The Windmill Row Theatre and the Irish (1796–1804): Civilizing Sydney Cove’s Convict Society

Abstract

This essay examines the role of the Irish, and the performance of Irishness, in the Windmill Row Theatre (1796–1804), which opened a mere eight years after the penal colony of Sydney Cove was established. Influenced by revisionist histories such as Grace Karskens’ The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2010), and by recent research about the performativity of Irishness on the eighteenth-century London and Dublin stages, it enriches the view that the colony was intended to be ‘a society, not a gaol’. While it offers a corrective to the idea that Sydney Cove was ‘a subsistence colony that would transform felons into farmers’, it takes issue with Robert Jordan's argument in The Convict Theatres of Early Australia (2002) that the theatre would have had little impact on the Irish. It proposes that several plays that were staged constituted a social experiment to manage the gender imbalance in the colony, and also considers the impact of Irish political protest, the role of the 1798 Rising and the effect of the contentious ‘Union of Hearts’ of 1800 on the theatre. It further speculates about Irish convict access to Australia's first commercial theatre, which had its own specifically designed building, booking system, regime of admission prices, and paid staff and actors.