Tasmanian actress/celebrities of the nineteenth century

437 Pages·2014·25.45 MB·English

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Declaration of Originality
This thesis contains no material accepted for a degree or diploma by the
University or any other institution, except by way of background
information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my
knowledge and belief no material published by any other person except
where due acknowledgement is made in the text of this thesis.
Date: /7 //- as—
Statement of Authority
This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in
accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.
Date: / 1,- °5
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements 4
Illustrations 5
Introduction
Statement of the Topic 6
Women, Theatre, Tasmania 8
PART ONE: Colonial Actresses: "The Vanguards of others who are to
follow" 27
Chapter One: Setting the Stage; Nineteenth Century Tasmanian Press
Culture & Theatre 28
Chapter Two: Stage Actresses in Tasmania, c. 1835 — 1845 46
Anne Clarke 49
Jane Thomson 60
Emma Young 71
Chapter Three: Madame Marie Carandini 84
PART TWO: International Players and Tasmanian Cultural Identity.... 119
Chapter Four: Celebrity Touring Stars of the 1850s 120
Chapter Five: CASE STUDY — The Child "Star" Anna Maria Quinn in
Tasmania, 1855 147
PART THREE: "First Wave" "Home Grown" Stars and Celebrity Culture in
the 1860s 173
Chapter Six: The "Tasmanian Nightingales" and their Repertoires 185
Chapter Seven: The Carandini Sisters 197
Chapter Eight: Emma and Clelia Howson 228
Chapter Nine: Hattie Shepparde 259
PART FOUR: The 1870s — Tasmanian "Stars" and "The Music of the
Future" 288
Chapter Ten "Home Grown" Celebrities of the Era 289
Chapter Eleven: Amy Sherwin: The Nineteenth Century's Last "Tasmanian
Nightingale" 308
Conclusion: Women, Identity and Actresses' Social Power 333
Works Cited 353
Notes 387
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Acknowledgements
This work could not have been done without the patience and
criticism of my supervisor, Dr. Rosemary Gaby.
I am very appreciative of the support of the University of
Tasmania, in particular being awarded a Research Scholarship for
this project.
Having spent hundreds of hours in libraries and archives
searching through documents, microforms and microfiches, I
would like to express my gratitude to the many professionals who
have guided my discoveries. Particular thanks go to the
Document Delivery Service at the University of Tasmania, and to
the State Library of Victoria for kindly giving me permission to
reproduce a number of photographs for this work.
I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the growing
number of theatre historians whose work has been so vital to my
own.
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Illustrations
Launceston Theatricals in the 1840s............................................................... ..... ........31
John Davies.. .41
Anne Clarke Debut as "Miss Remens" .52
Anne Clarke "fits-out" a Promenade ...... ............................ ..... ............ ..... ..................59
G. H. Rogers .74
Marie Carandini Bill, 1840s..... ..... ..............................................................................91
Monsieur E. Coulon with Catherine Hayes, Illustrated Sydney News, 21 October 1854...96
Mrs. Brougham .98
Marie Carandini from Lavenu's "I Cannot Sing To Night" ..... ...............................103
G. V. Brooke .127
Romeo and Juliet Burlesque 130
Catherine Hayes, Illustrated Sydney News, 21 October 1854........................................133
Mrs. Charles Poole .135
The Gougenheim Sisters.. 139
Laura Keene 143
Joseph Jefferson .176
Emilia Don as the Earl of Leicester .178
Sir William Don .179
Mary Provost as "Medea" .189
Avonia Jones 192
Rosina Carandini's Debut in Hobart .201
Alliance Rooms. .203
Emma Carandini (Mrs. Gilbert Wilson)....................................................................216
Clelia Howson .235
Clelia Howson .239
"Circumstance" .251
Nellie Stewart. .255
Hattie Shepparde in The Wicked World. ......... ........................ ............ ......... ..... 283
Lucy Chambers Portrait 294
Lucy Chambers Bill. . 299
Docy Stewart and Marion
Amy Sherwin ......317
Amy Sherwin 328
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Statement of the Topic
Australian celebrity culture of the nineteenth century combines personal success,
and the ideal constructions.of the individual and homeland, with the persuasive
power of the media to offer the celebrated a means of public visibility and
nationality. This thesis engages with the intersections between media and
celebrity culture of the nineteenth century by exploring the intimate relationships
between the construction of gender and the "localisation" of place. It examines
the representation of a number of Tasmanian-born actresses received as
celebrities during the period and historicises about the slippery nature of state
of origin when contextualised in what developed into a greater picture of global
media culture. It places these representations alongside those of off-shore
actresses and presents a "new" picture of women's engagement in colonial
culture and their social power. The thesis also argues that the Tasmanian
provenance of celebrated stage women such as Emma and Clelia Howson,
Hattie Shepparde, the Carandini Sisters, Lucy Chambers, Amy Sherwin, and
others, offered the State's population a lively and highly visible collection of
cultural exemplars. The thesis will interweave the narratives of their careers into
an analysis of contemporary and modern-day understandings of Australian
identity in two ways. First, it contends that these women heralded the dawn of a
new public visibility for women as professionals, decades before the
mobilisation of women's groups and suffrage leagues in this country. Second, it
traces their international successes as a way of demonstrating their contribution
to establishing the cultural roots of what is now known collectively as "the
Australian context." My research reveals that an important cultural
breakthrough coincided with the international tours of these women because
their achievement popularised, and therefore revolutionised, a new means of
gesturing Australian homeland offshore. A historicised and "localised" concept
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of celebrity is a valuable tool of analysis when considering that actresses
generally are continually overlooked as proactive conduits of social change, and
especially since their achievements as legitimate cultural agents were celebrated
in an era that is routinely considered as oppressive and restrictive for women.
The aim of the thesis is to explore how colonial society relied on Tasmanian-born
actresses as sources of cultural identification and how such figures enabled the
performance of identity as a result. There is, in the development of Australian
celebrity culture from the 1840s until the early twentieth century, an overt
politicisation of Tasmanian cultural identity. Coupled with this phenomenon is
a social evolution in changes to attitudes about "Tasmanian-ness" that can be
traced directly to the instrumental achievements of Tasmanian-born celebrity
actresses of the period.
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Women, Performance, Tasmania
Tasmania has enjoyed a long tradition of producing "home grown" theatre
stars. Errol Flynn is probably the best known of the twentieth century exports.
The antics of the dashing, charismatic and thrice-married actor of the 1930s
were so notorious that they earned for him the epithet "the Tasmanian Devil."
One of the better known female stars was Merle Oberon, whose publicists
claimed during the 1930s and 40s that she was Tasmanian-born: specifically
into a wealthy Hobart family. While her provenance has since been the subject of
some debate, Oberon's rank as "Tasmanian-born" did cast a glowing light on
the island's cultural credibility, despite the fact that she was 10 000 miles away
and only once set foot on the island, in 1978.
The more recent Tasmanian-born actresses, such as Genevieve Picot,
Alison Whyte and Essie Davis similarly experience an emphasis on homeland.
Domestic audiences are perhaps more familiar with Picot and Whyte than those
internationally, but actress Essie Davis has received considerable attention since
her role playing the wife of Dutch artist Vermeer in Peter Webber's film, Girl
With a Pearl Earring (2003). When Danielle Wood wrote in the Sunday Tasmanian
on 7 March 2004 that, "Essie Davis is making her Tasmanian family feel proud
for good reason," she used a traditional journalistic practice that recruited the
"home grown" star to uplift Tasmanian community pride. Wood makes a
direct connection between Davis' provenance and her success. Tim Cox's ABC
Radio interview with Davis, which went to air on Wednesday 12 March 2003,
also places significant emphasis her provenance. "When Essie Davis is in
London she is known as an Australian actress," claims Cox, "but when she
arrives in Australia she is known as a Tasmanian actress."
Any examination of how women such as Davis inform the process of
constructing versions of identity leads to questions concerning women's social
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power. Reflected in the narratives claiming Davis' significance are traditional
approaches to writing about public women, specifically theatre women,
formalised in the colonial era. The publicity of profoundly popular Tasmanian-
born theatre women of the period—such as Emma and Clelia Howson, the
Carandini sisters, Lizzie, Fanny, Rosina, Emma and Isabella, Hattie Shepparde,
and Maggie and Docy Stewart, and singers including Lucy Chambers and Amy
Sherwin, as well as others—all read remarkably like those written by modern-
day journalists about this century's contemporaries of the theatre world. This
suggests that not only do modern day actresses retain a level of social power
comparable to that of their colonial contemporaries, but also that the practice of
looking to actresses as exemplars of culture has its roots in the nineteenth
century.
This thesis examines "celebrated" Tasmanian-born actresses and singers
of the nineteenth century such as Shepparde, Chambers, Sherwin, the Howson,
Carandini, and Stewart sisters, and others, to explore how theatre women
informed processes of cultural meaning-making in order to exemplify how little
this faith in actresses as markers of social meaning has changed over time.
Clearly, in the case of stage women, there are connections between popular
culture and colonial social life that need to be made in order to understand their
public visibility. In the case of some women, particularly the Tasmanian-born
women studied here, they were "celebrated" because of the successes they
achieved in the dramatic and musical arts, and this was manifest as "celebrity":
a valuable asset to local culture. Celebrity in the colonial era was a powerful
tool legitimising the social and cultural worth of the communities in which the
celebrity was born, and if the lion's share of their social meaning was linked to
provenance—and their publicity suggests that it was—then discrete cultures
could gesture ownership of a celebrity as a way of legitimating community. The
process is very clear in Tasmanian press culture's response to the women
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studied here, and one of the most interesting phenomena this case study reveals
is that it is possible to take the process one step further. Once the public
visibility of these celebrity women grew to embrace the global market, then their
social meaning was, like that of Essie Davis nowadays, specifically linked to
nationality, and this connection therefore validated not only Tasmanian
community culture, but also the Australian homeland.
Women's crucial significance in this reciprocal interchange is the central
issue at the heart of this thesis. Women's "otherness" of course facilitated this
cultural meaning-making, and any analysis of women's social activity must
explore this "otherness" as integral to their public visibility and their popular
utility as cultural exemplars. But before proceeding to offer a more in-depth
discussion of the theoretical objectives of the thesis, as well as its organisation,
there are a number of issues relating to women, performance, and Tasmania
requiring examination.
In order to understand the importance of these women to defining what,
to paraphrase Graeme Turner, "Australian-ness" was and did' in the colonial
period, one must first recognise the marginalised "place" of women generally in
contemporary scholarship. For instance, it is not too surprising to find that most
historiographies about the Australian stage reflect meticulous research into the
careers of many male actors and entrepreneurs. But history, however, has not
been as kind to its theatre women, and recognising why scholarship continues to
underplay the significance of stage actresses as proactive catalysts of change in
Australian social history is a crucial step in redressing their under-
representation. I argue that the root cause of the problem is twofold:
approaches to writing women's historiography, and generalisations about
colonial actresses that seriously underestimate their social power.
Gaps in scholarship are traceable to traditional approaches to writing
and researching women's historiography. For the most part, the usual approach