Temporal setting: 1845; 1948-9
Location notes:
The primary setting of Too Young for Ghosts is the cane barracks identified as being located in North Queensland. Coordinates have been given for Tully in North Queensland, the town where playwright Janis Balodis was born and grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Balodis is the son of Latvian immigrants who, like those of the play, settled in North Queensland after World War II.
(http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A32665)
Freidrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt, often known simply as Ludwig Leichhardt, whose biography provides the basis for the character Ludwig Leichhardt in Too Young for Ghosts, was an early nineteenth-century Prussian naturalist and explorer who is credit with the "discovery" of much land in central and northern Australia that could be (and was) used for pastoral purposes.
In 1848 Leichhardt disappeared on an attempted east-west expedition from the Darling Downs to Swan River.
(http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/leichhardt-friedrich-wilhelm-ludwig-2347)
Quotes
“Isle: This is our new home. Our ducks and our chickens lived in more comfort. I thought these people came from Europe with knowledge that was hundreds of years old. There's no evidence of it. Perhaps we've fallen amongst exiles who have been sent a far from civilisation as possible. Is this the best they can do in a hundred and fifty years? They live as if they don't expect to stay”
(p. Act One, Sc. 4)
“Leichhardt: Fire and flood! That is the singular character of this remarkable country, extremes so often meet. The coast is luxuriant green. The interior is burnt red.”
(p. Act Two, Sc. 4)
“Leichhardt: This is no ordinary adventure, Mr Gilbert. We are in a new land in a new time. You look and you see specimens and you see danger. You are not seeing the woods for the trees. I am discovering the way for your 'others' to follow and the trees I mark will stand as monuments to our achievements. Thousands will come from the stagnant civilisation of Europe where men will kill each other for a pocket of soil. They will come with knowledge that is hundreds of years old and cultivate this Eden. The future is all around, larger than life, innocent and without secrets. There are no ghosts in her closets.
Gilbert: Except for the natives [...] .
Leichhardt: [...] They have hardly marked the soil.”
(p. Act One, Sc. 6)
