Characters and Relationships (HSC SSCE English Advanced): Revision Notes
Characters and Relationships
Introduction to the play
Michael Gow's Away centres on three interconnected Australian families whose relationships undergo profound transformations during their summer holidays. Set in the 1960s, the play explores how shared vulnerability can break down social barriers and facilitate genuine human connection. The characters represent different facets of Australian society during this period: the optimistic British migrants seeking a better life, the socially ambitious middle class striving for status, and the established elite grappling with national and personal loss.
The relationships between these characters fracture and heal throughout the play, revealing universal human experiences of denial, grief, reconciliation, and the search for authentic connection. The holiday setting acts as a transformative space where pretences are stripped away and characters are forced to confront difficult truths about mortality, class divisions, and the meaning of family.
The 1960s setting is crucial to understanding the social dynamics in the play. This period marked significant changes in Australian society, including increased migration, the Vietnam War's impact on families, and evolving class structures.
Tom
Tom is a charismatic teenager living with leukaemia who becomes the emotional catalyst for transformation throughout the play. Despite his terminal diagnosis, he radiates vitality and refuses to be defined by his illness or treated with pity.
Character overview
Tom embodies youthful authenticity and courage in the face of death. In the school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he plays Puck with infectious energy, demonstrating his ability to embrace life fully despite knowing his time is limited. Unlike his parents, who attempt to maintain a cheerful facade, Tom confronts his mortality with unflinching honesty, declaring plainly "I'm dying" when others try to avoid the subject.
Tom's directness serves multiple purposes in the play. By refusing to participate in denial, Tom forces those around him to face uncomfortable truths. He demonstrates that acknowledging death does not mean surrendering to despair; rather, it can lead to more meaningful connections and experiences.
His refusal to accept pity is evident when he propositions Meg before his death—he is not seeking sympathy but asserting his right to normal teenage experiences. When he directs Coral in her healing theatrical performance, he channels his understanding of mortality into helping another person confront their grief.
Key relationships
Harry and Vic (parents): Tom's relationship with his parents is defined by loving tension between their protective denial and his insistence on truth. Harry and Vic are devoted parents who mask their grief behind cheerful optimism, constantly urging Tom to "act happy" and pretend everything is normal.
The Beach Scene After the Storm
This pivotal moment demonstrates Tom's transformative impact on his parents. Tom's candid acknowledgement of his condition forces Harry and Vic to abandon their pretence and begin genuinely preparing for his death. This shift from denial to acceptance, though painful, allows the family to spend Tom's remaining time in authentic connection rather than false cheer.
Meg: Tom's relationship with Meg represents the collision between adolescent romance and mortality. Meg develops a crush on Tom, and they share a mutual attraction. However, when Meg learns of Tom's diagnosis, their relationship becomes complicated. Tom eventually rejects Meg's sexual advances because he recognises they stem from pity rather than genuine desire. This rejection highlights Tom's refusal to be defined by his illness or to accept relationships based on sympathy. The unresolved tension in their relationship reflects the tragedy of young love interrupted by death and the difficulty of navigating authentic connection when death looms.
Coral: Tom forms a platonic healing bond with Coral, the grieving mother who has become catatonic after losing her son in the Vietnam War. Tom directs Coral in an impromptu theatrical performance of Stranger on the Shore, which mirrors the play's larger theme of theatre as a vehicle for healing and truth. Through this creative collaboration, Tom's understanding of mortality helps revive Coral's maternal instincts and reconnect her to life. Their relationship demonstrates how shared experiences of loss can create powerful connections between people of different generations.
Gwen
Gwen represents the socially aspirational middle class and embodies the anxieties of nouveau riche status. She is the play's most complex character in terms of transformation, moving from bitter snobbery to humility.
Character overview
Gwen's defining characteristic is her classism, which stems from deep-seated trauma about her own impoverished background. Having escaped poverty, she now desperately clings to her newfound middle-class status and looks down upon those she perceives as beneath her. She dismisses Harry and Vic as "communists" based solely on their working-class background and creates constant complaint lists to assert control over her environment.
Gwen's behaviour masks a profound fear of failure and falling back into poverty. This background trauma is crucial to understanding her character—her snobbery is not simply meanness but a defensive mechanism born from insecurity.
Gwen's bitterness and social anxiety make her initially unsympathetic, but the play gradually reveals the insecurity driving her actions. Her transformation throughout the play models how confronting our own vulnerabilities can lead to empathy for others.
Key relationships
Jim (husband): Gwen's marriage to Jim demonstrates the toll her controlling behaviour takes on those closest to her. Jim is characterised by henpecked passivity for most of the play, enduring Gwen's constant complaints and domineering attitude. However, his passivity explodes into rebellion during Act 2, when he finally stands up to his wife.
Jim Burns the Complaint List
In a symbolic act of defiance, Jim burns Gwen's complaint list after learning about Tom's illness, reclaiming his agency and forcing Gwen to recognise the pettiness of her grievances in the face of genuine tragedy. This confrontation becomes a turning point in their marriage, leading to a more balanced relationship.
Meg (daughter): Gwen's relationship with her daughter is characterised by controlling maternal dominance. Gwen attempts to dictate Meg's behaviour and social interactions, particularly trying to prevent her association with Tom's family. Meg's open rebellion against this control creates ongoing tension. However, the play's conclusion brings imperfect but meaningful reconciliation when Gwen finally apologises to Meg, validating her daughter's right to make her own choices. This apology represents Gwen's growth and models how parents and children can find mutual understanding despite past conflicts.
Harry and Vic: Gwen's relationship with Harry and Vic traces a journey from contempt to transformative humility. Initially, Gwen displays open disdain for the couple based on their class status and migrant background. However, this attitude shifts dramatically when she learns about Tom's illness.
Vic's wisdom, encapsulated in her statement "Life's too short", cuts through Gwen's pretensions and forces her to recognise the superficiality of her concerns. Harry and Vic's grace in the face of their son's terminal illness humbles Gwen and teaches her to value human connection over social status.
This transformation represents the play's central theme of shared vulnerability dissolving class barriers.
Coral
Coral is a grieving mother whose loss has disconnected her from reality. Her journey back to life through art and human connection forms one of the play's most moving storylines.
Character overview
Coral has become catatonic following the death of her son in the Vietnam War. She wanders around the holiday resort "away with the birds", a phrase that captures her dissociation from reality. In her confused state, she kisses honeymooners and behaves in socially inappropriate ways that embarrass her husband Roy. Her behaviour represents an extreme response to unbearable grief—a complete withdrawal from a world that no longer makes sense to her.
Coral's character challenges assumptions about "proper" grieving and highlights how trauma can manifest in ways that society finds uncomfortable. Her unconventional behaviour is not weakness but a psychological survival mechanism in response to devastating loss.
Coral's eventual healing demonstrates that recovery from profound loss requires patience, acceptance, and creative expression rather than control or medical intervention.
Key relationships
Roy (husband): Coral's marriage has fractured under the weight of her grief and Roy's inability to accept her coping mechanisms. Roy responds to Coral's behaviour with control and threats, even suggesting electroshock therapy to "fix" her. His approach reflects his own inability to process grief and his need to maintain appearances as a headmaster and respected community figure.
The Talent Show Reconciliation
Their relationship begins to mend during a talent show where Roy finally accepts Coral's unconventional behaviour. The exchange of shells between them symbolises forgiveness and represents Roy's acceptance that healing cannot be forced or controlled. This reconciliation occurs only when Roy stops trying to change Coral and instead meets her where she is.
Tom: Tom serves as the primary catalyst for Coral's revival. Through his direction of her impromptu play, Tom's own confrontation with mortality helps Coral reconnect with life. The theatrical collaboration revives her maternal instincts as she engages with Tom's youthful energy and creativity. Tom's frank acceptance of death provides a model for how Coral might eventually accept her son's death. Their relationship affirms the play's belief in art's healing power and demonstrates how intergenerational connections can facilitate recovery from trauma.
Rick (honeymooner): Coral's brief interaction with Rick, a honeymooner at the resort, reveals the depth of her isolation and need for connection. This fleeting encounter foreshadows Tom's more substantial intervention in her recovery. The scene demonstrates how Coral reaches out for human contact in her confusion, seeking connection even when she cannot fully articulate her needs.
Harry and Vic
Harry and Vic, Tom's parents, represent the British migrant experience in 1960s Australia. They embody resilience, optimism, and the particular challenges faced by migrant families.
Character overview
Harry and Vic are British World War II veterans who migrated to Australia seeking a better life. They approach their Australian experience with determined optimism, constantly expressing enthusiasm for their "lovely holiday" even while privately grappling with their son's terminal illness. Their cheerfulness represents both the migrant desire to embrace their new country and their desperate attempt to maintain normalcy in the face of Tom's diagnosis.
Their characterisation captures the migrant experience of balancing hope for the future with the weight of past trauma (their war experiences) and present challenges. They demonstrate quiet endurance and model how couples can support each other through unimaginable grief.
Key relationships
Tom: Harry and Vic's relationship with their son is defined by protective pretence that ultimately collapses into honest acceptance. Throughout the play, they attempt to shield Tom (and themselves) from the reality of his condition by maintaining relentless cheerfulness. However, this facade cannot be sustained indefinitely. During a crucial beach scene, their pretence finally breaks down, forcing all three family members to honestly confront Tom's mortality together. Despite the pain of this acknowledgement, it allows them to spend their remaining time together authentically rather than hiding behind forced optimism.
Later, Harry and Vic use the hard-won wisdom from their experience to counsel Gwen, demonstrating how personal suffering can generate compassion for others. This sharing of wisdom becomes a key moment in breaking down class barriers.
Gwen and Jim: Harry and Vic serve as class mediators in the play, bridging the socioeconomic divide that Gwen desperately tries to maintain. Vic's speech about life's brevity and the importance of human connection over material concerns directly challenges Gwen's value system. By sharing their perspective as working-class migrants facing their child's death, they force Gwen to recognise the superficiality of class distinctions. Their dignity and wisdom in the face of tragedy shame Gwen's petty concerns and model a more authentic way of living.
Each other: Harry and Vic's relationship with each other demonstrates unwavering partnership. Their marriage models quiet endurance and mutual support through crisis. Unlike the other couples in the play, whose relationships fracture under pressure, Harry and Vic maintain their bond through their shared approach to Tom's illness. Their unity provides Tom with stability and demonstrates how couples can face tragedy together.
Meg
Meg represents adolescent rebellion and the struggle for authentic identity against parental control. Her character explores the tensions between youth and parental authority.
Character overview
Meg is characterised by her defiance of her mother Gwen's classism and controlling behaviour. She develops romantic feelings for Tom but struggles to navigate her attraction when confronted with his diagnosis. Her initial withdrawal from Tom after learning of his illness reflects adolescent discomfort with mortality and the difficulty of maintaining authentic relationships in the face of death.
Meg ultimately represents the younger generation's capacity to challenge outdated social prejudices and forge connections based on genuine affinity rather than class considerations. Her rebellion is not simply teenage defiance but a moral stance against injustice.
Key relationships
Gwen: Meg's relationship with her mother moves from open rebellion to mutual understanding. Throughout most of the play, Meg actively resists Gwen's attempts to control her behaviour and social choices. She refuses to adopt her mother's classist attitudes and insists on befriending Tom's family despite Gwen's disapproval. This rebellion reaches its peak during family conflicts but eventually matures into something more constructive. The play concludes with a mutual apology between mother and daughter, representing imperfect but meaningful reconciliation. This resolution models how families can overcome conflicts when both parties acknowledge their mistakes and validate each other's perspectives.
Tom: Meg's relationship with Tom is characterised by romantic tension left unresolved by his illness and impending death. Their mutual attraction represents normal adolescent romance, but Tom's diagnosis introduces complications. When Tom rejects Meg's sexual advances, he does so because he recognises they stem from pity rather than genuine desire, highlighting the difficulty of maintaining authentic relationships when one person is dying. Their relationship remains unresolved, representing the tragedy of potential cut short by death.
Jim: Meg and her father Jim form a quiet alliance against Gwen's maternal dominance. Jim's eventual rebellion against Gwen validates Meg's resistance and demonstrates parental support for a child's developing independence. Their relationship suggests that healthy family dynamics require fathers to support children's autonomy even when it conflicts with maternal control.
Roy
Roy represents the Australian establishment and embodies a particular response to national tragedy through the lens of patriotism and control.
Character overview
Roy is a headmaster whose position reflects establishment authority and traditional values. He justifies his son's death in the Vietnam War through rhetoric about the "Australian way of life," using patriotic language to give meaning to senseless loss. This ideological framing allows him to avoid confronting his grief directly, much as Gwen's snobbery masks her insecurities.
Roy's response to Coral's breakdown is characterised by possessive fear and attempts at repressive control, including threats of electroshock therapy. His authoritarian approach reflects both his professional identity and his inability to process grief in healthy ways.
Key relationships
Coral: Roy's relationship with his wife transforms from possessive control to acceptance. Initially, Roy responds to Coral's grief-induced behaviour with threats and attempts to impose order, reflecting his discomfort with her unconventional coping mechanisms. However, his possessive fear gradually yields to acceptance, particularly after witnessing Coral's performance in the talent show. This shift represents Roy's recognition that healing cannot be controlled or forced, and that acceptance of another person's process is more healing than attempted domination.
School community: Roy's relationship with the broader school community is characterised by detached authority that contrasts sharply with the family warmth displayed by Harry, Vic, and Tom. This contrast highlights how institutional roles can create distance from genuine human connection and suggests that establishment values sometimes prioritise appearances over authentic relationships.
Key relationship dynamics
Class convergence
The play traces a movement from class-based division to equality through shared human experience. Gwen's initial disdain for Harry and Vic's working-class background gradually transforms into respect and ultimately equality. The beach setting, particularly after the storm, becomes a levelling space where class distinctions dissolve.
The Transformative Power of Shared Vulnerability
Tom's illness serves as the primary catalyst for this transformation, as his mortality forces all characters to recognise the superficiality of social hierarchies in the face of death. The play suggests that Australian society's class divisions, though real and painful, can be overcome through shared vulnerability and recognition of common humanity.
Grief parallels
Coral's grief over her son's war death and Tom's impending death from leukaemia create parallel experiences of loss that facilitate mutual healing. Both situations involve the death of young people, making them particularly tragic and difficult to process. The parallel between war death (public, political) and illness death (private, personal) suggests that all forms of loss share common elements.
Tom's willingness to confront his own mortality helps Coral begin processing her son's death. Their connection demonstrates how shared experiences of grief can create bonds between people and facilitate healing through mutual understanding.
Generational tension
The play explores conflicts between parental denial or control and youthful authenticity. Parents (Harry, Vic, Gwen, Roy) all attempt to control their children's experiences or shield them from harsh realities, whether through forced cheerfulness, class-based restrictions, or patriotic rhetoric. The younger generation (Tom, Meg) resist these controls and insist on authentic engagement with reality.
Tom's frank discussion of his death and Meg's rebellion against class prejudice both represent youth's capacity to cut through adult pretences. The play suggests that genuine intergenerational connection requires adults to relinquish control and accept young people's right to confront reality on their own terms.
Performativity
Theatre and performance function throughout the play as vehicles for truth-telling and healing. The school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream establishes theatre as a space where characters can express truths difficult to articulate in everyday life. Tom's direction of Coral in Stranger on the Shore demonstrates how theatrical performance can facilitate emotional expression and healing. The talent quest becomes a space where Roy can finally accept Coral's unconventional behaviour.
Theatre as Liminal Space
These theatrical moments suggest that performance creates liminal spaces where normal social rules are suspended, allowing for transformation and honest expression of emotion. In Away, theatre is not mere entertainment but a crucial mechanism for psychological and emotional healing.
Human experiences illuminated
The relationships in Away reveal how shared mortality can dissolve social barriers including class prejudice, emotional denial, and grief-induced isolation. The holiday setting functions as a liminal space—a threshold between normal life and transformation—where pretences are stripped away and characters must confront fundamental truths about human existence.
Gwen's transformation from bitter classism to empathy models how aspirational cruelty can yield to compassion when we recognise our shared vulnerability. Her journey demonstrates that class anxiety and snobbery often mask deeper insecurities about our own worth and fear of returning to poverty. When forced to confront genuine tragedy in Tom's illness, Gwen's petty concerns are revealed as superficial, leading to personal growth.
Art as Healing Mechanism
Coral and Tom's relationship affirms the connective and healing power of art. Their theatrical collaboration demonstrates that creative expression can facilitate emotional processing and connection between people experiencing different forms of loss. The play suggests that art provides a language for emotions too powerful or complex for ordinary speech.
Harry and Vic embody migrant stoicism and the particular resilience required to build new lives in a foreign country while facing unimaginable personal tragedy. Their quiet endurance and eventual willingness to share their wisdom with others demonstrates how personal suffering can generate compassion and how migrant experiences enrich Australian society.
Contemporary Relevance for HSC Study
These relationship dynamics connect 1960s social tensions to contemporary issues:
- The play's exploration of class divisions resonates with current housing affordability crises and economic inequality
- Its treatment of migration speaks to ongoing debates about immigration and multiculturalism
- Coral's mental health crisis and Roy's attempted control through medical intervention connects to contemporary discussions about trauma, PTSD, and appropriate mental health responses
- The play's central insight—that vulnerability forges universal bonds across social divides—remains relevant to understanding how communities can overcome division through recognition of shared humanity
Key Points to Remember:
- Tom serves as the catalyst for transformation throughout the play, forcing other characters to confront truth through his frank acknowledgement of his own mortality
- The three families represent different aspects of 1960s Australian society: migrants seeking opportunity, middle class seeking status, and establishment dealing with national loss
- Class divisions dissolve when characters are forced to confront shared human experiences of grief, illness, and mortality
- Theatre and performance function as healing mechanisms, creating liminal spaces where characters can express difficult emotions and truths
- The holiday setting strips away social pretences, allowing for authentic connection and transformation across class and generational divides