Introduction:

Sometimes to get a rough idea of where we’re going it helps to take a quick peek at where we’ve been, even if we intend to be really revolutionary it still helps somehow.

So, a good place to kick off, is Margaret Williams absolutely top book:

“AUSTRALIA ON THE POPULAR STAGE 1829 -1929”
(Published by Oxford University Press 1983)

The Preface of Margaret’s book says: “Louis Esson, who is usually seen as Australia’s first significant playwright, was fond of saying that Captain Cook had only discovered the outline of the country; it was up to the artists and writers to discover the real Australia. When Esson pioneered a realistic national drama in the early years of this (C20th) century he had little patience with the Australian plays that were being staged in the commercial theatres. But for eighty years before Esson, the theatre had been discovering its own Australia in the popular forms of comedy, pantomime and melodrama. This book traces the emergence of what may be seen as the only form of popular drama that has existed, or is now ever likely to exist, in Australia, and of the way in which the popular stage showed Australians their own country for the first century of the Australian theatre …. This is not a theatrical history in the usual sense: the Australian play forms only a very small, though vigorous part of the theatrical spectrum of the nineteenth century … rich as the plays are in social comment … the strength of the popular tradition is its celebration of shared attitudes. The way in which the plays were advertised and the moments that brought audiences to their feet in thunderous applause are of more significance than any sociological content that can be abstracted from them without reference to the fact that they were written for living performance. If the plays of the last (C19th) century matter to us other than as objects of academic research (and few if any of them are great treasures of the theatre) it is because they celebrate in a lively and thoroughly entertaining form, the way Australians like to see themselves”.

…

“The plays set in Australia were a small part of the theatrical fare of their time, even in their heyday, and in the end they were swallowed up in the overseas entertainment industry. J.C. Williamson, whose influence dominated the Australian theatre for a century, from the 1870’s to the 1970’s, had little interest in the local play, though he professed that there was ‘room for it’ in his Life Story, published in 1912. The fault he found with most of the melodramas was that they would ‘bring in the revolver’ all the time: ‘I suppose in convict and bushranging days the revolver episode was the natural thing; but it isn’t the natural thing now, and I don’t see why it should be characteristic of Australian drama’.

Note. My own comment on this is I wonder what J.C. Williamson would think presently if he were to see the current state of television fare which is mostly American policemen (and policewomen) waving revolvers, it seems, all the time; that is when not being faithfully imitated by the local T.V. constabulary. But to return to our story:

…“It is extraordinary that a manager with Williamson’s nose for a good thing should have been credited with the maxim that ‘Australians don’t want Australian’ when theatres other than his own were staging Australian plays such as Robbery Under Arms and The Squatter’s Daughter, with a success that any entrepreneur might have envied. And so what might have been a living tradition from the beginnings of theatre in Australia to the present, fell into abeyance in the 1930’s and was assimilated into the new media of film and radio until the old popular forms were rediscovered in the late 1960’s by the maverick groups of the alternative theatre in Sydney and Melbourne”.

The European Shadow

1829 – 1857

Angelina: But of what avail domestic tragedy in scenes so rude as these?

Simpkin: None at all, Gelina. We shall have enough and to spare of the

dull Tragi-comedy of Bush Life

David Burn The Bushrangers (1829)

“In 1826, in the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s land, a Scottish journalist named David Burns is said to have witnessed the execution by hanging of a convict turned bushranger named Matthew Brady. Three years later Burn’s play The Bushranger, based on the story of Brady and his band of fellow escapees, was staged at the Caledonian Theatre in Burn’s native Edinburgh, together with his nautical farce Our First Lieutenant.

The first play written out of a direct experience of Australian life seems to promise a vigorous Australian theatre springing spontaneously from a brutal but energetic young colony. Significantly, it was not performed in Australia until almost a century and a half later, when in 1971 a Sydney high school staged the piece as a colonial curiosity.

The reasons for its not seeing earlier performance are various but they tell something of the conditions out of which the local theatre had to grow … including circumstances that made it unlikely if not impossible that a play of such pointed first-hand social observation would be performed. … even in Edinburgh, perhaps so powerful a championing of so recent a criminal as hero could be sanctioned only by the remoteness of the colonial setting which lent a romantic distance to what, in Australia, might well have seemed unabashed subversion of the whole penal system.

Burns returned to Australia more than once and in 1845 he had several of his plays staged in Sydney, but The Bushrangers was not one of them.

In the English theatre of the 1820’s the Gothic melodrama still survived – a drama of larger than life figures in the remote settings of near legend (note. Tasmania must have seemed that way). But side by side with that, the domestic melodrama was beginning to evolve, and it was to dominate the stage until late in the century, with its recognizable types of daily life, its scenes of high emotionalism set against slapstick comedy, and its ultimate vindication of conventional morality. The shadow of the European stage can be seen across Burn’s play in its drawing on both these strands of early nineteenth century drama, but they are set against the first-hand observation of the convict’s and settlers lives in the Tasmania of the 1820’s and the depiction of real-life figures who would have been instantly recognizable to an Australian audience. The Bushrangers straddles both the romantic world of theatrical fantasy and the harsh realities of a penal settlement with surprising ease, and it is hard to say which predominates, stage traditions or the precision of a journalist’s observation.

The outlaw-hero of Burn’s play belongs to a long tradition in the theatre. The brigand, and particularly the brigand who had turned to crime out of a burning sense of injustice was one of the favourite protagonists of romantic drama, representing all the oppressed victims of society’s privileged in his struggle against the law. In the English theatre of the first half of C19th real-life popular heroes such as the Newgate escapist Jack Sheppard and the highwayman Paul Clifford had begun to appear in popular melodramas, and not without some notice from the censors”.
However, Williams points out that these plays were about outlaw-heroes who had lived about a century before and already become legendary, not just hanged the year before!

“Against the overwhelming brutality of the penal system Brady’s desperate attempt to escape takes on a nobility which prefers death to oppression of the spirit. The ‘glorious cause of Liberty’ becomes the creed of the little band of escaped convicts and their code of honour, that of chivalrous banditry from Macheath to – much later – Ned Kelly:

Scape we hence, bushrangers for a time we needs must become, but never shall
Tasmania say I trampled the defenceless or outraged the modesty of woman !

But then Brady comes across a real genuine villain named Jefferies who has murdered a child and intends to rape the victim’s mother. “For the cowardly Jefferies, Brady has nothing but contempt, especially when the old lag insults the very name of bushranger by claiming to be one too”:

Jefferies: In this way you serve a brother bushranger?

Brady: Bushranger! – Say that again you child-murdering, woman-torturing fiend and I’m blessed if I don’t rob Docherty of his fee. You a bushranger!

If the Brady’s are romantic heroes, the villain is clearly corrupt officialdom, including the whole repressive system by which justice is manipulated to the advantage of wealth and privilege – a long arm of the law that extends all the way from England.
In contrast to Burn’s representation of heroic bushranging we have his contemporary Henry Melville’s version also titled The Bushrangers.
Melville was an immigrant settler in Hobart in 1827 who became editor of the Van Diemen’s Land Almanack as well as author of a history of Van Diemen’s Land.

In December 1833 Hobart saw its first theatrical entertainments at a tavern and shortly after in 1834, at another tavern, The Bushrangers was produced. It has about as simple a melodramatic plot as it would be possible to find, introducing a few Colonial characters which mirror those of England transplanted to the newer setting – such as the English country gentleman become an immigrant settler, seeking in the New World the security and social justice he was denied at home. His daughter is the heroine, and the hero is a young man recently emigrated to collect his sweetheart. This time the bushrangers are out and out villains. The low characters of melodrama are found here in an Irish servant girl (a simple combination of stock character and colonial reality) and the figure of the Aboriginal. The bushrangers have designs upon the property of the settler and his daughter’s person, but they are foiled by the timely arrival of the hero and the Aboriginal.
This is in essence the form of any number of later Australian melodramas.
Here is the attempted seduction scene:

Bushranger: You are too pretty a wench to be maltreated by the bushrangers – we are far too gallant to ill-use pretty women – come hold up your head my little chicken, and let’s have a kiss of your pretty lips (Attempts to kiss her)

Marian: Monster! Rather let me be shot than polluted with a kiss from such a horrid wretch!

SYDNEY

“Sydney, though it had a professional theatre a year earlier than Hobart, was not so lucky in maintaining it. The first theatrical performance in Australia on 4 June 1789 of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer presented in honour of the King’s birthday by a cast of officers and convicts, suggests a happy marriage between officialdom and the theatre. But for the next fifty years and more the Sydney theatre story is one of ups and downs in its relation with the colonial administration. At times it seems to have enjoyed an indulgence close to patronage; at other times it was held in deep suspicion and kept under tight control”. In 1796 and again in 1798, theatres were built, but following too-rowdy audiences, both were shortly closed down and dismantled by the Governor’s order.

“Amateur performances flourished in the Officers’ barracks and convict settlements, particularly at Emu Plains and Parramatta where the convicts seem to have been given co-operation from the authorities, if the lengthy description of a convict presentation in an anonymous novel of convict life, Ralph Rashleigh is any indication. But after 1800 Sydney had no theatre building for over three decades.

Theatre proper dates from the time when a stage-struck merchant named Barnett Levey in 1826 began staging concert evenings in the assembly rooms of the Royal Hotel in George Street. His persistent battle for a full theatrical licence culminated in its being granted by the new governor, Richard Bourke, in 1832.

On 5 October 1833 the Theatre Royal in the hotel complex was opened with a performance of the Gothic melodrama The Miller and His Men; its explosions and conflagrations showed the patrons just what their new stage could handle. Levey maintained a company at the theatre Royal, not without some disharmony, until his death in 1837, by which time the nucleus of an acting profession had been established”.

The licence granted Levey stipulated: ‘such plays and entertainments only as have been performed at one of His Majesty’s licensed theatres in London’ – which we might consider a dampener upon burgeoning creativity, as also the further addition of a clause prohibiting ‘any convict, whether or not under temporary remission of sentence’ from appearing upon the stage. This remained in force until 1847.
But it didn’t stop a local currency lad named Harpur from writing a Shakespearean style tragedy in blank verse, called familiarly The Bushrangers about an escaped convict Donohoe and his marauding mates in the bush. “The revisions between 1835 and 1867 indicate if anything, an increasing sympathy with the bushranger and a more explicitly Australian setting … in the 1853 (revised) text, the bushranger now re-named Captain Stalwart, links his resentful turning to crime to the injustices of the convict system”.

So we have a definite theme appearing in our early drama writing – although Harpur’s hero struggles with the contending phantoms of irrational hate and genuine remorse for his crimes, and he is not the debonair popular hero of Burn’s play, nevertheless it is ‘the law’ that has made him the wretch he is, so the ‘State frauds’ still bear the greater fault. “Harpur has drawn the outline of an ambivalent bushranging legend which together with an equally ambivalent contempt for authority, is a recurring theme in the drama for the next century”.
But unfortunately for Harpur, his life’s work never got on the stage in his lifetime.

Let’s see why, perhaps?

During the 1840’s in Sydney, things picked up with the opening of impressive new theatrical venues, however because of pre-existing licensing arrangements “Sydney theatre was in effect English provincial theatre” …(and) plays in England were required to have the approval of the Lord chamberlain before their presentation onstage” – This amounted to a formidable type of censorship, perhaps understandable in the context of a large convict population still existing even though transportation had been discontinued to Sydney in 1840, and further considering how local dramaturgical sentiment seemed to rail against the system in a defiant defence of the convicts! (More on that shortly)

Another writer Richard Fotheringham in his book:

“Australian Plays For the Colonial Stage 1834 – 1899 sheds further light on the question of the European Shadow when he points out that it could in fact go both ways. He says: “The infamous exploits of the early bushrangers were quickly appropriated by the English theatrical industry, but there is little reason to see such representations as founded on accurate reportage. (for instance) Don Giovanni arrives in Australia and finds the Governor is none other than Jonathon Wild, the notorious C18th king of London thieves and the model for Mr. Peachum in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera of 1728

The romantic highwayman of the same ballad opera, Captain Macheath was drawn from other Newgate calendar stories including that of Jack Sheppard who would later appear undisguised in his own stage plays.

‘Social Bandits’ expressed the discontent of society’s victims. Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) went further and formalized in non-comic drama, the split between the genuinely evil criminal and the proto revolutionary Gothic hero-villain whose activities are motivated at least in part by an unselfish desire to root out and punish official corruption and to right social wrongs even as he recognizes his own decline towards monstrosity.

By the time the first Bushranger dramas started appearing in the 1820’s playwrights had a range of character types, personal characteristics and motivations to draw on to explain chivalry and barbarism, private outrage and public revolt, the crimes of the poor and those of the rich.

Competing images of a south sea paradise and convict hell-hole gave Australia an unstable imagery in the minds of British playwrights and audiences”

Now back home (to Oz) –

“Henry Melville’s The Bushrangers or Norwood Vale (1834) is the first substantial work on an Australian subject written, published and performed in an Australian colony”.
So, locally written work still managed to slip through the censorship net, though more likely it was an English work altered somewhat to suit local conditions and audience.
Here is an example of one that stalled at the official barrier; (Fotheringham again):

“Tom and Jerry or Life in London (1821) became a popular success at several London hippodromes and throughout the English speaking world for many years after.
Tom and Jerry when first performed in Sydney in 1834, had moved the Australian to observe ‘that which may be very harmless in London, may be very pernicious here’ and in 1846 the Colonial Secretary would extend his powers over the stage to include English plays, agreeing that ‘what might be approved by the Lord Chamberlain could be locally objectionable’.” (This proved so when the play was given local flavour and remodelled - Life in Sydney or The ran Dan Club.)
“The local setting of Life in Sydney made it doubly dangerous. The pranks of gentry and Oxbridge gentlemen of rank in far away London were easier to interpret as harmless fun, the Prince Hal like excesses of aristocratic youth, than similar behaviour in a settlement of convicts, soldiers, sailors and runaways of all kinds, where the divisions between exclusivist free settler and emancipist ex-convict were bitter and deep and where violent street battles between police and street gangs persisted through the rest of the century”.

Moving forward quickly:

By the 1860’s there were anything up to one hundred professional productions a year in the major Australian cities. These were mostly touring shows – Grand and Comic Opera, Shakespeare, Society comedy, Problem plays, melodrama, pantomime, vaudeville and variety. Australian society was devoid of pre-industrial European festivals so we turned instead to horse-racing carnivals, sporting events, agricultural shows and theatre - which last one usually accompanied the others – it was almost mandatory to see the theatrical event straight after the other one. Though the Australian social mix was diverse, these events unified the community through sharing common interests. Also, by possessing some rudimentary understanding of the popular plots, characters and actors and knowing the right places to laugh, one demonstrated cultural competence. Similarly, the success of Australian actors, particularly female ones, overseas, (along with sportsmen of course), were acclaimed at home as sparkling antipodean achievements.

Fashion was in large measure influenced by the stage. When theatrical entrepreneurs induced actors and actresses from England and Europe to tour down-under (principally following the advent of the gold rushes in the 1850’s when it proved more financially rewarding to do so), such visitors would bring with them their wardrobes which were eagerly copied by the locals. An industry existed to manufacture imported innovations.

In keeping with the debate on “Art imitating Nature OR Nature imitating Art”, certainly theatre played its part in reflecting – or forming - society’s views on things.
Not least in this regard was “How Australians viewed themselves – and others”.

When Helen Lucy Benbow’s play For 60,000 Pounds appeared in 1874 it confirmed and carried forward standard motifs for melodrama such as; Emma is a development of the ‘bush country lass type’ who started to appear in Arabin’s Marian Waller, earlier. Emma is “no timid English girl to deal with, but an independent fearless Australian”. The new model of girl could ride astride and shoot and ply a stockwhip and took cheek from no man. Set against this is the ‘English chaperone of indeterminate age’ who, newly arrived in the colony seeks to instruct the presumed uncouth local lass in the finer things but then complains how she has come so far to be told “to shut up” or worse!

In the 1890’s, a translation of Ibsen’s Dollhouse toured down-under and found fertile soil in that it is credited with assisting to ease the passage of the world’s first granting of the ‘right to vote’ for women in New Zealand followed by similar revolutionary legislation in Australia.

Aborigines and their corroborees appeared at an early date in theatrical form, however to our medium of the stage, in large part, can be attributed the promulgation of the myth that the dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants is to be blamed on white ex-convicts, whereas in some places, principally Tasmania that dispossession was an outcome of official policy.

Returning to the theme of justice amongst those of European descent, we have the famous dictum of Lord Blackstone in England, to wit “It is better that ten guilty should escape than one innocent suffer”. This enjoined 1) more careful consideration of the evidence. 2) More humane conditions of imprisonment.

As already pointed out, drama was quick to demonstrate that State persecution drove the afflicted to only greater crime – as witnessed in the various Bushranger plays culminating in the many Ned Kelly versions on stage and later in film..

In France in 1862 Victor Hugo’s classic Les Miserables elucidated this and the related themes of atonement and compassion which is become the subject of what is possibly Australia’s most loved Musical at the present time.

Likewise Marcus Clarke’s novel For the Term of His Natural Life adds to the mix the elements of personal and family honour. Two versions of it appeared upon the stage in 1886, produced by competitors Leitch and Dampier – the latter being the most popular.

In 1890 Garnet Walch and Alfred Dampier produced onstage Boldrewood’s famous novel Robbery Under Arms. It solidifies the European - transferred to Antipodes tradition of robbers which has matured after a century and more of evolution, in that dramatically most of the maudlin element is gone – but then too so has social justice stepped up to meet it. It would appear that Art and Society have worked affectively upon each other to effect a change for the good of each.

Before leaving our brief, brief history of Oz theatre, the technical brilliance of the set designers and builders should not be neglected. These attained a high art of themselves.

One production featured a revolving racetrack upon which two horses galloped neck and neck right in front of the theatre patrons. Another had a bridge built onstage over which a horse was induced to step. The bridge would collapse, dropping the horse into a water tank. It was necessary to find a new horse for each presentation as no equine was willing to undertake such a stage appearance twice.

Then there was the stage-constructed element of a quay with small boats moored to it. These would actually move about as such boats do, presenting a very life-like appearance

It was not uncommon at the end of a show when the cast took their bows, for the stage carpenter to be called for by the audience and he would be given a greater ovation than all the rest.

Stage scenery painting was also frequently of a very high calibre, commencing early with the renowned colonial artist Buvelot (or Builow) and followed by a great many stunning representations and illusions of bush and town scenes, realistic or idyllic.

When the 1914 -18 war began, it transformed Australian society but the consequences were delayed for the stage. That had to wait for 1929 -30 when talking cinema arrived. Then theatres were bankrupted – those which couldn’t adapt to the screen.

CONCLUSION

(Quotes: Fotheringham)

“Theatre incorporated news report, documentary, annual review of events, travelogue, popular science, popular history, fashion parade, advertising, satirical commentary, voyeuristic or exhibitionistic spectacle”…

“Popular myth, mass enthusiasms and anxieties, obsessions and fantasies … a temple of respectable morality or a sink of iniquity, conservatism, radicalism, carnival freedom “ …

Such was the stuff of Oz theatre.