With the launch of a new history of our national drama, Australia in 50 Plays, author Julian Meyrick shares how he explored Australia’s story and our sense of nationhood as revealed in 50 landmark plays, here in this extract beginning with Federation. 

On 1 January 1901, the six individual states that had hitherto comprised the British colony of Australia became a self-governing dominion—the Commonwealth of Australia—with its own written constitution and bespoke balance of powers. On Thursday 9 May, the first federal parliament opened in Melbourne with considerable fanfare on the occasion itself and extended celebrations thereafter. From a distance, these have the aura of a school fete—inclusive, slightly wobbly festivities, with visiting dignitaries, colourful processions, earnest speeches and cheering crowds. That weekend, a parade of floats of mind-boggling variety and weirdness snaked its way through town to the Exhibition Building in Fitzroy, where the recently arrived Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York were installed in an octagonal pavilion painted red, white and blue for the occasion. 

An Argus journalist covered the parade (and the royal response to it) in microscopic detail:

The first large float… was… a richly decorated car, beneath the canopy of which were half-a-dozen figures representing the Rechabites of old… [while] [a] black-bearded man swallowed constant draughts of cold water from a golden goblet presented by a handmaiden … [Then came] … six girls, handsomely attired in classical costumes form[ing] a ring… while in the centre of this ring, raised on high, stood Britannia in a golden chariot. On each corner of the float was a stalwart young man with bare arms, mailed and helmeted like a Roman warrior. Closely following was a second float representing King Harold… Lines of hundreds of white hooded Druids marched behind, and… a very small boy riding a tricycle, and attired as Father Time… [Finally] [came] the Sons of Temperance, who had fitted up on a lorry a bit of Australian landscape snatched from the bush. Kangaroos, emus, and other fauna of the land were shown, browsing peacefully among a quartet of bushmen. Ferns rose from the ground, eucalyptus and wattle branches spread above them, while at the rear of the lorry rose a high rockery, down which a miniature waterfall dripped ceaselessly. The whole picture was redolent of Australia, and the spectators were quick to acknowledge the originality of those who conceived the idea.

Compared with other nation-defining events, Australian Federation has a decidedly holiday feel. Perhaps this was because it had taken so long to achieve. From 1891 onwards, the states haggled over the terms of their union, voting in separate, successive referenda whether to proceed with it or not. A note of burlesque can be detected. Sir Henry Parkes, initially an obstructer of Federation, became its champion. In the first round of plebiscites, only three states voted ‘yes’, while two would not participate. As the joke has it, the people must keep voting until they get it right.

After a decade of quarrelling and prevarication, collectiveagreement was finally reached. But there were some surprises. New Zealand, which as part of ‘Australasia’ had been expected to join the Commonwealth, chose to become a dominion in its own right. Western Australia, long adamant it would not be included in any federal arrangement, changed its mind at the last minute and voted to join it. Interstate negotiations had a monetary ring. If the aim was political union, it would only be acceptable if no individual state lost out economically. Thus was Australia as a (semi) independent nation born: no in the rifle’s mouth but the drawer of a cash register. 

Yet for all the lack of a sense of grand occasion, Federation was a moment of profound self-definition. Stuart Macintyre writes, “Those plebiscites were all important. They installed the people as the makers of the Commonwealth and popular sovereignty as its underlying principle… In the words of one celebrant, it was ‘the greatest miracle of Australian history.

How was the historical miracle memorialised in the theatre? What theatrical performance(s) marked the triumph of the people’s will? ‘Woman and Wine is proving a big-draw at the Royal, and on Saturday evening there was another excellent house’, noted the Melbourne Herald in the week the new parliament opened. ‘The drama abounds in exciting situations, the steeplechase scene, where a field of horses take the jumps in full view of the audience, being particularly thrilling; whilst the Japanese ball and the duel scene in the flower market are exceedingly good.’

With its spectacular visual effects, stock characters and ludicrous plot, Arthur Shirley and Ben Lanseck’s Woman and Wine, produced by the irrepressible ‘King of Melodrama’, Bland Holt, is an archetypal stage vehicle of the late Victorian era: theatrically innovative but dramatically inert. The Bulletin, a feisty nationalist newspaper that first appeared in 1880, took gleeful aim at the manifold absurdities of such popular fare. These by-the-numbers crowd-pleasers were purchased abroad, in London or New York, sometimes with costumes and props attached, then on-sold to producers in remote parts of the world, especially to the third of it coloured pink on the map—the territory of the British Empire. 

‘On Saturday a number of ’chasers jibbed and toppled over, bringing some of the scenery down with them’, noted The Bulletin sardonically. ‘If the same unreliable steeds are going to appear every night, the members of the orchestra… will probably be buried beneath an avalanche of horseflesh before the week is out.’ In its affectionate but unrelenting excoriation of these plot-creaky, over-the-top shows, The Bulletin was undertaking a ground-clearing operation. For Australian drama to live, a serious intellectual place would need to be found for it in a theatre scene then at the height of its commercial powers. Clustered around the behemoth of the Firm were a number of other production companies, chancing big money on a global touring circuit more extensive than any before or since. 

Thus the beginnings of Australian drama turn out to be as impromptu as the political arrangements around it. No bold statements of new artistic purpose are observable, as in Ireland’s Abbey Theatre or France’s Theatre Libre, no declarations of unique history or language. Rather, Australian drama was calved from the profit-making monster of British imperial theatre in the shadow of which local dramatists had to live and work for the next 60 years. Sometimes this relationship served them well, providing career paths, resources and audiences. More often, it imposed, dictating formats and values, and aggressively insisting on the ‘standards’ that ‘professional’ theatre required. Yet even at its most overbearing it remained of use. Australian playwrights—let us leave aside for a moment what sort of people might fill this category— watched the commercial plays put in front of them and took both what they needed and what they could not avoid. 

If drama arises in places that are, as Veronica Kelly has argued, ‘intractably regional’, it draws on the larger frame of cultural reference dominant at any one moment in time. It is what theatre artists do with that larger frame which is of interest: how they apply it, subvert it, bend it to their own purposes. Whatever else Australian drama may be, it is not pure. It is pointless to look for an exact moment of national inception. Australian drama grew demotically, incrementally, ineluctably, until one day it bent the imperial frame of reference around it sufficiently to claim it as its own. In looking for ‘difference’ we blind ourselves to a complex process of cultural individuation that occurred in combination with one of colonial domination. 

National dramas do not spring up like mushrooms in the field. They are the result of repeated acts of cultural exchange. The history of the development of Australian drama may look fragile, partial and hesitant compared with other countries. But it could not be stopped, any more than Federation could be reversed.    

This is an edited extract from Julian Meyrick’s Australia in 50 Plays just published by Currency Press and available from  http://www.currency.com.au

 

Author: Julian Meyrick

Title: Australia in 50 Plays

Publication Date: 3/03/2022

Edition: First

Publisher: Currency Press

Extent: 352pp.

ISBN: 9781760627386

Availability: Available