Chapter 3 investigates colonial actors’ performances on the 1841 opening night of the Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide. The Queen’s is the oldest extant theatre on mainland Australia. Its establishment reflected the South Australian colony fashioning itself as a colony of free settlers. We delve into the performance possibilities in this imported, Regency-style venue which opened with Othello, performed when race relations were particularly volatile. While we do not lose sight of the staging of the black body, we focus on corporeality in the shape of the audience. We reconstruct a culture of spectatorship across the auditorium by producing responses of the distinctive 1841 audience of Adelaide. The aim was to make in the Queen’s, and the rest of Adelaide, a better version of Britain, against the suppression of indigenous peoples, a matter that took on an even more macabre setting after the theatre’s closure, when it became the court that adjudicated on frontier politics. The performance laboratory for this chapter worked in conjunction with artists, actors, and a set designer to model an Othello for 1841 to consider audience responses to it at a time when race relations were topical.

This chapter examines the use of martial law powers during four frontier wars against the Xhosa people, in 1835, 1846, 1850 and 1877, and two rebellions by mixed-race ‘Hottentot’ and Griqua people, and discusses the debates over the nature of martial law which followed. During the first two wars, martial law powers were largely used to facilitate the raising of troops, but questions were raised about whether martial law could be used to govern newly acquired areas. As the debates over the status of the territory east of the Keiskamma river showed, martial law could not be used to govern land incorporated into the colony, but it could be used to administer conquered lands. Martial law powers were also used to conduct trials and imprison rebels in 1851 and 1878, which led to debates between law officers in London and Cape Town regarding the nature of these powers. In these debates, the law officers endorsed the English common lawyers’ view which had emerged after 1865. A strong commitment to the rule of law was also expressed by the Cape Supreme Court when dealing with the case of Griqua prisoners, detained without trial at Cape Town after the rebellion of 1878.