IN an age when people snap away with their phones at live performances as if to catch the moment forever, the National Library of Australia is proposing a very different way of understanding our past with its new exhibition, “On Stage: Spotlight on our Performing Arts”.

It’s a particular pleasure for me to catch up with the NLA’s curator of rare books and music, Susannah Helman, as my own academic training was in theatrical history and I know, as she does, just how hard it is to capture the most ephemeral of the arts.

Fashions change, camera angles are limited, voices seem distorted or from another time and the zeitgeist of one era transforms poorly into another, unless interpreted.

“We’ve had dance and music exhibitions, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had a stage exhibition and we have such a strong selection, so it’s been a pleasure to get things out of the stack,” she says as she enthuses about the photographs, posters, playbills, sheet music, costume designs, set designs, rare books and other objects she’s found in the library’s vast collection.

And as it ranges over theatre, jazz, dance, variety and “a little bit of magic”, it won’t just be about the big names such as JC Williamson, Nellie Melba, Robert Helpmann and Tim Minchin; it will also tell the story of those behind the scenes.

“Performance art humanises the records of the past,” Helman says.

“I love going to performance art and now I realise how vast a record we have at the library…a rich and wonderful story can be told.

“There’s a lot of wonderful, humanising details, like how you bought tickets and why some of the stars were so incredibly popular… it helps us to get to know the Australia of the past, well before mass media.”

In earlier days of serious letter writing, she explains, people kept both their outgoing and incoming correspondence so we can see their networks – “it’s wonderful, not like phone calls, with letters, we can see it all,” she says.

Letters by singer Nellie Melba, for instance, written on letterhead from hotels around the world reveal her florid style and “the sense of a real character”.

She’s found Tivoli records that show how people lived and worked in the past, but the JC Williamson collection at the library is especially important, because the great entrepreneur was a meticulous recordkeeper seen in this show through a decade’s worth of books and ledgers. 

At this point I can’t help cutting in with an “I know”, since I based my “Australian Dictionary of Biography” entry on Williamson on the NLA’s collection.

Although the chronological exhibition features a rare theatre playbill from 1796, Helman chose not to focus on the very earliest days of professional theatre, but to start a little later, with a markedly good look at life in the arts capital of the 19th century, Melbourne. 

And what a time it was, with larger-than-life entrepreneurs such as George Coppin, Bland Holt, George Musgrove and American-born James Cassius Williamson, who founded the country’s most famous theatrical “firm,” JC Williamson’s – there’s a special section of the exhibition devoted to that.

As well, the touring “star system” was in full flight, with big names from overseas such as Charles and Ellen Kean, Sir William and Lady Don and Sarah Bernhardt coming to Australia, Lola Montez doing her notorious Spider Dance on the diggings, and our home-grown Nellies, Melba and Stewart, taking the northern hemisphere by storm. 

“We’ve got Pavlova’s agreement with JC Williamson’s, we’ve got vaudeville, we’ve got the magician Murray the Magnificent, circus performer Con Colleano, we’ve got an advertisement for WC Fields performing in Perth in 1914 – it’s amazing the people who came to Australia.”

Our interview time is up and we’ve only just hit World War I, but the breathless Helman is keen to jump to the aftermath of World War II, to the emerging Aussie plays such as “Rusty Bugles” by Sumner Locke Elliott and “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” by Ray Lawler, and to a new era of JC Williamson stars, Evie Hayes, Nancye Hayes (no relation) and Jill Perryman.

“It’s a collection to get lost in,” Helman says. “Hopefully, we have captured the key moments and shown what it was like.”

“On Stage: Spotlight on our Performing Arts”, National Library, March 4-August 7, entry free. “Circus: Roll up roll up,” is on display in the library’s Treasures Gallery until June 19.

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