Astor Theatre is a heritage-listed cinema at 77 Burrowes Street, Surat, Maranoa Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1925 to 1960s. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 27 September 2002.
History
The Astor Picture Theatre was built in 1925 as an open-air picture theatre in Surat, which is situated on the Balonne River south of Roma and was the administrative centre of the Warroo Shire until its amalgamation into the Maranoa Region in 2008.
The Surveyor-General of New South Wales, Thomas Mitchell, mapped the area in 1846 and the District of Maranoa was proclaimed in November 1848. The new Commissioner of Lands arrived with several police in 1849 and set up camp on Yambougal station, moving slightly up river a few months later. This was the site selected in 1849 by surveyor James Burrowes for a service township on the Balonne River. He called the township Surat, after his former home in Madras, India. The main street, on which the theatre is situated, carries this surveyor's name.
A Court of Petty Sessions at Surat was gazetted in 1850 and a police building was erected. The Lands and Post Offices were soon represented and in 1859 a hotel was built. By the time that the town site was surveyed for land sales in 1863, a number of buildings had already been erected. Although Surat was superseded by St George as an administrative centre for the district in 1865, it continued to serve the surrounding area, which became Warroo Shire. Surat gained a school in 1874 and its first church in the late 1870s. In 1879 Cobb and Co set up a coach service from St George to Surat and on to Yuleba, constructing a staging post and store at Surat. This service was run until 1924, when it was the last coach route to be run in Australia.
Surat Pictures Limited was formed in 1925 when W Kitson sought building approval for the construction of a picture theatre in the main street of Surat. This was an open-air picture theatre comprising an earth-floored enclosure, a canvas screen at the rear and a shallow building along the street frontage containing a foyer with a projection booth above it. This type of structure was the cheapest and simplest kind of purpose built film venue and was not uncommon at the time in the warmer parts of Australia, though many of them were later roofed over.
The Lumiere Brothers had produced the first moving films in Paris in 1895, followed by Edison Studios in America in 1896, although these early films were very short and simply captured events without a narrative. The first feature length movie The Story of the Kelly Gang was made in Australia in 1906 and it was the ability of film to tell a story that was the key to its popularity. At first, films were shown as part of variety shows in theatres or were screened in halls. In the 1900s purpose built picture theatres showing a program of films accompanied by music were built in America, Europe and Australia. Some of those catering to centres with large populations were huge and luxurious, though most were far more modest.
Films were much less expensive to show than live theatre and the equipment was easily transported, making them well suited as an entertainment in country areas, some films being displayed by travelling "picture show men" in the early years. The growing popularity of films led to the construction of many open-air theatres or simple shed-like buildings as permanent venues for showing film. Although theatre chains usually owned the large "picture palaces" in cities, most small picture theatres in Queensland were independently owned and Queensland eventually had more independently owned theatres than any other state in Australia. These small ventures, frequently family owned, did not have the capital to build lavish premises, nor did they have a large client base in country areas and might screen movies only once or twice a week. Having invested in expensive projection equipment, particularly after the advent of talkies, extensions and improvements to picture theatres were often made piecemeal as demand grew and money became available. The Astor Theatre, extended in stages, provides a good illustration of this process.
The first films shown at Surat were silent and had a piano accompaniment, a generator providing power for the projector. Bill McKay Senior was the first proprietor and ran the Astor until the 1930s, when it passed to Geoff Armstrong. Between 1938 and 1940 a Mrs. Crump leased it. It was operated during the Second World War by GO and RD Armstrong and was acquired in 1945 by E J and V M Aldridge who ran it as a family business, with their son acting as the projectionist.