Performing The Revenge in Sydney: Blackface and Blackness in an Abolitionist Empire

On the appropriately stormy evening of January 16, 1796, a new theater opened in Sydney, New South Wales, with a performance of The Revenge by Edward Young. “Rage on, ye winds, burst clouds, and waters roar, ” cursed the vengeful protagonist, Zanga, a Moorish prince defeated in battle and enslaved by his victor, Don Alonzo, a Spanish general. “You bear a just resemblance to my fortune, /And suit the gloomy habit of my soul.” Blackface theater had arrived at the opposite ends of the earth from where it had first emerged, negotiating very different conditions from those that had spawned it. In a penal colony where slavery was proclaimed to be impossible, convict-citizens worked themselves to the bone for their superiors’ pleasure, and “Sydney people, ” as Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney region will be known, devoted themselves to revenging British encroachments on their land, persons, and food supply. Sydney in 1796 had become an amphitheater of struggle driven by the competing claims of British authorities and Aboriginal leaders. How this blackface performance negotiated the various levels of revenge that coursed across the Cumberland Plain is the subject of this chapter.