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NLA News - home August 2002 Volume XII Number 11
'Like a Hippo and Something Else': An All-Australian Bunyip Pantomime

Richard Stone describes the career of an original piece of Australian theatre

Advertisement for the vaudeville program, Majestic Theatre, Adelaide, 1917
Advertisement for the vaudeville program, Majestic Theatre, Adelaide, 1917
(Photograph courtesy of the State Library of South Australia)

It was inevitable that the bunyip, the mythological figure of fear from Aboriginal legend, should eventually be appropriated to appear on the Australian pantomime stage. Pantomime was a popular Christmas holiday tradition in Australia well into the twentieth century, and continues to a somewhat lesser degree today. Audiences cheered the heroes, loved the beautiful heroine, gasped at villains and fearful beasts, and marveled at the spectacular transformation scenes. Cinderella, Aladdin, Robinson Crusoe, and a bevy of characters from European fairy stories and fables filled theatres during holiday seasons. To keep Australian adults and parents entertained, extra songs, local Australian references, and a healthy dose of vaudeville acts were added.

In 1916, the first fully fledged Australian pantomime appeared, with the impeccable credentials of Australian authorship, Australian settings, Australian characters—and a bunyip!

The Bunyip, or The Enchantment of Fairy Princess Wattle Blossom opened at the Grand Opera House in Sydney on 22 December. By 1916, a strong sense of national identity permeated popular culture and the arts, with bushrangers, settlers, squatters, explorers, miners and sportspersons frequently being depicted on stage, on film and in music. This nationalism was reinforced by the patriotic response to the country’s involvement in the First World War.

The entertainment scene was also very competitive. Entrepreneurs such as the Tait brothers, the Fuller family, Hugh McIntosh, and J.C. Williamsons toured imported and Australian-made stage and film attractions around the country and across the Tasman. In its first season in Sydney, The Bunyip had to compete with a changing program of vaudeville at the Tivoli, musicals such as Very Good Eddie, Peg O’ My Heart and Waltz Dream, several stage farces, the popular play On Our Selection with Bert Bailey, and a new bush play called Mum Dawson, Boss. Films included A Daughter of the Gods (with Australian swimming star Annette Kellerman), Charlie Chaplin comedies, and the opening of D.W. Griffiths’ epic film Intolerance. In spite of this robust competition, however, record numbers of people flocked to Australia’s largest theatre for nearly 100 performances of The Bunyip.

The Bunyip Pantomime advertisement from The Age (Melbourne) 16 April 1917
The Bunyip Pantomime advertisement from The Age (Melbourne) 16 April 1917
Newspaper & Microform Collection

Following the Sydney season, Fullers took The Bunyip to Melbourne in time for the 1917 Easter holidays, where it ran at the Princess Theatre for seven weeks. It then moved on to Adelaide in June 1917, where a short two-week season was hugely successful. The Bunyip returned to Melbourne for the 1917–18 Christmas holidays and, to catch the Easter holidays again, moved to Brisbane for two weeks in early April 1918. A revival in Sydney over Christmas 1924–25 was its final appearance. All seasons were reported as being highly successful, with instances of patrons being turned away.

The original idea for an Australian ‘bush’ pantomime is credited to Ella Airlie, a young Ballarat writer. From 1908 she had attempted to interest entrepreneurs in taking up her ideas for a bush pantomime, and she finally convinced Benjamin Fuller, the New Zealander who had developed a lucrative vaudeville circuit on both sides of the Tasman. In 1914, Fuller had also engaged a young comedian, Roy Rene, who quickly became popular with his distinctive mix of larrikin and Jewish humour. In July 1916, Fuller had brought in another comedian, Nat Phillips, who combined with Roy Rene to develop a comic act called Stiffy and Mo, which became extremely popular. Fuller also commissioned Phillips to develop Ella Airlie’s bush pantomime. Though, as the Sydney Morning Herald would comment, ‘the title … is probably all that is left of the "book" by Ella Airlie after Nat Phillips had finished collaborating and producing the new piece in the marketable form the public expects at Christmas.’

The creators concocted a very successful combination of entertainment for children and adults, where the lines between pantomime and vaudeville were blurred. Fullers cast the pantomime with well-known performers from their vaudeville stable. As the Truth remarked in Brisbane, ‘The artists have all made big reputations in the vaudeville world.’ Among them were Stiffy and Mo, who appeared in all seasons of The Bunyip. (Indeed, often those pantomime seasons were preceded and followed by regular vaudeville attractions with Stiffy and Mo. Strangely, the lifespan of the pantomime paralleled the lifespan of their partnership, which began just before the birth of The Bunyip and dissolved not long after its final season.)

No copy of The Bunyip’s full script has yet been located in Australia, though a nine-page fragment in the Queensland Performing Arts Museum consists of segments of the comic part of Stiffy. However, the story line can be gleaned from newspaper accounts. The heroine was the fairy, Princess Wattle Blossom. A feud between the fairy household and the Gnome family led to the Chief Gnome stealing the fairy’s wand while she slept, and turning her into a bunyip when she awoke. She could temporarily be made mortal again if some kind soul took pity on her. This duty fell to the principal boy, Arthur, the son of the Warrawee station owner. (Arthur was played in traditional pantomime form by actress Queenie Paul.) As Princess Wattle Blossom’s temporary mortality waned, a bush fire was lit to defeat the Chief Gnome, who was mortally afraid of fire. Arthur and the Princess were united, and all lived happily ever after!

A bevy of other characters inhabited the plot, mainly to introduce vaudeville comedians and singers. Specialty acts appeared, such as much-praised bird imitations by ‘Belora’, ‘The Cavanna Duo’ (‘the funny fellow on the wire and the girl with the harp’), and ‘The Marvellous Manchurians’ (‘Startling Chinese Acrobats … In a bewildering series of feats—Whirling, Twirling and Swinging suspended by their Pigtails in midair’).

Bunyip, words and music by Herbert de Pinna (Sydney: W.H. Paling and Co., 1914) All I Want is a Cottge, Some Roses and You. Music by Chas. K. Harris
Bunyip, words and music by Herbert de Pinna (Sydney: W.H. Paling and Co., 1914)
Music Collection MUS N m 780 AAv.78
All I Want is a Cottge, Some Roses and You
Music by Chas. K. Harris (Sydney: Albert’s Music Score, c.1916)
Music Collection MUS N mba 783.2 H313

A generous number of young children also appeared on stage. Newspaper comments testify to this tactic as a sure winner in attracting audiences. One such child was four-year-old Leila Dabscheck, whose notes about her experiences as a child prodigy in The Bunyip in Melbourne are in the possession of her daughter, theatre publicist Coralie Wood. Having survived the grueling audition process along with hundreds of other hopeful tiny tots, Leila won a part:

I vividly remember coming down a flight of stairs on my tip toes & Mo looks at Stiffy & splutters, "look what I got in my Xmas stockin". Stiffy and Mo were all the rage and I must have upset many a fan being Mo’s special pet!

No pantomime was complete without special effects and spectacular scenes. In The Bunyip these include a trip inside the Jenolan Caves, several Aboriginal features including a ‘corroboree’, black trackers, and boomerangs (‘whizzing over the heads of the audience’). The coup de theatre was The Great Bush Fire, described in glowing terms by the Age of 9 April 1917:

The picturesque vista of white-stemmed gum trees and tree ferns with their delicate foliage and tattered bark, is suddenly shrouded in a mist of smoke. The scent of burning gum leaves fills the theatre. Then red sheets of flames spring from the undergrowth and lap the glowing trunks, licking wickedly at the forest giants; and as the trees crash amid a shower of sparks to the ground, and then the red glow of the fire lights the sky, the demon flees disconsolate, and Fairy Wattle Blossom regains her lost wand, and triumphs. 

(The dramatic impact of this theatrical conflagration prompted the producers to warn patrons in a program that the scene was staged ‘By Special Permission of the Superintendent of the M.F.B—NO DANGER.’)

Although the bush fire scene stayed in the pantomime for its life of eight years, other elements in the show changed.  In the 1924 revival, a scene set in England was added at the beginning, with most of the principal characters setting sail as emigrants for Australia. The order of scenes also changed, and some characters underwent sex changes. For example, the Swaggie was originally a ‘trousers’ role played by the popular actress Nellie Kolle, but in 1924 it was played by a young tenor, Peter Brooks. Specialty acts changed, and by 1924 ‘The Marvellous Manchurians’ had been replaced by the less exotic sounding ‘Foy Bros. The Acme of Acrobats.’

Songs were added and subtracted too, particularly in the early seasons, as The Bunyip reflected wartime sentiment. Songs appeared, such as ‘Bill’s Enlisted’, and ‘Down in Australia’, in which soldiers reminisced about home. ‘Hurry Up’, added on the final nights of the first Sydney season, was advertised as ‘Australia’s battle-song, sung by Nellie Kolle with Military Assistance’. By the 1924 revival, nearly three-quarters of the original songs by Ella Airlie, Herbert de Pinna and others had been replaced by new songs—including the debut of an American romantic ballad, ‘It Had to Be You’, destined to become a perennial favourite in Hollywood movies. (Its appearance in an Australian pantomime so early in the song’s career is an odd footnote in popular musical history.)

Tracking these changes and the history of this pantomime is an exercise as elusive as finding an actual bunyip. Newspaper items such as advertisements, articles and reviews are an important source. However, for a show that ran so successfully over many years, the survival rate of theatre programs in public collections is very low. Copies of programs for only half of the six seasons of The Bunyip have been located in various collections. No copies of the programs for the Brisbane 1918 season, or the Melbourne return season of 1917–18, have been found. The State Library of South Australia holds a program for a vaudeville show at Adelaide’s Majestic Theatre which carries a large amount of advertising for the forthcoming season of The Bunyip (including a rare group photo of principal cast members), but no actual program for the Adelaide production has been found.

The National Library holds sheet music for 21 of the songs included in The Bunyip at some time in its career. While it is the largest located set of music from the pantomime, it lacks three songs —‘Down Below’, ‘Rachel Mendelsohn’, and ‘Love’s Perfect Way’.

Many of the sheet music covers feature cameo portraits of the stars and creators surrounding a fantastical bunyip creature, described by the music publishers Palings as ‘a counterfeit presentment in colours of that legendary beastie’. Whether this was the bunyip as seen on stage is unknown, as no photo of its representation has been found.  Roy Rene, in his memoirs, described the bunyip as involving ‘two character actors inside … it had horns and its eyes were lit up. It was a bit like a hippo and something else’. The Courier Mail in Brisbane mentioned  ‘a bunyip with blazing eyes and foaming mouth’, whereas the Sydney Morning Herald described a ‘toad-like bunyip’.

All these attempts to picture a bunyip are of course, in the end, futile and counterfeit. The mysterious spirit from Aboriginal mythology must remain an elusive, potent figure of fear in spite of its ephemeral transformation in a hybrid piece of popular Australian theatre.

RICHARD STONE is a former National Library staff member. He is currently a consultant on ephemera and performing arts resources

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