The two came to Australia in 1955 as the lead actors in a Shakespearean company sent out from London by the Old Vic. Hepburn was fascinated by the habits of the lyrebird, which she saw on a trip to Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenong Ranges, and she insisted that Helpmann come with her to watch the lyrebird in its mating dance. Helpmann later included a note in a program for The Display in which he maintained that the movements he eventually choreographed for the character of the Lyrebird in his ballet were those "learned after many hours of watching this beautiful creature". So the background was certainly there for Helpmann to dream the dream he says he had.

The ballet portrays a group of young Australians on a picnic. The men practise football moves (Helpmann drew on the services of Ron Barassi of Carlton Football Club to coach the dancers), start drinking and then fight over a girl. She is left lying exhausted on the ground following the fracas, which culminates in her being raped. The lyrebird dances behind gauze at the beginning but reappears at the end with its tail fully displayed and enfolds the girl into its plumage.

The Display explores themes of hostility and aggression and Helpmann attempted to show the brutality that can emerge from gang behaviour. Some of Helpmann's colleagues have also suggested that elements of the story are autobiographical. William Akers, the ballet's lighting designer, recalled that as a youth Helpmann was thrown into the sea at Bondi by a gang who thought his clothing was "sissy". Akers suggested that The Display reflected Helpmann's feeling that he had always been an outsider in society.

The ballet's sexuality, both overt and suggested, occasionally incurred the wrath of some sections of society. When the work was shown in Glasgow as part of the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival, the Glasgow Presbytery tried to have the ballet banned.

But one of the stories behind The Display, which the Australian Ballet will restage in August as part of its Icons program, involves Patrick White, who was approached to write a scenario for the ballet. A cache of letters in a National Library collection show that when White submitted the manuscript it was not to Helpmann's liking - or artistic director Peggy van Praagh's, either. They rejected it. But what was contained in White's submission remained an annoying mystery until just recently when I chanced upon a manuscript in the National Library entitled A scenario for a ballet by Patrick White.

It reveals that Helpmann and van Praagh had excellent theatrical reasons for rejecting White's scenario. White's story concerns a picnic in the bush, a girl, a lyrebird and an Italian count to whom the girl is engaged. "When the ballet opens," writes White, "a grotesque fete galante version of an Australian picnic is about to take place." He continues, "As the dancers appear they have the air of embarking on something reprehensibly unusual. They are inclined to mock at their surroundings and to treat the whole occasion as a huge joke. LADIES are overdressed in satirical versions of contemporary clothes … The OLDER PERSONAGES are pompous and would-be refined, the YOUNGER PEOPLE rather gauche, if not hobbledehoy." In due course the girl, who is obsessed with a lyrebird, is killed by the Italian count who is then arrested by a detachment of policemen.

Helpmann appears to have borrowed elements from White's story, unless he gave White an initial plot outline, and removed the more bizarre features from the manuscript he received. There are no Italian counts, no hobbledehoy, no pomposity, no murders, no policemen, for example. Helpmann distilled the scenario into a story that could be told simply and clearly through dance. What White presented was too elaborate, convoluted and improbable to succeed as dance. Even White's three suggestions for a title, "The stroke of feathers", "The feather breast", or "The double engagement", have nowhere near the instant attraction of Helpmann's eventual choice, The Display, an ornithological term referring to the lyrebird's mating dance.

The Display was not the first all-Australian ballet, as Helpmann claimed when speaking to oral historian Hazel de Berg in 1964, but it did have an Australian creative team of the first order with designs by Sidney Nolan and music by Malcolm Williamson. Patrick White's involvement has, however, not been mentioned in published biographies of Helpmann.

The Display was an iconic work for the Australian Ballet, which was just two years old when it was first performed. Two other ballets that were considered ground-breaking when first presented by the Australian Ballet will complete the Icons program. Gemini, a ballet by American choreographer Glen Tetley, was created on the Australian Ballet in 1973. It was startling at the time for the way it mixed classical ballet and modern dance. Beyond Twelve, an early work by Graeme Murphy, dates to 1980. In contrast to the harshness of Helpmann's look at society, Beyond Twelve is a gentle and moving exploration reflecting Murphy's thoughts on growing up as an artist in Australia.

Icons plays in Melbourne August 30 to September 8.