For a young city with only a brief history of stage performance, federation-era Melbourne had a remarkably lively theatre scene. Scanning the amusement columns of the daily newspapers, Melburnians could select from a range of shows playing on the stages of at least five city venues.1 Plays written (or localised from overseas productions) by Australian playwrights comprised a small but significant proportion of that drama.2 Melodrama was the dominant genre of Australian plays produced in Melbourne between 1890 and 1914,3 and Australian playwrights modified many British (and, to some degree, European and American) melodramatic conventions to develop a ‘hybrid form’ that appealed to large audiences.4 A distinct strand of Australian melodrama was set in Australia’s thenrecent past. Many scholars observe that federation-era theatrical melodramas reflected the ways in which Australians began to imagine that they belonged to a nation and shared a distinctive national identity;5 yet none have systematically examined historical melodramas, analysing the trends in how this particular group of plays echoed Melburnians’ emergent nationalism.6 These plays tend to centre on the romanticised portrayal of five subjects of white Australia’s past: innocent convicts, respectable bushrangers, successful gold and silver miners, the Eureka stockade, and courageous settlers of the outback. This article explores how federation historical melodramas depicted past Australians as honourable and successful, bold adventurers and risk-takers. It argues that Melbourne audiences inferred from these plays that their ancestors shaped a spirited, respectable national character, and laid the foundations for a thriving nation.

To Australians, federation represented the birth of their nation. In preparing for and responding to this event, many citizens embraced an idealised vision of their new national community, enthusiastically adopting the nationalist ideologies that captivated Europe at this time.7 This ‘new form of collective identity’ appealed, as Neville Meaney notes, because many Australians were ‘disturbed by the insecurities of an urban-centred and modernising democracy’ and perceived that they 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 de siecle’, a ‘forward-looking, risk-taking’ period ‘when change is both possible and expected’.9 Australians absorbed a western ‘attitude of certainty, security, and optimism’ and a teleological ‘belief in future progress’;10 change would involve the community’s advancement toward prosperous nationhood.

Romanticised interpretations of colonial history were integral to Australian ambitions to create an ideal nation. In contemplating the past, white histories focused only on the years following European settlement, ignoring Indigenous histories. This had the effect of displacing Australia’s original inhabitants as ‘natives’, thus asserting an unproblematic membership of a white Australian nation.11 There was an anxiety to ensure that the colony’s past would not cast a shadow over the new nation and thwart its progress. In particular, Australians were determined to escape the stigma of their convict origins.12 A long-standing tradition of moral uprightness was necessary to the project of developing a respectable nation. To this end, narratives emerged that lauded the achievements of generations of honourable Australians in an uninterrupted, unique history.13 Such narratives emphasised that although Australians experienced various hardships in the past, they overcame them: colonial status did not preclude the creation of a dignified, self-sufficient nation.

An array of utopian writing, as well as Australian painting, novels, short stories, poetry and drama, reflected how the nation took shape in Australians’ collective imagination during the two decades flanking federation.14 Of those cultural forms, stage productions were among the most responsive to Australians’ burgeoning sense that they belonged to a distinctive national community. Theatre is unique in providing a public forum for the immediate, live, spontaneous and collaborative interaction between the members of a society.15 In the ephemeral moments of performance, drama evokes how a community sees itself at a specific point in time. Martin Esslin, building on Aristotle’s theory of mimesis (the notion that art imitates reality), emphasises that theatre is ‘a mirror in which society looks at itself’ and a situation in which a group of people ‘experiences its own identity and reaffirms it’.16 Audiences are only able to comprehend stage productions if they incorporate the values, images and myths with which they are familiar.17 Federation-era theatre can be understood to reflect the perceptions of a significant cross-section of Melbourne society for this reason: it was ‘popular’ culture. To profit from productions, commercial theatre companies principally intended to entertain — and thereby retain — large audiences.18 They attracted Melburnians of various ages, social classes and walks of life,19 and created a light-hearted, playful milieu in which they could reinforce their evolving understandings about the origins of Australia’s nationhood.

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

Australian playwrights modified the stock characters of the melodramatic genre23 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 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 of self, the exploration and understanding of … identity’, especially when ‘heroism [is] harnessed to the ideology of nationhood’.26 The heroes of federation-era historical melodramas were brave, respectable, tenacious and, ultimately, prosperous. They exhibited qualities that would imbue their descendents with the ability to develop a wholesome and successful nation. Such characters presented a guide to how the Australian nation would operate. Elaine Hadley observes that theatrical melodrama was a ‘version of the melodramatic mode’, which constituted ‘a behavioural and expressive model’ for British society.27 The same can be argued for the role played by the characters of historical melodramas for federation-era Melbourne.

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

Assuaging Australians’ anxieties about their ancestors, federation-era playwrights frequently depicted convicts as the morally upright victims of incompetent, unfair and brutal authorities. Dramatisations of Marcus Clarke’s popular novel His Natural Life appeared in various guises throughout the federation era. In 1890, Alfred Dampier, a prominent actor-manager, produced Thomas Somers’s adaptation of this novel, which emphasised that innocent — or at 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 wrongly charged with murder. Transportation is represented as a disproportionate punishment for the offences committed by other endearing convict characters, and the 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 shame surrounding Australia’s convict history. The depiction of the notorious convict Gabbett in For the Term of His Natural Life did not tarnish this image of a goodhumoured and relatively honourable past Australian community. Gabbett is the exception rather than the rule, one of the only convicts not imprisoned for insignificant misdemeanours or for crimes that they did not commit. The other convicts distrust Gabbett, but his exaggerated degeneracy — he delights in murder and is a cannibal33 — amused rather than shocked the audience. A critic for the Australasian alluded to the play’s light-hearted treatment of Australians’ convict ancestors:

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

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

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

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

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

Australian playwrights modelled their bushranging characters on the noble highwaymen of English drama,37 but their melodramas also fed into the mythology about Ned Kelly that Australians enthusiastically propagated almost immediately after the outlaw’s execution in 1880.38 From 1878 to 1880, Kelly prowled Victoria’s rural northeast with his gang.39 Rather than remembering him as a brutal murderer and thief, Australians quickly idolised Ned as a hero who bravely defied squatters on behalf of selectors.40 In the person of Ned Kelly, Australians saw an attractive ‘political definition’ of themselves as heroes who resisted 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 the Kelly legend. A review in the Argus noted the complimentary depictions of these criminals in ‘a stirring piece, founded upon the adventures of the outlawed terrors of the North-East’, which ‘was thoroughly enjoyed’ by the audience:

Mr Barry makes Ned Kelly an amiable sort of murderer, and the characters generally fit in with the common appreciation of the gang, as one which was impelled 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, and from the hippodramatic Newgate Calendar anti-heroes Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard.43

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

Rede’s bushrangers live up to their own mythology and repeatedly face challenges with courage and respectability. For the amusement of the audience, these bushrangers even boasted about their decency. Ned, for instance, reassures an 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 serious moments in which the audience could feel proud of its forebears, such as Ned’s final expression of remorse:

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

Rede encouraged audiences to respond warmly to the other members of the gang who share the honourable values of law-abiding citizens. Steve Hart plans to ‘take to farming and later on have a little homestead’, and Joe Byrne admits, ‘I don’t believe in taking life’.47 The differences between Dan Kelly and his associates made the other bushrangers’ uprightness more credible to audiences. Dan is hotheaded and violent. Whereas Steve believes that the gang should ‘only shoot in self-defence’, Dan orders, ‘shoot down every trooper who comes within range without question or parley’, and keeps to his word.48 It was impossible to argue that all past bushrangers were respectable, but because the play presents one of them as a brutal thug, audiences could more readily accept that his cohorts were virtuous. According to this production, the bushrangers’ contemporaries recognised that most members of the gang were decent, and that they committed illegal deeds for altruistic reasons only. Sergeant Steele observes, ‘there is so much sympathy with these Kellys that it’s hard to get recruits willing and ready to take on the work [of capturing them]’.49

Other federation-era historical melodramas portrayed fictional bushrangers in the same mode as the mythical Kelly gang, as outlaws who demonstrated an instinctive uprightness and bravery rather than any inherent criminality.50 Ambrose Pratt and A S Joseph’s melodrama Thunderbolt (1906) typifies federation-era theatre that perpetuated the image of the bushranger as a ‘great Australian folk hero’ for appreciative audiences.51 In the not-too-distant past, the eponymous protagonist of this play effects moral justice by committing illegal deeds. Alex Mason’s wayward son, Jack, forged a cheque to repay the corrupt bank manager/magistrate Geoffrey Marrow for a gambling debt. Marrow refuses to exchange the cheque for cash, but offers to forgive the debt if Alex Mason allows him to marry his daughter, Maude. Thunderbolt robs Marrow’s coach, forces him to chew up the forged cheque, shoots a murderous bushranger who assaults women, and frees Maude, who assisted with the coach’s robbery and was imprisoned by a bungling policeman. Thunderbolt’s actions, like those of the Kelly gang, seem warranted because he is represented as an innocent victim of unjust authority. Thunderbolt’s sweetheart, Sunday, explains that even prior to his conflict with the corrupt magistrate, other brutal authorities compelled Thunderbolt to adopt his profession, the only respectable option open to him. Providing the audience with another reason to glorify Thunderbolt, Sunday declares: ‘The law and the police treated him cruel hard … when he broke gaol he could do nothing else but take to the bush. If he hadn’t he would have been less than a man.’52 Thunderbolt’s illicit actions are also justified by his selfless intentions; he proves that he did not become a bushranger for personal gain in wealth or power. The outlaw refuses to take money from women or poor men, declines an offer to captain a brutal, immoral bushranging gang, and redistributes stolen money to Marrow’s debtors.53

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

A number of federation-era historical melodramas portrayed the richness, in both the material and the spiritual sense, of the gold rush era in Australia. In promoting The Miner’s Right (1891), which Dampier and Garnet Walch adapted from a novel by Rolf Boldrewood,57 Dampier drew links between Australian successes in the gold rush of the 1850s and present and future Australia. His advertisements promised that this play:

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

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

At a time when men’s minds are filled with the subject of Federation, it is well to recall 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 ‘roaring fifties’ when the men who were thrown together by circumstance were bound 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 The Miner’s Right included the following quotation from a critic:

The period with which it [The Miners’ Right] deals was itself the era of a great romance … a wonderful and all pervading excitement occasioned by the finding of gold … Colonial life was seized with a fever and intensity that have left an indelible mark 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 flourishing Australian community. By describing his fellow silver miners as ‘soldiers of fortune — adventurers’,62 Charlie, the play’s hero, confirms that Australians’ ancestors were bold and tenacious. These miners tried their luck at the remote outpost of Pluckup and their risk-taking was rewarded with riches. When Alice arrives to be the new barmaid, the publican informs her, ‘there’s not a real man here doin’ badly, and a lot are making big money’.63 The characters of The Lady of the Pluckup, with the obvious exception of the villain, display the same spirit of comradeship to which Dampier refers in his advertisement for The Miner’s Right. These early Australians bond together, forming the basis of a unified, successful national community. When Alice is devastated to discover that she is the 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 other men ‘shall be uncles’.64 Ironically, a critic for the Argus was disgruntled that the production did not idealise the material conditions at the mines, and thus offered few 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 order to keep it true to actual life. Real life on a mining rush is mostly dirt and disappointment and tawdry, commonplace roughness.65

Edmund Duggan’s play The Southern Cross (1908) typifies federation-era historical melodramas that showed how the miners of the Eureka stockade contributed to the development of an Australian national character. This play depicted, as a review in the Argus notes, ‘the fight between the diggers and the troops’.66 Duggan demonstrated that the conflict ensued from the miners’ valiant protest against the injustice and immorality of the authorities. The diggers were enraged by the court’s decision, based on the evidence of policemen who accepted bribes, to acquit a publican for the murder of a miner (and for the theft of his profits from the diggings). This perceived unfairness compounded their fury at the gold commissioners’ imposition of weighty licence fees, which they regarded as an unjustifiable tax on free labour.

Audiences of The Southern Cross were shown not only that their ancestors were brave and upright but also that they laid the foundations for a dignified, independent nation despite Australia’s subordination to Britain. Although the miners essentially opposed the representatives of imperial authority in the colony, they appointed an Englishman as their commander-in-chief. Duggan clearly modelled Walter Lisle on the real-life leader of the stockade, Peter Lalor. By changing his nationality (Lalor was Irish), Duggan emphasised that Australians’ rebellion was untainted by Ireland’s violent conflict with Britain. Duggan also showed audiences that Australia’s colonial relationship with Britain would not impede their progress toward nationhood. It is in fact this Englishman who happily 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 whether the miners of Ballarat are … men of spirit and courage … who will unite in one common cause … for liberty.67

He further incites the miners: ‘if it is your wish to see Australia a free country, you must nip oppression in the bud and exterminate it forever’, and ‘burst this chain of tyranny and establish a home of freedom’.68 Lisle confirms that the miners’ flag with its image of the Southern Cross, which the diggers describe as ‘the standard of the Australian Republic’,69 will become a symbol of Australians’ distinguished nationhood. He asserts: ‘this flag is destined to wave over free and United Australia’.70 Soon after the stockade, Lisle already charts it in Australian history as pivotal in the establishment of an Australian nation, stating: ‘I deem it an honour to those heroes who fought at Eureka Australia owes the liberty which she enjoys today’.71

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

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

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

At the beginning of On Our Selection, Joseph Murtagh Rudd (known affectionately as ‘Dad’), the play’s hero and the patriarch of the Rudd clan, battles drought and debt. By its end, he has become a member of parliament, his son and daughter-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-toriches tale, and the characters’ struggles and successes, were an uplifting metaphor for the trajectory of the new nation. The audience appreciated that Australians’ national community and identity evolved out of the contributions and character of these spirited, bold ancestors.

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

My wife and children lived in a bark humpy. They worked in the yards, in the paddicks, 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’ the same this very day.77

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

The scene at the close of the first act, in which the old man tells of his struggle against drought and disaster, rang truly, and afforded the strongest piece of acting in 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 Australian community:

Take me few ’ead of cattle, take every stick in the place. But if you think you can break me spirit [striking the table with his fist] by the Lord, no! It’s the spirit of the pioneers 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 can you do now?’, to which Dad boldly replies, ‘wot the men of this country with health, strength and determination are always doin’. I can start again’.80

Australian historical melodramas staged in Melbourne between 1890 and 1914 are an important record of how Melburnians created models of the Australian national character and Australian nationhood by rehabilitating significant figures from the colony’s white past. Other cultural forms similarly reflected Melburnians’ blossoming nationalism — indeed, several melodramas were also popular as short stories, novels, radio serials and films. Yet the theatre, in particular, evoked how Melburnians’ idealised sense of the past informed the ways in which they imagined that they belonged to a national community and shared a distinctive identity. Romanticised images of Australians who resisted authority — often colonial authority — played a significant role in establishing an independent national character: wrongfully transported convicts; outlaw bushrangers who put legal injustices to rights; miners who fought against judicial corruption and governmental exploitation; and courageous battlers of the outback who suffered from corrupt land legislation. The anti-authoritarianism that pervades federationera melodramas is striking at a time when Australia was asserting its independence from the United Kingdom. While the morally questionable nature of criminals and rebels was problematic, the plays’ exaggeration of the ethical motivations of such characters created a more socially acceptable national mythology and a moral basis for an Australian nation. A broad spectrum of Melbourne society rebuilt the imagery of the Australian genesis, eliding versions of the past that contradicted the idea that their nation was built on honourable, courageous origins. Together, the audiences of federation-era historical melodramas confirmed that Australians inherited a spirited, upright national character that would enable them to overcome any obstacle and create a thriving nation.

Notes

1 Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788, Longman Australia, Melbourne, 1995, p 68.
2 Australian dramatists commonly adapted non-Australian plays because an overseas success was guaranteed to be profitable in Melbourne, and they were poorly paid for their work. They could produce a greater quantity of plays by borrowing from theatre that had already proven its appeal to audiences, rather than by undertaking the longer process of drafting original drama. Elizabeth Webby, ‘Melodrama and the melodramatic imagination’, The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, Laurie Hergenhan (ed.), Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1988, p 212.
3 Veronica Kelly, ‘Melodrama, an Australian pantomime, and the theatrical constructions of colonial 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 and National Image in Australian Drama’, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1973, chap 3, p 12; Terry Sturm, ‘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 some colonial and contemporary Australian plays’, Southerly 50, no 2, 1990; Webby, op. cit.; and Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage 1829–1929: A Historical Entertainment in Six Acts, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983.
6 Some historians have, however, examined individual aspects of historical melodrama, such as Veronica Kelly’s analysis of the representations of explorers and bushrangers in ‘Explorers and bushrangers in nineteenth-century Australian theatre’, The Writer’s Sense of the Past: Essays on the Southeast Asian and Australasian Literature, Kirpal Singh (ed.), Singapore University Press, Singapore, 1987.
7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso Editions and NLB, London, 1983, p 66; E J Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, pp 104–5.
8 Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian identity: the problem of nationalism in Australian history and historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, no 116, 2001, p 81.
9 Helen Irving, To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia’s Constitution, updated edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp 36, 212.
10 Marvin Perry, et al., Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics and Society, 6th ed., vol 2, Houghton Mifflin 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, Helen Gilbert (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.
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 Gellner agree that a nation is greater than a political entity and also emerges in a community’s shared imagination.
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 popular theatre’, The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture, Ken Stewart (ed.), University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1996, p 110; John Rickard, ‘From pianos to panto: aspects of music and 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, Victorian Spectacular 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: The British 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 Anastasia Nikolopoulou (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 British Empire 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 and Identity, 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 most of the published and original play scripts do not include line numbers, this article breaks with conventional referencing. In its references to those texts, the first number represents the number of the act, the second number represents the page number or, if there is a third number, the second number 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.
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 by Rolf Boldrewood, was pivotal to the formation of the group of bushranging melodramas. Richard Fotheringham, ‘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. The manuscript of On Our Selection relied upon in this article is the published, producer’s copy, dated to early in the performance history of the work. It might not, however, be the precise copy used in the 1912 production. One million people in Australia and New Zealand saw On Our Selection between 1912 and 1916 (Table Talk, 21 September 1916, p 24). It was subsequently transformed into the plays Gran’dad Rudd (1917) and The Rudd Family (1928), and the radio serial Dad and Dave. On Our Selection was made into a film in 1920 (Graham Shirley, ‘Australian cinema: 1896 to 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.
75 Musa, op. cit., p 56. In the 1860s, the government offered parcels of land to self-employed farmers, 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.

Originally published in Colonial Post: Journal of Australian Studies no 81, Richard Nile (ed.), St Lucia, API Network and UQP, 2004.