Emu Plains Correctional Centre

The second theatre in Australia and the first outside Sydney was a makeshift building about 56 km to the west at the penal settlement of Emu Plains. Popular plays of the time were performed there, with much ingenious contrivance of properties, lights and costumes, to audiences of local gentry, prison officials and prisoners between 1825 and 1830. In a letter in the Sydney Gazette on 21 July 1825 ‘A Lover of Rational Pleasures' noted that the convicts at Emu Plains 'have erected a theatre, and established dramatic performances, thus providing for themselves a congenial relief from the rigours of compulsory servitude'. A recent performance of W. B. Rhodes's popular 1810 burlesque Bombastes Furioso and David Garrick's 1741 comedy The Lying Valet had been attended by many of the local gentry including Sir John Jamison, a wealthy landowner. The acting, the scenery - 'painted with great taste' - and the dresses, some supplied by the ladies of the neighbourhood, had all received great applause.

The most detailed account of this theatre comes from Ralph Rashleigh, a novel supposedly written in the 1840s by James Tucker, who had been a prisoner at Emu Plains in 1827. According to Tucker, the theatre was a slab-and-bark building, with the gaps in the walls filled with mud, and whitewashed with pipe clay inside. It was fitted out with conventional pit and boxes. The seating was made from local timber. Canvas for the scenery was scrounged from bags, bedding and clothing, and painted with more pipe clay, other coloured earths and charcoal. Oil lamps and candles donated by prison officials provided light.

The theatre's leading light, whom Tucker calls Jemmy King, was 'at once architect, manager, carpenter, scenepainter, decorator, machinist, mechanician, and to crown all, a very passable comic actor'. He was especially adept at devising properties and costumes. Tucker tells of Bombastes Furioso, in which King Artexomines's crown was made from pieces of tinplate and copper garnished with bits of window glass and his wig was contrived from sheepskin powdered with bone ash. All the costumes were similarly made from odds and ends of old clothes and other castoff materials. Tucker says the theatre even had an orchestra, composed of a violin-apparently made by Jemmy King from tinplate - a fife, a tambourine and a huge drum.

Tucker describes a performance attended by Sir John Jamison and other guests. Sir John chose the pieces - Monk Lewis's 1800 melodrama Raymond and Agnes and a 1732 ballad opera, The Devil to Pay, in abridged form. The program was even more ambitious when Sir John took his guests to the theatre in 1830. As reported by the Sydney Gazette on 10 July, it consisted of Isaac Pocock's 1818 Rob Roy and George Colman the younger's 1803 comedy John Bull. Apparently more than 200 people squeezed into the Emu Plains theatre for this performance.

In 1825 'A Lover of Rational Pleasures' had suggested 'the expediency of giving public notice in future of their performances, as their fraternity do at home'. In 1830 the convicts began to do just that, advertising in the Sydney Gazette to attract the theatre-starved public of Sydney. This unfortunately brought the Emu Plains theatre to the notice of Governor Sir Ralph Darling, who was then fighting all attempts to establish a theatre in Sydney on the grounds that such an amusement was inappropriate for a convict settlement. Under this policy, he ordered the closure of the Emu Plains theatre in November 1830.