Australian Child Actors on Early Twentieth-Century Touring Circuits1

Abstract

Unconfined by Australia’s geography, large children’s troupes toured the Southeast Asia region from 1880 through to 1914, participating in the international transference of recent “hits” from London’s West End—Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas (1880s) and Edwardian musical comedies (early 1900s). Most of the child actors of this period were female; many were from middle-class homes without familial links to the entertainment business; and then, as now, professional teachers of dance, singing, and elocution supported their entrée to the entertainment business. This chapter brings the two industrial aspects of touring work and training work into sharp focus through close studies of two child actors: Rosie Fitzgerald and Queenie Williams, both of whom toured Australia and New Zealand in pantomime and musical theatre productions during the first decade of the twentieth century. On the matter of “the centre,” this chapter casts the Australian theatre industry as the centre for training child actors and identifies both the United States and the United Kingdom as centres of aspirational career development for young Australian performers.