Historical Overview of Theatre in Australia

The Australian Continent

• modern, industrialized nation on largely unpopulated continent

• seven states, territories• only island continent• only continent to be

occupied by single nation• population hugs seaboard;

interior is mostly desert (80% of country in arid or semiarid zones)

Australia and New Zealand

Aboriginal Australia

• ancestors of the Aborigines arrived on the continent at least 65,000-70,000 years ago

• from South Indonesia during the last ice age

• over time, separated into distinct tribal groups with their own languages and traditions

• subsistence husbandry

Kinship, Religion, and the Land

• over this long period, tribal lands were integrated into a complex set of religious beliefs and practices that governed all aspects of Aboriginal life

• believed that physical structure of tribal territory embodied ancient spiritual entities that preserved and protected the land and its people

• since the land was a physical expression of spirit ancestors, and the spirits were progenitors of the Aborigines, land and people were connected in mutually dependent relationship

• land central to sense of personal identity; myths of “Dreamtime”

Uluru (Ayers Rock)

European Exploration

• Terra Australis Incognita

• 17C Dutch exploration: in 1642 Abel Tasman named Australia “New Holland”

• initial reports unfavorable

• 1770 James Cook annexed east coast territory on behalf of King George III of England, named it “New South Wales”

Convict Transportation 1788-1868

• 1776 Britain’s North American colonies declared independence

• Britain could no longer send convicts to America

• overflowing prisons• in the 1780s it was

suggested that Britain could use New South Wales as a prison

• transportation for seven years, 10 years, or life

The Australian Penal Colony• in January 1788 the first

shipload of convicts arrived in Botany Bay

• founded settlement named Sydney

• life was very difficult for early convict settlers: soil infertile, food scarce, sickness rife

• eventually learned how to survive; convicts who finished their “lags” became free settlers

Colonial Expansion

• Lachlan Macquarie became Governor of the colony in 1810

• number of free settlers increased markedly

• exploration inland• development of towns,

roads, public buildings• pastoral wealth; gold

discovered in 1850s• convict transportation

ceased in 1868

What about the Aborigines?

• 18C approx. 600,000 - one million Aborigines

• huge cultural gap between colonizers and colonized

• Aborigines considered to be “rural pests”

• opposing notions of land ownership and use: terra nullius

• two centuries of appalling economic and cultural disadvantage

The Stolen Generation

• as a result of murder, dispossession, sickness, Aboriginal population plummeted

• c.1900 Europeans assumed that Aborigines were dying out

• non-full-blood children forcibly removed from families, placed in institutions to learn European values and trades

• expected to breed with other “half-castes” or whites and ultimately eliminate the Aboriginal blood line

• loss of identity, mistreatment

History of Australian Theatre Convict Theatre 1788-1840

• convict theatre fueled by late-Georgian craze for amateur theatricals

• instigated by convicts • first play = George Farquhar’s

The Recruiting Officer, June 4 1789

• 1796 = Sydney’s first theatre, managed by Robert Sidaway

• convict performances sustained until c.1840

19C Colonial Theatre

• similar trends to other colonial settlements: melodrama, musicals, comedy, domestic drama, farces, and other “light theatre”

• bushranger plays

• literary-historical drama in verse, based on historical drama of the 18C (Addison, Racine), also Shakespeare; escapist

Towards an “Australian” Theatre1900-1950

• call for “indigenous” Australian drama• influence of realism, and Independent

Theatres overseas• rise of repertory groups, “authors’ theatres,”

e.g. Australian Theatre Society, Adelaide Repertory Theatre

• still characterized by amateurism, lacked widespread national support

Postcolonial Influences Post-1950

• 1950s = theatre subsidization• Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust• Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) and the

Australian audience• new era of sustained professionalism in

management, production, and acting associated with the Australian play

• out of this new creative environment = 1960s new dramatists, artists, experimenting with new forms

Aboriginal Theatre, 1970-2005• 1960s organized Aboriginal civil

rights movement • 1971 Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry

Pickers performed• 1970s-80s collective initiatives;

Black Theatre Groups• 1989 Bran Nue Dae = turning

point in Aboriginal theatre• 1990s social, political change• more creative control, intense and

high-profile activity; women writers; Indigenous Theatre Groups; writing as resistance, also reconciliation