The opening night of the former convict Robert Sidaway’s Sydney theatre was 16 January 1796. Edward Young’s The Revenge (1733) was performed that evening, with a gallery audience who paid in meat and flour rather than coin. The lead role of Zanga, the Moorish villain, was played by a convict actor, his face entirely smeared with burnt cork. Most likely Zanga’s costume was in the Elizabethan style, with a starched ruff at the neck and a great plumed hat and breeches. The evening’s costumes were supplemented by ’some veteran articles from the York theatre’, a patron observed.
The items worn by the convict actors in the The Revenge had probably been stolen from the York theatre and brought over in one of the early convict ships. According to theatre historian, Robert Jordan, a one-eyed caster of plaster ornaments called William Richards was serving a sentence in Sydney for the theft of costumes from precisely that theatre. This roguish Richards was listed as a member of Sidaway’s theatre company staff in early 1897, and as an actor there a few years later. Back in England, he had been convicted for the theft of ’sundry articles’ of theatrical attire, but was rumoured to have stolen much more:- to wit, a pair of scarlet morocco leather buskins, a pair of linen ruffles, three black feathers, a pair of paste knee buckles, and a fat silk sash. Since convicts brought trunks of their belongings with them when they were transported, it is possible that Richards smuggled some of these items to the Antipodes.
William Richards appears to have become obsessed with stealing theatrical costumes well before the heist at the York theatre which caused his removal to Sydney. An announcement in the English Newcastle Covenant in 1890 declared that he was wanted for stealing items from the Manchester, Margate and Derby theatres as well as the one at York. He was also found hiding in the Newcastle theatre with obviously suspicious intent.
As Robert Jordan says, it is unlikely that a fellow would steal theatrical costumes for their re-sale value. There were surely more profitable enterprises. Richard’s thefts seem instead to have been motivated by a fascination with the stage. Here, then, was a man whose very transportation was caused by a passion for the theatre, and who likely took the proceeds of his theft to the colonies in the hope of pursuing that obsession anew. And here, too, was a fitting opening for a theatre built by a former convict: a play led by a convict actor decked out in hot items cunningly spirited across the seas from York.
Source: Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia, 1788-1840 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003), 40-3, 247-50.
PS: Incidentally, Hazel Waters singles out The Revenge as a singular example of racism on the English stage in her book on that subject. A heavily-robed Zanga appears on its cover looking down viciously at his white foe:











The Source (1856)

10 January 2010
American critiques of Australian racism: the KFC ad & the Hey Hey imbroglio
Posted by Melissa Bellanta under Contemporary commentary | Tags: Hey Hey It's Saturday, Racism |1 Comment
Not long ago I spent a stint of insomniac nights wandering through Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War, written in the last waning period of George Bush’s presidency. Honed from his blog www.joebageant.com, Bageant’s style has a gonzo extravagance about it. He mixes political rants with gum-chewing sass. And as the subtitle of his book suggests, he does not mince words. (How many Americans would use the term ‘class war’?).
In spite of his deliberately intemperate style, Bageant in many ways treads a more nuanced political line than most well-off American liberals. He writes about the people in the conservative and working-class American town in which he grew up – the sort of people derided as yokels and white trash by affluent Democrats – in a way that is at once scathing and affectionate. Bageant manages to excoriate the individualist politics and racist sympathies of his white working-class former neighbours, and at the same time to passionately deride the contempt with which middle-class West Wing-wannabes direct their way.
Something of the same nuance is in order concerning the response from certain sections of the American media to the racist faux-pas aired on Australian TV over the past few months. Yes: it was naively racist for a bunch of white-ish Aussies to black up for a nostalgic skit on the Australian variety show, Hey Hey It’s Saturday in October last year. And yes, the more recent KFC ad depicting an Anglo-Aussie cricket supporter winning over black West Indian spectators with a bucket of fried chicken – that was naively racist too. Racism can come from gauche stupidity as well as from malicious intent.
It is no longer widely remembered in Australia that audiences here once flocked to blackface minstrel shows back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these shows, black people were depicted as simpletons who thought of nothing but fried chicken and happy-go-lucky dancin’. Even though that racist caricature has not survived in popular memory here in the way that it has in the US, where it originated (and even though there are obviously huge disparities with regard to the two countries’ histories concerning race relations), it was still stupid for Australian television to air material that brought those demeaning depictions to mind. But as for the chorus of denunciations about these incidents mixed with a sneering air of superiority from some American commentators – well, that deserves a rant worthy of Joe Bageant in my view.
After the Australian KFC ad was lambasted in the US, there were a whole range of comments by American viewers and talk-show hosts which served to juxtapose backwards Australian racism with soaring American progressivism: “Yeah, coming from the same people who almost single-handedly wiped out the whole race of aborigines (sic). You people are the worst. I’ve had friends who visited Australia and they told me how it is over there”.
The same kind of commentary attended the Hey Hey, It’s Saturday imbroglio. On the TV talkshow The View, one of the co-hosts declared: ‘we are in what people like to call post-racial America right now… we are trying to grow as a country and that’s kind of a demeaning sketch that we would never do here anymore’. Other commentators emphasised that it was an American judge (Harry Connick Jr) who criticised the skit on air (‘thank goodness Harry Connick Jr was there to be the voice of reason’) and ended with a jibe at Australianness: ‘hey hey, we’re talking about kangaroo land, after all’.
A white reader of the Newsweek then cut to the chase. “Thanks Harry Connick, Jr. for showing the world that all whites are NOT racist buffoons’, she wrote. We see here that white middle-class American prestige is the real thing at issue so far as most of those objecting to the ads are concerned – something that would surely prompt a ‘here we go again’ from Joe Bageant were he to comment on these storm-in-a-teacup controversies. Methinks a little less ego-stroking and a little more humility from any non-blacks implicated in our racist histories, both American and Australian, would not go astray here.