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Clarke, Robin JH: Sydney Diary (1950)

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An evening at home education content clip 1

This clip chosen to be G

Clip description

This is taken from a sequence depicting the domestic routine of a family evening spent at home. Clarke arranges it into a narrative which begins with a train pulling into Wahroonga station, and includes scenes of shopping, driving, cooking, and after dinner recreational activities.

Curator’s notes

by Poppy De Souza

It is evident from this footage that Clarke was a professional cameraman. His sense of narrative and choice of shots set up a contained story about family life after a day’s work and the context around which it occurs. It is edited together with quick shots in chronological succession and moves from afternoon to evening.

This clip is also valuable for its record of 1950s transport (cars and trains), domestic interiors (especially the kitchen), typical meals (neat servings of meat and vegetables), and recreational activities (listening to records, smoking, and chatting on the phone). As the Clarke family lived in the relatively wealthy northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga at the time, this home movie is also a window on a particular class of 1950s family.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows aspects of the everyday life of a family living in Wahroonga in Sydney, New South Wales in 1950. The clip, silent and in colour, is taken from a home movie. It opens with a series of shots of people boarding and alighting from a train, the local Anglican church, a suburban street with cars, a petrol station, and a woman and a man carrying their shopping from the local store to a car and then driving home. A woman is then shown in her kitchen, cooking food on an early Kooka stove and serving dinner to her family. The woman then smokes a cigarette while she chats on the phone, her son studies and her husband plays a record on the gramophone.

Educational value points

  • Home movies provide an important source of social history because they record everyday private life, illustrating examples of clothes worn, transport, food, buildings and people’s social and cultural habits at the time the footage was shot. Although some of the shots in this clip have clearly been staged and it has been edited to tell a simple story it is still a valuable descriptive record of important aspects of everyday life for one family at a specific time and place.
  • In the 1950s, movie cameras, film and projectors were expensive so home movies usually captured the lives of the wealthy, such as this family living in the affluent northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Home movies from this period are therefore limited as historical sources as they give a perspective on how only one section of the community lived at the time of the filming. Home movies were made to capture family events and to entertain family and friends.
  • The cars seen in this clip, mainly Vauxhalls and Austins, would probably have been made in Britain or the USA, as Australia did not develop a major car-manufacturing industry until 1948. After the Second World War the Australian Government offered financial assistance and tariff protection to encourage automobile manufacture. The first ‘Australian’ Holden was manufactured in 1948 and was an immediate success with the general population.
  • The meal being cooked and eaten in this clip is typical of 1950s Australian food, which was based on the traditional British meal of ‘meat and three veg’. This reflects the influence of British culture, which remained strong in 1950 before the effects of post-War migration changed Australians’ eating habits.
  • After the Second World War, Australian manufacturing of consumer goods, such as the early Kooka electric stove shown here, prospered so much that most manufactured goods were made in Australia. Government policies such as tariff protection and increased immigration encouraged manufacturing. However, during the 1950s Asian countries such as Japan, followed by Korea, began manufacturing consumer goods more cheaply due to lower labour costs and more modern manufacturing technology.
  • There was a pent-up demand for consumer goods in Australia after the deprivations imposed on the bulk of the population by the Great Depression and the austerity campaign of the Second World War, when manufacturing had been directed to the war effort. The refrigerator and electric stove, examples of which appear in the clip, were replacing the ice chest and the fuel stove. At the time the telephone, record player and portable radio, all seen in this clip, were luxuries.
  • The manner of food shopping in Australia has changed since the 1950s when people shopped at small local stores, as shown in this clip, or relied on home deliveries. Local stores specialised in a particular range of products: greengrocers supplied fruit and vegetables, bakers sold bread and grocers offered dry and packaged goods. Shopping this way provided a sense of community and ensured individual relationships between customers and local store owners.
  • The Wahroonga Anglican church of St Andrews, shown in this clip, reflects the religious culture of Australia in the 1950s, when churchgoing, particularly on Sundays, was common and when the Christian religions of Protestantism and Catholicism dominated. Since the 1950s churchgoing has declined in Australia and as the make-up of Australia’s population has changed the diversity of religions practised in Australia has increased.