RAHS Day Lecture – The ‘Girls’ Who Made Australia Laugh

Event Date & Time: Wednesday 4 October 2023 @ 1 pm – 2 pm

Event Location: Online via Zoom

Cost: Free

Event Description:

Hundreds of Australian women graced the popular stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite the racism, sexism and other cruelties of vaudeville, it gave them space in which to live unusually public lives, and sometimes to test conventional ideas about how women should behave. Their stories speak to the treatment of women in earlier times. But they also show what is lost to our culture and our history when imported entertainments are permitted to overwhelm local artists and their work.

About the speaker:

A former documentary filmmaker, television producer and chief executive of Film Australia, Sharon Connolly has been involved in making many landmark history programs since her first film, Red Matildas. In her first book, My Giddy Aunt and her sister comedians, she once more writes some remarkable yet uncelebrated women back into the stories of Australia.