History of The Jews in Australia - Arts and Culture

Arts and Culture

Barnett Levy founded an early theatre in Australia. Having been refused a license by then governor Darling in 1828, though in the following year he was permitted to hold approved performances in his Sydney Hotel. A record of that fact is found in the following entry in "Sydney in 1848," a work published in that year: "In the late twenties His Excellency Sir R. Bourke granted Barnett Levy a license for dramatic performances, with a restriction that he should confine himself to the representation of such pieces only as had been licensed in England by the Lord Chamberlain." Levy was at that time the owner of the original Royal Hotel in George Street; and he fitted up the saloon of that establishment as a theatre, where the first representations of the legitimate drama in the colony were given. The encouragement that this undertaking received induced the enterprising proprietor to enlarge his sphere of action. He built a theatre called the Theatre Royal, which was opened in 1833, at a cost which almost bankrupted him.

Isaac Nathan, who emigrated to Australia in 1841, wrote the first Australian opera, Don John of Austria to a libretto by Jacob Levi Montefiore. It premiered on 3 May 1847 at the Royal Victoria Theatre in Sydney.

There have been Jewish contributions to Australian visual arts. Georges Mora, born Gunter Morawski in 1913 in Leipzig, Germany of Jewish/Polish heritage, fled Germany to Paris in 1930, then to Melbourne in 1949. He established the Tolarno Gallery in Melbourne's bohemian St Kilda. This became a venue for exhibitions of Australian Modernist avant garde art. Printmaker and projection artist Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack graduate and professor of the Bauhaus was deported to Australia as an "enemy alien" on the ship HMT Dunera, spending time in internment camps in Hay, Orange and Tatura, before being sponsored for Australian citizenship by (Sir) James Darling, headmaster of Geelong Church of England Grammar School. He was influential in the introduction of Bauhaus principles into visual art and design curricula in Australia. E. P. Fox and Abbey Alston have achieved distinction. Paintings by both these artists have been hung in the Melbourne National Gallery. In the Adelaide Gallery hangs a tribute to the memory of H. Abrahams for the services he rendered to the progress of art in Australia. Two Jews of Australian birth have attained to some distinction as writers, S. Alexander and Joseph Jacobs.

In May 2004, the art collector and dealer, Joseph Brown (artist), donated his substantial collection of Australian art of the 20th century to the National Gallery of Victoria. It was the largest single gift of works of art ever made to a public gallery in Australia. Brown migrated from Poland in 1933. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his services to the arts.