The Controversial "Case of the Opera Children in the East": Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child

In 1910 a political and media panic erupted over the physical mistreatment of Australian child actors who were touring the Indian subcontinent with Arthur Pollard's juvenile opera company. Dubbed by Australian journalists as the "case of the opera children in the East," the subsequently explosive legal proceedings that took place in Madras and the morally charged reporting of the case in Australian and Indian newspapers resulted directly in a new Australian federal law. The Emigration Bill (as the new law was called) sought to prevent anyone taking a child out of Australia to perform theatrical, operatic, or other work. In this instance the juridical intentions of the lawmakers extended well beyond theatre industry practices or narrow concerns about the labor of child actors. The social ramifications of the Emigration Bill meant that it was prohibited for any child of European race or extraction to be taken out of Australia, "unless in the care or charge of some adult person of European race or extraction." Curiously, the new law also extended its ruling to Australia's First Nation people, preventing "any aboriginal native" being taken off shore by another party, either for the purpose of laboring or exhibition in circuses or other popular entertainments, such as ethnographic people shows.¹ (Exceptions to these prohibitions had to be covered by a legal permit, with assessment on a case-by-case basis.) A chain of events, instigated by child actors touring with Pollard's theatrical troupe in Madras, led also to definitional clarity of the terms child and aboriginal native in Australia's legal system. The Emigration Bill of 1910 established the age definition for a child as well as the racial definition for an aboriginal native: yet, it is almost unknown that long-running debates about the accepted legal meanings of these terms were unequivocally settled as a result of the Pollard case.

This fascinating case represents a defining moment in transnational theatre history and the cultural history of childhood. Knowledge of the intricacies of the case caused Australian lawmakers to end the three-decades-long industrial practice of traveling child actors in the Asia Pacific region. The case initially drew international attention because of obvious malfeasance by the company's manager. But as I argue, Pollard's popular repertoire of Edwardian musical comedy, with its "playful gambolling on the verge of indecency,"² framed the child actors as possessing adult levels of insight and understanding that contradicted reformist ideas about acceptable childhood experience. Since the 1880s, industrial and education reforms had been gradually reshaping cultural attitudes to children and childhood.

From 1883 to 1910 numerous juvenile theatre troupes working under the Pollard name participated conspicuously in the international transference and exchange of culture that Stephen Greenblatt and others have critically analyzed as "cultural mobility." Proposing a theoretical apparatus for understanding the mobility of "peoples, objects, images, texts, and ideas," mobility studies critically addresses the "physical, infrastructural, and institutional" means by which culture is transmitted across space and time.³ Pollard's troupe journeyed restlessly among south Asian centers of colonial administration and Australia's major cities, at first developing and then maintaining a reliable and popular audience base in India, present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, and Singapore. Without bricks-and-mortar roots in Australia—there was no fixed building or geographic home base for this troupe—it nevertheless identified and was received as being culturally from Australia, and its aesthetic and business strategies both reflected and influenced the operations of other producers of touring projects in the Asia-Pacific region.⁴

This essay explores the broader theatrical and social contexts of this watershed moment in theatre history when child entertainers were the key protagonists in "the making of social meaning."⁵ It illuminates the contribution of child actors to south Asian theatrical circuits at the turn of the twentieth century, reveals that child performers contributed to the global transference of Edwardian musical comedy (a popular entertainment form that has attracted scant attention from theatre historians),⁶ and [End Page...