Alfred Rolfe

Biography

Melbourne, 1862: a restless boy named Alfred Rolfe grows up amid the smell of sawdust and the clamour of stage coaches. While Victoria’s goldfields roar outside the city, Rolfe is already rehearsing lives he has never lived. By 1911 he has swapped greasepaint for the crank of a camera, steering the bushranging romp Captain Starlight, or Gentleman of the Road onto flickering screens and into legend. A year later he chases sound itself with Cooee and the Echo, letting the bush answer back. In 1915, as Europe convulses, he marshals The Loyal Rebel, a colonial answer to empire. The curtain finally falls on 9 September 1943 in Sydney, but the light he threaded through celluloid keeps running, frame by steady frame.