David Williamson is widely recognised as Australia's most successful playwright and over the last thirty years his plays have been performed throughout Australia and produced in Britain, United States, Canada and many European and Asian countries. His play Travelling North had a successful production in Vietnam and The Club ran for a year in Beijing, where its depiction of back room committee politicking obviously struck a chord with the locals.

 

David Williamson has won the Australian Film Institute film script award five times, for Petersen (1974), Don's Party (1976), Gallipoli (1981) Travelling North ( 1987) and Balibo (2009) and has won twelve Australian Writers' Guild AWGIE Awards. He also wrote the screenplay for Pharlap (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) receiving a nomination for best screenplay from the Writer’s Guild of America. He wrote the screenplay for Showtime’s On the Beach which won the Australian AFI award for best miniseries and was nominated for the Golden Globe awards in the U.S. He also wrote the screenplay for the HBO miniseries A Dangerous Life, about the fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines which made the critics top ten list of the year in both New York and Los Angeles.

 

Altogether he has written twelve screenplays and five miniseries, including The Four Minute Mile for the BBC and The Last Bastion about General McArthur’s arrival in Australia in WW 11, which was sold all over the world. In 1983 he became an Officer of the Order of Australia (A.O).