Round Earth Theatre Company
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The Round Earth Theatre Company, founded by Richard Davey, performs in Strahan, West Coast, Tasmania nightly Australia's longest running play - The Ship That Never Was.
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[edit] History
The Round Earth Company was established in Western Australia in 1972 in response to the rapid growth in Australian drama and theatre at that time - such as the Australian Performing Group in Melbourne ; and especially the creative impact of aboriginal dance and story activity - the Mowamjum Dancers and others in Western Australia , South Australia and the Northern Territory.
From this experience came the idea of a performing company on the road which would take stories to a network of communities, collecting other stories and forms along the way: using a kind of pre-electronic network, a kind of story web around the world - it was based on a simplistic understanding of the Tjurkupa, the web of Dreaming Tales which formed a network of communication, history and navigation for aboriginal communities in the Centre and Far North of Australia. In 1973, '74 and '75 three journeys into the North and the Central Deserts were undertaken, with storytellers, musicians, artists and craft workers, visiting both remote mining towns and aboriginal communities. These journeys were funded by the Australia Council.
[edit] Travel and return
In 1975, Round Earth left Australia and travelled North and Central America, Britain, Europe, Egypt, and India for four years. They linked up with various communities and performance companies along the way, participating in rain and harvest dance ritual in Hopi villages in Arizona, Canadian companies creating stories in remote communities, and travelling troupes in India telling legendary epics.
In 1980, they returned to Australia and decided to base the Company in Tasmania. The Salamanca Theatre Company provided a kind of base of operations): the notion was to create a repertoire of stories in and about Tasmania in the hope that they might shed some light on the larger Australian story, then take them on the road. By 1988, a repertoire was accumulating and had begun to find its way interstate: Broken Dreams in Adelaide and Melbourne in 1984, Hallelujah Lady Jane, Pieces of Iron and Guarding the Perimeter in '86-'88.
[edit] Zootango
But from 1987-93 The Round Earth Company was to establish a professional company in Tasmania after the demise of The Island Theatre Company (the shortest-lived State Theatre Company in Australia) to provide the state with an ensemble company. But Zootango, as the new company was known, despite its many triumphs - and disasters - became embroiled in the demands of Australia Council and Tasmanian Arts policy.
[edit] The Ship That Never Was
In 1992, Round Earth went solo again, attempting a return to the road with A Bright and Crimson Flower, a large-scale epic about Australian Prisoners of War under the Japanese. Between 1992 and 1995 A Bright and Crimson Flower performed in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales.
In 1994, in response to a request by Alan Coates, a Tasmanian Parks Ranger, The Round Earth Company, facing bankruptcy, took a two-hander to Strahan on the West Coast of Tasmania: The Ship That Never Was. Originally written and produced at the Peacock Theatre in Hobart in 1982 for Breadline Theatre Company, it is the story of the last great escape, by the capture of the Frederick, from Sarah Island, the dreaded penal Settlement celebrated in Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life. It performed in Strahan in 1994 for eight weeks, in a woodchop arena, on board yachts, on Sarah Island, outside the Strahan Pub, and even at the Mount Lyell Picnic on the beach.
The Ship That Never Was performs every day and has exceeded 5000 performances, also the Company undertook the daily task of providing Guided Tours on Sarah Island, dramatic performances in the form of a guided tour, sometimes four each day. In 1998, as a contribution to the community which was supportive of the venture, Round Earth undertook to operate the Strahan Visitor Centre, curating the exhibition created by Robert Morris Nunn and Richard Flanagan, and providing information to tourists.
Round Earth operated a performing/information/guiding company year round in a town of 800 permanent residents with an annual turnover of nearly a million Australian dollars, but the Performing Company subsidised the increasingly expensive operation of the Visitors Centre and in 2005 the Company shed the operation of the Strahan Visitor Centre. In 2002 the Company expanded its fledgling publication services (information booklets) to publish The Sarah island Conspiracies by Richard Davey (2002) and The Travails of Jimmy Porter (2003), the memoir written on Norfolk Island in 1842 by James Porter, one of the leaders of the escape on the Frederick.
