"My pen shall add a testimony to men noble and daring"; Poetry, Heroism and the Wreck of the SS Admella (1859)

This examination attempts to claim the significance of a number of original poems written by nineteenth-century amateur poets in direct response to the wreck of the SS Admella and published in the days, weeks and months following the actual event on 6 August 1859. Situating selected works in the collection of verse contemporaneously termed 'Admella poetry' against the cultural backdrop of this maritime disaster reveals that these poems contributed to informing the colonial and trans-Australian mindset in response to the tragedy. 'Admella' poets responded to twin cultural upheavals affected by the disaster: the unprecedented communal response to the wreck as a colonial tragedy; and, the two-fold significance of the electric telegraph in both mediating the event as a real-life occurrence, and in mobalising communities in a collective experience of trauma, grief and commemoration

'Belly-speakers', machines and dummies: puppetry in the Australian colonies, 1830s-1850s

The purpose of this article is to give some attention to the characteristics and performative styles of Australian colonial puppetry during the first fifty years of European settlement. Both formal and informal modes of puppetry will be examined - from self-assembled 'toy theatres' in around the 1830s, to grand exhibitions of mechanical automata in the 1840s, and roadside glove puppet shows and marionette theatre beginning in the J850s. In particular, the examination argues that it is possible to track key developments in nineteenth-century colonial puppetry to twin factors: shifts in attitudes to entertainment motivated by mechanisation and commercialisation; and the rising popularity of ventriloquism, magicians and minstrel shows in the early Victorian era

Poses, plastiques: the art and style of 'statuary' in Victorian visual theatre

Sometimes dismissed as practitioners of a humble variant of pornography, specialists of a Victorian performance style known as 'poses plastiques' mastered the art of manipulating the body into highly stylised and apparently motionless 'attitudes' to resemble so-called 'living statues'. Most favoured adopting 'Classical' stances in the garb of Greek and Roman deities, and a number of its female technicians titillated audiences with costumes giving the appearance of almost complete nudity. Poses plastiques were, for a time, a remarkably popular 'sensation' in Australia, as elsewhere, and this article argues two main points: firstly, that the appeal of poses plastiques during the Victorian era characterised a broader social 'blurring' of the boundaries between titillating visual theatre and pornographic displays and secondly, that this genre of visual theatre later developed to eroticise and personify a burgeoning sense of early twentieth-century Australian nationalism

'The new prima donnas': 'homegrown' Tasmanian 'stars' of the 1860s Emma and Clelia Howson

[Introduction]: Even during the height of his career, Errol Flynn’s reputation was never really overshadowed by his ‘Tasmanian-ness’. In fact, both his reputation and his origins were often integral to his publicity. Around the same era, Merle Oberon’s publicists claimed that the famous actress was Tasmanian-born, specifically, into a wealthy Hobart family. Whether or not this was true, Oberon’s identification as ‘Tasmanian-born’ cast a glowing light on the State’s cultural credibility despite the fact that she lived 10,000 miles away and returned to the island only once, in 1978. Modern-day Tasmanian celebrities encounter a similar emphasis on their State of origin. Tasmanian actress Essie Davis received considerable attention after playing the role of Dutch artist Vermeer’s wife in Peter Webber’s film Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003). Sunday Tasmanian journalist Danielle Wood claimed on 7 March 2004 that ‘Essie Davis is making her Tasmanian family feel proud for good reason’.1 The emphasis on the Tasmanian homeland is reiterated in a comment made by Australian Idol’s first Tasmanian-born top-ten finalist, Amali Ward. When asked why she wanted to be an Australian Idol, Ward replied: ‘To prove to mainlanders that Tasmania is not just about incest! The amount of jokes I’ve heard is ridiculous’.2 Exploring the ways in which Davis and Ward are represented in the media is useful to an examination of earlier Tasmanian-born ‘stars’ of the colonial theatre Emma and Clelia Howson. Ward’s remark reveals, among other things, how alongside her ‘Tasmanian-ness’ are pressures concerning State identity not necessarily projected onto the girl from Queensland or the guy from New South Wales. Ward’s aim to ‘prove’ a point to ‘mainlanders’ is akin to Woods’s claim that Davis ‘is making her Tasmanian family feel proud’. While Ward seeks approval, and Davis has apparently earned it, each construction narrates and enacts gestures of ‘Tasmanian-ness’. I suggest that these are reflexive articulations traceable to ideologies about being ‘Tasmanian’ that were first propagated by early settlers. The representations of Ward and Davis (and indeed Flynn and Oberon) illustrate Veronica Kelly’s notion of the enactment of ‘serviceable identities’.3 For Kelly, colonials continually rehearsed and renewed their sense of distinctiveness. This meant that identity resembled a series of ‘performances’, which were motivated by a struggle against ‘social and discursive abjection’.4 From its early beginnings as a penal colony, Tasmania both created and inherited a range of identity types, some of which settlers were eager to overthrow. The performance of Tasmanian identity was, and is, enacted through a variety of mediums. For colonials, the interplay between identity and credibility was inextricably connected with theatre and press culture, a point exemplified by the media representation of Emma and Clelia Howson

Adventures in nineteenth century gender bending: Lady Emilia Don in Tasmania: 1862 and 1865

Many leading ladies of the nineteenth century stage have attracted significant biographical attention from scholars in the field of theatre history. Lady Emilia Don, however, remains largely forgotten, even though evidence of her Australian tours suggest she was a highly acclaimed figure of the stage during the 1860s. Her two visits; first with her husband in 1861, and then again as “name” star in 1864, were widely publicised for a variety of reasons, and examining her Tasmanian publicity in 1862 and 1865 offers a valuable point of entry when analysing the reasons behind this fascination. A number of important events occurred in the State that coloured perceptions of Emilia as a public figure, and these in turn, influenced her engagement with colonial audiences and her relevance to community culture. It is the aim of this article to shed new light on Emilia’s significance by examining why aspects of her tours were reported b Tasmanian media men in such sharp detail. Revisiting the content of these colonial artifacts offers a rare glimpse into the professional life of one of the most popular visiting actresses of the 1860s, as well as addressing a longstanding gap in scholarship acknowledging Emilia’s remarkable performances of gender

“[T]hey seemed to recognise us as brethren from a far distant tribe”: The influence of the fisk jubilee singers among Australian and New Zealand indigenous communities, 1886-1936

Anae, N ORCiD: 0000-0001-8441-2771This article argues that the influence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers on both Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Māori communities had long‐term implications for both communities. Māori New Zealanders and Australian Aboriginal peoples experimented with musical traditions, adapting African American traditions introduced by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and incorporating them into their own music‐making and performance history. To the author's knowledge, an (ethno)musicological study of this kind has not been published. Very little research explicitly addresses the influence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers on Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Māori communities from a historical perspective, apart from a few cursory and very brief mentions in Australian sources, such as Ann Curthoys' “Paul Robeson's Visit to Australia and Aboriginal Activism, 1960.”2 There are however, selected historical, musicologically oriented texts, such as Louis D. Silveri's “The Singing Tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers: 1871–1874,” Andrew Ward's Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America, and Sandra Graham's “What's the Score? Interpreting Transcriptions of the Fisk Jubilee Spirituals,” which, while not focusing specifically on the influence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers on the cultural practices of Australian Aboriginal and Māori New Zealander peoples, nonetheless deserve a mention. Other themes under examination here have been covered widely by folklorists and (ethno)musicologists, including black minstrelsy related to constructions of racial identity as well as notions of “authenticity” and what it means in terms of the racialization of musical performance. These studies include Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Daphne A. Brooks's Bodies in Dissent: Spectator Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910, and Brian Roberts' recent work, Blackface Nation: Race, Reform and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812–1925, among others

"She flings her elfin dreams of mystery”: The child-poet Gwen Cope in the land of “Australian Faery,” 1931–1939"

Anae, N ORCiD: 0000-0001-8441-2771Gwen Cope enjoyed a significant reputation as a gifted Australian child-poet throughout the 1930s. Nevertheless, her two collections remain unacknowledged in the history of Australian literature despite their popularity. This article situates Cope’s fairy-poetry against the ideological backdrop defined by adult fairy-poets of the 1930s to reveal fundamental discords between the child-poet writing her vision of fairy-folklore and the canonical writers who aimed to re-conceptualize “ faery-lore” in the interests of Australian national literature

“The majestic Hebrew racial ideal”: Herr Daniel E. Bandmann’s Shylock on the Australian stage, 1880—1883

Anae, N ORCiD: 0000-0001-8441-2771German-Jewish tragedian Daniel E. Bandmann’s performances as Shylock in his production of The Merchant of Venice between 1880 and 1883 quite literally radicalized Australian understandings of the part and the theatrical practice of the character’s dramatic portrayal. This examination draws on existent nineteenth-century press reports published throughout his 1880/83 tour to reclaim Bandmann’s conception of Shylock and usury in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice against contemporaneous theatrical reviews debating the aesthetic and dramatic implications of his portrayal. In this way, the examination recovers Bandmann’s mastery in exploiting the power of The Merchant of Venice to reflect back to audiences national trends responsive to the question of usury in his time