Roll Up to the Circus!
Gillian Arrighi searches for remnants of the FitzGerald Brothers’ During the 1890s and early years of the 20th century, the circus tent was arguably the most popular place of entertainment in The FitzGeralds rose to prominence in the eastern colonies of
From 1894 the company regularly crossed the Tasman to tour 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.
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
Prior to this, the circus had spent most of 1896 in 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. 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 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,
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 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
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