1803 is a unique outdoor physical theatre performance on the banks of the Yarra River at The Collingwood Children's Farm in Abbotsford. The work is a subverted re-enactment of the first Europeans to come up the river in 1803.During the rehearsal period there was regular indigenous revegetation work on the banks of the river, and Sense of Place exercises at the site with the director,  the dancers and a broader group of workshop participants.

The performance contains a critical and playful examination of how these first Europeans saw the landscape(through the lenses of Enlightenment Science, and Romanticism), how they interacted with indigenous people, and how the journals they kept wrote the landscape into the European Imagination. Other themes are; how our current view of the land is informed by the approaches of these first explorers, the nature of colonial exploration, the types of narratives in explorer's journals, and some of the ways which early European men in Australia related to this place (through damaging and exploiting the land, through drunkenness, and through aggressive and/or sexual interactions with the indigenous population, amongst others.)

The work was first staged in 2003 and then again in 2005. It was supported by The City of Yarra, Parks Victoria, The Collingwood Children's Farm, and the Victorian College of the Arts. Most of the performances sold out, and there was a fully booked schools program.
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