With all the noise about Ipswich luring Ed Sheeran from Brisbane recently, here’s a concert 110 years ago that was positively stolen. I told a version of this story live on Ipswich’s West Bremer Radio.

It’s fantastic that Ed Sheeran snuck out to Ipswich to sign the mural. I don’t know who started the campaign, but yesterday happened after the mayor Teresa Harding took up the mantle to lure Sheeran to Ipswich. Tonight is the second of three shows in Brisbane, and it be awesome if he came back for a pop-up concert. You ever know.

And that’s not out of the question, following his other visits to Ipswichs in the UK and USA, and there’s been such a concerted effort. As you might know, last year the Ipswich mayor went to Ipswich in the UK to hand-deliver an official invite to his local pub. That large mural that Sheeran signed, it was commissioned by Warner Music. The Prince Alfred Hotel created a special “Ed Beeran” brew. There’s even a cardboard cut-out Ed that posed in a cockpit at RAAF Base Amberley.

All that sounds really manic, but it’s no different from back in 1916, during the depths of the First World War, when another extraordinary sold-out concert swept all before it across Australia and New Zealand.

The singer then was Paul Dufault the great Canadian tenor. Between 1906 and about 1920 Dufault made regular concert tours through Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan. In 1910 he had two appearances at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic. He was described as the “golden voiced Canadian tenor”, “The Tenor of Tenors”, “Prince Charming” of the Concert Platform, and he even studied for the Priesthood. Here in Ipswich we embraced him as “the world’s greatest tenor”.

Dufault’s extraordinarily successful 1916 tour culminated with four sold-out concerts at His Majesty’s Theatre in Brisbane, and one here at the Ipswich Town Hall.

His Majesty’s Theatre in Brisbane was built in 1888, and originally named Her Majesty’s, before being demolished in 1983 to make way for the Wintergarden centre. At the time it was the largest theatre in Queensland with a main auditorium that seated almost 2,000 people.

When the Brisbane tickets went on sale, the queue went all the way up Queen Street, it formed early in the morning, hours before the opening of the box office, and lasted throughout the day. The Brisbane ticket sales set a new Queensland record. At His Majesty’s Theatre concerts, not only was every seat occupied, and every legal inch of standing room, but a temporary platform was even built over the footlights so that the stage itself could take 200 more patrons, while 80 more actually filled the orchestra pit, pushing the orchestra to one side.

Four concerts were scheduled for Brisbane, but after the crazy opening day of ticket sales in which all of them were sold out, that’s when the unthinkable happened.

The Ipswich concert at our Town Hall was cancelled to make way for an extra Brisbane concert. It sucked. Ipswich missed out in favour of Brisbane, and not for the first or last time.

So 110 years ago, Brisbane got five Paul Dufault concerts, and Ipswich lost its only one. Therefore when Ed Sheeran left his Brisbane hotel to visit Ipswich, it was some recompense after that gross injustice suffered by that city over a century ago.

CLICK HERE TO LISTENTO A VERSION OF THIS STORY ON WEST BREMER RADIO.

Photo credits:
Representation of Paul Dufault and Ed Sheeran together at His Majesty’s Theatre Brisbane – Copilot image.
Ed Sheeran in Ipswich, 2026 – West Bremer Radio Facebook page.
Paul Dufault, French-Canadian tenor, 1872–1930 – State Library of Victoria.
Audience inside His Majesty’s Theatre, 1914 – State Library of Queensland.