Colonialism and the Role of the Local Show
A Case Study of the Gympie District Show, 1877–1940
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600005092Keywords:
Agricultural shows, Gympie District Show, 1877–1940, 'The Vision Splendid', rural and regional showsAbstract
Agricultural shows are important events in rural and regional Australia. For over a century, they have often been the main annual festival on any given town's calendar. This importance makes the lack of scholarly attention to rural and regional shows puzzling. Recently, Australian exhibitions and agricultural shows have come in for some very welcome scholarly attention, although very little has been written about rural and regional events. Scholars such as Kate Darian-Smith and Sara Wills, Joanne Scott and Ross Laurie, Judith McKay, and Kay Anderson have all written on exhibitions and shows – although, of this group, only Darian-Smith and Wills have written on rural shows, the rest focusing more on inter-colonial and metropolitan Australian shows. Even Richard Waterhouse's groundbreaking study of rural Australian cultural history, The Vision Splendid, provides little detail on agricultural shows and their role in rural cultural life, although the show's importance is recognised.
References
See, for example, Darian-Smith, Kate and Wills, Sara, ‘From Queen of Agriculture to Miss Showgirl: Embodying Rurality in Twentieth-Century Australia’, in The Show Girl and the Straw Man, ed. Nile, Richard (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 17-31; Kay Anderson, ‘White Natures: Sydney's Royal Agricultural Show in Post-Humanist Perspective’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(4) (2003): 422-41; McKayJudith, A Good Show: Colonial Queensland at International Exhibitions’, PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 1996; Joanne Scott and Ross Laurie, Showtime: A History of the Brisbane Exhibition (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008); Judith McKay, ‘The Queensland Exhibition of 1897: “Dazzling Display" or “a Frost"?’, Queensland Review 5(1) (1996): 78-85; Joanne Scott and Ross Laurie, ‘Colonialism on Display: Indigenous People and Artefacts at an Australian Agricultural Show’, Aboriginal History, 31 (2007): 45-62; Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Fremantle: Curtin Books, 2005), 158-59. Google Scholar
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Hoffenberg, Peter H., An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), xiv. Google Scholar
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Cooloola Shire Library Service, Cooloola Shire, Part 3, 41.
Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, xiii–xiv.
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Brisbane Courier, 21 April 1877, quoted in Turtle Bunbury, ‘Dr J.R. Benson (1834-1885) – The Australian Politician’, Family History: Benson of the Fould, www.turtlebunbury.com/history/history_family/hist_family_benson.html, accessed 14 January 2009. All biographical information on Dr Benson comes from this site and should, I argue, be considered more authoritative than the information offered by Jacqueline Bell in ‘Benson, John Robinson (1836?–1885)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 3 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), 144.
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Hoffenberg, An Empire On Display, 258.
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This inverts the order Amanda Rasmussen observes at the Bendigo Easter Fair during the same period, where the Chinese came last and the Mayor, Governor and other local elites took the lead. Amanda Rasmussen, ‘Networks and Negotiations: Bendigo's Chinese and the Easter Fair’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 6 (2004): 81.
For example, in 1869, Ah Long, Chien Wangli and Lin John all subscribed to the Race Meeting. See Gympie Times, 3 November 1869: 2.
‘Visit of His Excellency Governor Normanby to the Gympie Goldfield’, Gympie Times, 30 April 1873: 3.
‘Visit of His Excellency, Sir A.E. Kennedy, to the Gympie Goldfield’, Gympie Times, 22 June 1878: 3.
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Lockwood, R.G. Vickery, ‘History of Gympie: the 1840s-1900s’, BA (Hons) thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland, 1964, 69; the Cooloola Shire history observes that George Flay was ‘probably the first man’ (apart from the Chinese) to begin growing fruit in 1871. See Cooloola Shire, Part 3, 41.
See ‘The Show’, Gympie Times, 29 December 1880: 3.
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See Sear, Martha, ‘Unworded Proclamations: Exhibitions of Women's Work in Colonial Australia’, PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney, 2000. This is not to say, of course, that women's work at exhibitions was universally praised and recognised alongside more traditionally ‘masculine’ industries and exhibits.
‘The Gympie Exhibition’, Gympie Times, 17 October 1877: 3.
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‘Gympie's Jubilee Show’, Gympie Times, 30 August 1917: 3.
‘Celebrating Gympie's Jubilee: Conflicting Suggestions’, Gympie Times, 13 March 1917: 3. Delegates at the meeting included representatives from the Gympie City Council, Widgee Shire Council, Chamber of Commerce, GAM&P Society, as well as some representatives of the Friendly Societies of Gympie.
Advertisement in the Gympie Times, 28 August 1917: 2.
‘Gympie's Jubilee Show’, Gympie Times, 30 August 1917: 3.
‘The Gympie Show, 1931: Prospects Bright for Successful Exhibition’, Gympie Times, 16 May 1931: 13.
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Anderson, ‘White Natures’: 434.
