The earliest demonstrable example of an Australian travelling show, and the most enduring, was the circus. The colonial popularity of horses and horsemanship, wrote Richard Twopeny in 1883, produced ‘perhaps the most critical and appreciative circus audiences in the world’. The modern circus crystallised in London from 1768. Open-air displays of trick horsemanship given in a field called Ha’penny Hatch on London's southern outskirts began to assume the form that we today associate with the circus. Crucial to these developments was a former cavalryman and veteran of the Seven Years War, Sergeant-Major Philip Astley. Astley (d.1814) combined displays of horsemanship with those of clowns, ropewalkers and gymnasts. By 1779, he had enclosed these displays within a permanent venue, which he named Astley's Amphitheatre. This new genre of entertainment was popularly known around London as ‘the circus’ and the name stuck. While the Roman circus and the circus of modern times do share some features, the term ‘circus’ was 18th century London vernacular to describe the large, open-air, circular riding tracks used by recreational riders, traces of which remain today in thoroughfares such as Piccadilly Circus.

The establishment reached the peak of its fame in the years 1825-41 under the management of the superlative horseman, Andrew Ducrow (1798-1844). Ducrow raised the spectacle of circus riding to an art form. His exquisite equestrian-based pantomimes and spectacles were imitated in circuses throughout the British Isles, on the Continent, in the new United States and in the new colonies of Australia. The ropewalkers, gymnasts and equestrians who made occasional colonial appearances as early as 1833 proved transient. Some 60 years passed before the elements necessary to launch a colonial circus industry - bureaucratic largesse, entrepreneurs, performers, audiences and prosperity - fell into place.

In 1847 Launceston gave birth to the first comprehensive and successful demonstrations of colonial circus activity and, with it, the launch of a colonial circus industry. A Devonshire-born equestrian, horse dealer and publican named Robert Avis Radford (1814-65) pioneered the first successful circus in Australia and, with it, a continuous Australian circus tradition. This Astley's ‘on a limited scale’ was a building of simple construction (presumably timber, iron and canvas) located in the yard of Radford’s Horse & Jockey Inn in York Street. It opened on the evening of Monday, 27 December 1847. With a little company of performers, some of whom were former convicts, Radford presented feats of horsemanship, dancing, vaulting, gymnastics, acrobatics, clowning and equestrian burlesque.

The features of Astley's Amphitheatre and the equestrian art of Andrew Ducrow were thus transposed, on a miniature and probably rougher scale, to this most distant point on the globe.
Following Radford’s example, colonial circus exhibitions were soon given in amphitheatres of modest descriptions in Port Phillip, Maitland, Singleton, Sydney and Adelaide in the years leading up to the first gold rushes. From these early establishments were derived the first travelling circus troupes that traversed the eastern colonies to deliver equestrian, acrobatic, tumbling, clowning and tightrope performances to audiences in city, town and bush From Sydney in February 1851, Henry Burton, a professional English circus man, took to the road with Australia’s first peripatetic company.

Golding [known professionally as ‘James Henry’] Ashton (1820-89), who gave his first Australian appearances as ‘the renowned British horseman’ in Radford's in 1848, opened his own amphitheatre in 185], and was travelling the New England goldfields with his tented circus by the summer of 1852-53.
Another of Radford’s performers, the London-born acrobat, equestrian and ropewalker John Jones, who in 1865 adopted the professional and less prosaic nom d’arena of St Leon. From the late 1870s until the early 1920s, St Leon’s was one of Australia’s major circus companies.

The early circus proprietors found, as had the wandering minstrels of mediaeval Europe and the circus men of the American frontier, that it was easier to change audience than repertoire. To change audience, they had to change location. Moving beyond the confines of the amphitheatres, the Australian circus acquired the characteristics of mobility with which it is today identified - tents, touring and transportability. Light, flexible tents replaced the early cumbersome structures called booths that had to be erected, dismantled and transported between each location visited. Tented circuses reached Moreton Bay [now Brisbane] in 1855 and Adelaide in 1856. It took longer for the circus to reach Fremantle (1869), Cooktown (1889) and Darwin (1914). Not until the 1890s, in the wake of the fabulous gold rushes, did the larger circus companies of Australia’s eastern seaboard regularly visit Western Australia.

Gill Bros Rodeo & Circus was established in 1874. The show travelled extensively in Australia, staging Wild West shows before rodeos became commonplace. The Gill Brothers were also Australia’s first official rodeo stock contractors.

In 1881, four brothers John, Harry, Philip and George Wirth established a circus troupe. The company was incorporated in 1913 by Philip and George Wirth after they had received an inheritance from an American uncle and quickly rose to one of Australia's largest and most prestigious circus companies and continued operating until 1963.

In 1889 Perry Bros Circus was founded Perry Bros and became the first circus to circumnavigate Australia and effectively kickstart the nation's circus industry. The first Eroni's Circus toured Australia from the late-1800s until the 1920s, run by William Perry, himself having split off from a larger circus called the Perry Bros.
In 1893 Lennon's Circus was funded by Mary Lennon and covered Australia's remotest towns, to the largest cities.

Advance agents travelled ahead to advertise the circus along its route. A theatrical licence, usually costing a guinea and good for 12 months, was required in each colony visited. There was something peculiarly appropriate about the circus in an Australian context. On outward appearances, the circus reflected some of the most pervasive features of Australian life: on the one hand, it eschewed matters of intellect on the other, it reflected our pursuit of athletic glory in any form and irreverence for pretentiousness and authority.

In many respects, Australia’s itinerant circus people of the late 19th and early 20th century were explorers who constantly pushed at the frontiers of human settlement and faced the natural challenges of drought, fire and flood and the lack of roads, bridges and communications that we today take for granted. The smaller circuses went to extraordinary lengths to reach people in the most remote areas of the bush and well away from the beaten track, the shearers, miners and the railway construction gangs. Early circus proprietors did their best to identify with these people of the bush by generously supporting appeals for hospitals, schools, churches, orphanages, Masonic halls or other buildings of civic importance in the towns they visited. Even the bushrangers tended to take a kinder view of a circus on the road preferring to wave it through rather than bail it up.

The circus was also a highly popular entertainment from throughout the United States. The first circuses reached California in 1849 and within a few years one circus troupe, J A Rowe’s North American, had crossed the Pacific to Melbourne where Rowe erected a ‘commodious’ pavilion and played in the gold-stricken city for two years. After the interruption of the Civil War (1861-65), the completion of the transcontinental railway (1869) and the regularisation of trans-Pacific shipping services (1873), the ‘fabled land’ of Australia once again claimed the imagination of American circus men. Between 1873 and 1892, a steady stream of American circuses, among them the largest, visited Australia. The development of colonial rail systems facilitated their tours. The parade of Cooper, Bailey & Co’s Great International Allied Shows - the lineal ancestor of today's famous Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey's Combined Shows - through the streets of Melbourne, carnival style, aroused a sensation in 1877. Its caravans were gaudily painted and decorated with parables from the scriptures. This was the ‘great moral show’, the one patronised by the American clergy, the circus that did not show on a Sunday.

By the close of the 19th century, FitzGerald Bros and Wirth Bros toured the six states of Australia and New Zealand by rail and steamer along standardised routes, with imported companies of artistes, menageries of wild animals, large bands of professional musicians and lavish promotion. In 1901, FitzGerald Bros Circus comprised 112 people and was conveyed on 34 rail carriages. After the co-incidental deaths of the FitzGerald brothers in 1906, continents apart from each other, Wirth Bros was left as Australia’s largest circus company, a position it held until its final closure in 1963.

Australia nurtured some of the great stars of the international circus in this era. Two artists in particular deserve mention, although they have largely been forgotten in their native land. These were the superlative equestrienne, the Bundaberg-born May Wirth (born May Zinga, 1894-1978), an adopted daughter of the Wirth family and the Indigenous tightwire dancer and acrobat, the Narrabri-born Con Colleano (born Cornelius Sullivan in Lismore, 1899-1973), whose family started out with its own circus from Lightning Ridge in 1910.

By the 1920s, Australian circus proprietors long accustomed to the free-spirited conduct of their business were now faced with municipal restrictions governing parades and the posting of bills, while the cost of employing star acts and unionised musicians had soared. New forms of competition emerged in the form of the picture shows which reached the country districts from 1908, while cinemas were erected in the larger country towns from 1915. A motorised circus could move faster in this changing economic landscape. An advance agent travelled ahead of Ashton’s Circus in his own motor car in 1911 but motorisation did not become widespread in circus until the late 1920s and, as late as 1935, West Bros Circus crossed the Nullarbor Plain with horses and wagons.

Alfred Bullen and Lilian Bullen founded Bullens Circus in 1920. Their sons Stafford Bullen and Kenneth Bullen were circus proprietors and would later go on to co-founding the African Lion Safari (Warragamba).More than 20 motorised ‘road shows’ were active in the 1930s, such as Ashton’s, Bullen’s, Gill’s, Lennon’s and St Leon’s, while the largest, circuses, Wirth’s and Perry’s, were transported by rail. In 1942, after war with Japan commenced, circus and other travelling show activity was severely curtailed.

During World War I, circus horses had been commandeered by the army. Now, in World War II, the army requisitioned circus vehicles. As a morale-boosting measure, Wirth’s and Perry’s, were permitted to operate on a reduced scale for the remainder of the war. After 1945, the circuses flowered once again, unfettered by wartime restrictions and able to ride upon the ever-increasing prosperity of post-war Australia. There were 17 circuses travelling the country by the mid-1950s. Then television was introduced. Wirth’s ceased operations in 1963 after 80 years of continuous travel and an international reputation to its name. The Wirth management placed blame for the demise on television although unpaid taxes, soaring rail costs and mismanagement contributed to the failure. The Bullen family, after more than 40 year’s touring throughout Australia and New Zealand, voluntarily pulled its 94-vehicle circus off the road in 1969 and re-directed its energies towards the establishment of wild animal safari parks.

By 1973, there were 4 main circuses touring, Ashton’s, Circus Royale, Sole Bros and Alberto’s, the last two conducted by descendants of the famous Perry family. The public’s appetite for high quality circus entertainment was satisfied by the regular visits of The Great Moscow Circus, which first visited Australia in 1965 under the auspices of the Edgley Organisation and has continued every three to five years in Australia and New Zealand ever since and is now run by The Webers Circus Family.

Broadly speaking, Australian circus is today comprised between contemporary groups on the one hand, and the more conventional family-based itinerant companies on the other. Some of the latter have been active for well over one hundred years, their programs dependant to varying degrees upon the presentation of animals, whether domesticated, exotic or wild.

The former can be divided between the avant-garde ‘new wave’ companies, which are constantly pushing the meaning of circus to (and even beyond) conventional limits, and the youth-focussed community circus groups which are flowering all over the country in various forms and guises and also adapting their own shows to modern audiences.

Some of the Australian Contemporary circus groups dominating the local and international industry are Gravity & Other Myths, Circus Oz, Briefs, and Circa.

-Australian Historian Mark St Leon (PhD) - Assisted with further information provided by our advisory committee.

Mark St Leon is a freelance university lecturer and is descended from one of Australia’s earliest circus families. His website can be seen at www.pennygaff.com.au. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2006 for his thesis, Circus & Nation, published in an adapted form by Miegunyah Press in October 2009.