The re-enactment of
events from Australia’s history as popular entertainment has dropped away in
the twenty-first century. Whilst Old Sydney Town attracted crowds from 1973
through to 2003 with its daily parades of British red coats who marched down to
an artificially constructed ‘Old Sydney Cove’, Australians today often have a
more conflicted view of Australia’s colonial history. If national identity is
maintained through acts of ‘remembering’, as suggested by Ian McBride (2001),
the past can be a contested issue that impacts on what is accepted as popular
representation. Yet the persistence of bushranger escapade re-enactments,
though set in colonial times, suggests that issues beyond Australian national
identity are at work in maintaining the popularity of such events. Bushrangers
in Australia have fuelled imaginative representations in theatre and then later
cinema since the early 1800s, with Andrew James Couzens (2019) stating that the
Australian “bushranger legend … responds to the historic and mythic characteristics
of outlawry” with “the outlaw as heroes”.
This paper investigates three specific bushranger re-enactments. In
Braidwood, south-eastern New South Wales, from 1865-1867 the Clark Gang, Tom
and John Clark terrorized citizens and were known as ‘the bloodiest of
bushrangers’. In 2017, the 150-year anniversary re-enactment of the Clark
Gangs’ shooting up of the small country town of Braidwood attracted crowds keen
to witness, as well as take part in the drama. The second re-enactment occurs
regularly through performances by the Gympie Historical Re-enactment Society.
Opting to entertain tourists, the group have staged a ‘Bushranger Show’ at
numerous sites throughout inland regional Queensland. The third re-enactment
occurred annually, until Covid struck, at Canowindra in northern New South
Wales. In 1863 the notorious bushrangers, Ben Hall and Johnny Gilbert locked a
group of villagers in the Canowindra pub, the re-enactment takes place at the
site of these events, the now named Royal Hotel in the main street of
Canowindra. These re-enactments are investigated through multiple lenses of
performance, place, and politics. The site-specific nature of these
performances positions them as specifically different than performances
depicting Australian bushrangers in the cinema or theatre.
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