Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows the exterior and interior of a large hotel in Townsville in northern Queensland in 1926. It begins with an intertitle: 'Modern palatial hotels provide every demand of the most exacting guest … Spacious open air lounges give them an Eastern atmosphere’. Sepia-tinted scenes of the exterior follow and include shots of parked cars and a horse-drawn cart. The clip ends with a series of scenes from inside the downstairs lounge of the hotel where guests are shown relaxing in comfortable chairs.

Educational value points

• This clip promotes tourism to Townsville by showing the type of hotel that prospective tourists could expect to enjoy. Its exterior is imposing while its interior boasts high ceilings, plenty of space, comfortable lounges and state-of-the-art décor. The footage gives an indication of how a hotel lounge advertised at the time as 'modern’, 'palatial’ and 'spacious’ was furnished: with tables, cane chairs and potted palms.

• Buildings of the type shown here were to be found throughout the British Empire in warmer climates, especially in India and Sri Lanka (the 'East’) and reveal the architectural influences of the colonial period dating from the late 19th century. The hotel is built in the classical revival style with the ground-floor columns, arches and grand entrance loggia contrasting with the lighter construction of timber and iron of the second-storey veranda, to suit the Australian tropics.

• Some of the transport used in Townsville in 1926 is illustrated in the footage. Motor cars, possibly owned by wealthy guests (at the time all cars were imported), can be seen parked outside the hotel. A horse and cart can also be seen, probably for the delivery of goods.

• The clip shows men and women dressed for afternoon drinks in a location promoted as a tropical holiday destination. The men generally wore lounge suits with high-collared shirts and ties (although one man is seen in a white colonial suit and pith helmet). Women were dressed in the short-sleeved, waistless dresses with below-the-knees hemlines, fashionable in the 1920s. All had short, bobbed and waved hairstyles and some wore cloche hats.

• The cinematographer used three fixed locations and shot this footage using both panning and medium close-up static shots. The final scene, looking from the inside out with the guests’ heads in silhouette, was an interesting approach but insufficient light inside the building presented problems for the cinematographer. The light from the windows makes the inside of the room and its occupants appear darker.

• The clip is introduced by an intertitle, a device used in silent films to tell the audience what is to follow. When 'talkies’ (films with sound) were introduced, the use of intertitles was replaced by the voice of a narrator. The intertitle remains on screen for what appears to be a long time today, but was normal in the 1920s. The length of time the intertitles would appear on screen was based on the filmmaker’s judgement of how long it would take the audience to read the words.

• Round about Townsville is a nine-minute documentary produced by the Commonwealth Government’s Cinema and Photographic Branch. The Branch’s function from 1911 onwards was to advertise Australia overseas, but in 1923 it received government permission to spend part of its budget for non-migration purposes, and so from 1925 to 1930 one reel a week was put on public release. This film was probably used in the series 'Know your own country’.

This clip starts approximately 3 minutes into the documentary.

Intertitles read, ‘Modern palatial hotels provide every demand of the most exacting guest…… Spacious open air lounges give them an Eastern atmosphere.’ In sepia tones we men and women seated and talking at tables in the hotel gallery/lobby.