The Wild Australia Show was a troupe of Indigenous Australian performers that toured Australia during 1892 and 1893. The group was formed by the Scottish-born businessman Archibald Meston and his business partner Brabazon Harry Purcell with the intention of performing in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe on the way to Chicago to perform at the World's Columbian Exposition. The troupe comprised 27 people—21 men, 5 women, and 1 child—from across northern Queensland and the surrounding region.
The Indigenous performers were recruited by Purcell during 1891 and 1892. Their motivations for joining the tour are unknown; scholars have suggested that some may have been kidnapped or coerced, while others may have sought an escape from violent and oppressive conditions on the Queensland frontier. Inspired by the ethnological expositions popular in the colonial era, as well as by Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the troupe's performances included dances, corroborees, demonstrations of spear and boomerang throwing, and stagings of scenes inspired by the Australian frontier wars. Meston and Purcell acted as narrators and provided commentary on Aboriginal culture during each performance. The group performed in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. They were photographed during their tour at the studios of the photographers Charles Kerry, John William Lindt, and Henry King.
Facing financial pressures and contractual disputes, Meston abandoned the troupe in Melbourne in 1893, leaving Purcell and the performers stranded without the funds to return home. Purcell made attempts to continue their planned world tour but was eventually forced to return to Queensland. The performers returned to their lands and largely faded from the historical record. The failed endeavour led to criticism of Meston for his abandonment of the troupe, as well as accusations of kidnapping and a fierce legal battle between the two former business partners.
Background
In 1851, Archibald Meston was born in Scotland, and emigrated to the Colony of New South Wales with his family as a child. He moved to Queensland in 1874, where he managed a sugar plantation and became a successful journalist. He became the editor of the Ipswich Observer in 1876 and published articles in The Queenslander. Meston was elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly in 1878, but was forced out of his seat in 1881 after declaring bankruptcy following a failed coal mining venture. He moved to North Queensland, where he became the editor of the Townsville Herald and established a sugar plantation near Cairns. After the collapse of his sugar business, he made a series of speculative property investments; these ventures ended in failure, resulting in accusations of fraud from those who had lost money in a failed settlement scheme near the Russell River.
Meston, who had once openly espoused virulently racist views, developed an interest in Aboriginal culture and joined the Aborigines' Protection Society of Queensland in 1890. He began to employ more admiring rhetoric towards Indigenous Australians, describing their treatment by colonists as "a reproach to our common humanity", while also supporting assimilationist policies that aimed to eradicate Indigenous cultures. He began to present himself as an ethnologist and an expert on Aboriginal peoples. He often praised the athleticism of Aboriginal Australians and spoke of his admiration for their prowess as warriors. He presented the first of what he termed "illustrated lectures" on Aboriginal Australians at the Theatre Royal in Brisbane on 29 September 1891. Meston's early lectures—which featured live Aboriginal people, painted bush scenes, and taxidermied animals—became the model for the Wild Australia Show.
In late 1891 it was reported that Meston was assembling an Aboriginal performance troupe to travel to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His plan was for the troupe to perform in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, before finishing their tour in Chicago. Meston was joined in the endeavour by Brabazon Purcell, a journalist and stock and station agent he had met during an 1891 Aborigines' Protection Society event, who was promised one-third of the profits. The pair borrowed a substantial sum of money to pursue the project, hoping that it would prove a commercial success. Meston later said that he had spent more than £1000 () on the show and that he had been motivated primarily by the "benefit of the aboriginals".
History
Recruitment of performers
Meston and Purcell's recruitment of Indigenous performers took place between November 1891 and October 1892. Meston insisted that all of the Aboriginal performers be physically fit to illustrate his vision of the athleticism of Aboriginal Australians. Purcell set out on an expedition across northern Australia to recruit Aboriginal performers and collect artefacts, while Meston worked to secure financing for the tour. Purcell began by visiting the rainforest region surrounding Cairns and climbed Mount Bellenden Ker. While he did not recruit any performers during this initial expedition, he collected a number of artefacts that were likely among the props used during the Wild Australia Show.
Purcell then travelled to the frontier region of north-western Queensland near the Northern Territory border. In late 1891 or early 1892, Purcell met the first group of Aboriginal people to join the Wild Australia Show: five Wakaya people from near Lake Nash, including an elder named Kudajarnd and two of his wives. How Purcell convinced this group to join him is unknown; he was later accused of kidnapping or coercing some Aboriginal performers, but it is likely that others joined willingly. The anthropologist Paul Memmott has suggested that some may have felt that they had few better options available to them given the violence that they faced on their own lands. Purcell arranged to reunite with the Wakaya group a few months later. In late July 1892, Purcell brought the five Wakaya people back to Townsville, and on 3 August he arrived in Brisbane to hand the group over to Meston.
Purcell left Brisbane three days later to travel to Normanton, where he collected Aboriginal people from a variety of tribal groups who had been assembled by middlemen in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. These individuals are believed to have been recruited by police officers with whom Meston had made arrangements earlier that year. He collected five Aboriginal people from the Kimberley Town Camp and eleven from camps in the town of Croydon. Most had likely been displaced into the camps by the violent settler incursions into their lands that had begun in the 1860s and 1870s. Memmott suggests that some element of coercion was likely involved in their recruitment to the Wild Australia Show.
Purcell then travelled to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait to collect a group of Kaurareg people who had been brought there from Muralug (also known as Prince of Wales Island) after being recruited by public servants whom Purcell was using as agents. The group included Gida, a Kaurareg chief, and his wife and adopted son. On 14 September, Purcell arrived in Cairns with the 21 Indigenous people he had collected from across the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Torres Strait, before continuing on to Brisbane. There, the 26 recruits assembled at a camp in St Lucia to begin their rehearsals.
The last member recruited to the Wild Australia Show was a Kabi Kabi man named Yamurra who had previously appeared in Meston's lectures. He arrived one month after rehearsals had begun. Fluent in English and the only performer from southern Queensland, Yamurra was likely recruited by Meston to act as a liaison between the other Indigenous performers and white Australians. He travelled alone to the camp in St Lucia by train from Maryborough.
Rehearsals and initial performances in Brisbane
The troupe spent several months rehearsing in St Lucia between late September and November 1892. Meston drummed up substantial media interest in his planned tour and attracted many visitors to the rehearsal camp. One of these visitors was the painter Oscar Fristrom, who painted a portrait of a Walangama performer named Werdbura. Advertisements and newspaper articles began to be published about the upcoming show. They often referred to the Wakaya tradition of penile subincision; the practice, known as "Sturt's terrible rite", had become notorious among the settler population. Many newspapers referred to the performers as part of a "doomed race", echoing the popular notion at the time that Indigenous Australians were destined for extinction. Others suggested that the show would correct the misconceptions that audiences had been taught and would show them "the true character of the wild tribes of Australia".
The opening performance was held at Her Majesty's Opera House in Brisbane on 5 December 1892. The performance was positively received, although some reviewers criticised Meston's commentary as overly long-winded and expressed their wish that the Indigenous performers had simply been allowed to perform uninterrupted. The show's audience soon dwindled, and it moved to weekly outdoor performances at the Breakfast Creek Sportsground and then at the Exhibition Grounds, where it attracted much larger audiences.
Performances in Sydney
The troupe travelled to Sydney and gave its opening performance at the Bondi Aquarium on 26 December 1892. They quickly came under scrutiny from New South Wales government officials, who were alarmed by their lack of control over the Indigenous performers. Unlike the Queensland government, which did not have a dedicated protection office for managing its Aboriginal population, the New South Wales government was pursuing a strict policy of segregation and wished to remove Aboriginal people from the city of Sydney entirely. Despite scrutiny from the authorities, the troupe attracted large crowds and began staging daily afternoon and nighttime performances. It was reported in The Sydney Morning Herald that the opening performance attracted a crowd of 10,000 people. During their time in Sydney, the performers were photographed by Charles Kerry at his studio near the Aquarium; the photographs were offered for sale to the public and were eventually turned into postcards.
In January 1893, the troupe began performing a condensed nightly show at the School of Arts as part of the Walshe Family Circus, along with regular afternoon performances at the Bondi Aquarium. Due to the smaller size of the stage, this version of the show omitted the spear and boomerang throwing demonstrations and instead focused on acting and dancing scenes.
Reviews during the show's time in Sydney were not all positive. One review in The Daily Telegraph described the performers as "merely an indiscriminate assortment of blackfellows... having no proper supervision, and run purely as speculation". Concern about a lack of supervision was a common refrain; the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board, fearing that the performers might be left unsupervised in the city and unhappy with the "unseemly spectacle" of their presence, sought to have the show shut down throughout its time in the city. The board was also determined to avoid a repeat of a prior incident in which a troupe of 100 Aboriginal performers had been brought to Sydney and then abandoned in the city. The Aborigines Protection Board placed the troupe under police surveillance and sent a letter to the Queensland government inquiring whether Meston had been permitted to take his Indigenous performers out of the state. Meston attempted to soothe the board's concerns, while increasingly facing pressure from those who had lent him money for the tour.
Performances in Melbourne