences: Responses to Theatre, practical guides and manuals on acting and auditioning, learning dialects, using drama to improve literacy and language, teaching drama and creating drama with young people. Drama however remains the backbone of the list. The incoming stream of manuscripts never slows, yet even as our list expands Currency remains—and will always remain, given its mission—a small business.
Today Currency Press is managed by Claire Grady (Publisher), Deborah Franco (Marketing Manager), Lucia Nguyen (Editor, Social Media Coordinator), Nick Parsons (ePublishing Editor and son of founders Katharine and Philip), Jack Mitchell (Trade Sales Manager), Jodine Muir (Bookkeeper), Rose Callaghan (Publishing Assistant) and Peter Harris (IT Manager).
The existence of Currency Press has in itself become an incentive to aspiring playwrights. To have a play in print is a confirmation of their achievement and encourages further productions. In 1998 the rising status of playwrights was reflected with the choice of Alma De Groen, author of The Rivers of China, The Girl Who Saw Everything and The Woman in the Window, for the Patrick White Award for literature, the first time a playwright had been recognised as pre-eminent in the company of poets and novelists. In 2001 Hannie Rayson’s Life After George became the first play to be short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2008 John Romeril, a pivotal and prolific writer since the dawn of the New Wave, became the second playwright to receive the Patrick White award, and in 2017 Leah Purcell’s play The Drover’s Wife won the Book of the Year at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the first play to do so.
In 2020 S. Shakthidharan won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Louis Esson Prize for Drama for Counting and Cracking, and in 2026 the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, the third Australian to do so after Noëlle Janaczewska and Patricia Cornelius.