THE THEATRE OF AUTHORITY

The predominantly English culture which invaded and settled in Australia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was steeped in performance as a means of asserting control over people and property. The official theatre of authority produced its first symbolic and theatrical act in the flag-raising ceremony by which Britain on 26 January 1788 convinced itself that it had legally taken “possession” of an entire continent already inhabited and controlled by hundreds of Aboriginal communities with quite different ritualised understandings of law, relationships to land, and performance. From that time forward the adventure and military dramas of colonisation and Empire provided understanding of actual historical events and processes, and were explicitly deployed in other quasi-theatrical displays. Military parades, naval pageants, staged battles and mock invasions displayed international political strength and threats as the Empire understood them. In the individual colonies rituals of public order ranging from civic ceremonies to the reading of the riot act laid out the boundaries of acceptable public behaviour and the hierarchies of authority within that community. Rituals of land division and acquisition established rights of lease and freehold title, and the growth of cities produced areas where ritualised public behaviour was not only allowed but expected. Such sites included not just theatres and public halls but also major thoroughfares, military parade grounds, public squares, points of embarkation and debarkation, historical sites, and other places which came to have symbolic significance in the overall mythology of nation-building.