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Convict Performances in a Penal Colony: New South Wales, 1789–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Robert Jordan
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Extract

The craze for amateur theatricals among the higher orders in late Georgian England is notorious. It was a passion that was given vent not only in Britain itself, but throughout the Empire, where military officers and civilian gentlefolk trod the boards in centres as far apart as Montreal and Cape Town, Jamaica and Calcutta. One colony that conspicuously lacked such genteel pleasures was convict settlement in New South Wales. The rigours of the posting, the minute numbers constituting the social elite, their geographic dispersal, and the bitter factionalism of their community effectively killed off any possibility of such theatre for the first twenty-five years or so of the outpost's existence. For the next fifteen years the positive influence of a growing population was negated by the continuance of the factionalism, by the deep suspicions of a succession of governors, and by the growing influence of the clergy, most of whom were bitterly hostile to theatre.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Spring 1996 , pp. 33 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1996

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References

Notes

1. Current scholarly opinion has it that this theatre was closed down hy the Governor in 1801.I have, however, found a reference to frequent performances in late 1803 and early 1804. There is evidence which suggests strongly that the theatre was defunct before January 1808.

2. Historical Records of Australia, Series 1 (Sydney: Government Printer, 1914), 1, 502, 598.Google Scholar

3. Collins, David, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, ed. Fletcher, Brian H. (Sydney: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1975), I. 379.Google Scholar

4. These were the restrictions placed on the Norfolk Island theatre in 1793. The Sydney Theatre opened on Saturday, 16 January 1796, and of the handful of other performances that are recorded or can he inferred almost all take place on a Saturday. My assumption that these were on a monthly rather than a fortnightly or weekly basis may be an error.

5. Collins, , I. 375.Google Scholar

6. The information about Green, and about the backgrounds of the other convicts, comes from an extensive search of court records, newspapers and other contemporary sources—a search which is still continuing. Information about some of the performers can be found in the biographical dictionaries of arrivals in Australia up to 1790, Gillen, Mollie, The Founders of Australia (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1989)Google Scholar, and Flynn, Michael, The Second Fleet (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1993).Google Scholar

7. Some of them, of course, had lost any status associated with their official occupation through having become recognized, even before their conviction, as habitual criminals, and members of a criminal subclass.

8. Based on the convict list in The Journal and Letters of Lt Ralph Clark 1787–1792 (Sydney: Australian Documents Library, 1981), pp. 2–7.Google Scholar

9. Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged (London: Allan Lane, 1991), pp. 101–2.Google Scholar

10. Collins, , I. 375.Google Scholar

11. Mitchell Library, Sydney, M.S.M1574, fol. 80v.

12. Mitchell Library, Sydney, M.S.M677, p. 55.

13. Baer, Marc, Civil Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Historical Records of New South Wales, ed. Bladen, F. M. (Sydney: Government Printer, 1893), II. 107.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., 140.

16. Mann, Daniel Dickinson, The Present Picture of New South Wales (London: John Booth, 1811), p. 54.Google Scholar

17. For example, The Sporting Magazine (19 11 1801), p. 226.Google Scholar

18. The playbill for this performance survives in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.

19. Attributed to a Leicestershire gentleman, Henry Carter, published in several journals, and made famous by its inclusion in the second and subsequent editions of The History of New South Wales, attributed by the publisher to the notorious gentleman pickpocket and transportee, George Barrington.

20. For Vasconcellis, see New South Wales Archives Office, M.S.COD77, p. 70. The music-loving Private Henry Parsons was a performer in June 1799, and the Master Haddock, who played a minor female role in The Recruiting Officer in 03 1800Google Scholar, was presumably the son of Sergeant Haddock, the only adult of that name in the community.

21. The Sydney Gazette, 15 05 1830, p. 3.Google Scholar

22. Howe's Weekly Commercial Express, 25 07 1825, p. 2.Google Scholar

23. Tucker, James, Ralph Rashleigh, ed. Roderick, C. (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1953), pp. 97–102Google Scholar. Tucker was a convict, and probably one of the performers at Emu Plains.

24. The Sydney Gazette, 15 05 1830, p. 3.Google Scholar

25. The Sydney Gazette, 8 07 1830, p. 3.Google Scholar

26. The Sydney Gazette, 21 07 1825, p. 4.Google Scholar

27. The Sydney Gazette, 15 05 1830, p. 3.Google Scholar

28. The Sydney Gazette, 25 07 1825, p. 4.Google Scholar

29. The Sydney Gazette, 21 07 1825, p. 4.Google Scholar

30. Ralph Rashleigh, p. 102.Google Scholar

31. Ralph Rashleigh, pp. 98–9Google Scholar; The Sydney Gazette, 21 07 1825, p. 4Google Scholar. The Sydney Gazette, 8 07 1830, p. 3Google Scholar, reporting one of the more fashionable evenings, remarked that there were ‘nearly forty ladies and gentlemen’ in an audience of ‘upwards of two hundred’.

32. Printed in The Monitor, 6 11 1830, p. 1Google Scholar, and repeated on 10 November.

33. For Watt's career, see Walker, R. B., The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803–1920 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1976), pp. 21–3.Google Scholar

34. The Times, 6 01 1825 and 7 03 1825.Google Scholar

35. The Sydney Gazette, 21 07 1825, p. 4.Google Scholar

36. Ralph Rashleigh, p. 97.Google Scholar

37. Some of this material is noted in Irvin, Eric, Theatre Comes to Australia (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1971), pp. 7–9, and passim.Google Scholar

38. For Jamison's career see Fletcher, Brian, ‘Sir John Jamison in New South Wales 1814–1844’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 65 (1979), pp. 1–29.Google Scholar

39. See note 33.

40. Much of the surviving correspondence can be found in Letters of John Maxwell, ed. Smith, B. M. and Lloyd, B. (Wangaratta: Shoestring Press, 1982), pp. 194–9.Google Scholar