The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama 1890s - 1920s

In the decades from Federation to the 1920s live entertainment was an integral part of the Imperial world and performers were the first generation of truly global marketeers. In epic tales of royal splendours and Napoleonic conquests, of heroic gladiators and Christian sacrifice, of musketeers and courtesans, hussars and doomed princesses, Arab houris and Oriental mandarins, international stage celebrities transported Australian audiences into identification with the older, more powerful civilizations from which they had come. These stars travelled the world in style, carrying messages of trade, fashion, tourism, modernism and the privilege of being a member of the British Empire.