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STEELE RUDD," and HIS GIFT of LAUGHTER an Australian Literary Heritage [By ERIC D
127 "STEELE RUDD," AND HIS GIFT OF LAUGHTER An Australian Literary Heritage [By ERIC D. DAVIS] (Read at a Meeting of the Society on 26 March 1970) To me personally—it is something very close to my heart to be asked to address you concerning my late father—bet ter known as "Steele Rudd." From as early as I can remember, I always thought he was the greatest man in the world, and with the passing of the years, my admiration for him has not diminished any. Needless to say, I am honoured when 1 am called upon to tell people about the person I always called "Dad." No doubt this is also the cardinal reason why I am in the process of writing his biography. The wording on his memorial cairn at Drayton, where he was bom, on the Darling Downs, Queensland, has always impressed me. It reads: "He brought to Australian writing the rich gift of hon est laughter with the undertones of the struggles and sor rows of the pioneers." Yes, indeed, he had the abUity to make people laugh, and at the same time combine his humour with pathos. I think it can be truthfully said his writings were an affirmation of the thoughts of W. M. Thackeray, the famous English author, that "A good laugh is sunshine in the house." Strangely enough, it wasn't my father's intention to ap pear as a funny man when he started to write in the early 'nineties, but as time went by, the literary mantle of fame which became his lot, I fear often weighed heavUy upon him as he endeavoured to please his reading public. -
Dad Rudd, M.P. and the Making of a National Audience. Dad Rudd, M.P
Dad Rudd, M.P. and the making of a national audience. Dad Rudd, M.P. was the fourth and final film made by Ken G. Hall based on characters originally created by ‘Steele Rudd’ (Arthur Hoey Davis) in 1895. It. was also the first of four films to receive a £15,000 overdraft from the NSW government as part of an attempt to encourage local film production. It was released by Cinesound in Australia in June 1940. According to the Australasian’s film critic ‘The Chiel,’ when the film was shown in Melbourne, ‘a queue that was 100 yards long to the box office, a crowded theatre, and sustained applause indicated that the Australian people have no fault to find with “Dad Rudd, M.P.”’(Chiel 1940). Box office for the film was indeed remarkable in Australia and the film also gained popular acclaim in Britain, where it was screened more than 1400 times before mid-1941 (Pike 1980:45). The Rudd family texts are unique in Australian cultural history for the extent to which they have been adapted, and the degree of their popularity in a variety of media over time. Authors, producers, directors and publicists of these texts engendered a market defined by its recognition of Australian cultural commonplaces. In this respect the Rudd characters have been instrumental in the creation and characterization of a specifically ‘Australian’ audience that can be defined in relation to a set of national symbols. Dad Rudd, M.P., in particular, illustrates the way in which such national symbols can be a product of market imperatives, overseas influences and chance. -
Historical Officers Report from the Pages of the Camden Advertiser 1St
Historical Officers Report From the Pages of the Camden Advertiser 1st February 1940 WE PROTEST Against Milk Board's Decision This newspaper has ranged its self alongside the district dairy farmers in their battle against the undemocratic methods of the Milk Board, which, according to latest information, intend to refute to accept local milk testing below 3.4 per cent, cream, on and after February 14 next. We claim that it U the first essential of the Government to raise the legal standard of milk from 3.2 to 3.4 per cent, before the Milk Board is handed the power to insist on a better quality product from the farmer. Secondly, it is only fair for the dairy farmer to be paid an increased price for the increased cream content of his milk. To-day, in this district, dairy farmers are appealing for fair-play. Here they work 18 hour a day and often enlist the services of their families to eke out a precarious existence, while subject to a distasteful dictation from the city distributing end of the industry, where Milk Board members and employees, together with distributing agency staffs, enjoy award rates of pay and 8 hours n day—at the farmers' expense. While Britain is fighting a war for democracy we have to contend with the undemocratic acts of a Milk Board—blessed by one of His Majesty's Governments. The "Advertiser" has a circulation large enough, we believe, to swing the Wollondilly electorate against the Government, at the next State elections if equal conditions are denied the farmers. -
Copyright Sources for Australian Drama and Film Richard Fotheringham Many Early Australian Play Scripts Have Survived Only Because of Stage Censorship
Copyright Sources For Australian Drama and Film Richard Fotheringham Many early Australian play scripts have survived only because of stage censorship. Such manuscripts have been retained in files in the Australian Archives’ copyright files. The author outlines some of his more interesting discoveries during his research, and describes how to proceed to view them. One of the side benefits of the otherwise dubious practice of stage censorship is that it was an excellent way of ensuring that scripts of performed plays were preserved for posterity. It is because of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in London, for example, that complete manuscripts of two of the most important Australian plays of the nineteenth century George Darrell’s The Sunny South and Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch’s stage version of Robbery Under Arms — were preserved in the British Library and eventually published in modern critical editions.1 The British censorship system became involved because both plays had at different times been staged in London, as were several other Australian plays held in this collection. It has usually been assumed that the survival of unpublished playtexts performed only in Australia, after the early attempts at censorship, was a far less regular or regulated business, and that we are faced with the almost total disappearance of the plays of several vigorous and exciting ages of Australian drama, including significant works written as recently as the 1930s. It is not just stage history which is impoverished by the loss of these texts, for the live stage has always been a place where the Australian language, its slang and colloquialisms, is quickly picked up; and a place too where contemporary ideas about nationhood, nationalism, aboriginal people, ethnic minorities, the role of women in Australian society, the Australian identity, war, the bush and the city etc, have been freely discussed. -
Towards a History of Transtasman Literary Relations
The Neglected Middle Distance: Towards a History of Transtasman Literary Relations TERRY STURM Prefatory Note. The following article was originally delivered as a public lecture at the University of Auckland. In some intro• ductory remarks I spoke of contemporary economic and political developments in Transtasman relations as giving some urgency to the more specific literary and cultural questions raised in the lecture. I was also conscious — in thinking about the ways in which New Zealand and Australian literature might be related — of pressures from a very different quarter : the burgeoning academic industry in comparative Commonwealth literary studies. I remain obstinately sceptical about many of its tendencies, and the lecture was an implicit argument against at least one of them : the anti-historical tendency in comparative studies to treat authors and works, and the national traditions they belong to, as autonomous, self-contained totalities. What is attempted here is a mapping of the historical contours of Australian cultural influ• ence on, and presence in, New Zealand literature: a continuous, shifting history within which any comparative literary analysis needs, in my view, to be situated. JLHE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY is a phrase used by Allen Curnow in a longish review of twentieth-century Australian poetry which appeared in the second number of the New Zealand magazine Landfall in 1947.1 Its implication was that New Zealanders had concerned themselves too little with understanding a neighbour• ing culture which occupied the "middle distance" of their out• ward perspective — too much, perhaps, with the Anglo-European and American horizons beyond. Until very recently, awareness of each other's literature has been at an even lower ebb, perhaps, 30 TERRY STURM than when Allen Curnow wrote. -
Theatre in Melbourne, 1914–18: the Best, the Brightest and the Latest
6 ELISABETH KUMM Theatre in Melbourne, 1914–18: the best, the brightest and the latest Australian theatre was already undergoing momentous change when war broke out in 1914. Corporations were replacing actor–managers, theatre interests were contracting from multiple groups to just a few, and Australian audiences were increasingly open to American plays and players. The years immediately before the war saw the passing of two of the country’s leading entrepreneurs – music hall singer and founder of the Tivoli circuit Harry Rickards, and actor–manager JC Williamson, founder of JC Williamson Ltd – while other 19th-century show-business luminaries – George Coppin, George Rignold and Bland Holt – had died or retired.1 What did not change was the role of the audience as the arbiter of taste, which saw the public demanding the best, the brightest and the latest. JC Williamson and its competitors Known as JCW or ‘The Firm’, JC Williamson Ltd was the dominant force in Australian theatrical promotion, with controlling interests in theatres throughout Australia and New Zealand. The company was founded by American actor James Cassius Williamson, who first visited Australia under the auspices of George Coppin in 1874. He made his preliminary foray into Front cover of musical score for George R Hyam’s ‘Imshi’, which was first sung inStop Your Nonsense – an original Australian musical burlesque – at the King’s Theatre in December 1915. Sydney: J Wynter, c. 1915. National Library of Australia MUS N mba 783.2421599 H992 Theatre in Melbourne, 1914–18 8 The La Trobe Journal No. 97 March 2016 management in 1879 when he purchased the Australian performance rights for the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. -
Iii: Australia and New Zealand - the Early Years, 1915-1920
III: AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND - THE EARLY YEARS, 1915-1920 "He the best player!" cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer. "Why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. ... The king for my money! He speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud again as the other. Anybody may see he is an actor." Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Bk.xvi, ch.5) Allan Wilkie's career in Australia had an auspicious beginning, for his first certain engagement was with Nellie Stewart (1858-1931), Australia's most popular actress at that time. In January 1915 she completed a successful run of revivals which showed her in some of her best-loved roles: Nell Gwynne in Paul Kester's Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1900), Dorothy Vernon in Dorothy o' the Hall by the same author, and the title role in David Belasco's Du. Barry (1901). George Musgrove, who managed her career, organised a company to tour New Zealand with these popular productions, and Wilkie was taken on as "heavy man". It was the last time that Nellie Stewart was to tour New Zealand, and it proved to be a highly successful venture." It gave Wilkie ample opportunity to observe theatrical conditions in that country, where he was later to tour with his own company six times. His memoirs comment on the well-equipped theatres which even the smaller New Zealand 2 centres seemed to possess, unlike many towns in Australia. -
Kate Howarde
KATE HOWARDE (1864-1939) The leading Australian female thespian/writer/entrepreneur of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, Kate Howarde carved out a distinguished stage career over more than forty years, producing drama, musical comedies, pantomime, revusicals, and film. Between 1905 and 1909 she and her second husband, Scottish comedian Elton Black, lived overseas, spending most of the time in the USA, where she worked as a journalist and theatre critic, and also the United Kingdom. As a result of her remarkable activity in Australia and New Zealand, Howarde not only provided much needed entertainment to audiences throughout the two countries but also provided opportunities for numerous theatre practitioners, several of whom went on to establish their own high-profile careers. Most notable were S. A. Fitzgerald, Bert Bailey, and Charles Villiers. As a writer, her most popular original stage works were Possum Paddock (1919) and Gum Tree Gully (1924). Howarde's earliest-known radio appearance was with her dramatic company in 1931. She continued presenting her views and memories on air at irregular intervals up until at least 1938. 1864-1904 Born in North Woolwich, London, to labourer Edward George Jones and Harriett Hannah (nee Payne), Kate Howarde was born Catherine Clarissa Jones on 28 July 1864. She began her association with the Antipodes as a child, when her family immigrated to New Zealand. Although Howarde has claimed that she began receiving payment for her contributions to the Wellington Post at age nine after being encouraged to write by the paper's editor, this is believed to have occurred later in her teens.1 Her name is first identified with theatrical endeavours in June 1883 when she was billed as one of the members of Willmott's Dramatic Company, then playing a season at the Alexandra Hall, New Plymouth, New Zealand.2 The following year she married musician William Henry de Saxe. -
The Ghost of Dad Rudd, on the Stump
THE GHOST OF DAD RUDD 19 The Ghost of Dad Rudd, On the Stump JULIEANNE LAMOND University of Sydney Much of the work of politics involves creating and recognising constituencies. It involves persuading a group of people to identify themselves as part of a particular community of interest. The language of the “ordinary”, the “forgotten”, people, the “battlers” have all been used in Australian politics to imply such a community. In looking at the various adaptations of stories by Steele Rudd (A. H. Davis), it becomes apparent that popular culture involves a very similar process of constituency building. The adaptations of Davis’s stories illuminate this process in both cultural and political contexts and prompt speculation as to how popular culture and politics continue to influence one another in Australia. Dad Rudd is a figure who has come to haunt Australian politics as well as our popular culture. Like politicians, those involved in the production and marketing of Davis’s stories have used the language of nation to imply and create a broad community of interest, in this case a market for their books, plays and films. They do so largely through the establishment of Dad as a character representative of the Australian community, and they establish him as this representative through his involvement in politics, and more particularly through his speeches. These speeches suggest some ways in which popular culture can reflect and also contribute to people’s understandings of themselves as part of a political community. The adaptations of Davis’s stories invite reflection about how this process of constituency building works. -
Down Memory Lane: the Victoria, Newcastle's First
38 39 DOWNMEMORY LANE: THE VICTORIA, NEWCASTLE'SFIRST GRANDTHEATRE LE. Fredman The faded and peeling exterior of Eastham's Theatre Store in Perkins Street is a poor reminder of the Victoria, dubbed at its opening in September, 1891, "Newcastle's First Grand Theatre". Inside is a strange contrast of jeans and mod. gear, the costume of today, with the original royal blue curtain, stage, flies and dress circle which served the performance and costume of yesteryear. "And let us, ciphers to this great accornpt, On your :imaginary forces work'', to quote Chorus in Shakespeare's Henry V. Let us, while the building survives, try to recall the great tradition of such theatres and the way in which they served their communities and reflected their times. "Think when we talk of horses that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth". Techniques and taste constantly change. The Victoria had its share of the realistic melodrama of the Victorian age with real horses and an approximation to "the perilous nan:ow ocean", to be followed by the movlng pictures and literally hundreds of thundering hoofs. The theatre then had a new lease of life to be finally overwhelmed in March, 1966 by the pressures of TV and the blockbuster movie. The Victoria Theatre There have been three theatres named the Victoria. The first, in the Courtesy of the Newcastle Region Library Service 1850's, was converted from a wooden building backing onto a hotel in Watt Street, the main street, with an entrance in Hunter Street. The second, in Perkins Street, opened in April, 1876 as the first theatre in Newcastle built for that purpose and soon became the main venue for touring productions. -
The Ghost of Dad Rudd, on the Stump
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The Australian National University THE GHOST OF DAD RUDD 19 The Ghost of Dad Rudd, On the Stump JULIEANNE LAMOND University of Sydney Much of the work of politics involves creating and recognising constituencies. It involves persuading a group of people to identify themselves as part of a particular community of interest. The language of the “ordinary”, the “forgotten”, people, the “battlers” have all been used in Australian politics to imply such a community. In looking at the various adaptations of stories by Steele Rudd (A. H. Davis), it becomes apparent that popular culture involves a very similar process of constituency building. The adaptations of Davis’s stories illuminate this process in both cultural and political contexts and prompt speculation as to how popular culture and politics continue to influence one another in Australia. Dad Rudd is a figure who has come to haunt Australian politics as well as our popular culture. Like politicians, those involved in the production and marketing of Davis’s stories have used the language of nation to imply and create a broad community of interest, in this case a market for their books, plays and films. They do so largely through the establishment of Dad as a character representative of the Australian community, and they establish him as this representative through his involvement in politics, and more particularly through his speeches. These speeches suggest some ways in which popular culture can reflect and also contribute to people’s understandings of themselves as part of a political community. -
1 Dramatic Copyright in Australia to 1912 Roslyn Atkinson
Dramatic Copyright in Australia to 1912 Roslyn Atkinson & Richard Fotheringham [This article originally appeared in Australasian Drama Studies 11 (1987): 47-63. It has been revised, corrected and updated (11 September 2006); the version below should be cited.] In 1879 the American lawyer Eaton S. Drone prefaced his A Treatise on the Law and Property in Intellectual Productions in Great Britain and the United States with the observation: Meaningless, inconsistent, and inadequate statutory provisions, ambiguous, erroneous, and conflicting decisions cover the law of copyright with doubt, difficulties and confusion.1 Pity then Australian colonial playwrights, for whom the difficulties of protecting their intellectual productions from unauthorised theatrical productions were compounded by additional problems. Unless they were permanent residents of the United States they could not secure copyright in that country, even if they were temporarily resident while performing there;2 as British citizens living in the colonies their work, if registered in the colony where it was written or first performed, was protected only in that colony, whereas a script registered at Stationers’ Hall in London was protected throughout the Empire. The whole question of the legal defence of dramatic creative effort was fraught with uncertainty. Consequently dramatists in colonial Australasia often sold their scripts outright to theatrical managers as quickly as possible, and managers, instead of relying on copyright protection, attempted to restrict the making of copies of original manuscripts by more direct means, A successful play often existed only as a single manuscript prompt script which was guarded like a prized jewel: if it was stolen or destroyed then the work itself was lost.