AUSTRALIAN
CULTURE 1789-2000
By Paul Bentley
October
1999
Strike
Me Lucky! 1901-1950
When the Commonwealth of
Australia came into being on 1 January 1901, the continent was still a
collection of divided and distant states. There were divisions between city
and country, antipathies between east and west, and rivalries between
cities. There was no national anthem and no national flag. Australians still
felt a strong allegiance to Britain.
The national surge of the
1890s faltered under the strain of new economic and social tensions:
management of the new nation, conflicts between capital and labour, between
government and unions, and the tribulations of another devastating economic
depression. Two world wars cemented ties with the mother country. At a time
when the weekly musical evening round the piano formed the basis of cheap
entertainment, the gramophone and crystal set created new diversions for the
home. In theatres, new entrepreneurs of the silver screen offered
competition to the old-style live theatre managements.
Theatre
By the second decade of the
twentieth century, most of the theatrical movers of the past two decades had
retired or were dead. After the death of J.C. Williamson in 1913, the
company merged with the Tait brothers in 1920 and remained the dominant
force in Australian show business.
The Musgrove family
continued to play a role in entertainment after the death of George Musgrove
in 1916. Three of his brothers, Harry, Arthur and Frank, were involved in
theatre management and his nephews, Harry G. Musgrove and Jack Musgrove,
were involved in vaudeville, film distribution and exhibition and dance hall
management in the first half of the century, a period in which Nancye
Stewart, daughter of George Musgrove and Nellie Stewart, performed with
distinction in theatre, film, radio and television in Australia and abroad.
Australian-born William
Anderson (1868-1940) continued the tradition of the English-born actor
managers, with polished and spectacular productions of melodramas such as
The Worst Woman of London and The Greed of Gold and "Australian
plays for Australian audiences," written by members of his company, Edmund
Duggan and Bert Bailey. In The Squatter's Daughter, two real
kookaburras greeted the Australian down of a typical Australian landscape
and, later, a wallaby and kangaroo rat bounded across the stage. On Our
Selection brought Bert Bailey fame and fortune as Dad Rudd in many stage and
film versions and sequels, both silent and talking.
Repertory or little
theatres - amateur or semi-professional enterprises emerged to champion the
plays of Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, O'Neill and Australian playwrights. Leading
the movement was Gregan McMahon, whose Melbourne and Sydney Repertory
Theatres and Gregan McMahon Players were active, with the support of
J.C.Williamson and the Tait brothers, from 1909 until McMahon's death in
1941. In 1930, Doris Fitton, one of McMahon's pupils, established the
Independent Theatre in Sydney and continued the repertory theatre tradition
until the demise of the Independent in 1977. New Theatre in Sydney, part of
a network of left-wing theatre groups, was formed in 1932 and has survived
into the 1990s.
Vaudeville and revues were
the most popular forms of entertainment in the first decades of the new
century. The most successful enterprise was the Tivoli Circuit, established
by Harry Rickards in 1893. In 1909, Rickards had 532 people on his payroll.
The Circuit was carried on after Rickards' death in 1911 by a succession of
managements including Hugh D. Mclntosh (in 1912), Harry G. Musgrove (in
1921), J.C. Williamson's Tivoli Vaudeville Pty Ltd in 1924, Mike Connors and
Queenie Paul (in the Depressions years), Musgrove Theatres again in 1934
under Frank Neil and Wallace Parnell and, from 1944, David N. Martin,
Managing Director of Tivoli Circuit of Australia. The Fuller brothers were
the biggest competitors to the Tivoli after taking over the Brennan
vaudeville circuit. Billed as the home of clean vaudeville, they based their
operations on local performers, rather than the overseas celebrities of the
Tivoli, and introduced Australian audiences to George Wallace, Jim Gerald
and Roy Rene and other comedy stars of the era. "Strike me lucky", "cheeky
possum" and other comic lines of Roy Rene became embedded in the Australian
vernacular. The Fuller circuit transferred their interests to moving
pictures in the 1930s, but became involved briefly again in the theatre
during the 1950s.
Travelling vaudeville,
dramatic companies and circuses showed resilience during the first three
decades of the century. In 1905, there were 31 touring companies including
Cole's Wild West Dramatic Company, Coleman's Pantomime Company, Pat Hanna's
Diggers, the Lynch Family Bellringers, Kate Howarde and George Sorlie. The
dramatic companies died with the advent of the talkies and the depression
played havoc with the vaudeville shows, although some of them survived into
the 1950s.
Circus
In the circus world, Wirths
gained supremacy when both Fitzgerald brothers died in 1906. The bush
circuses flourished and proved to be more popular in the country areas than
the rival itinerant theatre and vaudeville shows. The family circuses of
Sole Brothers, Perry Brothers, St. Leon, Bullens, Ivan Brothers and Ashtons
continued to combat the physical hardships of climate and terrain and the
increasing costs of travel with new, motorised transport. In the difficult
times, it was the strong family thread and the interchange of performers and
intermarriage which stitched up their survival.
Film
Theatre had survived
competition from silent films, but the arrival of the talkies at the
beginning of the Depression was almost fatal, with a crippling entertainment
tax, imposed until 1933 by both the federal and most state governments
adding to the financial pressure on theatre companies. In 1929, Sydney
boasted 10 theatres; in 1935 there were two.
The movies had been
introduced to Australia in 1896, when Carl Hertz presented his cinematograph
at Melbourne's Tivoli Theatre. J and N Tait produced Australia's first
feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang. The infant Australian film
industry was ahead of most other countries and it continued to flourish
until the talkies arrived in the 1930s, when competition from Hollywood and
its control of distribution in Australia strangled the efforts of Australian
filmmakers, despite notable efforts by Cinesound, which produced 17 features
between 1931 and 1940, including the popular series of film adaptations of
the Steele Rudd novels.
Radio
Radio broadcasting officially started in Australia on 13 November 1923 and,
by by 1939, more than 1 million people held radio licences and were tuning
in to Dad and Dave and other popular radio serials. In 1932, a national
broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, was established under
Charles Moses and became an important force, not only in the development of
radio broadcasting, but live concert music as well. In 1936, Moses, with the
help of Bernard Heinze established ABC orchestras in each state, with a
small core of professional musicians - as many as forty-five in Sydney and
as few as eleven in Hobart - augmented by amateur musicians. In 1946, the
Sydney Symphony Orchestra was increased to full orchestral proportions on a
full-time basis and a conductor of international reputation, Eugene Goossens
was appointed as first resident conductor. With Goossens on the podium,
subscribers to the ABC's orchestral series rose from 3663 in 1946 to 9629 in
1955. Season tickets, according to Charles Buttrose, "had become items for
mention in last wills and testaments".
The ABC, during this
period, was also a catalyst for the presentation of Australian drama on
radio through the efforts of Leslie Rees, who joined the Commission as
federal drama editor in 1936. Rees organised Australian play festivals in
1937 and 1938 and lifted the ABC's Australian play quota to 70 percent of
all plays presented. Between 1935-1953, almost 200 Australian plays were
produced, including David Stewart's verse drama, Fire in the Snow.
Opera
Opera was presented with
mixed success at frequent intervals during the first half of the 20th
century, largely through the J.C. Williamson organisation, which organised
the enormously successful Melba-Williamson opera seasons of 1911 and 1924,
the 1928 Melba-Williamson season and offerings in 1900, 1910 and 1948-49.
George Musgrove had organised seasons in 1901 and 1907 and, among seasons by
other entrepreneurs, the 1912 tour by the Thomas Quinlan Company from London
stands out. The process of establishing a permanent opera company in
Australia is said to begin in 1939, when Gertrude Johnson, a pupil of Melba,
presented performances of The Flying Dutchman and The Marriage of
Figaro by the National Theatre Movement in Melbourne.
Publishing
The potency of The
Bulletin declined after the turn of the century, as it shed its
republican and radical ideals for a more conservative outlook. The critical
voice of The Bulletin was adopted by a new magazine, Smith's Weekly,
established in 1919 by the Lord Mayor of Sydney, James (later Sir Joynton)
Smith and two journalists, Claude McKay and Robert Clyde Packer (grandfather
of Kerry Packer). It became "the mouthpiece of the digger" and was an
immediate success, selling 35,000 copies of its first issue and 300,000 at
its peak in the mid 1940s, before it ceased publication in 1950.
George Robertson's
entrepreneurial flair at Angus and Robertson was matched by Arthur
Rowlandson at the New South Wales Bookstall Company. It was Rowlandson who
conceived the idea of producing paperback editions of Australian novels in
the company's bookstalls, beginning with a Steel Rudd story, Sandy's
Selection, for which Steel Rudd was paid 500 pounds plus 10 per cent of
sales. This was published in 1904 and, over the next 18 years until
Rowlandson's death in 1922, 200 Australian novels were published and nearly
5 million copies sold.
The
final section of this paper, The Coming of the White Elephants
1950-2000, will be published on our Website in 2011.
