The Controversial "Case of the Opera Children in the East": Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child

This essay examines the international controversy that arose from the 1909-10 south Asian tour by Pollard's juvenile company, a troupe that was organized in Australia and wholly comprised of Australian child actors. Charges of physical mistreatment brought by the children against the troupe's manager attracted the attention of legislators and social commentators in both India and Australia. A storm of outrage in both countries resulted in Australian federal legislation, the Emigration Bill of 1910, that aimed to prevent any child from being taken offshore; the new law further enshrined the protection of all children (not just performing children) and effectively strengthened the social ideology of childhood. Extending recent work on theatre as a transnational phenomenon, the essay illuminates the contribution of children to global theatrical circuits at the turn of twentieth century; it reveals that in the early years of the century, child performers on the transnational popular stage were in a paradoxical position, caught between high demand for child entertainers in Western and Anglophone societies and the education and labor reforms in their home territories that were reshaping social conditions for children. Examining Pollard's repertoire of Edwardian musical comedy and arguing that this repertoire framed the child actors as possessing adult levels of insight and understanding that contradicted reformist ideas about acceptable childhood experiences, the essay is the first to recognize that a children's company contributed to the global transference and international popularity of Edwardian musical comedy.