Conference 2008, Presidential Address, Australian Historical Association
Australian Historical Association
18 August 2008
Photographer: Janet Doust
Australian Historical Association
Conference 2008

Location! Location! Location!
Mind Maps and Theatrical Circuits
in Australian Transnational History


Desley Deacon, Presidential Address, July 2008

     
  1. The theme of this conference is Locating History. This is a very interesting question for historians of Australia. Where is Australia? Is it in Asia? or is it an extension of Europe? Is it part of the former British Empire? or is it a satellite of the USA? Is it part of the Pacific Rim? And where does 'Australia' end? At its geographical borders – or at its sphere of influence? Wherever people who think of themselves as Australians live? Wherever people who have lived in Australia live? In the minds of people who imagine themselves in Australia? And what of those original Australians whose sense of place has been overlaid with a new—European-based—map?
     
  2. These are questions that historians of any geographical space have to grapple with. I am speaking about Australia— and to some degree about the United States, because those are the countries whose histories I know most about. To a large extent, I, and historians of other nation states, am confined by the organization of the discipline, by genres, by publishers, and by audiences, and by sheer time and energy, to geographical and political borders. How many of us can become experts on more than, say, two countries?
     
  3. Ideas of location are inculcated in us during childhood, and can change dramatically over time. When I attended my little two-room primary school in rural Queensland in the 1950s, geography lessons were the moments when large maps of the British Empire were unfurled; and I knew the rivers of South Africa long before I knew anything much about Australia, let alone our geographical region, or even the United States, which was that unknown (and apparently uninteresting) place south of Canada. I had little sense that those movies I saw every Saturday night at the local hall were American: they seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
     
  4. My idea of my location in the red bits of the world map was strengthened by my grandparents' home next door, which was full of memorabilia from India, where my grandfather had been in the British Army and then the Indian Police Force before my grandmother had persuaded him to move on to Australia. And my aunt returned during my early childhood from the mythical 'England' or 'Home' as she always used to call it - the source, apparently, of all those red bits—where she had seen out the war in Coventry, where she ran the local branch of the Young Women's Christian Association; and I had no idea at that time of the international reach of this eminently transnational organization, which was so important in my aunt's life.
     
  5. My main history (and geography) lessons about Australia were gleaned from the large paintings of the Australian explorers that adorned the walls of the senior half of the school. There was no sense that these 'explorers' were doing anything other than mapping places that had not been mapped before - and I wonder now if the one Aboriginal family at our school had any different knowledge about this 'terra nullius' that we did not share?
     
  6. Mine was a generation intent on repudiating everything our parents stood for, so it is not surprising that we fervently embraced the study of specifically Australian history and literature in the early 1960s. I can vividly remember discovering Miles Franklin's Laughter Not for A Cage and staying up all night reading Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.[1] I was an English Honours student then, and the formidable AK Thompson was rumoured to have been denied promotion because of his specialization in Australian literature. But all of this was in the process of change - and I was witnessing the beginning of the great outpouring of work on Australian topics that has greatly enriched our knowledge of the history and culture of our country. I don't want to denigrate the importance of this work - to which I myself contributed—when I say that the focus exclusively on Australia since the 1960s has left enormous blind spots and skewed interpretations in the history we produce - particularly, I would argue, in our interpretations of our relationship with the United States. Many Australian historians have of course continued to work on Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, and other parts of the world, but these have tended to be seen as separate from Australian History, resulting in divisions such as that at the ANU between Asian and Pacific History and Australian and other histories (inferring—it seems—that Australia is not part of Asia or the Pacific), and the predominance of papers on Australia at AHA conferences.
     
  7. In thinking about trends in history in Australia, I was galvanised last month when our Mandarin-speaking Prime Minster Kevin Rudd announced that he wanted Australia to spearhead the creation of an Asia-Pacific Union similar to the European Union by 2020. He further elaborated that the union would comprise twenty-two members, adding India to the 21-member APEC grouping, and that it would encompass a regional free-trade agreement and provide a crucial venue for cooperation on issues such as terrorism and long-term energy and resource security.[2] In discussing what he called a 'new global architecture for the Asia-Pacific century' he underlined that: 'Ours must be an open region — we need to link into the world, not shut ourselves off from it.'[3]


    'We need to link into the world, not shut ourselves off from it.'
     
  8. Australia is what is often called a settler society, whose indigenous inhabitants were initially severely reduced in numbers, and whose population is overwhelmingly derived from immigration. This places us in a very small world club. Only three per cent of the world's population lives in anything other than their country of origin; but 23 per cent of Australia's population in 1998 was born elsewhere— a proportion similar to New Zealand and Singapore (20 per cent) and Canada (18 per cent). The big immigration flows nowadays are to middle-eastern countries: the United Arab Emirates (80 per cent), Jordan and Israel (33 per cent) Arabia (25 per cent) are the leaders in this club, while the United States, the country we always think of as the archetypal receiver country, now has only 13 per cent foreign born.[4] Even though we are part of this small club, the term 'settler'—or 'mmigrant'—society—has much too settled a connotation for most of our history. Jill Matthews talks of the 'unsettled settlers' of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sydney—and this more aptly describes the way many Australians located themselves.[5] The unsettled nature of so-called 'settlement' was brought home to me when my colleague Margaret Steven gave a paper on Alexander Berry, whom the ADB describes as 'merchant and settler.' Margaret's paper was about the years before he settled—and what a story it was. Born in 1781 in Fife, Scotland, Berry studied medicine and became surgeon's mate in an East Indiaman bound for China and later in another ship to Madras. He began to speculate in goods for the Indian market and chartered a ship for a commercial venture to the Cape of Good Hope. There he and his partner heard of the shortage of provisions in New South Wales and sailed with supplies to that colony and Van Dieman's Land. Arriving in Sydney in January 1808 in time to witness the deposition of Governor Bligh, things did not go according to plan and he had to take on further local commitments. His ship was badly battered on a subsequent voyage from Norfolk Island to Tasmania. After making costly repairs in Sydney, he set off for Fiji to collect a cargo of sandalwood. On the return voyage he arrived off the New Zealand coast in time to rescue the survivors of the massacre of the crew and passengers of the Boyd. Sailing on to Cape Town, his ship lost its rudder and they limped into Valparaiso and thence to Lima where it was repaired. After rounding Cape Horn they put into Rio de Janeiro, where Berry discovered that his partner—still in the Cape of Good Hope—had become insolvent. His ship finally had to be abandoned off the Azores after becoming waterlogged in fierce storms. Its crew and passengers were landed safely and Berry went on to Lisbon. He sailed for England but his ship was captured off Cape St Vincent. Transferred to a Swedish ship, he was landed at Malaga and finally reached London late in 1812 after more than four years at sea.[6] Undeterred by these misadventures, Berry returned to Sydney in 1819, where he rapidly became, in Governor Macquarie's words, 'an eminent merchant of this place'. In 1822 he was granted 10,000 acres in Shoalhaven and in time became a nominee to the Legislative Council.[7]
     
  9. Not all so-called 'settlers' had such a hard time getting settled as Berry did. But Berry's travails reminded me that people who landed up in what we now call Australia—whether for a short or a long period, or permanently—had different maps in their minds of where, or what, Australia was. For Berry, it was but one place on a map of new trade opportunities, along with China, India, the Cape of Good Hope, New Zealand, Fiji, Valparaiso, and Rio de Janiero. That he finally settled here was a matter of chance, contacts, economic opportunity, legal considerations and government policy.
     
  10. My interest in these 'mind maps' has been reinforced recently in my work on the Australian-born actress Judith Anderson—who most of you will know best as the spooky housekeeper Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's 1940 movie Rebecca—though she was, from the mid-1920s, acknowledged as one of the United States' greatest actresses in the legitimate theatre, best remembered for her searing role in Medea. From the beginning I was fascinated by the fact that she set off for Hollywood in 1918 when she was only 20 years old and not yet a star in her own country, armed with a letter to Cecil B. De Mille. What gave her the confidence to do this, I asked myself. Being an historian, I went backwards, and discovered the enormous and shifting theatre circuits that linked Australasia to the US, Britain, and Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[8]
     
  11. I tell Anderson's story elsewhere, but I want to ruminate briefly this afternoon on the history of those circuits and the 'mind maps' our early theatrical pioneers had of Australia's place in the world. The earliest were—like Alexander Berry—adventurers—strolling players—literally — who trawled for business along the shipping routes instead of through the highways and byways of their country of birth. The founding father of commercial theatre in Australia, George Coppin - 'The Great Coppin', as he was later called —was an engaging and energetic ruffian whose father had abandoned his medical studies and was disowned by his clergyman father when he went off with the group of strolling players and married one of them who was twice his age. George grew up in this itinerant world, appearing on stage as an infant. In his early twenties, in 1842, he tossed a coin that sent him to Australia rather than to America. Here he was a hustler and a gambler, investing in theatres and hotels, always in financial trouble, involved in rivalries, takeovers, short-lived partnerships, insolvencies, politics, and, as his biographer Sally O'Neill puts it, 'not always scrupulous in dealing with rivals.' But he had charisma, good taste, and a persuasive tongue - and he brought to Australia many theatrical stars and future stars of the period, and some of them stayed, attracting relatives and friends in the sort of capillary effect that all immigrant countries are familiar with.[9]
     
  12. Coppin's theatrical fortunes were boosted enormously by the next 'mind map' I want to talk about - the map of gold. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, in Victoria in 1851, and in Otago, New Zealand in 1861, adventurers and strolling players like Coppin had a more focussed map to bring them to America and Australasia and to travel between them—and the pickings were greater, not just in gold but in what successful miners spent their gold on—which was often entertainment. Coppin made a trip to London in 1855 and arranged for the great tragedian GV Brooke to tour the Australian colonies. Brooke stayed for six years, and the family ties were tightened when Coppin married Brooke's widowed sister-in-law—and, when she died a few years later, her daughter. Brooke in his turn brought the young actress Fanny Cathcart to Australia. She married a fellow actor, and, as Mrs Heir, she led one of the colonies' major theatrical companies for many years; and after her husband died, she married another actor-manager, George Darrell. Fanny Cathcart's older brother James Cathcart came to the colonies with another of Coppin's imports, Charles Kean, in the early 1860s. He and Kean went on to tour the United States, but Cathcart returned to Australia ten years later, and was a beloved figure in the theatrical world here till his death in 1902.[10]
     
  13. Gold also lured Richard Stewart, the father of Australia's Sweetheart, Nellie Stewart, to Victoria in the 1850s. From a theatrical family, he quickly turned from mining to entertaining and married actress Theodosia Guerin - and Nellie Stewart was born to the couple in 1858.[11]
     
  14. Gold again brought the skilled circus performer GBS Lewis to Victoria in 1853, where he opened Astley's Amphitheatre for equestrian drama and circus.[12] But the theatrical 'mind map' was changing rapidly—and it was increasingly focussed on what we would now call 'the Pacific Rim'—though it did, like Prime Minister Rudd's current mind map, include India, which then, of course, included Burma. In 1854 Japan was opened up to outside influence by the Treaty of Kanagawa with the United States government. In 1858 British rule in India was consolidated when the authority of the British East India Company was transferred to the British Crown. The 1860 Convention of Peking between the British and Chinese Empires, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China granted freedom of movement and guarantees of protection for persons and property in each other's territory. In particular, the Burlingame Treaty recognised 'the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from one country to the other for purposes of curiosity, of trade or as permanent residents.'[13]
     
  15. These treaties and the sentiments they embodied encouraged millions of people from varied backgrounds—Chinese, Indian, Japanese and European alike—to move across the Asia-Pacific region as travellers, workers, and migrants.[14] Australia was well placed to benefit from this transnational flow; and one of the industries that benefited most was the theatre.
     
  16. GBS Lewis was one of the first to take advantage of this. In 1859 he took his circus company to China, possibly with Henry Risley's troupe, which was in Australia at that time.[15] Back in Australia in 1863, he formed a dramatic company with the Edouin family, a former juvenile troupe, 'the celebrated Edouin Family,' who had moved, like many theatrical groups, from the US in 1849 to the Australasian colonies in 1856 and then on to India, China and Japan. Lewis's new company toured British communities in Asia, and in 1864 in Shanghai he married Rose Edouin, now aged twenty. (Her brother Willie Edouin returned to the US to join the company of burlesque star Lydia Thompson, who had been in a juvenile company with him in their native England, and became one of the world's greatest comedians.)[16] From 1867 the Lewises and their company opened annual dismountable theatres on the Calcutta maidan. For the next ten years the company commuted from Australia to China and India, playing Shakespeare and popular melodramas such as East Lynne. They settled finally in Melbourne in 1876, where they leased a number of theatres and Rose Lewis became a leading elocution teacher who trained many Australian actors. The couple lived in comfortable semi-retirement until they lost much of their money in the 1890s depression. Drawing on her family connections, Mrs Lewis became Rose Edouin again and joined her now-famous brother at his Strand Theatre in London. After her husband died in 1906, she returned permanently to the London stage until her death in 1925.
     
  17. With the completion of the American transcontinental railroad and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the theatrical map changed once again. The Australasian colonies were now, more than ever, part of a world circuit that took in the whole English-speaking world. British actors—if they had the stamina—played in Cairo, India (including Burma), China, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada before returning to London; and American actors traced this route from the opposite direction, heading for New Zealand and Australia from California. India became an important node in these theatrical maps. Future giant of the Australian theatre George Titheradge was playing Hamlet in the Corinthian Theatre, Calcutta in late 1876 when he was called upon to be the herald at Lord Lytton's durbar for the proclamation of Queen Victoria as the Empress of India.[17] Back in India in 1878, he continued to Melbourne the following year and toured for three years until he moved on to the United States in 1882. He finally settled in Australia from 1883 to 1899 and again in 1908, becoming president of the Australian Actors Association before his death in 1916.[18]
     
  18. Further developments in the Pacific tipped the centre of Australia's mind maps towards its links with the United States. Steamships began to ply regularly between California and Australasia in 1874. Over the next thirty years, the US extended its Pacific interests, first of all by annexing Hawaii and then by taking over the Philippines and Guam from Spain—resulting in what Carroll Pursell has described as the 'offshoring' of the American Dream.[19] These were years of Australia's own ambitions for colonial power in the Pacific and of close ties of friendship and exchange of ideas between Australian statesmen such as Alfred Deakin and American intellectuals, and of American reformers' interest in Australia's emerging state socialism.[20] United States power and Australian-US friendship were symbolically consolidated in 1908 when the Great White Fleet of sixteen American battle ships and seven auxiliary ships visited Australia as part of an 18-month journey around the Pacific Rim, and through the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean - a visit, I might add, that was not condoned by the British government.
     
  19. During this period, Australia quickly became the metropole for theatrical circuits in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. In 1874 the global networks in which the Australian theatrical world was now enmeshed brought to Australia the young American comedians JC Williamson and his wife Maggie Moore—'young, handsome [and] sober' and able to 'sing and dance good,' according to their California agent.[21] Williamson and Moore were a great hit in Australia, and after they completed their world tour through Asia and Europe and back to the US—the Asian leg of which they did with the Lewises, they returned to Australia with the rights to HMS Pinafore. With Coppin as a silent partner, Williamson formed the Royal Comic Opera Company and a partnership with Arthur Garner and George Musgrove known as the Triumvirate. In various incarnations the Triumvirate and its successors dominated the Australian theatrical world, eventually known as JC Williamson's—or just 'the Firm.'[22]
     
  20. The partnership of Williamson and Musgrove brought together many of the maps I have been discussing so far and centred them firmly in Sydney and Melbourne. The British-born Musgrove followed his uncle William Lyster to Australia in 1866, when he was 12 years old. Lyster was another Coppin, described by his biographer as a 'pushing, energetic business man, personally liked … and possessed of that valuable quality, tact'—a quality that Coppin apparently did not share.[23] Born in Dublin to a 'good' family, he went on a sea voyage for his health in his early teens - in a whaling boat! — during which he visited Sydney and Melbourne. He spent a year in Calcutta deciding he did not want to be an indigo planter, then volunteered for the Kaffir War in 1847. He went to America in 1848 with his two brothers, one of whom fell overboard and drowned during the voyage. In 1855 he joined soldier of fortune William Walker in an ill-fated expedition to Nicaragua. The other brother, Frederick, was by this time a well-established musician, and after the Nicaragua fiasco, William joined him as manager of an opera troupe that featured Frederick's wife and William's future wife, Georgina Hodson, who came, in her turn, from a well-known British theatrical family.[24]
     
  21. With the Civil War looming and the lure of an Australasia newly affluent from gold, they took the company to Australia in 1861 and William Lyster subsequently made his headquarters there, going backwards and forwards to the US and Europe engaging singers for his various opera companies.[25] His nephew George Musgrove started his career in Lyster's box office.[26] Frederick Lyster—that is, the brother who returned to the US—had recruited the young JC Williamson and Maggie Moore to his stock company in San Francisco in 1872, and it could well have been through the Lyster brothers that Coppin heard of them.[27]
     
  22. Whatever the case, Williamson—born in the US, and Musgrove—born in England, began a long, rocky, partnership in 1881 that drew on their combined world-wide connections to build a major theatrical firm in Australia that developed its own territory—the major cities and towns of the Australian colonies and New Zealand, brought American and British performers and companies to Australasia, and brought Australasian actors and singers into a global network that increasingly linked Australasia and the Unites States. As Williamson put it:

      In seeking new attractions I keep in touch with the market all over the world. I watch everything in the theatre world and personally visit England and America every two or three years. I see the most notable productions and talk with my representatives, whom I at the same time acquaint with the prevalent taste of theatregoers in Australia. I also read carefully press notices for all parts of the world and keep a careful and systematic record of them.. . ."[28]

  23. They did not have to look far for one of their principal attraction, Nellie Stewart—daughter of the peripatetic Stewart family who made their base in Australia in 1858. From 1878, now aged twenty, Nellie Stewart toured with her family through New Zealand, Calcutta, Bombay, London, and the US. In 1880 Coppin cabled her in the US offering her the role of principal boy in the pantomime Sinbad the Sailor. George Musgrove saw her in this role and offered her the lead in Offenbach's La Fille du Tambour Major, and this was the beginning of her enormously popular Australian career—and of their long personal relationship, never with the benefit of clergy, but acknowledged by all. Musgrove and Stewart made many long visits to London, where Stewart made her London debut in 1892 and Musgrove acted as The Firm's agent in 1896. From 1897 to 1905 he leased the Shaftesbury Theatre, where he successfully introduced American musicals that he considered had more 'go' than British ones. In 1905 the company began a tour of the US. Sweet Nell was successful in San Francisco, but the 1906 earthquake shattered their plans of reaching New York.[29]
     
  24. The partnership of Williamson and Musgrove established a distinctive Australasian theatrical system in the 1890s, which Williamson brought to perfection in partnership with George Tallis and Gustave Ramaciotti from 1903 till his death in 1913.[30] Theatre scholar Veronica Kelly has called this Australia-based system a 'complementary economy'.[31] What she refers to is an almost independent theatrical economy that was linked into the world centres of London, and increasingly New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, but had its own tastes and its own territory—rural Australia, New Zealand, what was then called the East, and from 1913, South Africa. Within this complementary economy, a system developed that was devised by George Musgrove in 1896. Williamson preferred to import stars with their entire company; but Musgrove proposed, as more economical and less risky, a sort of repertory company, with some imported actors - established actors but not stars—and some local players.
     
  25. Musgrove's system worked. The first company they formed in 1897, 'Julius Knight with English & Australian Actors', featured the relatively unknown English actor Julius Knight, along with five other imported actors and a number of local players.[32] The Australian public took the handsome young actor to their hearts and made him their star. He returned again and again between 1898 and 1916, spending 16 years of his career in Australia and training several cohorts of actors.[33] Although Knight had the most lasting effect on the formation and training of the Williamson [JCW] stock companies, other companies also flourished and nurtured Australian talent under the JCW banner. Increasingly these were American. Some of the up-and-coming American actors who came to Australia between 1900 and 1908 were Nance O'Neil, the young American tragedienne Minnie Tittell Brune, a very young John Barrymore, Charles Waldron and Ola Humphries, and, in 1908, the great Canadian actor Margaret Anglin.[34]
     
  26. As part of stock companies that worked with these visiting actors, the Australians employed by Williamsons became part of a global freemasonry, gaining entrée into a worldwide theatrical labour market that increasingly focused on New York and Hollywood. These close links were consolidated between 1912 and 1915 by the visit of comedian Fred Niblo and his wife Josephine Cohan. Josephine Niblo was the daughter of George M. Cohan, perhaps the most successful theatrical entrepreneur, performer, writer and producer of his time. (A self-described 'song-and-dance man,' Cohan wrote Give My Regards to Broadway and Yankee Doodle Dandy, among many other well-known songs). Niblo and Cohan came for two years but stayed for three, introducing new, fast-paced American comedy that Australian audiences loved. It was a mutual love affair, and Niblo retained close links with Australia when he finally returned to the US, furthering the careers of many Australian actors, including that of beautiful young Australian Enid Bennett, whom he married in 1918, two years after Josephine Cohan had died. Bennet became a major Hollywood star, appearing in Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks in 1922 and Niblo a popular Hollywood director (Blood and Sand with Rudolph Valentino, 1922 and Ben Hur, 1925), and the pair was part of Hollywood royalty in the early 1920s.[35]
     
  27. This new US-Australian circuit drew many talented Australians to Broadway and to the American film world, first of all in New York and then in Hollywood, from the earliest days of movie making. Clara Thompson, for instance, the wife of Williamson's musical director, Henry Bracy, followed Nance O'Neil to the US, acted with her and the young actor Lawrence Griffith in California in 1906, and became part of his stock company at Biograph when he became the up-and-coming movie producer and director in 1908.[36] Australians—or should I say Australasian—many of these were born in New Zealand—Ronald Byram, E. Pirie Bush, Leonard Willey and his wife Irby Marshall, Enid Bennett, Marjorie Bennett, Sylvia Bremer, Arthur Shirley, Dorothy Cumming, Louise Carbasse (as Louise Lovely), Rupert Julian and his wife Elsie Wilson—to mention just a few of the many names that are now mostly forgotten in Australia—did well in this new labour market because they were well-trained and because, as I argue in a recent article, they were cosmopolitans before they ever left Australia, ready—as Christina Stead remembered it, to board a ship for elsewhere—something that was 'so natural, because these ships were always in and out, in and out.'[37]
     
  28. I have talked so far about 'mind maps' or 'geographies of the mind'—the different ways English-speaking theatrical people situated Australia in their minds. But there was another 'mind map' that had only a tenuous relationship with actual geographical places. This was the map of family. I have spoken many times in the last thirty minutes about who was the daughter of who and who was married to who. This will give you a sense of the thickness of the 'tender ties'—to use Sylvia Van Kirk's evocative phrase—that wove the world theatrical fraternity together.[38] Theatrical people had lives very different from other people. They moved constantly, often over vast distances and from country to country. Even when they were settled, they worked at night and slept in the day - hours not conducive to a stable family life with anyone other than fellow actors. There were enormous hazards in this life. Theatre history is littered with suicides in lonely rooms, loss at sea, miscarriages, stillbirths, infant deaths, divorces, infidelities. A good marriage and a close-knit family was the best guard against these dangers. The families I have talked about today—those who established the Australian theatrical industry—were related to each other in all sorts of intricate ways—George Coppin was married to GV Brooke's sister; GV Brooke brought Fanny Cathcart to Australia and her brother James Cathcart followed her. Rose Edouin came to Australia as part of the juvenile company formed by the Edouin Family, and when she married GBW Lewis, they toured as a couple, often with other family members. Nellie Stewart was born into a travelling family company. William Lyster came to Australia as manager of his brother's opera company and he married company member Georgina Hodson, whose nephew George Musgrove began in Lyster's box office and formed a long-term attachment—really a marriage—to Nellie Stewart, as well as being her manager. These family maps overlay the geographical ones, adjusting themselves to the changes brought about by the serendipity of adventure, the lure of gold, large-scale political movements and ambitions, and improvements in transport and communication.
     
  29. In conclusion, let me return to Prime Minister Rudd's exhortation that 'We need to link into the world, not shut ourselves off from it.' This is the message that I have received loud and clear from my own life and from my work, first of all on the American feminist, anthropologist, and transnationalist Elsie Clews Parsons, and now in my work on Judith Anderson, who was one of the 'cosmopolitans at home' who took advantage of the global theatrical labour market I have just talked about and lived and worked happily in the US for the rest of her life without ever feeling that she was no longer an Australian.[39]

    'We need to link into the world, not shut ourselves off from it.'
     
  30. Many historians based in Australia and New Zealand have been expounding this idea over the last few years.[40] At this week's conference we have many papers on individual countries, mainly on Australia; but in what I think is a new development, ninety-five papers are on what I would call transnational history, eighty of these focused on Australia in some way in the world. This new development is exemplified by the panel, fittingly titled 'Reconceptionalising Australian History', that will discuss a major new book that sets a benchmark for looking at Australia in the world: Drawing the Global Colour Line, by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.
     
  31. And then, to mention just a few of the papers using this transnational perspective: Graham Willett writes about the homosexual world in Australia and its place in a transnational world.

    • Angela Woollacott looks at the Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman as a transnational icon of the spectacular, fit, modern female body.

    • Richard Pennell examines the way global politics tossed Maltese murderer Joseph Azzopardi from pillar to post, so that he finally ended up transported to the Australian colonies.

    • Barbara Webster links the local and the global in her paper on railway and port development in Rockhampton, Queensland.

    • Andrea Lemon examines the geographical and genealogical maps of Australian circus families and how they place themselves in history through those maps. As she points out, the circus, rather than the Australian state, is their country.

    • Shino Konishi and Leah Lui-Chivizhe look at the lives of young Torres Strait Islanders who were recruited to build railways in the Pilbara district of northwestern Australia.

    • Nick Guoth remembers the 1923 Chinese football tour of Australia.

    • Heather Goodall retells an iconic Australian story of local union self-congratulation—the 1945 boycott of Dutch shipping in Australia in support of Indonesian independence—as an Indian Ocean story of political and social interaction between working people of India, Australia and Indonesia—with Indian seamen as the actual heroes.

    • Ann Curthoys explores the visit of African American communist singer Paul Robeson to Australia and New Zealand, especially for its role in the developing Aboriginal rights movement. Her concern, she says in her abstract, is to place the history of Australian racialized politics and culture in its world context, and to situate local activism in relation to international political movements, especially those for racial justice.

    • And finally, in 'A Ride Down Horseferry Road', Anne-Marie Conde evokes the place of this 'charmless part of Westminster' in Australian history. During the First World War, the neo-Gothic buildings at 130 Horseferry Road were the headquarters of the Australian Imperial Force in London. Australians serving on the Western Front (and in the Middle East), she points out, would have tramped along Horseferry Road to report in while on leave, to collect pay, to replenish uniform and kit, to have a bath and a feed, to post a letter, to see a show, and to sleep at last between clean white sheets. Her paper explores the ways in which tens of thousands of Australians once called this place home. I like to imagine Judith Anderson's lover, Oliver Hogue, enjoying these 'home' comforts when he was being demobbed in London in 1918, before dying of influenza after having survived Gallipoli and the entire desert campaign.

     
  32. And, again fittingly, we will hear from keynote speakers from Britain, Australia, and the United States who will help clarify how to think about movement and place—elements of Australian life I have touched on briefly today and that I hope will inspire new perspectives in Australian history over the coming years.
     
  33. Once more, welcome. And enjoy the intellectual feast laid out before you.


Endnotes

[1] Miles Franklin, Laughter Not for a Cage: Notes on Australian Writing with Biographical Emphasis on the Struggles, Function, and Achievements of the Novel in Three Half-Centuries, Angus & Robertson, 1956; Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, William Heinemann Ltd, 1930.

[2] APEC comprises Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Mexico. New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Thailand, United States and Viet Nam.

[3] Matthew Franklin, 'Kevin Rudd to drive Asian union,' in The Australian, 5 June 2008.

[4] Thanks to Melanie Nolan for drawing my attention to these figures.

[5] Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity, Sydney: Currency Press, 2005.

[6] Margaret Steven, 'Risk Management in the 18th Century,' paper delivered in the seminar series of the History Program, RSSS, ANU, 2003. This is part of a larger biography of Berry that Stevens is engaged on.

[7] TM Perry, 'Berry, Alexander 1781–1873,' in Australian Dictionary of Biography, [ADB], Volume 1, Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp. 92–95.

[8] This biography, 'Judith Anderson: Voice and Emotion in the Making of an International Star,' is funded by an ARC Discovery Grant. For work published so far see Desley Deacon, 'Films as Foreign Offices: Transnationalism at Paramount in the Twenties and Early Thirties,' in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005, 129–46; 'From Sydney to Hollywood: JC Stock Companies and the World Theatrical Market,' Refereed paper, Australian Modernities Conference: Vernacular Performers and Consumers. University of Queensland, December 2006; '"World English"? How an Australian Invented "Good American Speech",' in Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon (eds), Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, ANU E Press, 2007; 'A Cosmopolitan at Home,' in Meanjinvol. 66, no. 4, 2007-vol. 67, no. 1, 2008; 'Cosmopolitans at Home: Judith Anderson and the American Aspirations of JC Williamson Stock Company Members, 1897–1918,' in Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly (eds), Impact of the Modern: Everyday modernities in Australia 1890-1960, Sydney University Press, 2008 (in press); 'Becoming Cosmopolitan: Judith Anderson in Sydney, 1913 to 1918,' in Transnational Lives, ed. with Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (under review, Palgrave Press). For transnational lives see 'Introduction' (with Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed with Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott. ANU E-Press (in press); and 'Introduction' (with Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott), Transnational Lives.

[9] Sally O'Neill, 'Coppin, George Selth 1819–1906,' ADB, Volume 3, Melbourne University Press, 1969, pp. 459–62. See also Alec Bagot, Coppin the Great: Father of the Australian Theatre, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965.

[10] HL Oppenheim, 'Brooke, Gustavus Vaughan 18–1866,' ADB, Volume 3, Melbourne University Press, 1969, pp. 243–45; Helen M. van der Poorten, 'Cathcart, Mary Fanny 1833–1880,' ADB, Volume 3, Melbourne University Press, 1969, pp. 369–71; 'Kean, Charles John 1811–1868,' ADB, Volume 5, Melbourne University Press, 1974, p. 4; 'Cathcart, James Faucitt 1828–1902,' ADB, Volume 3, Melbourne University Press, 1969, p. 369; and 'Darrell, George Frederick Price 1851–1921,' ADB, Volume 4, Melbourne University Press, 1972, pp. 22–23.

[11] Ross Cooper, 'Stewart, Eleanor Towzey (Nellie) 1858–1931,' ADB, Volume 12, Melbourne University Press, 1990, pp. 86–87.

[12] Mimi Colligan, 'Lewis, George Benjamin William 1818–1906,' ADB, Supplementary Volume, Melbourne University Press, 2005, pp. 232–33.

[13] Marilyn Lake, 'Lowe Kong Meng appeals to international law: Transnational lives caught between empire and nation,' in Deacon, Russell and Woollacott, Transnational Lives. See also Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, 'Modern Mobilities,' in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 15–45.

[14] Lake, 'Lowe Kong Meng appeals to international law.'

[15] Stuart Thayer, 'Richard Risley Carlisle, Man in Motion,' Circus History Society, 2005, online: http://www.circushistory.org/Thayer/Thayer3o.htm, accessed 18 August 2008.

[16] [Anon.], 'Edouin, Willie 1846–1908,' rev. Nilanjana Banerji, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32973, accessed 28 June 2008. For Thompson, see Kurt, Ganzl, Lydia Thompson: A Biography, Routledge, 2002; for the Edouins see Ganzl, William B Gill: From the Gold Fields to Broadway, Routledge, 2002.

[17] John F. Riddick, The History of British India: A Chronology, Westport, Conn., Praeger, 2006, p. 71. See image at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Delhi_Durbar_1877.jpg.

[18] Martha Rutledge, 'Titheradge, George Sutton 1848–1916,' ADB, Volume 6, Melbourne University Press, 1976, pp. 279–80.

[19] Carroll Pursell, Technology in Postwar America: A History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

[20] See Marilyn Lake, 'Special Friends,' in Peter Beilharz and Robert Manne (eds), Reflected Light: La Trobe Essays, BlackInc, Melbourne, 2006; '"The Brightness of Eyes and Quiet Assurance that Seem to Say American": Alfred Deakin's Identification with Republican Manhood,' in Australian Historical Studies 28, 129, April 2007; 'Australia's Statutory Authority for an Island Empire: Edmund Barton's reminder to the Colonial Office,' paper presented at the 'Making Empire Visible in the Metropole: Comparative Imperial Transformations in America, Australia, England & France' Conference, University of Wisconsin/University of Sydney, Sydney, 2–4 July 2008; 'Special Friends: Fraternal Yearning Across the Pacific,' paper presented at the Australian Historical Association Biennial Conference, Melbourne, 2008.

[21] Peter Downes, Shadows on the Stage: Theatre in New Zealand: the First 70 Years, Dunedin, John McIndoe, 1975, p. 80, quoted in Bagot, Coppin the Great.

[22] Helen M. van der Poorten, 'Williamson, James Cassius 1845–1913,' ADB, Volume 6, Melbourne University Press, 1976, pp. 406–07; and Richard Refshauge, 'Moore, Maggie 1851–1926,' ADB, Volume 5, Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 279–80; Jean Gittins, 'Musgrove, George 1854–1916,' ADB, Volume 5, Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 324–25.

[23] Sally O'Neill, Maureen Thérèse Radic, 'Lyster, William Saurin 1828–1880,' ADB, Volume 5, Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 116–17.

[24] Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera troupes in the United States, 1825–60, University of Illinois Press, 76, 244–47, 267, 418–68. See Errol Sherson, London's Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century, Ayer, 1925 for George Hodson and descendents, including Henrietta.

[25] Harold Love, The Golden Age of Australian Opera: WS Lyster and His Companies, Sydney, Currency Press, 1981; Alison Gyger, Civilising the Colonies: Pioneering Opera in Australia, Sydney, Pellinor, 1999; Opera for the Antipodes: Opera in Australia, 1881–1939, Currency Press, 1990; Frank Van Straten, 'William Saurin Lyster 1828–1880,' Live Performance Australia: Hall of Fame, 2007, online: http://www.binaryblue.com.au/LPA/williamlyster1.html, accessed 18 August 2008.

[26] Van Straten, 'William Saurin Lyster.'

[27] Van Straten, 'William Saurin Lyster.'

[28] Downes, Shadows on the Stage, p. 86.

[29] Cooper, 'Stewart, Eleanor Towzey (Nellie)'; and Gittins, 'Musgrove, George.'

[30] van der Poorten, 'Williamson, James Cassius'; Refshauge, 'Moore, Maggie'; Colligan, 'Lewis, George Benjamin William'; D. Shoesmith, 'Jefferson, Joseph 1829–1905,' ADB, Vol. 4, 1972, pp. 475 –76; Gittins, Musgrove, George'; M. Colligan, 'Tallis, Sir George 1869 –1948,' ADB, Vol. 12, 1990, pp. 165–66; C. Neumann, 'Ramaciotti, Gustave Mario 1861 –1927,' ADB, Vol. 11, 1988, pp. 325 –26.

[31] Veronica Kelly, 'A Complementary Economy? National Markets and International Product in Early Australian Theatre Managements,' in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 21, no. 1 (February 2005):77 –95.

[32] Playbill, 13 February 1897 for Prisoner of Zenda, Princess Theatre Melbourne. Georgina Musgrove Scrapbook: 36, National Library of Australia [NLA] 8426.

[33] Veronica Kelly, 'Julius Knight, Australian Matinee Idol: Costume Drama as Historical Re-Presentation,' in Australian Victorian Studies Journal, Vol. 9 (2003):128 –44.; Deacon, 'Cosmopolitans at Home'.

[34] 'Miss Nance O'Neil. A farewell demonstration,' in Argus, 30 August 1900, p. 6; Table Talk, 7 June 1900, p. 10; Argus, 11 June 1900, p. 6; & 18 June 1900, p. 6; Table Talk, 26 July 1900, p. 9; Argus, 12 June 1905, p. 7; Table Talk, 22 June 1905; K. Brisbane (ed.), Entertaining Australia: The performing arts as cultural history: an illustrated history, Sydney: Currency Press, 1991, p. 140. For Brune, see Table Talk, 11 August 1904; Veronica Kelly, 'An Australian idol of modernist consumerism: Minnie Tittell Brune and the Gallery Girls,' in Theatre Research International, Vol. 31 (2006):17 –36, 161 –62, 179; and 'JC Williamson produces Parsifal, or the Redemption of Kundry: Wagnerism, religion, and sexuality,' in Theatre History Studies, Vol. 15, (1995):161 –181; Brisbane Entertaining Australia, p. 140; and R. Fotheringham, in Parsons and Chance, Companion, p. 600. For Barrymore see Damned in Paradise: The Life of John Barrymore, Athenaeum, 1977; William Collier Co with John Barrymore, The Dictator 26 May 1906, Her Majesty's Theatre, Melbourne for 3 weeks: see Tallis; Argus, 28 May 1906, p. 6. For Waldron and Humphrey see SMH, 24 September 1906, p. 4; Table Talk, 6 June 1907. For Anglin see Table Talk & Argus, 30 April to 17 December 1908; SMH, 23 November to 7 December 1908; Theatre, 1 January 1909, p. 13; Brisbane Entertaining Australia, p. 141.

[35] Robin Hood, United Artists/ Douglas Fairbanks, 1922; Blood and Sand, Famous Players-Lasky, 1922; Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, 1925. For Niblos and Bennett see For Niblo see 'Farewelling the Niblos,' in Theatre, 1 April 1915, pp. 5 –8; obituaries in York Republican, November 18, 1948, p. 1 and New York Times, November 12, 1948, p. 23; National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 38 (1953):264 –65; International Directory of Films and Filmmakers: Directors, 2nd ed, Vol. 2, St. James Press, 199l, pp. 603 –05; Lincoln Journal Star, June 27, 1999: K-2; Deacon, 'Becoming Cosmopolitan.' For Cohans, see George M. Cohan, Prince of the American Theater, Lippincott, 1943.

[36] See Ganzl, Lydia Thompson; and Deacon, 'Cosmopolitans at Home.'

[37] Deacon, 'Cosmopolitans at Home'; and 'From Sydney to Hollywood'; Rodney Wetherell, 'Interview with Christina Stead,' in Australian Literary Studies, 9.4 , 1980, p. 437. For Griffith see Robert M. Henderson, DW Griffith: The years at Biograph, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. See also Ina Bertrand, 'Lovely, Louise Nellie 1895–1980,' ADB, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, 1986, pp 156 –57; 'An Actor Who Has Made Good. Jerome Patrick's American Career,' in The Theatre, 1 November 1919, pp. 5–9; 'Patrick of New Zealand,' New York Times, Sep 27, 1914, p. X5; for Rupert Julian and Elsie Jane Wilson see The Theatre, 1 December 1914, p. 26, For Ronald Byram see The Theatre, 1 September 1916, p. 34 For Willey see 'Australians in America. A Leonard Willey Letter,' 1 May 1915, p. 39. For Bremer see 'Film Forecasts: Another Australian Find,' 1 June 1917, pp. 27 –30; and 'In the Limelight: The Australian Girl, as a Movie Actress in America,' in Lone Hand, July 1917, pp. 383 & 384.

[38] Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870, Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1980.

[39] Desley Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

[40] See in particular Curthoys and Lake, Connected Worlds; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; and Deacon, Russell and Woollacott, Transnational Lives and Transnational Ties.



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