The FitzGerald Brothers' Circus : considering circus entertainments in late colonial New Zealand

From the 1850s through to the 1870s the discovery of gold around the Pacific Rim at various sites in California, New Zealand, and the eastern colonies of Australia, gave rise to an itinerant performance culture which induced an assortment of troupes to travel in the wake of the moving labour force of miners and camp followers. Historical accounts of the circus in colonial Australia have shown that out of the itinerant circus troupes that provided entertainment to gold rush settlements the genre developed to become, arguably, the most popular form of entertainment throughout the colonies of Australasia during the latter years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. To date, a broad historical retrieval of the circus in New Zealand has yet to be undertaken. Consideration of the cultural recreations of colonial New Zealand society has tended to relegate circus to a subset of entertainments termed 'gold rush culture', a grouping that includes opera, vaudeville, theatre, and circus shows. However, my study of the vibrant, internationalist, and prolific entertainments presented in New Zealand by the FitzGerald Brothers' Circus in the years from 1887 to 1904, from which this essay is derived, challenges the historic relegation of circus to the frontier settlements or to the periphery of colonial society. The FitzGeralds were part of a group of elite entertainment entrepreneurs employing advanced marketing and management strategies to undertake major tours of the colony in this period. This essay aims, in some measure, to reconsider the position occupied by circus entertainment in late colonial life.