GOLDEN SOIL

$5.40 – $15.00

This is the story of Australia’s wheat – an old farmer who grows it, his son David who sells it and the grandson Harry who doesn’t want to take over the farm. David is an executive with the Australian Wheat Board and has to save the huge contracts with Iraq during the oil-for-food sanctions, a complex UN system mired in corruption. He risks his life on a desperate trip to Bagdad.

David’s wife Susan is a casualty doctor. When she discovers David has been paying kickbacks, she volunteers at the Bagdad hospital. She travels there with an Iraqi-Australian doctor who has arranged for the placement.

Harry is in the Australian army in Iraq and is shocked his father was handing millions to the enemy, Iraq. In confusion and misadventure, he joins Blackwater International – mercenaries fighting in Iraq. While in Bagdad, Susan searches for Harry.

The play explores the relationships that hold farming families together. There is humour, suspense and optimism.

The story is punctuated with a newsreader’s interjections of actual events that happened in Iraq, Australia, the United Nations and Russia. These dramatically present the farcical world of trade where the wheat executives took great personal risk to sell wheat in a corrupt system. They lost the game they played.

"My most enthusiastic congratulations, and acclamation of Golden Soil. I am sure this play will find a permanent part in the moral and cultural appraisal of our involvement in an unsavoury venture." Sir Laurence Street (Chief Justice of NSW)

"The moral issues covered here are on a higher scale." MiSociety, Sydney

APT