Convicts, gold and scandal: the musical digging up our secret past
Around her, a big band swirls. Mick Thomas, with smashing bushranger beard, leads members of Weddings Parties Anything and guitarist Jeff Lang and other local legends through rehearsals for Vandemonian Lags, a piece of musical-theatre that reckons with colonial Australia's lesser-known past.
'She got pregnant to a lieutenant,' Short says of the subject of the song. 'She was 16; too young. And she settled up next to the river and had the baby there. She didn't end up staying with the lieutenant because he had a family of his own back home.
'I love a story of a strong woman back in the 1800s. I love it when those stories are lifted up, because history is often told by big white men.'
That spirit of recovering lost voices – convict, female, otherwise muted – lies at the heart of Vandemonian Lags, a song cycle performed in costume and based on true stories from Tasmania's convict past (the title combines a name for inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land, as the island was known until 1856, and a term for convicts).
First staged at Dark Mofo in 2013 and performed only a few times since, the show returns this week to Melbourne, Bendigo, Ballarat and Frankston with a cast that also includes Tim Rogers, Brian Nankervis, Darren Hanlon, Sal Kimber, Van Walker, Ben Salter and newcomer Claire Anne Taylor.
The stories come from 19th-century records of the 75,000 convicts sent to Van Diemen's Land; some include details of their later lives after crossing to Victoria during the gold rush. UNESCO has called it the most detailed archive of the Victorian working class ever recorded.
'The Vandemonian is a pestilential addition to our population, and his coming is an evil we must guard against at all costs,' raged The Argus in 1852. But neither the convicts nor their stories could be stopped.
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