'The new prima donnas': 'homegrown' Tasmanian 'stars' of the 1860s Emma and Clelia Howson

Abstract

[Introduction]: Even during the height of his career, Errol Flynn’s reputation was never really overshadowed by his ‘Tasmanian-ness’. In fact, both his reputation and his origins were often integral to his publicity. Around the same era, Merle Oberon’s publicists claimed that the famous actress was Tasmanian-born, specifically, into a wealthy Hobart family. Whether or not this was true, Oberon’s identification as ‘Tasmanian-born’ cast a glowing light on the State’s cultural credibility despite the fact that she lived 10,000 miles away and returned to the island only once, in 1978. Modern-day Tasmanian celebrities encounter a similar emphasis on their State of origin. Tasmanian actress Essie Davis received considerable attention after playing the role of Dutch artist Vermeer’s wife in Peter Webber’s film Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003). Sunday Tasmanian journalist Danielle Wood claimed on 7 March 2004 that ‘Essie Davis is making her Tasmanian family feel proud for good reason’.1 The emphasis on the Tasmanian homeland is reiterated in a comment made by Australian Idol’s first Tasmanian-born top-ten finalist, Amali Ward. When asked why she wanted to be an Australian Idol, Ward replied: ‘To prove to mainlanders that Tasmania is not just about incest! The amount of jokes I’ve heard is ridiculous’.2 Exploring the ways in which Davis and Ward are represented in the media is useful to an examination of earlier Tasmanian-born ‘stars’ of the colonial theatre Emma and Clelia Howson. Ward’s remark reveals, among other things, how alongside her ‘Tasmanian-ness’ are pressures concerning State identity not necessarily projected onto the girl from Queensland or the guy from New South Wales. Ward’s aim to ‘prove’ a point to ‘mainlanders’ is akin to Woods’s claim that Davis ‘is making her Tasmanian family feel proud’. While Ward seeks approval, and Davis has apparently earned it, each construction narrates and enacts gestures of ‘Tasmanian-ness’. I suggest that these are reflexive articulations traceable to ideologies about being ‘Tasmanian’ that were first propagated by early settlers. The representations of Ward and Davis (and indeed Flynn and Oberon) illustrate Veronica Kelly’s notion of the enactment of ‘serviceable identities’.3 For Kelly, colonials continually rehearsed and renewed their sense of distinctiveness. This meant that identity resembled a series of ‘performances’, which were motivated by a struggle against ‘social and discursive abjection’.4 From its early beginnings as a penal colony, Tasmania both created and inherited a range of identity types, some of which settlers were eager to overthrow. The performance of Tasmanian identity was, and is, enacted through a variety of mediums. For colonials, the interplay between identity and credibility was inextricably connected with theatre and press culture, a point exemplified by the media representation of Emma and Clelia Howson.