Round Earth Theatre Company - The Ship That Never Was

The Ship That Never Was

In 1992, Round Earth went solo again, attempting a return to the road with A Bright and Crimson Flower, a large-scale epic about Australian Prisoners of War under the Japanese. Between 1992 and 1995 A Bright and Crimson Flower performed in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales.

In 1994, in response to a request by Alan Coates, a Tasmanian Parks Ranger, The Round Earth Company, facing bankruptcy, took a two person play to Strahan on the West Coast of Tasmania, performing The Ship That Never Was. Originally written and produced at the Peacock Theatre in Hobart in 1982 for Breadline Theatre Company, it is the story of the last great escape, of the Frederick from Sarah Island, the dreaded penal Settlement celebrated in Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life. It performed in Strahan in 1993 for eight weeks, in a woodchop arena, aboard yachts, on Sarah Island, outside the Strahan Pub, and even at the Mount Lyell Picnic on the beach. During the play a mock ship is built on the stage with the actors utilising audience members, including children, for additional characters in the play.

The Ship That Never Was performs every day and has exceeded 5000 performances; the Company undertook the daily task of providing Guided Tours on Sarah Island, and made dramatic performances in the form of a guided tour, of which four were sometimes organized in one day. In 1998, as a contribution to the supportive community, the Company undertook to operate the Strahan Visitor Centre, curating the exhibition created by Robert Morris Nunn and Richard Flanagan, and providing information to tourists.

The Round Earth Theatre Company operated a performing/information/guiding company year-round in a town of 800 permanent residents with an annual turnover of nearly a million Australian dollars; the new company subsidised the increasingly expensive operation of the Visitors Centre and in 2005 shed the operation of the Strahan Visitor Centre.

In 2002 the Company expanded its fledgling publication services (information booklets) to publish The Sarah island Conspiracies by Richard Davey (2002) and The Travails of Jimmy Porter (2003), the memoir written on Norfolk Island in 1842 by James Porter, one of the leaders of the escape on the Frederick.