Australia Felix

Australia Felix or, Harlequin Laughing Jackass and the Magic Bat. Pantomime in two acts by Garnet Walch. premiere: 26 December 1873, Prince of Wales Opera House, Melbourne, by W. S. Lyster's opéra-bouffé company. Cast: Lydia Howarde, J.E. Kitts, Charles Lascelles, George Leopold, Jeanie Winston, Alice Wooldridge. Music arranged by F. Zeplin. Scenery: Alexander Habbe. Published Melbourne: Azzopardi, Hildreth 1873. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press 1988.

The most successful colonial pantomime to use Australian characters and topics in a fantasia based on the conventions of the form was Australia Felix. Garnet Walch reworked his own 1871 Sydney pantomime Trookulentos, the Tempter for the plot and his literary model appears to have been W. M. Akhurst's 1869 Melbourne pantomime The House that Jack Built. Australia Felix involves rivalry between Mirth and Mischief for the rule of Australia, supervised by the Demon King Kantankeros, who wishes to import English gloom. Young Australia Felix is given a magic cricket bat to play for a Victorian XVIII against W.G. Grace’s all England XI. The real match – which the Victorian’s won – began on the very day of the of the pantomime's premiere, and Walch includes it in the offstage action. Felix gambles away the bat but it is recovered through the agency of a kookaburra and other helpful characters, and Kantakeros is defeated. The Australasian praised the ‘ingenious consistency’ of the piece on 27 December 1873. The local points were harmoniously brought in and the allegorical character was well preserved, it said. The Leader on 3 January 1874 found ‘a dramatic unity and completeness in the pantomime that fixes the attention and excites the interest’.