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The 1988 Moscow Circus tour by Edgley International attracted considerable newspaper coverage about a tight-wire bear act, travelling cage sizes, and animal rights protests that culminated in the prosecution of a new circus performer. This increased media attention in 1988 indicates a turning point in social opposition to performing animals in Australian circus. Yet the 1993 Edgley's Moscow Circus tour had double the animal acts and a wire-walking tiger. Despite continued media coverage of an anti-animal performance position in subsequent years, exotic animals continued to be part of successful circus tours. It seems that the strategies used in protests after 1988, which targeted all animals in the circus without differentiating between the species, may have been less effective than the species-specific protests in 1988. Protesting about a general category of animal performer correlates with the rhetoric of the modernist circus that collapses species differences. Hence the circus could maintain its defence that animals were well-treated, living with their trainers in one big circus family. This article argues that, even so, from 1988 the contradictions of the traditional circus had been exposed because newspaper stories and reviews accommodated points made by protestors about animals while they also supported human acts in the circus. These revealed that the allure of exotic geographies embodied by animals in the circus had been disrupted.

Chinese theatrical performances were part of the popular visual culture of colonial Australia. This article addresses a cultural fascination with Chinese female feet in China and Australia in the nineteenth century. It discusses the political and social interpretations of an advertised performance featuring Chinese females with small feet in Australia in 1860 and proposes new cultural understandings of the Chinese performers’ identity by the mainly male spectatorship.