ABSTRACT
Chinese Opera was a prominent feature of colonial Australia, initially in the Victorian goldfields, but later in New South Wales, Queensland, and north-eastern Tasmania. Tracing its performance history and key locations, this chapter constitutes a first study of Chinese Opera in Australia in the long nineteenth century and opens the field for further investigation. In describing how it was staged and received, as well as the efforts to attract a non-Chinese audience and the emerging practise of charitable benefit performances, the study demonstrates the cultural importance of Chinese Opera, both to the Chinese living in Australia and as an exotic form of entertainment for their European and other co-colonials. The reasons for the absence of this form of entertainment from the historical memory are also reflected upon within the context of the psychology of a White Australia and the persistence of orientalist stereotypes in which ‘operagoer’ has no place.
