Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip from a promotional documentary shows school students in South Australia marching in orderly lines from a schoolyard and up a flight of stairs to their classrooms. An intertitle, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, introduces footage of a boys’ football team gathered for a group photograph. This is followed by footage of girls playing netball. Two girls’ hockey teams are then shown, with team members wearing the sports uniforms of the time.

Educational value points

• This section of the documentary The Rising Generation has a major focus on school sports and was intended to signal to the citizens of South Australia that their schools were well equipped for physical activities with large outdoor areas such as assembly areas and sports ovals. The Rising Generation was filmed to promote the range of education facilities provided by the government for all SA children and young people from kindergarten to university.

• The clip indicates the growing availability of vigorous and competitive team sports, such as women’s basketball (now known as netball) and hockey, for girls at school. In the 1920s, women’s basketball had only just been introduced to SA schools and was played on various surfaces including grass as seen here. Hockey dated from the 1910s. Independent girls’ schools took the lead in introducing such sports but government schools soon followed.

• Before the 1920s there had been considerable opposition to girls playing energetic sports at school. Sports were thought to encourage aggression and diminish the girls’ femininity. By the late 1920s, however, interschool sports associations had been formed and various interschool competitions in girls’ sports were underway in Adelaide.

• As shown in the clip, schools in the 1920s generally insisted that their students line up in designated places at assemblies and march in unison. Assemblies at some Adelaide schools are known to have concluded with a marching routine that students knew by heart. Regulated by a drum and often accompanied by a percussion band, the students were expected to keep in step and move off to class in a specific order, marching all the way.

• Although the girls’ sports uniforms seen here with their stockings or long socks, long tunics, blouses and ties would seem to impede free movement compared with modern sports clothing, they in fact allowed much greater freedom of movement than the sports dress of previous decades. Girls’ school uniforms in the 1920s followed women’s fashions with their shortened skirts and dropped waistlines.

• The title of the film, The Rising Generation, may reflect the desire for renewal in SA after the memory of the losses of the First World War, given that almost 10 per cent of Australia’s war dead came from SA. Many also died during the post-War influenza epidemic. The subsequent rapid population increase and good harvests contributed to a more positive view of the future.

This clip starts approximately 5 minutes into the documentary.

This silent black-and-white clip from a promotional documentary shows school students in South Australia marching in orderly lines from a schoolyard and up a flight of stairs to their classrooms. An intertitle, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, introduces footage of a boys’ football team gathered for a group photograph. This is followed by footage of girls playing netball. Two girls’ hockey teams are then shown, with team members wearing the sports uniforms of the time, we see a fragment of a hockey match.