Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth-Century Australia and New Zealand By Mimi Colligan Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2002. Cloth Pp.xvi+240. $59.95 rrp.
So much in thrall are we with imaging technology’s spectacular and converging internet, television and the cinema applications that we are sometimes forgetful of its history. Media history, let alone media pre-history, gets scant attention these days. This is a pity because Mimi Colligan’s Canvas Documentaries is fascinating on pre-cinematic forms and popular culture in Australia and New Zealand.
Quite understandably, we prefer a history of ‘firsts’, great beginnings and successes. We think of the birth of photography and the cinema as defining moments (and so they were) but many teachers of media, film and communications would do well to explore this book that explores the world of commercial image making and presentation in the nineteenth century through the diorama and the panorama (moving, still and modelled) and that interesting but almost forgotten construction, the cyclorama. Colligan takes her cue from pioneering studies such as Richard Altick’s The Shows of London tracing these entertainments (and their people) to the antipodes, where, not surprisingly, wealth was to be had and they plied a busy trade, although the record of bankruptcies and downfalls suggests a hazardous livelihood as well. The terrain is not so little known amongst historians, which is where Dr Colligan began. Many will be aware of her 1987 Monash university doctoral thesis ‘Canvas and Wax’ for its ground-breaking explorations of nineteenth century popular culture. Canvas Documentaries is a long awaited embracing in book form of this terrain with much gleaned in the interim in Australia and overseas libraries by one of the best researchers in the business.
This is not just a story of picture men on the move from the old world to the new but a well-documented study in art history and popular culture, one in which the images go backwards and forth. Many early representations of Australia were, after all, intended for these forms. Canvas Documentaries offers contextualisation for many of the images of Australian history. A panoramic view of Sydney was on show at Barker’s Panorama in the Strand, London, as early as 1824. Sketches by August Earle provided the basis for a similar display on Hobart in 1831. London was then the world’s market for such entertainments but colonial centres soon boasted populations and potential audiences for the same and in the forty year period of moving panorama popularity in Australia (which ranged from the mid 1840s to the late 1880s) Colligan observes three main categories of subject: scenes of the colonies themselves, scenes of England and the Continent, and scenes of historical and contemporary battles, with religious scenes included as a minor category.
‘Static pictures’ represented on stage in the form of theatre ‘scenes’ quite early provided bread and butter work for artists. Successful practitioners were always striving after effects that would enthral and enliven. Colligan tells us about these scene painters and gives us important insights into practical, and then highly commercial, applications of artistic technique. Her journeymen scene painters, some trained and some self-taught, some famous some less so, moved with illusionism’s appeal through panoramas, dioramas, and cycloramas – a useful ‘picture show terminology’ is offered to the definitionally-challenged reader in the early pages. The terms may be unfamiliar to some but they shouldn’t be, for their legacy in visual technique is significant and call to mind the latest attempts at virtual reality and video games involving applications of lasers and holography – there is, after all, nothing new under the sun. The panorama, too, as Colligan notes, had its origins way back in the quest for realism in art in techniques deriving from the Renaissance, but which, as visual attractions, offered spectacles to the masses. And so Victorian ideologues told, just possibly, a form of rational amusement – commercial entrepreneurs of such entertainments could always justify their enterprise in such terms.
The fun fairs, pleasure gardens and theatres led the way but most impressive and dedicated at the end of the period was the Cyclorama (from the Greek cycl, round; and rama, view: round view). The term was used in the United States and Australia to distinguish 360-degree panoramas from moving panoramas. These were purpose-build constructions into which the public entered (for a fee, of course) to marvel in promenading comfort at scenes of the Eureka Stockade or the Battle of Waterloo. For some reason battles seem to have offered the cyclorama’s main fare, its forte perhaps being the realistic presentation of landscapes. The story is balanced across the Tasman and Bass Strait, even if Melbourne gets the lion’s share of attention. It was, after all, the get rich quick metropolis. It had the well-to-do and the masses; also, entrepreneurs like George Coppin whose gold rush period Cremorne Gardens in Richmond were elaborate pleasure gardens on the London model. Among its illusionistic extravaganzas was an erupting Vesuvius. Like Cremorne, Melbourne’s cycloramas have not survived. But the State Library of Victoria still has John Hennings 360 degree backdrop painting of pre-gold rush Melbourne from the Cyclorama display of Early Melbourne shown at the Exhibition Building in 1892. The cyclorama buildings, alas, have not survived, although the remnant and altered structures managed to prick the interest of the heritage-minded, Colligan among them. A rebuilt cyclorama ought to be a viable project for heritage media enthusiasts. After all, steam buffs keep their technology alive.
These displays and the peregrinatons of their authors, meticulously recorded and documented by Colligan, tell us much about cultural transmission and production in Australia in the nineteenth century and Canvas Documentaries should encourage further studies. Arcana as the topic may seem to some, we are not dealing with marginal experience. As Colligan reminds us, in those times of ‘simple technology and daunting geographical distances such images attracted mass audiences’, or at least they were mass audiences by the standards of the day. Possibly also, these images and entertainments were as forging of contemporary identity and cultural understandings as any period novel or collection of gallery paintings so ardently worshipped by scholars today, and probably a good deal more so.
This review originally appeared in the Journal of Australian Studies issue 78 (2003), pp. 163-165.
