A prominent member of Queensland’s arts community will turn a university lecture into a dramatic production to launch his new book charting the history of plays staged in the Australian colonies.
Executive Dean of The University of Queensland’s Faculty of Arts Professor Richard Fotheringham will discuss the significance of colonial plays during the lecture, which will also contain staged readings of scenes from the plays.
His new book, Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834-1899, contains the scripts of nine colonial plays, beginning with Henry Melville’s The Bushrangers and ending with the best known of the Kelly Gang plays.
“I want to tell something of the quest to locate and recover these plays,” Professor Fotheringham said.
“I also want to speculate about how the neglect of Australian cultural history has led us to make very different assumptions about what colonial society was like.”
The free public lecture will be held as part of UQ’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies’ annual program on Thursday, March 16 in the University’s Abel Smith Lecture Theatre at Campbell Place from 5.30 to 6.30pm. Director of the Centre Professor Graeme Turner will chair the lecture.
It will be followed by the official launch of Professor Fotheringham’s book by Justice Margaret McMurdo, President of the Queensland Court of Appeal.
Professor Fotheringham said many of the plays in Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834-1899 were about crime and punishment.
“The plays in this collection give us for the first time an insight into the extraordinary lively and brash colonial theatre industry as it started to tell for the first time the tragic and terrifying stories of European settlement, the rise of flag-waving nationalistic pride, and the comic misadventures of parliamentary self-rule,” Professor Fotheringham said.
Each script in the book has been carefully edited or reconstructed from unique manuscripts or rare colonial printed editions, giving full respect to their historical forms and usages.
The plays have been given generous historical and textual introductions and are supplemented with explanatory notes on the many people, places, events and stories referred to.
The extensively illustrated general introduction describes the Australian colonial theatre industry – its stories, artists, stage traditions and innovations – and explains their appeal as art and show business to men and women from different social groups living in both city and country.
Professor Fotheringham has a long history with the Queensland theatre industry. As a UQ graduate, he returned to the University in 1979 to teach theatre, film and television studies after a decade working in professional theatre.
Copies of Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834-1899 will be available for sale on the night at a discounted price, courtesy of the UQ Bookshop and University of Queensland Press.
Enquiries: Rebecca Ralph, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (telephone 07 3346 9764, email admin.cccs@uq.edu.au).
Media: For more information, contact John Gunders at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (telephone 3346 9765, email j.gunders@uq.edu.au) or Chris Saxby at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2479, email c.saxby@uq.edu.au).
