The Vapour Trail

The detritus of little newspapers begun in a bedroom or tiny office downtown is everywhere in the historical record: flotsam and jetsam of political fervour and voices striving to be heard. Reading some of Sydney’s late 19thC examples, I’m struck by how much they functioned like blogs – that is, as a diaristic commentary on their editor’s daily life and proclivities.

I’ve already written about the Truth, for example, which included accounts of the unsavoury Bob Avery on his visits to theatres and bars. Another example is Society, another easy-come-easy-go Sydney offering with a theatrical bent. Wish I knew what its editor looked like. He inhabited a very similar oeuvre to the owner-editors of the Truth, but in a more benign and charmingly lugubrious way. ‘The other night our Ed was mournfully perusing copy under the somnolent effects of whisky and tobacco’, he wrote in Feburary 1886. And elsewhere: ‘One of my idiosyncracies is to want refreshments. Wherever I go I have a morbid longing for tea, and cakes, and lemonade and ice-creams, little things like that. And I note that whenever ladies condescend to overlook my repulsive personal appearance… they develop an appetite for ice-cream’.

Came across a little yellowed volume called Dreams and Their Interpretations, published sometime in Melbourne towards the end of the 19thC. It is really just a glossary of objects or events that might appear in one’s dreams, with a guide to their significance. Its gorgeous succession of images and quaint language made me wish I was a Preraphaelite maiden, sighing over the possible romantic meanings of the fruit-plattter in last night’s dream:

 Almonds foretell difficulties, loss of liberty, and deceit in love.

Apples betoken long life and success, a boy to a woman with child, faithfulness in your sweetheart, and riches by trade.

Currants prefigure happiness in life, success in undertaking, constancy in your sweetheart, handsome children to the married.

Gooseberries indicate many children, chiefly sons, and an accomplishment of your present pursuits; to the sailor they declare danger in his next voyage; to the maiden a roving husband, and to the man a rakish wife.

Grapes foretell to the maiden that her husband will be a cheerful companion, and a great songster.

Lemons denote contentions in your family and uneasiness on account of children; they announce the death of some relation and disappointment in love.

Oranges are very bad omens. They forbode loss of goods and reputations; attacks from thieves.

Next time you dream about gooseberries, ye maidens, men and sailors, you have been warned.

So recently I finished a piece about larrikin culture, and its theatricality, in late-19thC Australia. Larrikins were renowned for loitering in the vestibules of colonial theatres, and afterwards packing into the galleries to amuse themselves at everyone else’s expense during a show. They were also among the mob at the back of smaller suburban venues of a Saturday night. Sometimes they hung about grabbing the top-hats of the dress-circle crowd, crushing them beneath their high-heeled boots. But larrikins also specialised in sartorial pretensions of their own – not just the fancy boots, but bell-bottomed trousers, coloured neck-ties, and jauntily-tilted hats. They walked with a swagger, set their faces with a leer; all in all, a  self-conscious mode of self-presentation. The same could be said of larrikin women, who dolled themselves up in flounced dresses and brazen face.

The theatricality of larrikin identity has  often been observed in accounts of them making a nuisance of themselves in colonial cities during the 1870-90s. But I haven’t read anything about the role played by popular theatre - about the way that larrikins used it as a resource upon it when styling their street persona. Hence my paper. It looks at the role of coon songs from American minstrel-shows, and coster swell songs from English music halls as inspiration for Australian larrikin culture. Who would have thought that blackface ‘coon’ characters would have had such an influence on what it seen now as such an ocker cultural identity? But it seems to me that this was the case. 

Larrikins and ‘coons’ were both reviled as savage and oversexed at the end of the century, for intimidating people in the street, for thieving and living the fast life. Little wonder, then, that dance-mad larrikins would have kicked up a storm to songs like I’m a Hot Thing or Darktown is out To-night, feeling a sense of gleeful recognition in the words and the toe-tappin’ beat:

Warm coons’ a-prancin’s, swell coons a-dancin’
Tough coons who’ll want to fight;
So, bring along your blazers,
Fetch out your razors, Darktown is out to-night.

Almost all the theatre memoirs I’ve been reading are by men. So many of them give a sense of a similar subjectivity: loud, jocular and glib, as if perpetually ready to slap someone on the back and make a show of meeting them in the street. These works exude a kind of soiled, knocked-about-a-bit but-ain’t-that-life sensibility, full of anecdotes evidently worn from use. The memoir of Australian variety comedian Bobby Watson, for example, is a little down-at-heel volume, published in 1926. You picture him as a geezer laughing beefily over a pint, wearing a crumpled shirt with sweat-stains beneath the arms. After a while, he grows tiresome through his determination to be thought a ‘wag’ and a ‘colourful bloke’.

Watson’s stories are mostly about blokes doing things together. When he was a boy, he and other game ‘uns decided to black their faces with burnt cork and busk as minstrels on a Sydney street-corner. One goldminer passing threw a morsel of gold, he said - scout’s honour - into their upturned cap. Much later on, he and a bunch of other variety performers played a trick on their friend Viktor the strongman, convincing him he had mesmeric powers. He later booked out a hall and tried to convince audiences to ‘eata the candle’ on stage. That sort of thing. Some of this is funny, but after a while you start wishing there more women in it, and less of this all-hail-well-met caper all the time.

One of the places I’ve found these memoirs is in a cache of material collected by an obscure Australian magician, William (?) Robbins, now at the State Library of New South Wales. Among other things he collected autobiographies by other magicians and popular performers. There’s work by the English conjurors David Devant, Harry Leat, one of the Maskelynes, and an out-and-out shyster called Van Hare, perhaps the most likeable of the lot, who showed boa constrictors, alligators, Bloomer-girls, conjurors, and ‘a wonderful dwarf, named the celebrated Miss Paten’, in the last half of the nineteenth century. There is a single memoir by a woman in the Robbins collection, a very curious little offering by an unfortunate lady  born without arms or legs, and who was exhibited in a cage by P. T. Barnum (and others) for most of her life. That work is remarkable for its prim matter-of-factness, its quiet reportage of this show and that tour as if it were not so bad, really, to be gawped at continually, and have ladies pretend to faint upon beholding one’s visage, the better to fall into the arms of their male companions. No flashy stories or greasy anecdotes there at all.

I spent another week at Mitchell Library, Sydney. That strange velvety dust from old paper on my fingers; crick in my neck as I leant over the laptop hours on end. There were boxes and boxes of old playbills and posters, some crumbling hopelessly as I turned them, and scrap albums in which theatre buffs had carefully glued reviews, usually (infuriatingly) with no indication as to date or city. What a humbling thing it is to pick over cryptic remnants of the past like this, residuum of other people’s preoccupations and hopeful enterprise. Sometimes it makes me feel hopfeul as well – how wonderful, that people have been creating and striving and toiling all this time, and how wonderful to be able to participate in it now - and sometimes it feels almost horribly plaintive: time to fend off fatalism and melancholy.

At the moment I haven’t really been looking at mystic theatre per se. I’ve been trying instead to give myself an education about popular theatre in late nineteenth-century Australia at large: burlesques, variety shows, minstrelsy, and to a lesser extent, pantomime. This is partly because of how caught up I became in writing and researching my paper on larrikins for the AHA conference in Armidale (I loved writing that paper). And it’s also how keen I am now to write one more specifically on larrikin women, looking at the ways in which they used variety theatre characters as an inspiration for their own identities and style.

I’m not sure yet whether this is going to end up taking me in a slightly different direction to the one I’d planned for this project, but I figure I will follow where the interest takes me for the next little while. And it’s here at the moment: in the attempt to visualise nineteenth century popular theatre, its restless, chaotic, open-ended and interactive character, so different from anything I know, and which, I’m convinced, was far more important to Australian culture than I’ve been thinking up until now.

It was easy to blog in the first weeks of my postdoc, because the ideas I had then were small and discrete. Not hard at all to make something like that (single object left behind on a shelf in a room / first leaves on a skeletal array of branches) the subject of a short piece. The last few weeks I’ve been researching and writing a long paper on larrikins, however – the people who were rowdy as they come in Australian theatre audiences – and the ideas have been coming too thick and fast to be made the subject of a quick-grab blog entry.

Query: does blogging encourage an aesthetic or way of thinking attuned to the singular and impressionistic? Does it work against other modes of thought and appreciating the things one is into? It certainly seems that blogging becomes difficult for me in the midst of writing something bigger, and that this is about more than just the time it takes to write an entry. It’s more about the difficulty of inhabiting two differerent sensibilities simultaneously.