 At one point, Mike sums up the "great Australian novel", Henry Handel Richardson's "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony", as "Doctor's marriage goes bad, he goes to the goldfields, gets gangrene and dies", to which Kate says "I don't think your synopsis quite does the book justice".To that, he simply dismisses it as a "downer".The play was first performed in Australia in 1987 by the Sydney Theatre Company

It was premiered in the United States off-Broadway by the New York Theatre Workshop at the Perry Street Theatre in Greenwich Village in 1988.