Convicts, gold and scandal: The musical digging up our secret past

In a century-old industrial warehouse in Richmond, Shelley Short sings a story twice as old. Through the old tin and timber rings Martha Hayes, a song about the innocent daughter of a transported convict woman, and the mother of Tasmania’s first European child.

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.

Rehearsing at Bakehouse Studios for Vandemonian Lags, from left: Mark Wallace, Jen Anderson, Darren Hanlon, Craig Pilkington, Mick Thomas, Shelley Short, Jeff Lang and Ben Salter.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“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.

Mick Thomas (left), Shelley Short and Ben Salter during rehearsals at Bakehouse Studios for Vandemonian Lags, billed as “musical theatre from the Tasmanian convict underbelly”.Credit: Wayne 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.

“My brother Steve came across the archive through his film company in Hobart,” Thomas says. “They’d been incredibly meticulous in what they recorded. Every person who stepped ashore, they measured their height, they weighed them, they transcribed their tattoos.”

Tim Rogers provides the dramatic narration in Vandemonian Lags.

Thousands of forgotten names and stories landed in the songwriter’s lap. “It was a dream job,” he says. But after writing about 10 songs “it was just too much. So I brought in [Tasmanian singer-songwriter] Ben Salter. And then it was just opening the address book.”

Darren Hanlon was another who answered the call. “There was no information except that he stole a book,” he says of his character in The Book Thief. “That gave me huge scope ... but it’s a real tongue twister. It keeps me up at night, worrying I’m going to forget the lyrics.”

With Short, Hanlon also performs The Wildest Dreams of Samuel, a tale of long-game redemption. “He was caught poaching on this estate in England and was sent to Tasmania. Twenty years later, he went to Victoria and struck it rich on the goldfields.”

Samuel sailed back to England, unaware his girl had waited for him, and had borne his child. “They got married the day of his grandchild’s christening, and he went and bought the estate he was caught poaching on.”

Performing for a Tasmanian audience that included descendants of the characters was “very emotional,” Hanlon says.

Rogers, who provides the show’s dramatic narration (with Nankervis), has also felt the weight of responsibility.

Brian Nankervis features in Vandemonian Lags.

“I take all the awful, malevolent characters, the Dickensian ponces, also some haughty establishment figures,” Rogers says. Sex Hospital, about the illicit nocturnal trade of a Launceston medical facility, is the showstopper he didn’t expect.

“For all its lascivious-sounding detail, it’s an intriguing tale of a young woman who just had no other way of earning a living in desperate circumstances. So we have to deal with that, making sure the story is told amongst all the flounciness.

“When we performed in Tasmania I got to speak with some ladies who were related to some of the workers at that hospital, and it was really something. I don’t doubt that will happen in Victoria as well.”

For Thomas, the connection is personal. “My father was from there,” he says. “My grandma always showed me pictures of where they grew up, on the north coast. My brother Steve, when he became an adult, just wanted to go there. And he hasn’t come back.”

Vandemonian Lags is at Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo on May 22, Melbourne Recital Centre May 23, Her Majesty’s Theatre, Ballarat on May 24, and Frankston Arts Centre May 25.