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Jack Hibberd

Jack Hibberd is a Melbourne playwright. He graduated from the University of Melbourne with a degree in medicine and went on to become a co-founder of the Australian Performing Group (APG). He has written over forty plays, including A Stretch of the Imagination, A Toast to Melba, Slam Dunk, and Legacy, and penned his most famous play, Dimboola, in 1968. He served on the Literature Board of the Australia Council for Arts from 2005–08.

Jack Hibberd reviews 'The La Mama Collection: Six plays for the 1990s' edited by Liz Jones

November 1997, no. 196 • 01 November 1997
Playwright and professional poéte maudit, Barry Dickins launched this collection as part of La Mama’s thirtieth anniversary festivities. Dickins, it is reported, was not in a festive mood. In an unusually begrudging and self-absorbed frame of mind, he allegedly failed to extol the selected plays and went so far as to hint that one of his own tautly sprung specimens should have been included. W ... (read more)

Jack Hibberd reviews 'Rethinking Life and Death: The collapse of our traditional ethics' by Peter Singer

December 1994, no. 167 • 01 December 1994
CLOV: If I could kill him I’d die happy. Samuel Beckett, Endgame There is no doubt of viciousness of existence. Bertolt Brecht spoke of how one minute you are striding out freely down a merry boulevard, the next poleaxed by a great lump of steel fallen from the heavens. If only it were as simple as that. Of course Brecht, intellectually weaned on early gestalt theory, was asserting that i ... (read more)

Jack Hibberd reviews 'The Australian National Dictionary: Australian words and their origins' edited by W.S. Ramson

November 1988, no. 106 • 01 November 1988
Apart from Abbott’s booby (the gannet Sula abbotti, which now breeds only on Christmas Island), all entries on the first two pages of the Australian National Dictionary pertain to race and white foundation. Is this mere chance, or do we here have an instance of the knack of language to trap and reticulate human experience from its very springs? Probably a spot of both. Whatever: how apt that a d ... (read more)