The Aboriginal Theatre, funded by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust toured southeastern states and territories in 1963 alongside a Bennett-Campbell Australian Aborigine Trust exhibition of bark paintings from across the Northern Territory. In this presentation, we consider records of these live performances of Top End Aboriginal culture in southeastern Australia alongside exhibited bark paintings functioning not just as theatrical backdrop, but as visualisations of song cycles or ceremonies. While Welfare Directors intervened to protect the Aboriginal performers from the ardours of international touring, the visual artworks created by their colleagues enjoyed a life of their own touring the world in the hands of non-Indigenous collectors and curators, ending up in various national museum and gallery collections. The career trajectory of the performers, and that of the artworks differed greatly in scale. By entwining a variety of historical methodologies – interrogating colonial archives, listening to living memories and viewing museum collections – we seek to situate an event, occurring on a small scale, in a larger view of Australian cultural history, and to recognize the agency of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performers alongside the administration’s attempts to control the movements of those people and their ephemeral and material cultural products.