A 40-minute radio play dramatising the courtship of Charles and Effie Bean at Tuggeranong Homestead in 1920 will be broadcast on ArtSoundFM on Anzac Day.

Wanterwrite, Wanterlove: Love & Loss at Tuggeranong is the work of Canberra author and historian, Peter Stanley, who says he first wrote the play while researching his 2005 book Quinn’s Post after reading Joan Butler’s memoir, now in the Mitchell Library, of her visits to Tuggeranong in 1920. The title is taken from a letter to the legendary historian and official war correspondent CEW Bean from his publisher, George Robertson.

Stanley is now a research professor at the University of New South Wales and formerly principal historian at the Australian War Memorial who has published more than 40 books.

His play is set during the period when Bean was writing the first volume of his official war history at Tuggeranong Homestead, located in what is now the suburb of Richardson.

While a work of fiction, it draws heavily on the actual history of Charles Bean’s life, particularly the writing of the first volume of The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, which took 20 years to complete.

ArtSound’s drama producer, Bart Meehan, directed and produced the radio play with a cast including Adam Salter, Stefanie Lekkas, Millie Hayes, Peter Fock and Dick Goldberg. The broadcast will include an interview with Peter Stanley about Charles Bean.

Wanterwrite, Wanterlove began life as a stage play, but was cast aside by a Tuggeranong acting group and languished until Stanley’s wife heard that Meehan was advertising for scripts, so he dug it out of a bottom drawer.

But it is not his first radio play. That was Scenes from the Life of Jesus, which was broadcast on Radio 2XX on Christmas Day 1978, and, he assures us, preceded Monty Python’s Life of Brian by a year, so was not a rip-off.

“I hope it’ll illuminate the relationship between Bean’s writing (Wanterwrite) and his courtship of Effie (Wanterlove),” Stanley adds.

And there’s a spoiler. Despite the gloomy note in the subtitle, it has a happy ending – the pair get married.

Wanterwrite, Wanterlove: Love & Loss at Tuggeranong, ArtSound FM Canberra, 1pm, April 25 here.