Innocent Convicts and RespectableBushrangers: History and the Nation inMelbourne Melodrama, 1890–1914

Gabrielle Wolf

For a young city with only a brief history of stage performance, federation-eraMelbourne had a remarkably lively theatre scene. Scanning the amusementcolumns of the daily newspapers, Melburnians could select from a range of showsplaying on the stages of at least five city venues.1 Plays written (or localised fromoverseas productions) by Australian playwrights comprised a small but significantproportion of that drama.2 Melodrama was the dominant genre of Australian playsproduced in Melbourne between 1890 and 1914,3 and Australian playwrightsmodified many British (and, to some degree, European and American)melodramatic conventions to develop a ‘hybrid form’ that appealed to largeaudiences.4 A distinct strand of Australian melodrama was set in Australia’s then-recent past. Many scholars observe that federation-era theatrical melodramasreflected the ways in which Australians began to imagine that they belonged to anation and shared a distinctive national identity;5 yet none have systematicallyexamined historical melodramas, analysing the trends in how this particular groupof plays echoed Melburnians’ emergent nationalism.6 These plays tend to centreon the romanticised portrayal of five subjects of white Australia’s past: innocentconvicts, respectable bushrangers, successful gold and silver miners, the Eurekastockade, and courageous settlers of the outback. This article explores howfederation historical melodramas depicted past Australians as honourable andsuccessful, bold adventurers and risk-takers. It argues that Melbourne audiencesinferred from these plays that their ancestors shaped a spirited, respectablenational character, and laid the foundations for a thriving nation.

To Australians, federation represented the birth of their nation. In preparing forand responding to this event, many citizens embraced an idealised vision of theirnew national community, enthusiastically adopting the nationalist ideologies thatcaptivated Europe at this time.7 This ‘new form of collective identity’ appealed, asNeville Meaney notes, because many Australians were ‘disturbed by theinsecurities of an urban-centred and modernising democracy’ and perceived thatthey had ‘but a fragile hold on a vast land set in an Asian sea’.8 Further,Australians were steeped in what Helen Irving describes as ‘the spirit of the fin desiecle’, a ‘forward-looking, risk-taking’ period ‘when change is both possible andexpected’.9 Australians absorbed a western ‘attitude of certainty, security, andoptimism’ and a teleological ‘belief in future progress’;10 change would involvethe community’s advancement toward prosperous nationhood.

Romanticised interpretations of colonial history were integral to Australianambitions to create an ideal nation. In contemplating the past, white historiesfocused only on the years following European settlement, ignoring Indigenoushistories. This had the effect of displacing Australia’s original inhabitants as

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‘natives’, thus asserting an unproblematic membership of a white Australiannation.11 There was an anxiety to ensure that the colony’s past would not cast ashadow over the new nation and thwart its progress. In particular, Australians weredetermined to escape the stigma of their convict origins.12 A long-standingtradition of moral uprightness was necessary to the project of developing arespectable nation. To this end, narratives emerged that lauded the achievementsof generations of honourable Australians in an uninterrupted, unique history.13

Such narratives emphasised that although Australians experienced varioushardships in the past, they overcame them: colonial status did not preclude thecreation of a dignified, self-sufficient nation.

An array of utopian writing, as well as Australian painting, novels, shortstories, poetry and drama, reflected how the nation took shape in Australians’collective imagination during the two decades flanking federation.14 Of thosecultural forms, stage productions were among the most responsive to Australians’burgeoning sense that they belonged to a distinctive national community. Theatreis unique in providing a public forum for the immediate, live, spontaneous andcollaborative interaction between the members of a society.15 In the ephemeralmoments of performance, drama evokes how a community sees itself at a specificpoint in time. Martin Esslin, building on Aristotle’s theory of mimesis (the notionthat art imitates reality), emphasises that theatre is ‘a mirror in which society looksat itself’ and a situation in which a group of people ‘experiences its own identityand reaffirms it’.16 Audiences are only able to comprehend stage productions ifthey incorporate the values, images and myths with which they are familiar.17

Federation-era theatre can be understood to reflect the perceptions of a significantcross-section of Melbourne society for this reason: it was ‘popular’ culture. Toprofit from productions, commercial theatre companies principally intended toentertain — and thereby retain — large audiences.18 They attracted Melburniansof various ages, social classes and walks of life,19 and created a light-hearted,playful milieu in which they could reinforce their evolving understandings aboutthe origins of Australia’s nationhood.

The genre of melodrama, with its fixed elements of romance, nostalgia andmorality, was suited to idealised dramatic recreations of Australian history, and togenerating an emotional, patriotic response in an audience.20 Every melodrama isstructured around a conflict between good (represented by the hero/heroine) andevil (embodied in the villain); a struggle to punish and expunge wickedness andan eventual victory of virtue over vice.21 Federation-era playwrights adapted thisform to demonstrate that early Australians defeated all threats to the respectabilityand advancement of their community. Theatre companies used ‘realistic’ stagedevices that brought this idealised history alive for their audiences. In federation-era melodramas, spectacle, music, and elaborate sets and costumes created anillusion or ‘verisimilitude’ of a past romanticised Australian society, emphasisingits ‘uplifting and inspiring’ aspects.22

Australian playwrights modified the stock characters of the melodramaticgenre23 to suit depictions of the five glorified subjects of white Australia’s past.These recognisable characters appear in many melodramas of the federation era,with consistent traits and clearly expressed motivations and morality.24

Melodrama’s ‘social stereotypes’, as Jim Davis observes, ‘reinforced national

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stereotypes and sometimes redefined them’.25 Some of those characters were‘stage heroes’, who, in J S Bratton’s words, ‘are part of the drama’s definition ofself, the exploration and understanding of … identity’, especially when ‘heroism[is] harnessed to the ideology of nationhood’.26 The heroes of federation-erahistorical melodramas were brave, respectable, tenacious and, ultimately,prosperous. They exhibited qualities that would imbue their descendents with theability to develop a wholesome and successful nation. Such characters presenteda guide to how the Australian nation would operate. Elaine Hadley observes thattheatrical melodrama was a ‘version of the melodramatic mode’, whichconstituted ‘a behavioural and expressive model’ for British society.27 The samecan be argued for the role played by the characters of historical melodramas forfederation-era Melbourne.

It is not surprising that convicts were often the noble heroes of federation-erahistorical melodramas. Australians wanted to distance themselves from theircommunity’s origins as a penal colony, particularly because they feared the moraltaint of the convicts’ presumed degeneracy.28 The title of Charles Taylor’sUnjustly Sentenced (1894) demonstrates that Melburnians were eager to forget oralter the shameful memory of their criminal history.29 Like many other convictcharacters in federation-era melodramas, the protagonist of this play was, in thewords of a critic for the periodical Table Talk, ‘sentenced to transportation for acrime perpetrated by another man’.30 Audiences readily accepted the myth thatmost of their convict ancestors were either innocent of their alleged crimes or atleast inherently respectable people who had been temporarily led astray. Therighteousness of the criminal protagonist of Inigo Tyrell’s melodrama During HerMajesty’s Pleasure (1894) was exaggerated to a ludicrous extent; yet a review inthe Argus newspaper soberly recorded, ‘the central figure is a virtuous convictnamed Dromoyne, who develops into a philanthropist’.31

Assuaging Australians’ anxieties about their ancestors, federation-eraplaywrights frequently depicted convicts as the morally upright victims ofincompetent, unfair and brutal authorities. Dramatisations of Marcus Clarke’spopular novel His Natural Life appeared in various guises throughout thefederation era. In 1890, Alfred Dampier, a prominent actor-manager, producedThomas Somers’s adaptation of this novel, which emphasised that innocent — orat least innocuous — convicts endured but were not defeated by a corrupt system.Richard Devine, the hero of For the Term of His Natural Life, is a convict wronglycharged with murder. Transportation is represented as a disproportionatepunishment for the offences committed by other endearing convict characters, andthe audience is encouraged to sympathise:

VEITCH: I borrowed a piece of rope.CROWE: Yes, a bit of rope with a horse on the end of it.32

Such absurd representations of crime and punishment relieved residual shamesurrounding Australia’s convict history. The depiction of the notorious convictGabbett in For the Term of His Natural Life did not tarnish this image of a good-humoured and relatively honourable past Australian community. Gabbett is theexception rather than the rule, one of the only convicts not imprisoned forinsignificant misdemeanours or for crimes that they did not commit. The otherconvicts distrust Gabbett, but his exaggerated degeneracy — he delights in murder

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and is a cannibal33 — amused rather than shocked the audience. A critic for theAustralasian alluded to the play’s light-hearted treatment of Australians’ convictancestors:

The book is powerfully written, but it has always been seriously handicapped … bythe painfulness of the story and the pervading sombreness of its tone. In their stageform the characters lose much of their essence.34

This ‘essence’ that the majority of the characters lost in the performance ofSomers’s version of the novel was apparently wickedness and gloom rather thanspirit and respectability.

In For the Term of His Natural Life it is not the convicts but the figures ofauthority who are corrupt and dishonourable. Devine and his fellow convicts,presented as Australians’ true ancestors, are maltreated by their merciless andsadistic overseer, Captain Maurice Frere. Frere demonstrates his debased, amoralcharacter through his violent responses toward any perceived opposition,including vulnerable women.35 At one point in the play, the usual order ofauthority is inverted. The convicts prove that they are inherently principled andmore upright than their superiors, and that their spirit cannot be quashed byoppressive conditions. The convicts successfully stage a mutiny and one of theirnumber informs Frere:

We are your masters now; you are entirely in our power. We could flog you if weliked; we could kill you if we liked; but we won’t do either, and if ever you shouldget into power again, let the memory of the clemency we have shewn you, causeyou to show some mercy to the hapless convicts you may have in your charge.36

Federation-era historical melodramas portrayed other white Australians whowere also (in the dramatists’ representations) erroneously accused of depravity,and who were similarly resilient to unfair treatment. Just as Australians’ convictancestors were depicted as honourable, many of the bushrangers in the plays ofthis era were respectable, Robin Hood-type outlaws. Some productions includeddisreputable bushrangers, yet audiences identified the righteous, bravebushrangers as the authentic Australian characters, for they consistently overcamethe ruthless bandits as well as other unjust, powerful people and authorities.

Australian playwrights modelled their bushranging characters on the noblehighwaymen of English drama,37 but their melodramas also fed into themythology about Ned Kelly that Australians enthusiastically propagated almostimmediately after the outlaw’s execution in 1880.38 From 1878 to 1880, Kellyprowled Victoria’s rural northeast with his gang.39 Rather than remembering himas a brutal murderer and thief, Australians quickly idolised Ned as a hero whobravely defied squatters on behalf of selectors.40 In the person of Ned Kelly,Australians saw an attractive ‘political definition’ of themselves as heroes whoresisted the control of a distant British authority and who established a new,egalitarian social order appropriate to their own community.41

Reg Rede’s The Kelly Gang (1898) most obviously bears the influence of theKelly legend. A review in the Argus noted the complimentary depictions of thesecriminals in ‘a stirring piece, founded upon the adventures of the outlawed terrorsof the North-East’, which ‘was thoroughly enjoyed’ by the audience:

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Mr Barry makes Ned Kelly an amiable sort of murderer, and the charactersgenerally fit in with the common appreciation of the gang, as one which wasimpelled by police despotism to take to crime.42

Rede’s protagonist did derive to a significant extent from non-Australian drama.Veronica Kelly notes:

As far as the popular stage goes … the Ned Kelly figure had in fact been ‘invented’many decades before his birth, evolved from the Romantic brigand-drama, andfrom the hippodramatic Newgate Calendar anti-heroes Dick Turpin and JackSheppard.43

Dan Barry, who produced the show, nonetheless attempted to convince audiencesthat the gang’s experience, as depicted in the play, was unique to Australia’shistory. Even through the actors’ costumes — a critic for the Argus noted, ‘thearmour used is the original worn by Ned Kelly’44 — Barry emphasised toaudiences that the stage depiction of Ned as a legendary hero mirrored the realAustralian executed just eighteen years earlier.

Rede’s bushrangers live up to their own mythology and repeatedly facechallenges with courage and respectability. For the amusement of the audience,these bushrangers even boasted about their decency. Ned, for instance, reassuresan elderly woman: ‘don’t you worry about the Kellys. They never harm women,or men either unless they are driven to it’.45 The Kelly Gang also included seriousmoments in which the audience could feel proud of its forebears, such as Ned’sfinal expression of remorse:

It has been a dreadful time … I have no desire to live. Let me die and let my fatethe fate of Hunted Ned Kelly be a warning to all evil doers for Honesty is the bestpolicy after all.46

Rede encouraged audiences to respond warmly to the other members of the gangwho share the honourable values of law-abiding citizens. Steve Hart plans to ‘taketo farming and later on have a little homestead’, and Joe Byrne admits, ‘I don’tbelieve in taking life’.47 The differences between Dan Kelly and his associatesmade the other bushrangers’ uprightness more credible to audiences. Dan is hot-headed and violent. Whereas Steve believes that the gang should ‘only shoot inself-defence’, Dan orders, ‘shoot down every trooper who comes within rangewithout question or parley’, and keeps to his word.48 It was impossible to arguethat all past bushrangers were respectable, but because the play presents one ofthem as a brutal thug, audiences could more readily accept that his cohorts werevirtuous. According to this production, the bushrangers’ contemporariesrecognised that most members of the gang were decent, and that they committedillegal deeds for altruistic reasons only. Sergeant Steele observes, ‘there is so muchsympathy with these Kellys that it’s hard to get recruits willing and ready to takeon the work [of capturing them]’.49

Other federation-era historical melodramas portrayed fictional bushrangers inthe same mode as the mythical Kelly gang, as outlaws who demonstrated aninstinctive uprightness and bravery rather than any inherent criminality.50

Ambrose Pratt and A S Joseph’s melodrama Thunderbolt (1906) typifiesfederation-era theatre that perpetuated the image of the bushranger as a ‘greatAustralian folk hero’ for appreciative audiences.51 In the not-too-distant past, the

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eponymous protagonist of this play effects moral justice by committing illegaldeeds. Alex Mason’s wayward son, Jack, forged a cheque to repay the corruptbank manager/magistrate Geoffrey Marrow for a gambling debt. Marrow refusesto exchange the cheque for cash, but offers to forgive the debt if Alex Masonallows him to marry his daughter, Maude. Thunderbolt robs Marrow’s coach,forces him to chew up the forged cheque, shoots a murderous bushranger whoassaults women, and frees Maude, who assisted with the coach’s robbery and wasimprisoned by a bungling policeman. Thunderbolt’s actions, like those of theKelly gang, seem warranted because he is represented as an innocent victim ofunjust authority. Thunderbolt’s sweetheart, Sunday, explains that even prior to hisconflict with the corrupt magistrate, other brutal authorities compelledThunderbolt to adopt his profession, the only respectable option open to him.Providing the audience with another reason to glorify Thunderbolt, Sundaydeclares: ‘The law and the police treated him cruel hard … when he broke gaol hecould do nothing else but take to the bush. If he hadn’t he would have been lessthan a man.’52 Thunderbolt’s illicit actions are also justified by his selflessintentions; he proves that he did not become a bushranger for personal gain inwealth or power. The outlaw refuses to take money from women or poor men,declines an offer to captain a brutal, immoral bushranging gang, and redistributesstolen money to Marrow’s debtors.53

Thunderbolt’s moral uprightness was so exaggerated that a critic for theAustralasian found him irritating. He valued theatre in which ‘latter-day Australialook[s] back with a certain amount of admiration to its desperadoes of half acentury ago’.54 Yet, he also believed that Thunderbolt was ‘inclined to preach atrifle too much’ and complained that Thunderbolt ‘delivers a University Extensionlecture on the ethics of bushranging’.55 Despite his own frustration withThunderbolt’s extreme virtue, this critic observed that ‘The house wassympathetic with the outlaw … and, for the time being, bushranging was regardedas the most elevating occupation in which man could engage’.56 In part, Pratt andJoseph inflated their bushranger’s decency for comical effects. Nonetheless, suchmoralism helped to alleviate embarrassment about undignified aspects ofAustralia’s recent history, depicting those questionable individuals who shapedAustralians’ national character as honourable and brave.

A number of federation-era historical melodramas portrayed the richness, inboth the material and the spiritual sense, of the gold rush era in Australia. Inpromoting The Miner’s Right (1891), which Dampier and Garnet Walch adaptedfrom a novel by Rolf Boldrewood,57 Dampier drew links between Australiansuccesses in the gold rush of the 1850s and present and future Australia. Hisadvertisements promised that this play:

Makes us Proud of the Land we Live In … It furnishes a Vivid Picture of the GoodOld Days … It treats of Golden Times, Golden Opportunities, Golden Hopes andGolden Hearts.58

Dampier explicitly affirmed that Australians’ gold rush experiences laid thefoundations for their nation:

At a time when men’s minds are filled with the subject of Federation, it is well torecall the scenes of a past from which the Great Australia of the Future takes its rise.The National Spirit now being so freely evoked had its inception in the days of the

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‘roaring fifties’ when the men who were thrown together by circumstance werebound to one another by the growth of common interest.59

Audiences appreciated Dampier’s messages. A critic for the Argus observed that‘the principal situations were heartily applauded’.60 Further, the program for TheMiner’s Right included the following quotation from a critic:

The period with which it [The Miners’ Right] deals was itself the era of a greatromance … a wonderful and all pervading excitement occasioned by the finding ofgold … Colonial life was seized with a fever and intensity that have left an indeliblemark on everything Australian.61

Randolph Bedford’s The Lady of the Pluckup; or The Days of Eighty-Four(1911) similarly gave audiences cause to celebrate a past brave and flourishingAustralian community. By describing his fellow silver miners as ‘soldiers offortune — adventurers’,62 Charlie, the play’s hero, confirms that Australians’ancestors were bold and tenacious. These miners tried their luck at the remoteoutpost of Pluckup and their risk-taking was rewarded with riches. When Alicearrives to be the new barmaid, the publican informs her, ‘there’s not a real manhere doin’ badly, and a lot are making big money’.63 The characters of The Ladyof the Pluckup, with the obvious exception of the villain, display the same spiritof comradeship to which Dampier refers in his advertisement for The Miner’sRight. These early Australians bond together, forming the basis of a unified,successful national community. When Alice is devastated to discover that she isthe only woman on the field, the miners console her by extending their friendship.Charlie informs her, ‘we’re to be brother and sister’, and Alice quips that the othermen ‘shall be uncles’.64 Ironically, a critic for the Argus was disgruntled that theproduction did not idealise the material conditions at the mines, and thus offeredfew visual glimpses of the prosperity to which they eventually gave rise:

Mr Bedford has hampered the dramatic action and the dressing of his play in orderto keep it true to actual life. Real life on a mining rush is mostly dirt anddisappointment and tawdry, commonplace roughness.65

Edmund Duggan’s play The Southern Cross (1908) typifies federation-erahistorical melodramas that showed how the miners of the Eureka stockadecontributed to the development of an Australian national character. This playdepicted, as a review in the Argus notes, ‘the fight between the diggers and thetroops’.66 Duggan demonstrated that the conflict ensued from the miners’ valiantprotest against the injustice and immorality of the authorities. The diggers wereenraged by the court’s decision, based on the evidence of policemen who acceptedbribes, to acquit a publican for the murder of a miner (and for the theft of hisprofits from the diggings). This perceived unfairness compounded their fury at thegold commissioners’ imposition of weighty licence fees, which they regarded asan unjustifiable tax on free labour.

Audiences of The Southern Cross were shown not only that their ancestorswere brave and upright but also that they laid the foundations for a dignified,independent nation despite Australia’s subordination to Britain. Although theminers essentially opposed the representatives of imperial authority in the colony,they appointed an Englishman as their commander-in-chief. Duggan clearlymodelled Walter Lisle on the real-life leader of the stockade, Peter Lalor. By

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changing his nationality (Lalor was Irish), Duggan emphasised that Australians’rebellion was untainted by Ireland’s violent conflict with Britain. Duggan alsoshowed audiences that Australia’s colonial relationship with Britain would notimpede their progress toward nationhood. It is in fact this Englishman whohappily predicts that the stockade will lay the foundations for a proud,autonomous Australian nation and bold national character:

This meeting today will be chronicled in Australian history. It is to decide whetherthe miners of Ballarat are … men of spirit and courage … who will unite in onecommon cause … for liberty.67

He further incites the miners: ‘if it is your wish to see Australia a free country, youmust nip oppression in the bud and exterminate it forever’, and ‘burst this chainof tyranny and establish a home of freedom’.68 Lisle confirms that the miners’ flagwith its image of the Southern Cross, which the diggers describe as ‘the standardof the Australian Republic’,69 will become a symbol of Australians’ distinguishednationhood. He asserts: ‘this flag is destined to wave over free and UnitedAustralia’.70 Soon after the stockade, Lisle already charts it in Australian historyas pivotal in the establishment of an Australian nation, stating: ‘I deem it anhonour to those heroes who fought at Eureka Australia owes the liberty which sheenjoys today’.71

Lisle considered that in Australia’s recent past, the white settlers of theoutback, like the miners, courageously sacrificed themselves to help create thecommunity that would become a nation:

Australia’s young … but she can already boast of heroes, whose bones arebleaching in the wilds of the bush, men who’ve laid down their lives in opening upthis vast continent, the brave pioneers all honour to their name.72

Portrayals of these ‘pioneers’ in other historical melodramas substantiated Lisle’sdescription of them. On Our Selection (1912) was the most successful of thefederation-era productions about the settlers of the outback. Indeed, this dramaticadaptation by Arthur Hoey Davis (alias Steele Rudd), Bert Bailey and others ofDavis’s short stories was so popular that it was subsequently transformed intoother plays, radio serials and films.73 The fortunes of the Rudd family in On OurSelection exemplify the ‘pioneer legend’ that John Hirst identifies in Australianculture: the farmers overcome disadvantages and difficulties through hard work,bravery, tenacity and good humour.74 The Rudds represent the real-life losers of acorrupted land regulation system, the selectors or ‘cockies’ who were compelledto cultivate infertile land because squatters exceeded their entitlements.75 Yet theplay celebrates these selectors who endured and tamed the land, founding both awhite settlement in the bush and, implicitly, the Australian nation.76

At the beginning of On Our Selection, Joseph Murtagh Rudd (knownaffectionately as ‘Dad’), the play’s hero and the patriarch of the Rudd clan, battlesdrought and debt. By its end, he has become a member of parliament, his son anddaughter-in-law (Dave and Lily) are building their own home, and his daughter(Kate) has ventured to the city and received some formal education. This rags-to-riches tale, and the characters’ struggles and successes, were an uplifting metaphorfor the trajectory of the new nation. The audience appreciated that Australians’

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national community and identity evolved out of the contributions and character ofthese spirited, bold ancestors.

Apparently with good reason, Dad lauds the bravery and hard work of hisfamily and all long-suffering pioneers. In one of many similar speeches, heproudly asserts:

My wife and children lived in a bark humpy. They worked in the yards, in thepaddicks, on the drays, and beside the stacks. They ’ad courage, they ’ad ’earts,that’s ’ow my family faced the land. And there is ’undreds of families doin’ thesame this very day.77

A critic for the Age newspaper noted that Dad was a ‘stout-hearted pioneer’, andrecorded:

The scene at the close of the first act, in which the old man tells of his struggleagainst drought and disaster, rang truly, and afforded the strongest piece of actingin the production.78

In that scene, Dad informs Carey — his neighbour and creditor, a wealthy,malicious squatter — of the pioneers’ roles in the development of the Australiancommunity:

Take me few ’ead of cattle, take every stick in the place. But if you think you canbreak me spirit [striking the table with his fist] by the Lord, no! It’s the spirit of thepioneers who struggled to make the land.79

Dad further glorifies the pioneers’ inclination to confidently tackle all problems.Carey taunts Dad, ‘the drought has got your crops, I’ve got your stock. What canyou do now?’, to which Dad boldly replies, ‘wot the men of this country withhealth, strength and determination are always doin’. I can start again’.80

Australian historical melodramas staged in Melbourne between 1890 and 1914are an important record of how Melburnians created models of the Australiannational character and Australian nationhood by rehabilitating significant figuresfrom the colony’s white past. Other cultural forms similarly reflectedMelburnians’ blossoming nationalism — indeed, several melodramas were alsopopular as short stories, novels, radio serials and films. Yet the theatre, inparticular, evoked how Melburnians’ idealised sense of the past informed the waysin which they imagined that they belonged to a national community and shared adistinctive identity. Romanticised images of Australians who resisted authority —often colonial authority — played a significant role in establishing an independentnational character: wrongfully transported convicts; outlaw bushrangers who putlegal injustices to rights; miners who fought against judicial corruption andgovernmental exploitation; and courageous battlers of the outback who sufferedfrom corrupt land legislation. The anti-authoritarianism that pervades federation-era melodramas is striking at a time when Australia was asserting its independencefrom the United Kingdom. While the morally questionable nature of criminals andrebels was problematic, the plays’ exaggeration of the ethical motivations of suchcharacters created a more socially acceptable national mythology and a moralbasis for an Australian nation. A broad spectrum of Melbourne society rebuilt theimagery of the Australian genesis, eliding versions of the past that contradicted theidea that their nation was built on honourable, courageous origins. Together, theaudiences of federation-era historical melodramas confirmed that Australiansinherited a spirited, upright national character that would enable them to overcomeany obstacle and create a thriving nation.

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Notes to pp 66–74

Innocent Convicts and Respectable Bushrangers: History and the Nation in MelbourneMelodrama, 1890–1914Gabrielle Wolf

1 Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culturesince 1788, Longman Australia, Melbourne, 1995, p 68.

2 Australian dramatists commonly adapted non-Australian plays because an overseas success wasguaranteed to be profitable in Melbourne, and they were poorly paid for their work. They couldproduce a greater quantity of plays by borrowing from theatre that had already proven its appealto audiences, rather than by undertaking the longer process of drafting original drama. ElizabethWebby, ‘Melodrama and the melodramatic imagination’, The Penguin New Literary History ofAustralia, Laurie Hergenhan (ed.), Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1988, p 212.

3 Veronica Kelly, ‘Melodrama, an Australian pantomime, and the theatrical constructions ofcolonial history’, Journal of Australian Studies, no 38, 1993, p 53; Margaret Williams,‘Introduction’, The Sunny South, George Darrell, Currency Methuen Press, Sydney, 1975, p xii.

4 Margaret Williams, ‘Nimble Naiad, Lonely Squatter and Lively Aboriginal: Convention andNational Image in Australian Drama’, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1973, chap 3, p 12; TerrySturm, ‘Drama’, The Oxford History of Australian Literature, Leonie Kramer (ed.), Melbourne,Oxford University Press, 1981, p 195; Waterhouse, op. cit., pp 67–8.

5 See, for instance: Eric Irvin, Australian Melodrama: Eighty Years of Popular Theatre, Hale &Iremonger, Sydney, 1981; Veronica Kelly, ‘The melodrama of defeat: political patterns in somecolonial and contemporary Australian plays’, Southerly 50, no 2, 1990; Webby, op. cit.; andMargaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage 1829–1929: A Historical Entertainment in SixActs, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983.

6 Some historians have, however, examined individual aspects of historical melodrama, such asVeronica Kelly’s analysis of the representations of explorers and bushrangers in ‘Explorers andbushrangers in nineteenth-century Australian theatre’, The Writer’s Sense of the Past: Essays onthe Southeast Asian and Australasian Literature, Kirpal Singh (ed.), Singapore University Press,Singapore, 1987.

7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism, Verso Editions and NLB, London, 1983, p 66; E J Hobsbawm, Nations andNationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge1990, pp 104–5.

8 Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian identity: the problem of nationalism in Australianhistory and historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, no 116, 2001, p 81.

9 Helen Irving, To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia’s Constitution, updatededition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp 36, 212.

10 Marvin Perry, et al., Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics and Society, 6th ed., vol 2, HoughtonMifflin Co, New York, 2000, pp 722, 431.

11 Veronica Kelly, ‘Hybridity and performance in colonial Australian theatre: the currency lass’,(Post)Colonial Stages: Critical and Creative Views on Drama, Theatre and Performance, HelenGilbert (ed.), Dangaroo Press, West Yorkshire, 1999, p 49.

12 Waterhouse, op. cit., pp 73, 101.13 John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000,

pp 118, 69. McLeod summarises Homi Bhabha’s argument in his essay ‘DissemiNation: time,narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994, pp 139–70.

Notes to pp 74–76

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14 Anderson, op. cit., p 15; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,1983, pp 6, 48; Hobsbawm, op. cit., p 10; Irving, op. cit., p 39. Anderson, Hobsbawm and Gellneragree that a nation is greater than a political entity and also emerges in a community’s sharedimagination.

15 Angela O’Brien, ‘Restoring our dramatic past’, Researching Drama and Arts Education:Paradigms and Possibilities, Philip Taylor (ed.), Falmer Press, London, 1996, p 105.

16 Martin Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama, Maurice Temple Smith, London, 1976, pp 6, 27–9, 103.17 Herbert Blau, ‘Universals of Performance; or Amortizing Play’, By Means of Cultural

Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Richard Schechner and Willa Appel(ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p 258.

18 Lawrence W Levine, High Brow/Low Brow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America,Harvard University Press, 1988, London, p 56. Levine defines ‘popular culture’.

19 Veronica Kelly, ‘Female and juvenile meanings in late nineteenth-century Australian populartheatre’, The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture, Ken Stewart (ed.), University ofQueensland Press, St Lucia, 1996, p 110; John Rickard, ‘From pianos to panto: aspects of musicand theatre in colonial Victoria’, Victorian Historical Journal, no 49, 1978, p 70; Waterhouse, op.cit., p 73.

20 Michael Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991,pp 150–1, 62; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,and the Mode of Excess, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1976, p 30; Webby, op.cit., p 210.

21 Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, op. cit., pp 150–1; Brooks, op. cit., pp 12–13, 15, 29–32;Williams, ‘Nimble Naiad’, op. cit., chap 3, pp 7–9; chap 4, p 8.

22 Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, op. cit., pp 123, 129, 139; Michael R Booth, VictorianSpectacular Theatre 1850–1910, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp 13–14, 17, 74;Heidi J Holder, ‘Melodrama, realism and empire on the British stage’, Acts of Supremacy: TheBritish Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930, J M MacKenzie (ed.), Manchester University Press,Manchester, 1991, p 135; Waterhouse, op. cit., p 68; Webby, op. cit., p 210.

23 Williams, ‘Nimble Naiad’, op. cit., chap 3, pp 7–9.24 Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, op. cit., pp 150–1; Williams, ‘Nimble Naiad’, op. cit.,

chap 3, pp 7–9.25 Jim Davis, ‘The Empire right or wrong: Boer war melodrama on the Australian stage,

1899–1901’, in Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, Michael Hays and AnastasiaNikolopoulou (eds), St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996, p 22.

26 J S Bratton, ‘British heroism and the structure of melodrama’, in Acts of Supremacy: The BritishEmpire and the Stage, 1790-1930, J M MacKenzie (ed.), Manchester University Press,Manchester, 1991, pp 18–19.

27 Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace,1800–1885, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, p 8.

28 Kelly, ‘Hybridity and performance’, op. cit., p 40; John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History,Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1988, p 24; Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images andIdentity, 1788–1980, George Allen and Unwin Australia, Sydney, 1981, pp 22–3.

29 Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, op. cit., p 70.30 Table Talk, 29 September 1894, p 6.31 Argus, 7 May 1894, p 6.32 Thomas Somers, ‘For the Term of His Natural Life’ Play Script, 1890, ML MSS 1412/2

items 13–18, Microform, William Anderson Collection, Mitchell Library, Sydney, 1.4. As mostof the published and original play scripts do not include line numbers, this article breaks withconventional referencing. In its references to those texts, the first number represents the numberof the act, the second number represents the page number or, if there is a third number, the secondnumber represents the scene number and the third number represents the page number.

33 ibid., 1.9; 2.2.25; 1.16.34 Australasian, 24 May 1890, p1010.35 Somers, op. cit., 3.3.44-5; 5.1.55.36 ibid., 2.1.21.37 Kelly, ‘Explorers and bushrangers’, op. cit., p 125; Margaret Williams, Drama, Oxford

University Press, Melbourne, 1977, p 7.

212

Notes to pp 76–80

38 Kelly, ‘Explorers and bushrangers’, op. cit., p 125.39 Kelly, ‘Melodrama, an Australian pantomime’, op. cit., p 52.40 Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, op. cit., pp 54, 62.41 Kelly, ‘Explorers and bushrangers’, op. cit., pp 126–7; Kelly, ‘Melodrama, an Australian

pantomime’, op. cit., pp 51–2.42 Argus, 14 March 1898, p 7.43 Kelly, ‘Melodrama, an Australian pantomime’, op. cit., p 52.44 Argus, 12 March 1898, p 12.45 Reg Rede, ‘The Kelly Gang’, Play Script, c1898, MSS.1412/8 item100, Mitchell Library,

Sydney, 3.1.88.46 ibid., 5.3.143.47 ibid., 1.24; 1.28.48 ibid., 2.3.57.49 ibid., 2.1.50.50 See also W J Lincoln, The Bush King (1894), and Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch, Robbery

Under Arms (1890). Richard Fotheringham notes that the latter play, adapted from a novel byRolf Boldrewood, was pivotal to the formation of the group of bushranging melodramas. RichardFotheringham, ‘Introduction’, Robbery Under Arms, Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch,Currency Press, Sydney, 1985, p lii.

51 Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, op. cit., p 195.52 Ambrose Pratt and A S Joseph, ‘Thunderbolt’, ML MSS.1412, William Anderson Collection,

Mitchell Library, Sydney, 2.3.26.53 ibid., 3.3.61; 3.3.57; 2.1.13.54 Australasian, 8 September 1906.55 ibid.56 ibid.57 Argus, 16 February 1891, p 7.58 Argus, 28 February 1891, p 16.59 Argus, 7 March 1891, p 16.60 Argus, 14 February 1891, p 7.61 Telegraph, 16 April 1891, quoted in program for The Miner’s Right, Albums of Newspaper

Cuttings, Playbills and Press Notices, Mitchell Library, Sydney.62 Randolph Bedford, ‘The Lady of the Pluckup; or the Days of Eighty-Four’, Play Script, 1911,

A1336/2 item 2119, National Archives, Canberra, 1.44.63 ibid., 1.8.64 ibid., 1.39–40.65 Argus, 25 September 1911, p 9.66 Argus, 20 April 1908, p 7.67 Edmund Duggan, ‘The Southern Cross’, Play Script, 1908, National Archives, Canberra, 3.4.20.68 ibid., 3.2.11; 3.4.20.69 ibid., 4.1.3.70 ibid., 4.2.6.71 ibid., 5.9.72 Duggan, op. cit., 3.2.10–11.73 Irvin, op. cit., p 96. Helen Musa, ‘Introduction’, On Our Selection: A Dramatisation of Steele

Rudd’s Books, Steele Rudd, Helen Musa (ed.), Currency Press, Sydney, 1984, pp 9, 14, 39–40,44. Davis’s stories had been published in the Bulletin and then in a collected volume in 1899. Themanuscript of On Our Selection relied upon in this article is the published, producer’s copy, datedto early in the performance history of the work. It might not, however, be the precise copy usedin the 1912 production. One million people in Australia and New Zealand saw On Our Selectionbetween 1912 and 1916 (Table Talk, 21 September 1916, p 24). It was subsequently transformedinto the plays Gran’dad Rudd (1917) and The Rudd Family (1928), and the radio serial Dad andDave. On Our Selection was made into a film in 1920 (Graham Shirley, ‘Australian cinema: 1896to the renaissance’, in Australian Cinema, Scott Murray (ed.), Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994,p 7.

74 John Hirst, ‘The pioneer legend’, Historical Studies 18, no 71, 1978, p 331.

Notes to pp 80–85

213

75 Musa, op. cit., p 56. In the 1860s, the government offered parcels of land to self-employedfarmers, but squatters used dummy selectors to acquire the best properties.

76 Hirst, op. cit., p 316.77 Bert Bailey, On Our Selection: A Dramatisation of Steele Rudd’s Books, Currency Press, Sydney,

1984, p 133.78 Age, 16 September 1912, p 20.79 Bailey, op. cit., p 95.80 ibid.