The Vapour Trail is Melissa Bellanta’s research blog. Melissa has a postdoc at the University of Queensland. She’s a cultural historian based at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies there. She wants to find out what popular theatre and its lower-working class audiences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – especially the sort of productions that larrikins attended in Australia during this time. She’s also interested in Australian masculinity from this era, which wasn’t all about Russell Ward-esque bush-stoicism or sexist bohemians. And Melissa is intrigued by ‘mystic theatre’ as well: public seances, magic shows, displays of mental telepathy and mesmerism, popular lectures on spiritualism and paranormal phenomena. This blog records some of her musings along the way.
For a list of Melissa’s publications, see here. You can read her latest article on larrikins and Australian theatre in Australasian Drama Studies (vol. 52 (April 2008 ) here: the-larrikins-hop.
2 February 2008 at 9:01 pm
Your Jan. 10, 2008 entry on minstrel shows in Australia in the late 19th century mentions they were “about the love of Kentucky, or Dixie” etc. Why on earth would Australians favor shows about Southern U.S. stereotypes? Were there a lot of expat Americans in Australia during that era?
3 February 2008 at 2:04 am
The popularity of the blackface minstrel show in late nineteenth century Australia is in many ways intriguing, if not downright bizarre. There were numerous touring minstrel companies from the US in Australia in the 1870-80s (including Charles B. Hicks’ Afican-American performing troupe, the Georgia Minstrels, at the end of the 1870s). And there were also homegrown minstrel companies, some formed by white Americans (such as Frank Weston and Frank Clark) who made their careers in the Australian colonies. But the main audiences for these shows were white Australians, not Americans – there certainly weren’t enough American expats around to sustain audiences for minstrel shows.
The only historian to have written at any length about the minstrel show in colonial Australia so far is Richard Waterhouse. (I will be publishing an article on larrikin Austrlaians’ fondness for blackface minstrelsy in future, but that’s still in the works as yet). He talks about the fact that colonial Australians, like Anglo-Americans, were invested in the feelings of white superiority encouraged by the minstrel show. But it wasn’t all about racial stereotypes. The minstrel shows’ mixture of sentimentality and ribald, bathetic humour, and its overlap with English music hall and pantomime entertainments, gave it a cross-cultural appeal.
16 May 2008 at 5:38 am
There were quite a few Americans around Melbourne during the 1860s for the gold rush, but probably not enough to sustain minstrelsy, as Melissa says.
It might be worth noting that minstrel songs about Dixie and Kentucky were not so much realistic songs about places in the US; they were metaphors for a distant home (at a time of mass-migration) as well as for an idealised, utopic (for whites at least) past. No doubt audiences in Australia during the C19th experienced feelings of homelessness and nostalgia – both of which minstrel shows tapped into.
16 May 2008 at 7:01 am
I couldn’t agree more, bennymill – in fact, the nostlagic appeal of ‘Old Kentucky’-style songs is very much what I’ll be talking about in a paper I’ve just written for the Australian Historical Association conference in July 2008, drawing on comments to the same effect by American historians such as Alexander Saxton and Eric Lott.
29 April 2009 at 2:26 am
Hi Melissa,
Long time no see. Good to come across your work on the ether. Excellent research into larrikins.
I have been looking for songs and poems related to larrikins. Do you have the lyrics for ‘The Larrikin’s Hop’? Have you come across any other songs or poems in your travels?
Have you heard the fantastic experimental version of ‘The Raspberry Pickers’ Song’ by Percy Nobby Norton? You can listen online.
Looking forward to seeing future results of your research.
Toby.
30 April 2009 at 6:48 am
Dear Toby
Very good to hear from you, and long time no see indeed. I will email you an article on larrikins and blackface minstrelsy which contains the lyrics to ‘The Larrikin’s Hop’. Why are you interested in the songs and poetry? And no, haven’t come across Percy Nobby Norton… should I have??
- M
28 October 2009 at 5:03 am
Melissa, you mention your interest in telepathy and the paranormal, and I wonder if you’ve read books about Edgar Cayce, the USA Virginia Beach psychic.
Thanks,
Judy