Ratbags at the gates
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Helen O'Neil
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Helen O'Neil's biography and other articles by this writer
On a July evening in Sydney in 1955, the nation's arts establishment gathered to celebrate the beginning of a new era in Australian culture. It was the gala opening of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust's Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown and they were all there: a former High Court judge, scions of media and grazing dynasties from all the states, the hierarchy of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and of course the senior public servant who drove the changes in cultural policy for decades, H.C. ‘Nugget' Coombs.
The crowd had gathered in the refurbished Majestic Theatre in Newtown – a former cinema and before that a live Vaudeville venue – to applaud an English dame, seventy-three-year-old Sybil Thorndike, and several English knights of the stage including Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir Lewis Casson, as they performed English playwright Terence Rattigan's now-forgotten Sleeping Prince. A lot of imported talent, one might think, to celebrate the birth of Australian culture in its modern guise – a new partnership of philanthropy and government subsidy.
The souvenir program included a poem written for the occasion by James McAuley that took the Majestic's Vaudeville past as the takeoff spot for a more upmarket future. Dame Sybil, nearing the end of her career as the leading British actress of her generation, delivered the lines:
Here Drama used to live; and now once more
She breathes, she wakes, far lovelier than before.
The poem ended with the tribute to the youthful Queen Elizabeth, eponymous patron of the Trust that would oversee Australian efforts to build permanent performing arts companies to serve local audiences – and perhaps even rekindle the age of Elizabethan and Shakespearian drama in the twentieth century antipodes:
She broke the spell, she summoned up delight,
And led us to the triumph of this night.
I found the souvenir program recently in a battered folder of old photos and newspaper clippings. Printed on cream basket-weave paper tied with a red ribbon, and adorned with the backstage signatures of the visiting English artists, the program – like the night itself – was a cherished memory for my grandmother, Eunice Lloyd O'Neil, who performed on the night as one of the two Australian pianists.
For Eunice, the evening was an important statement that Australian culture would now embrace high art. A classically trained pianist, she had worked as an accompanist for the great South Street eisteddfod competitions in Ballarat. But this was not enough to support her as a single mother in the Great Depression, and she moved to Melbourne to pursue a precarious career as a musician, servicing the hungry demands of a new technology – radio broadcasting – for live content and personalities.
Vaudeville artists and actors, classically trained musicians, novelists and short story writers were at the centre of a big experiment to discover what would excite audiences, keep them buying radio sets and attract advertisers. Eunice's yellowed publicity clippings mark the progress of her career from accompanist for children's talent competitions and juvenile choirs to billing as ‘Australian pianiste and songstress' with the 5 Star Revue on commercial 3XY. She performed with Vaudeville stars including Stella Raymond and Max Reddy, and future newsreader Eric Pearce, who all moved on to successful careers in television in the 1960s.
Eunice had later joined the more erudite 3LO, to create a live show called Sweet Sophistication, based on performance of new songs and piano music. The radio station was part of the newly established ABC in 1932, and programmed popular music, commissioned radio drama and formed the classical ensembles that went on to be Australia's symphony orchestras. Even though radio dramas were not considered serious theatre, they attracted large and devoted audiences, and provided employment for countless actors, musicians and sound engineers. Eunice's commercial profile earned little respect from the cultural policy-makers of the time; artists like her were not considered carriers of Australian culture, more like ratbags, so the invitation to perform at the Newtown gala must have been particularly sweet.
ENTER THE AUSTRALIAN ELIZABETHAN TRUST, based on an entirely new model of cultural policy – a partnership of private funding from philanthropists and public funding from the state governments, with the Commonwealth contributing thirty thousand pounds. Although the Commonwealth had supported selected authors since 1908, this new subsidy model for non-profit art-making was formulated and articulated as a conscious effort to create an Australian-based cultural industry; it was an unapologetic nation-building exercise. The arts embodied a new creative energy and showed Australia could stand as an independent nation. ‘Our aim,' the Trust declared, ‘is to provide a theatre of Australians by Australians for Australians.' It would do this by establishing institutions: a national opera, a national theatre and a dramatic arts institute to train young performers. The Trust's first annual review featured messages from the Prime Minister as well as all of the state premiers: Joe Cahill, Henry Bolte, Vince Gair, Thomas Playford, Robert Cosgrove and Bert Hawke (Bob's uncle). Notwithstanding Cahill's role in committing New South Wales to the Sydney Opera House, this was as unlikely a bunch of arts supporters as you could find – even then. But there they were, left and right, premier-patrons all, promoting the arts for audiences in their states as an explicit expression of an emerging Australian arts sector. And paying for it.
For me, it is almost unbelievable that this landmark was celebrated by importing English theatre stars to perform an English play. I look at this piece of memorabilia, preserved among my grandmother's professional clips and publicity shots, as an outstanding example of the cultural cringe – a quaint but embarrassing lapse in taste which Australia has put firmly behind it.
But has it? In the profoundly different world today, where cultural product pervades every waking moment, there is a need for new models that encompass, but go beyond, the nation-building ethos and subsidy system of which the Trust marked the beginning – there is a need for new visionaries in policy and politics, artists who are prepared to buck the system, and push and prod their society to better define and understand itself by telling stories, providing insight and the joy that comes from watching outstanding and innovative performances.
When you read Nugget Coombs' accounts of why the Trust spent so much to import work, it is clear he and the other trustees and policy-makers thought Australian audiences valued English work more highly – the superior product of the ‘mother country'. Even among the most passionate advocates of Australian culture, in the upper reaches of the ABC and the public service, there was a lack of confidence that locally based artists had the skills to enrich and entertain their audiences. The Borovansky Ballet toured, but had to shut down regularly as finances dictated; live theatre had declined during the Depression and war years, and commercial productions were largely imported while the orchestras were still building their strength.
Coombs notes in his memoirs that ‘in the exuberance of the immediate post-war years', Australians were conscious that they had proven their capacity to stand alone and achieve things on an international stage: ‘This self-awareness and assurance was reflected in a burst of activity in the arts.' Coombs and his colleagues were aware of the growing pressure from artists themselves for more public and private investment – to move their work to higher standards with better production resources and more rehearsal time, and actually reach audiences in dedicated venues and exhibition areas.
Coombs worked hard to establish the local equivalent of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which had been championed by John Maynard Keynes. Coombs argued this case, using his persuasive powers on a succession of prime ministers and pointing to the success of Keynes' model, which had fostered new British culture with public investment. Australian politicians took longer to be persuaded. In 1949, he persuaded Prime Minister Ben Chifley to invite British director Tyrone Guthrie to visit and advise on the establishment of a national theatre. Guthrie proposed a two-phase program: first importing foreign – principally British – companies to tour and raise the level of audience appreciation, critical review and local standards; and then creating a London-based company of Australian actors as a training ground. Guthrie's plan was dropped after the election by the new prime minister, Robert Menzies, but the idea reappeared in modified form when Coombs convinced the general manager of the ABC Charles Moses, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, John Pringle and Melbourne money-man Ian Potter to join forces to found the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust as a public-private partnership.
The trust was designed to have flexibility, to foster expertise and build its reserves by producing ‘popular' – profitable – productions. As the opening night gala program declared: ‘The Trust [will] provide greater opportunities for Australian artists to earn a living in their own land, and for Australian audiences to enjoy the pleasure that live theatre can bring.' Imported stars and productions were an integral part of its activities, designed to give it a profitable source of income.
The deference to British models and the lack of confidence in local creative skills perhaps reflected the weight of the Depression and years of war. Australia had shown great signs of a vibrant and eclectic mix of cultural expression in its early years. The first theatres opened in the 1830s, and a constant mix of professional and amateur artists created performance and exhibitions of art. Currency Press has documented an extraordinary story of the richness and diversity of this cultural life which contradicts the more dour views of struggle and survival in a harsh climate. In its encyclopaedias Companion to the Theatre in Australia and Music and Dance in Australia, there are fascinating vignettes of communities staging, writing and connecting with European art from early in the nineteenth century – in opera, theatre and music – with classical ballet performances from 1845 and Australia's first professional opera company augmenting amateur work from 1861. In the Victorian era, the colonies established collecting institutions for visual arts, historical and scientific material. In the new universities, faculties of arts and humanities began a conservative, but nevertheless heartfelt, discussion of literature and fine arts, and the conservatories trained musicians. The great quest for winners gave the Welsh eisteddfods a congenial home in provincial towns and the suburbs, and generations competed across the performing arts. The emergence of a stream of talented Australian singers, headlined by Dame Nellie Melba, was no happy accident, but a product of this competitive environment. In regional Victoria, the South Street, Ballarat competitions which gave my grandmother her start provided one of the prime venues for this grassroots artistic and cultural life, creating a well-supported hub of community life of choirs and ensembles and soloists. By the mid-twentieth century, artists like Eunice had found a niche wherever they could. In the 1950s, she played the piano for children's productions at the North Sydney Independent Theatre where Doris Fitton continued to produce new work, and established a children's theatre company in Castle Hill in the city's north-west. Even in the comparative affluence of the 1950s, theatre happened at the junction of professional and amateur, where people gathered to make their own art and nurture local audiences.