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NLA News - home April 2006 Volume XVI Number 7

Roll Up to the Circus!

click to enlarge
Photograph of a circus scene with horses and tents in the background Papers of Agnes Greenwood
Manuscript Collection
MS 72/Box 2/Folder 22

Gillian Arrighi searches for remnants of the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus, Australia’s largest and most dazzling producer of popular culture in the late 19th century

During the 1890s and early years of the 20th century, the circus tent was arguably the most popular place of entertainment in Australia. Of the many native and foreign circuses which toured our continent throughout those years, the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus became the largest and most successful provider of circus entertainment across Australasia. Yet, despite thousands of performances from 1889 to 1908, very few pieces of ephemera remain. A recent week spent at the National Library revealed some unique and diverse articles relating to the FitzGeralds, each of which casts light on this important company.

The FitzGeralds rose to prominence in the eastern colonies of Australia during the Depression years of the early 1890s. They marketed their principally equestrian circus with fiercely nationalistic rhetoric. In 1892, the circus enjoyed its first major success in Melbourne when it presented 200 performances over a period of 24 weeks, a season which was claimed as a show business record for Melbourne. A year later they followed this impressive run with a popular season in Sydney that lasted 14 weeks. During these years, the FitzGeralds’ ring tent seated over 3000 people, and by 1898 the company and its popularity had grown to such an extent that their vast performance marquee had expanded to accommodate an audience of 7000.

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FitzGerald Brothers, Variety Shows, Sydney c.1898
Sharp Collection
Box 1 of 4; PROMPT Collection
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FitzGerald Brothers’ New Circus
b&w negative; 11.4 x 7.1 cm
Part of collection of photographs on the history of the circus in Australia
Reproduction of poster for the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus, in Bulletin, by Mark St Leon, 2 November 1901
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3622450

From 1894 the company regularly crossed the Tasman to tour New Zealand where it spent up to six months at a time working through the islands. In 1904, the FitzGeralds expanded their reach to the colonial outposts of Asia, touring for two years through the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, the Straits Territories, India and into China as far as Shanghai.

Of all 19th-century entertainment genres, the performance histories of travelling shows are possibly the most problematic to retrieve. The transitory nature of the travelling circus meant that its proprietors and performers generally left few records concerning either themselves or their business operations. My task of tracing the movements of the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus, and their shifting range of productions and personnel, has been conducted primarily through newspapers from the various colonies and territories where the circus played. Amusement column advertisements provided essential indices of date and place, while reviews provided, to a greater or lesser degree, the names of the performers together with detailed descriptions of their acts. Reviews also provided surprising information about a range of variables which might have impacted on performances such as the weather conditions, the range of technology utilised by the production, details concerning the audience, and the tone in which the show was received. Occasionally, a newspaper divulged a rare interview with one of the agents or proprietors of the circus which filled some of the gaps in my research, while very occasionally these primary sources were enriched by the discovery of a program, an oral history, or a selection of photographs such as those I discovered on my recent visit to the Library.

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FitzGerald Brothers
b&w negative; 10.0 x 7.1 cm
Part of collection of photographs on the history of the circus in Australia
Reproduction of illustration and text in NZ Mail, by Mark St Leon, 3 March 1898
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3622420

The Prompt Collection holds one program for the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus and, given the scarcity of ephemera relating to the company, this is a rare commodity indeed. Finding such an article can be both exciting and poignant. The materiality of the fragile paper connected me immediately with the past; it is the last remnant of a singular and vibrant performance. As I read through the 22 acts on the bill, the thrill of finding another piece of the jigsaw became clouded by the fact that 19th-century circus programs were rarely printed with the date or location of the performance they describe. The program in the Prompt Collection is no exception but, in this case, the many display advertisements which fill the page margins indicate that it originated in Sydney. Further newspaper research has enabled me to identify it as being from a season which ran from 22 December 1897 to 22 January 1898. The FitzGerald Brothers’ career was highlighted with numerous successful metropolitan seasons, but this program dates from a period when they were unchallenged as the premier circus in Australasia, and were attracting larger audiences than any other Australian circus.

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Herr Zapf, the German liontamer with FitzGeralds’ Circus
&w negative; 11.5 x 9.0 cm
Part of collection of photographs on the history of the circus in Australia
Reproduction of illustration in Melbourne Punch, by Mark St Leon, 2 February 1899
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3622241

Prior to this, the circus had spent most of 1896 in Western Australia where the standing company of artists, stud and menagerie had wintered at a camp near Albany. During those few months of hiatus from touring, Dan Fitzgerald, the elder of the brothers, travelled to Europe to engage new artists for the coming year. The Sydney season at the close of 1897 marked the company’s first return to that city in 18 months. Styled the FitzGerald Brothers’ Monster Combined Shows, the aggregation was shipped from Adelaide to Sydney aboard three steamers. Among the large travelling community were the prizes of Dan’s expedition to Europe which included a range of unique performing animals from Carl Hagenbeck’s Zoological Circus in Hamburg, reportedly purchased at a cost of 60 000 marks.

The recent acquisitions were an elephant that ‘performed’ two acts, the first a comedy routine with a Russian pony named Oscar, the second with a lion known as Prince. The latter of these turns was presented as the climax to the show and involved the elephant, Lizzie, riding a specially constructed tricycle around the ring with the lion seated on a velvet cushion on her back. At a time when society generally accepted the novelty of animal acts, this particularly amicable pairing of two natural enemies was promoted as a triumph of wise and gentle training. Such an approach to animal education was the hallmark of Carl Hagenbeck, a German animal handler and dealer renowned for a system of animal training which was based on gentleness and patience.

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The Levon Troupe of Acrobats at FitzGeralds’ Circus. The two young women with this troupe also performed a dual act on the high wire under the nom d’arena of the Alma Sisters
Reproduced from Melbourne Punch, 9 February 1899
Newspaper and Microform Collection mfm NX 314

A closer study of the program revealed that the circus company was a multicultural and multiracial community, and I make this comment even allowing for the outright mendaciousness that characterised the publicity of 19th-century circuses. Among the acts appear the names of two Aboriginal performers, Harry Cardello and W.E. (Billy) Jones, both of whom were long standing and versatile members of the company. Performers from Germany, Japan, Java, England and the United States were also represented on the bill.

Item number 11 on the program refers to ‘Ernest Shand, The Marvellous Boy Jockey’, and despite the announcement that he was from ‘Sanger’s Famous Circus, Liverpool’, Shand was in fact a young lad from Fitzroy, Melbourne, who had been apprenticed to Dan FitzGerald in 1894 at the age of 11. It is Shand who provides a link to the oral history holdings of the Library and the life story of Iris Shand, recorded by the Library in 1985. Iris was Ernest’s daughter, and Iris’ mother, Katie Montgomery, was a highly skilled equestrienne who joined the FitzGeralds in 1900. In the recording, Iris recounts the stories which her parents told her about the methods used to train circus acrobats and equestrians. These preserved memories in turn illuminate the hidden backstage operations of the FitzGeralds and other Australian entertainment organisations of the period. One of the acts explained by Iris is the ‘Serpentine Dance on a Rolling Globe’ which was a regular item in the FitzGeralds’ programs. The routine was a signature of La Belle Rose, the nom d’arena of Millie FitzGerald, wife of Tom FitzGerald, co-proprietor of the circus. La Belle Rose also appears in the Prompt Collection program.

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Mdlle Millie Dagmar 1899
b&w negative; 10.8 x 8.2 cm
Part of collection of photographs on the history of the circus in Australia
Reproduction of illustration in Melbourne Punch, by Mark St Leon, 9 November 1899, p. 473
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3622224

Time spent in the Library’s Newspaper Collection with the weekly magazine Melbourne Punch revealed a number of photographs of performers who appeared with the FitzGeralds during the Sydney season of 1897–98. The static images can never attest to the skill, energy or excitement of the acts performed by these artists, but nevertheless an idea of their costumes and the manner in which they wanted to present themselves is captured in these photographs.

The personal papers of Agnes Greenwood, held in the Library’s Manuscript Collection, brought to light a rare photograph that captures the FitzGeralds’ staff in a very different aspect of their work. Agnes Greenwood was born into a small rural circus and performed with the FitzGeralds before going on to work on the Variety stage. The battered photograph from her papers shows an informal gathering of circus workers in the midst of preparing a site for the tents; the slogans on the wagons indicate that the photograph postdates 1893, the year the company first assembled a menagerie. The efficient and ordered labour displays of the circus workers as they unloaded animals and paraphernalia, then transformed a vacant site by setting up pavilions and seating, were another type of public performance generated by the circus. This informal photograph reveals the less than glittering work regimen of the travelling 19th-century circus.

My retrieval of the performance history of the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus has been enriched by the variety of these sources. However, the task of locating these interrelated items and allowing them to speak to each other, as it were, could not have been possible without the detailed catalogues of the Library’s various collections.

GILLIAN ARRIGHI is currently engaged in a PhD at the School of Drama, Fine Arts and Music, University of Newcastle, where she is also a techer of Acting.

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