Boom and Bust in the Gaiety - by Gabrielle Lis
ISLAND | ISSUE 161In a collaboration between Island and the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival called ‘If These Halls Could Talk’, ten selected Tasmanian writers were paired with ten halls or notable buildings around the state, responding to place through creative literary works. This piece is one of the ten, which are all published in full on this site.
On Main Street, Zeehan, 20 km inland from the west coast of Tasmania and 20 m south of a recruitment office that has been defunct for five years but still has an ‘Our business is people’ sign hanging above the footpath, stands the Gaiety Theatre, a grand old building painted in ice-cream parlour pastels: mint green, vanilla cream, pale strawberry, frosted boysenberry. Locals will tell you Houdini performed there, walked a tightrope from the roof across to a nearby hotel. They’ll tell you Dame Nellie Melba sang there, or was meant to, if only she hadn’t gotten drunk in Launceston the night before the scheduled gig. They’ll tell you, with some embarrassment, that the floorboards are pocked and scuff-marked not only because the building is 120 years old but because kids played basketball in the auditorium back in the 1980s, before the town understood the value of what they had. It’ll all be true and not true, what the locals tell you, and that’ll be apt, because the Gaiety Theatre – so indisputably bricks and mortar beneath the pastel-hued paint – was conjured up out of collective delusion: an audacious, improbable and now improbably durable mistake.
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Back in 1898, when the Gaiety had its opening night, Zeehan was known as the Silver City of the West. The metal – wanted for diverse products such as eye-drops, coins, wound-dressings, jewellery, coffeepots, mirrors and silver-gelatin photographic prints – had been found in the region more than a decade prior by Frank Long, a red-headed boozer who bashed tracks through the western wilderness looking for profitable things to dig up. Long’s mine – the Mount Zeehan – failed, but in coming years nearby mines including the Silver Queen, Western, Spray Silver, Montana and Oceana proved riddled with silver-lead, right there on the surface, easy pickings. From fewer than 150 prospectors in 1889, Zeehan grew rapidly to be the third largest town in Tasmania, with a population of between eight and ten thousand people. Amongst other amenities, it had a stock exchange, banks, hotels and numerous entertainment halls. Charles Witham, an Indian-born Brit who worked for Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company and who first visited Zeehan in the 1890s, recalls his arrival, but not his drunken departure, from the ‘vociferous’ town. The bars were packed with ‘mining experts, promoters, engineers, metallurgists and architects,’ ‘roaring shouters’ all, buoyed up by free-flowing booze and ‘riotous hopes – no not hopes, but certainties’ of ‘fabulous ore bodies just discovered at Magnet, at Farrell, at Rosebery, Colebrook, Jukes, and Darwin, with all the country towards the Frenchman yet to be unlocked ...’. Businesses were founded on boundless, groundless optimism:
You could float anything into a company; you did not need to have any actual mine; just say you knew of a good thing, or that someone had told you he knew of a ‘cert’.
It’s hard to picture such mania on a flat where it rained two days out of three and the ground, in the words of an 1888 report from the Government Mining Geologist’s Office, was ‘low and swampy’, drained by ‘sluggish creeks’, but it was beneath the bog where things got interesting. There, contorted grey sandstones and dark blue slates were packed with fossils of coral and delicate, fern-like sea creatures. ‘Trilobites, Polyowa, Corallites, Crinoids, and Brachipoda,’ as the geologist’s report lists with palpable pleasure, winding up for the big finale, the money shot, enclosed within twisted walls of fossil-laden rock: streaky-white, metal-bright lodes of silver-lead. Yes, the ore approached the surface unpredictably, striking out first this way then that, disappearing and reappearing, changing orientation, but the geologist whose report filled the bars and justified all the sight-unseen investment was confident that:
... all these irregularities in strike and underlay represent really but one or two main lodes, which, at greater depth and in more settled country, will doubtless assume that regularity and greater value upon which so much of the future success of the whole district depends.
Edward Mulcahy, the man behind the Gaiety and later the Tasmanian Minister for Mines, was willing to bet on it. He was a draper and hotelier with businesses across the state, successful enough to absorb a £5000 loss when his first hotel in Zeehan burned to the ground and bold enough to raise the Gaiety and the adjoining Grand Hotel in its ashes. At a ‘smoking party’ to celebrate the opening of the theatre, attended by 200 of the town’s most prominent men, Mulcahy declared that he had ‘... always had confidence in the resources of Zeehan and in the prolific nature of the ground as far as minerals were concerned’. The Zeehan and Dundas Herald, which reported Mr Mulcahy’s speech, went further:
This hall and the handsome block of buildings in which it is included marks an epoch in the history not only of Zeehan but the whole of the West Coast. It indicates that the days of struggling are past and that we have entered upon an era of stability and steady progress.
It must have seemed a sure thing. In just 10 years, prospectors like Long had gone from tents in the mud, pitched as close to the mine as they could get, to the grandeur of the Gaiety, with its stage the same size as that in Hobart’s Theatre Royal and an auditorium 10 feet wider than the Hobart Town Hall with 15 feet more seating space. At capacity, 1000 people could admire the pristine white plaster of the theatre’s interior, illuminated by electric generator and acetylene-fuelled gas-jet, the ‘pleasingly painted’ cement dado that ringed the walls, the Ionic pilasters and bases, the bold and striking frieze and cornices, the panelled ceiling with its ‘large, handsome centrepieces of fruit and flowers’: things of beauty, sure, but symbols, too – symbols of a successful bet.
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These days, Hobart has a population of 240,000, while the population of Zeehan has dwindled to 700. A third of the houses in town are unoccupied, and a third of occupied households subsist on less than $650 a week, gross, according to the 2016 Census. To put this in context, the Australian Council of Social Service puts the poverty line at $960 a week for a household with two adults and two children. Patronage of the Gaiety reflects this socioeconomic reality. In 2017, the Melbourne Ballet drew an audience of just 100. In 2013, West Coast Heritage Ltd, which manages the theatre, underwrote three interstate performances, losing $30,000 from an already tight budget as a result.
Compare this to the sell-out success of The Sign of The Cross, a B-Grade Christian melodrama that had a three-night run at the Gaiety in 1899. Hotels and boarding houses in town overflowed with people who’d travelled from Strahan and Queenstown to see the show. Those who missed out on rooms bedded down on sofas, tables and floors or simply walked the streets until breakfast time, according to the local paper. Profits from ticket sales were sufficient to support a touring company of 53, comprising actors, operatic chorus and orchestra.
‘Most of the plays in the Gaiety were light and fluffy farces, but there was also infidelity and murder,’ says Malcolm Ready, an amateur historian who has published a five-volume history, Attractions, Events and Performances at the Gaiety Theatre, Zeehan. Ready has no trouble picking a favourite: ‘Number one would be Fredony. He was a quick-change artist in a show called The Man In the Clock. It went for 15 minutes, during which time he played five different characters – the husband, the wife, the lover, the butler, the mother in law – and had 29 costume changes. There were three doors across the back of the stage. He guaranteed he could go out one and in the other with a complete costume change in under two seconds, £50 to anyone who could prove he had an accomplice.’
There were also magic shows, vaudeville, opera, sets by comedians, military bands, choirs, a woman known as the Tasmanian Nightingale and another who performed feats of impossible strength, calling herself the Georgia Magnet.
‘You probably know that Houdini played at the Gaiety,’ says Richard Wolfe, owner of Zeehan Rock Shop. ‘Stretched a tightrope across the street from the roof of the theatre to the Central Hotel, right over what used to be the trainline.’ Similar claims are made by local woman Margaret Coulson in a short film that now screens daily in the Gaiety. ‘I talked to people that did actually see Houdini,’ Coulson says. ‘They saw him on his little practice run in the afternoon ... to draw the crowds ready for the night. And not only one old timer told me that. Several remembered it as young boys. You can imagine them walking around, spellbound.’
However, Ready is a fact-checker as well as an enthusiast. He says there is no record of Houdini in Zeehan. Most likely, the oral history has confused Houdini with the lesser known Blondin, a French tightrope walker. Blondin didn’t actually perform at the Gaiety either but in 1903 Alexander ‘the Australian Blondin’ did, wearing a spangled uniform and going through what the Zeehan and Dundas Herald described as a ‘clever and daring performance on a 3⁄4 inch wire rope’.
Wolfe is momentarily disconcerted by this revelation but quickly adjusts. ‘So I’ve been identified as one of the myth spreaders! That’s fine. I’ve been spruiking Houdini for 15 years but you won’t offend me if you tell me I’ve been spouting bullshit. The reason I went with the Houdini story is the Melba myth got a bit boring.’
According to Ready, the facts regarding Melba and the Gaiety are prosaic. Phonograph recordings of her greatest hits were played in the auditorium but she never performed live, nor was scheduled to do so.
It is true that the auditorium of the Gaiety was used as a basketball court in the 1980s, but far from being an embarrassing anomaly, this was in keeping with the history of the hall. An early example of sport in the Gaiety was a ‘go-as-you-please’ running race held in 1903. For this event, a track of resin topped with sawdust was lain inside the theatre, 33 laps to a mile. The winning contender ran 627 laps in three hours, a distance of more than 19 miles.
‘They did everything in there,’ Ready says. ‘Running, walking, boxing, wrestling, wood chopping, tug of war, roller skating and roller hockey. There was a club swinger, that was pretty weird. He swung clubs for 77 hours straight. I mean, why would you? I remember reading that he struggled tremendously with the cold. They tried a fire inside the theatre but smoke got in his eyes. They tried a few different things. I think in the end he stood on heated sand. Even so, he didn’t get anywhere near his record, which was 144 hours of swinging clubs.’
Less peculiar were the community events: balls for Anzac Day and Armistice, fundraisers for Bread and Butter, Indian Famine, the Children’s Hospital, the Catholic Church. There were fancy dress balls and balls specifically for children who attended in costume as gypsies and pierrots, fairies and brownies, cricketers and scarlet troubadours. Bazaars were popular too, including one held to raise money for Worn Out Miners. Men off to fight in the Boer War were farewelled in the Gaiety, dogs and poultry received blue ribbons there. School children performed concerts for their parents.
As time passed, live theatre gave way to silent film, then talkies, then technicolour – all cheaper alternatives to the massive touring companies of the early years, in keeping with both changing technologies and the diminishing fortunes of the area.
“As time passed, live theatre gave way to silent film, then talkies, then technicolour – all cheaper alternatives to the massive touring companies of the early years, in keeping with both changing technologies and the diminishing fortunes of the area.”
Now live performances in the Gaiety are rare, but the theatre remains important to locals. In his rock shop directly across the street, Wolfe recalls the early-1990s run of Boomtown, a purpose-written musical put on via a community arts fund. Due to a plunge in the price of tin, the nearby Renison Bell mine had just closed and a third of the population of Zeehan had abruptly moved elsewhere. ‘It was a tough time out here but the town really came together. We used the play to vent our problems and just get together and have a bit of fun. We packed the house out three nights in a row. It was a great community-strengthening event, the whole thing. That’s my best memory of the Gaiety,’ he says.
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As it turns out, fabulous ore bodies are a poor foundation for a town.
“As it turns out, fabulous ore bodies are a poor foundation for a town.”
Contrary to the predictions of the government geologist, the lode that Frank Long found did not persist at depth, or at any rate not at sufficiently high quality to sustain the silver-lead boom for long. ‘The rich ore bodies that they liked in the 1800s tended to be very small,’ says Sebastian Meffre, Head of Earth Sciences at the University of Tasmania. Then, mining profitability hinged on the grade of the ore, which is a shorthand way of saying the relative concentration of valuable metal to surrounding waste rock. Extraction was a hands-on process. ‘The ore around Zeehan was economic a hundred years ago, when you could mine bits here and there, but that’s no longer the case,’ Meffre says. ‘Once all the shallow ore bodies have been found and exploited, you’re left with the lower grade ore bodies, which tend to be larger but more difficult to mine. To make a profit from these, you have to take large amounts of waste rock out along with the ore, and invest in much larger processing plants to extract the target metal from the rock. These plants cost millions to billions of dollars. To borrow that kind of money, you need to offer certainty to investors that mining will be profitable for decades into the future.’
Mining is still lucrative on the West Coast: the question is, who profits? There are currently five large-scale working mines near Zeehan. The closest is the reopened tin mine at Renison which is 50% owned by Perth-based Metals X and 50% owned by the Yunnan Tin Group Holding Company, a mammoth Chinese enterprise. Foreign ownership of mines is not a new phenomenon – many of the mines that fuelled the silver boom were British-backed – but walking along the main street of Zeehan, it’s hard to see any signs of local benefit from the riches the earth continues to yield.
‘People in the industry don’t live here anymore, they just come here for seven days to work and then go back to where they live for their time off,’ Wolfe says. ‘That idea of a mining company looking after a community and having miners living in that community and playing in local sports clubs and having social clubs and that kind of thing, you just don’t see that now.’
Meffre says that there are still mining companies exploring around Zeehan, including taking drill samples in the town itself, off the main road near the golf club. There are at least three potentially profitable ore bodies in the vicinity. To exploit these in an economically viable way, you’d need to tunnel beneath the houses and streets, beneath the abandoned employment office, beneath the park where school children have painted a mural in which dutifully drawn mining machinery is juxtaposed with a vivid scene of a sea monster writhing around a sinking ship. You’d have to literally undermine the historic mining town and its grand, boom-time theatre to satisfy the economic imperatives of the modern mining industry.
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Since the mid-1990s, the Gaiety has been part of the West Coast Heritage Museum, a multi-building sprawl that dominates Main Street. The museum houses an interesting collection but is visibly tired; understandable given that the whole institution, four heritage buildings included, gets by on $148,000 a year from Arts Tasmania, plus museum entry fees and ad hoc Tasmanian Community Grants, minus any underwriting misadventures.
‘In 2002 we had 25,000 paying customers through; last year we would have been lucky to have had 12,’ says Phil Vickers, Mayor of the West Coast and Executive Director of West Coast Heritage Ltd. He volunteers that museum ticket prices are set at the ‘upper limit’ and that the museum itself has no capital. The collection is owned by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The Gaiety is essentially public property too, reverting to Crown ownership should West Coast Heritage Ltd go bankrupt. Vickers mentions this possibility more than once. ‘We’re the custodians of valuable things that belong to the people of Tasmania but we struggle to find 20 bucks to fix everything that needs repair,’ he says. ‘But it’s not all doom and gloom. We’re currently doing a feasibility study on adding a boutique hotel to the theatre complex. It’s stacking up not too badly.’ He calls it a Catch-22 situation: without the money to refurbish the Gaiety, there’s no compelling tourist attraction, but without tourists there’s no money to do the work.
In October 2020, restrictions related to COVID-19 had temporarily put paid to the screening of short films in the theatre’s auditorium. Chairs on which museum visitors once sat to take in locals’ memories and tall tales instead lined the sloping stage. Down narrow, groaning stairs, light bulbs in old dressing rooms were blown, the torch function on a mobile phone needed to illuminate piles of empty boxes and walls on which grubby mint green was in the process of giving way to raw brick. Whether the derelict heart of the Gaiety or its pastel façade tells the truer story is hard to say. Perhaps they are sides of the same silver coin: vision and delusion, boom and bust, the good bet and the bad coexisting, two-faced.
“Whether the derelict heart of the Gaiety or its pastel façade tells the truer story is hard to say. Perhaps they are sides of the same silver coin: vision and delusion, boom and bust, the good bet and the bad coexisting, two-faced.”
Malcolm Ready has heard $3 million floated as the figure needed to refurbish the Gaiety, inside and out. ‘The bones are still there,’ he says. ‘It would be nice to get it back to something like its glory days, but I’m not sure that will happen. It saddens me a bit actually. But then I remember a book I own, written in the 1980s, where the author says there’s no hope of the Abt railway ever being used again. Look at the Wilderness Railway now. You never know what will happen.’ ▼
This article appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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