Staging the North Stephen Carleton

Staging the North Finding, Imagining and Performing an Australian Deep North. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in April 2008 Stephen Carleton School of English, Media Studies and Art History STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original, except as acknowledged in the text, and has not been submitted, either in whole or in part, for a degree at this university or at any other university. Candidate Name: Stephen Carleton Candidate Signature: Supervisor Name: Prof. Joanne Tompkins Supervisor Signature: ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my supervisors, Prof. Joanne Tompkins and Prof. Veronica Kelly, for their unstinting professionalism and the forensic reading and feedback they have provided throughout the duration of the writing process of this thesis. The wealth of knowledge and experience they bring not only as academic researchers and theatre historians, but also as teachers have made this thesis so much more intellectually comprehensive and historically detailed than it might otherwise have been. They’ve helped make this the best possible piece of writing and research it can be. I’m deeply appreciative of their patience and support. Thanks also go to the family, friends and housemates who have lived with this project for as long as I have. Thanks especially to Lisa Beilby for providing time-in-kind in the form of child care during key redrafting periods over the last couple of years; and to my parents for being so interested in my professional pathway for so long. Thanks finally to all those theatre workers in the North whose work comprises part of the content of this project, and with whom I’ve talked for many, many hours about the subject matter contained in this thesis. I hope that this PhD acts as some kind of homage to your work, and documents at least some of it in a permanent way. This thesis is for all of those who continue to live, work and create excellent theatre in the relative isolation and resource-starvation of the Australian North. iii ABSTRACT This thesis identifies the existence of a distinctive Australian North within a critical framework of spatial inquiry, and in so doing explores how this vast geographical and discursive space has been enacted in theatre praxis from Federation to the present. I say “enacted” because this study is especially interested in the way the North has been invented on the Australian stage, and how theatre in turn has had and continues to have a significant cultural relevance in the shaping and perpetuation of national tropes and visions. Drawing primarily from Gelder/Jacobs’s concept of the “uncanny,” Jennifer Rutherford’s notion of the “Great Australian Emptiness,” Joanne Tompkins’s concept of “unsettlement,” and Rob Shields’s formulation of “space myths,” the thesis utilises current critical inquiry into symbolic depictions of contested Australian racial/spatial politics to argue the case for a distinctively troped Australian North that has hitherto been unidentified as such and under-theorised accordingly. Key concepts the thesis identifies as being central to this formulation of a Deep North are the notion of the North housing a vast cultural “emptiness” on the one hand, and of it being simultaneously “full” on the other; full, that is, of the nation’s fears surrounding race and space. These fears centre around a century-long mainstream apprehension of cultural inundation/invasion/occupation/pollution at the hands of either the Asian (external) or Aboriginal (internal) “Other.” The North is analysed as postmodern frontier space, in this sense – as both the outer extremity and the key site of friction for the entire nation’s relationship with race, place and the cultural Other. Further, the thesis asserts that the North operates as the stage onto which the South Eastern majority metropolitan population projects these fears/anxieties/fantasies, and as such it becomes the “playing field” for the nation’s collective repressed. Consequently, it is my contention that theatre becomes a prime medium for exploration of the enactment and re-enactment of national myths surrounding place, space and race. Theatre, this study argues, is all about space: it is about the fictionalisation, enactment, embodiment and symbolic representation of space in space. Using theatrical depictions of distinctly Northern topologies from Federation to the present, the thesis also then identifies a hitherto unacknowledged Northern body of theatrical works. It traces the oeuvre’s development over the span of the twentieth-century, from the North’s aetiology in Federation era melodrama, to its present state of post-colonial re- and self- invention. iv Contents Introduction: Staging the North………………………………………………………1 1. Inventing and Theorising the North………………………………………………48 2. The Northern Frontier…………………………………………………………….91 3. The North as Asian Buffer and the Black Man’s Zone……………………...…131 4. Darwin as the Frontier Capital: Theatrical Representations of City Space in the North……………………………………………………………………………….179 5. Seen From Up Here: The Multiracial North……………………………………228 Conclusion: the Continuing Function of the North……………………………….268 Works Consulted…………………………………………………………………….279 Appendix One: Plays About the North…………………………………………….289 v Introduction Staging the North Midway through Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia, the young Norman Shillingsworth boards a ship in Batman, heading up the Eastern Australian coast to rejoin his family in the far northern capital of Port Zodiac. Norman believes himself to be the son of a Javanese princess. In what we would now read as classic Orientalist terms, Herbert describes how the first-class liner passengers are initially intrigued by Norman, whom they “had to thank for giving them something new and strange to talk about, and something exciting too, suggesting lust – lust in the sun, or before the moon’s hot face, amid the scent of the frangipani and the throb of heathen drums” (210). The further north the ship heads, the more tenuous the romantic delusions become, and it is with the symbolic crossing of the ship from South to North – the crossing of the Tropic of Capricorn – that the fantasy dissolves altogether. Norman is recognised by a publican boarding the ship at Port Magnetic, who reveals him to be the illegitimate offspring of a “Capricornia gin” (211). Norman is ostracised by the first class and saloon passengers, forced by journey’s end to cohort with the “dagoes and roughs of second class” (211). It is as though the further Norman heads into the Northern tropics, the harsher the glare of scrutiny becomes, and the harder it is for fantasy and self-invention to take hold. The North forces a brutal version of “truth” to prevail. Louis Nowra uses this passage as the starting point for his 1988 dramatic interpretation of the novel, and similarly, the scene has acted as some kind of galvanising trigger for this thesis and what the Australian North is, if in fact it “is,” and how this vast geographical and discursive space has been enacted. I say “enacted” 1 because this study is especially interested in the way the North has been invented on the Australian stage, and how theatre in turn has had, and continues to have, a significant cultural relevance in the shaping and perpetuation of national tropes and visions, rather than just reflecting them obediently in a form of theatrical mimesis. This thesis offers a reading of the North through a theatrical lens. Such a reading might sit usefully alongside studies that focus on representations of the North in film, visual art, literature or music. Certainly the readings of the symbolic functions of the Australian North offered in this thesis are designed to open up ways of understanding the nation that might be applied beyond the bounds of this theatrical investigation. I frame an analysis of representations of the North in theatre within the critical lens of spatial inquiry. Spatial theory is a burgeoning field of critical and cultural analysis that applies especially well to theatre studies which is, of course, based on “space.” It is the cultural, political and symbolic analysis – the representation – of specific Australian spaces with which this thesis is primarily concerned. Theatre not only represents space, it enacts space. It reads, politicises and activates the ways in which we imagine cultural geographies. It brings Australian landscapes to the fore, and populates and physicalises them in conscious and frequently metaphoric or metonymic ways. In bringing together a study of theatre with an application of spatial inquiry to the theatre, this thesis offers a unique and specific reading of the Australian North over the past century in order to better understand what this hitherto under-investigated and under-analysed region might represent symbolically to the nation as a whole. This curiosity about an Australian North is not mine alone, it would seem. Julianne Schultz describes Australia’s associations with the North in her introduction to a Griffith Review edition devoted entirely to the topic of unravelling the region’s mystique. Her overview of the North’s “myths, threats and enchantments” states: 2 It may be the product of living in the second most southerly continent, but every generation of Australians has had iconic images of threats from the north. Flip through your memory of popular history and there they are – Chinamen in pigtails set to overrun the goldfields, Japanese aggressors poised to invade, dominoes tumbling on a Cold War map, Indochinese boat people searching for a safe haven and refugees stumbling out of leaky boats onto isolated beaches. Most of the images feature people with dark hair and Asiatic features whose intent is clear: to occupy the vast, virtually empty spaces between the northern coastline and the southern capitals. (7) Schultz’s equation of the North with anxieties about invasion and infiltration from a demonised Asian “Other” is a salient one, and I return to it throughout the course of this thesis.

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