The playbill is compelling evidence that in Sydney, only eight years after arrival of the First Fleet, on an inhospitable shore lacking familiar facilities, the small community was already lively and sociable enough to enjoy such a sophisticated pleasure as going to the theatre. Granted, the theatre was small and the audience limited, but the very fact of its existence presents a different view to the usual perception of, as Watkin Tench put it, ‘ dreariness and dejection’ in a land far from home.

Robert Jordan’s book The Convict Theatres of Early Australia, 1788–1840 (2002) gives a comprehensive account of theatrical activity in Sydney in the early years, including the information that the first theatre performance in Australia was in 1789, only a year after the landing. This was a production of George Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer, performed with a cast of convicts to mark the birthday of George III on 4 June 1789. It took place ‘in a mud hut fitted up for the occasion’ and with no aim greater than ‘humbly to excite a smile’. However, the ‘Theatre, Sydney’, as named in the new-found playbill, was not a hut but a small purpose-built theatre erected by Robert Sidaway, an ex-convict become prosperous citizen, with the assistance of ‘some of the more decent class of prisoners’. This theatre opened on 16 January 1796, under the management of one John Sparrow, playing Edward Young’s melodramatic tragedy The Revenge (1720), and the entertainment The Hotel. Performances apparently took place in the new theatre with some regularity, and though it is not known how long the theatre lasted, playbills exist advertising productions up to the year 1800.

Though small, measuring only 20 x 12 cm, the playbill is of major significance because of what it can tell us about early Sydney, Australian printing history and colonial theatre. Its significance to the story of Australian publishing and printing, as the earliest surviving example of a document printed in Australia, is undeniable. Previously the earliest existing example was a Sydney broadside entitled Instructions for the Constables of the Country Districts, dated 16 November 1796, and now held by the New South Wales State Records Authority. Broadsides, informing the public of upcoming events and activities, are one of the oldest recognised forms of printed ephemera.

The discovery of this rare playbill is a story of luck and happenstance. It was found in late May 2007 by Elaine Hoag, rare books specialist at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). An old scrapbook containing theatrical memorabilia and printed ephemera, including playbills and advertisements for performances in nineteenth-century England, had contained the treasure for 150 years. The scrapbook was given to LAC by the Canadian Parliamentary Library in 1973. It came from the collection of an Englishman, Dawson Turner (1775–1858). Banking was Turner’s profession, but he had many interests, mainly botany, on which subject he wrote several books. He also maintained an extensive library which held nearly 8000 volumes and more than 34,000 manuscripts and letters. Much of his extensive collections was sold, some in 1853, and the rest in 1859, after his death. Material from these scattered collections can be found in the British Library, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Trinity College, Cambridge – and now, it seems, in locations as far away as Canada. The LAC holds a catalogue of the 1859 auction sale of Turner’s manuscript library, which lists among other items ‘upwards of forty thousand autograph letters’. The path of the playbill from Australia to Canada is still being sought, but perhaps it was one of these sales in the 1850s that began the playbill’s journey from England to Canada.

A clue to the playbill’s journey from Australia to England comes in some intriguing handwritten jottings on the back of the bill. The jottings read:

1^st Play acted at Port Jackson, June 4th 1789 The Recruiting Officer

1^st Play performed at Norfolk Island, December 1793 Richard 3rd Poor Soldier

PG King

To George Chalmers Esqr

The handwriting and signature have been identified as that of Philip Gidley King, a First Fleet marine officer, and lieutenant governor of Norfolk Island from 1791–96. King, from 1793, had sanctioned performances of plays on the island about once a month, before withdrawing the privilege as a result of a riot at one of the performances in January 1794. Later, from 1800 to 1806, King was third governor of the colony of New South Wales. The inscription suggests that it was King who took the playbill to England when he returned there in October 1796, but how the bill came into his possession, and the significance of the inscription, are matters for conjecture.

The playbill’s printing history is clearer. It was produced in Sydney on the first printing press seen in Australia, a small wooden screw press brought to Port Jackson by Captain Arthur Phillip. The Australian Dictionary of Biography tells us that the printer in 1795 was George Hughes, given charge of the press because he had ‘some abilities in the printing line’. Working in a small printery behind Government House, Hughes printed some 200 government orders and several broadsides. Probably he printed playbills for most performances at the Sydney Theatre, from the first performance on 16 January 1796, as well as the National Library’s playbill for 30 July 1796.

The actors in the plays were convicts, and Hughes performed with them; quite probably he was a convict too, though there is no actual evidence. Hughes’s career as a printer came to an end with the arrival of George Howe (1769–1821), ‘transported to Sydney on the Royal Admiral’ on 22 November 1800. Howe was a more experienced printer, who had worked on The Times in London, and was ‘immediately brought into employment’, whereupon Hughes vanished into obscurity.

This month, the National Library of Australia will be celebrating the return of the playbill at an event on 25 June, supported by the High Commission of Canada. The event will include readings by Amanda Muggleton from one of the plays advertised in the playbill, Jane Shore, and an evocation of life in the colony by David Malouf. It will be a celebration of the survival of a small scrap of paper and the stories it can tell.

1796: The Officer, the Convicts and the Theatre Playbill will be held at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, at 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 25 June. Enquiries e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..