Amateur Theatre in Australia

History

Amateur theatre in Australia began almost at the same time as European invaders settled in Australia. The First Fleet, carrying British military and convicts sentenced to transportation arrived in January 1788 at Port Jackson (now Sydney) on the east coast of Australia. Within eighteenth months, the convicts had put on a performance of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer to celebrate the King's birthday on 4th June 1789. Convicts and soldiers, sailors, officers and their wives joined in this reassuring spectacle of English culture, reproduced in improvised circumstances by amateurs.

Robert Jordan has written about this inThe Convict Theatres of Early Australia, 1788-1840 (Currency Press, 2003) and Kathleen Wilson has remarked, in Strolling Players of Empire: theater and performances of power in the British imperial provinces, 1656-1833, (2024) wherever the British went, they put on a play. Australian novelist, Thomas Keneally, imagined the making of this performance in his novel, The Playmaker (1987), which was adapted by British playwright, Timberlake Wertenbaker as the play, Our Country's Good (1988).

Amateur theatre in Australia was important in reproducing European culture and society in the early colony, and remains a force in community involvement with the performing and creative arts.