Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

McKenzie, Roger and Kent, Bernie: Silent Car Trip Australia (c.1960)

play
Email a link to this page
To:
CC:
Subject:
Body:
clip Surfers Paradise education content clip 1, 3

Original classification rating: not rated. This clip chosen to be G

Clip description

A Surfers Paradise title card opens this segment which includes shots of typical Queensland holiday units, hotels and motels, and swimming pools. The main streets are filled with billboards and signs, motels, cafes and pubs. The ‘Beachcomber’ nightclub is shown and a ’60s style brick holiday apartment block. A brief view of the beach ends this clip.

Curator’s notes

An ever-popular tourist destination on Queensland’s Gold Coast known for its coastline, shopping, nightlife, and dining, Surfers Paradise has expanded exponentially since the 1960s. The beginnings of the phenomenon that is Surfers Paradise today can be clearly seen in this clip. Billboards for Qantas and Ansett-ANA perch on top of buildings, neon signs adorn the fronts of restaurants and night clubs, and holiday apartments and hotels (with must-have outdoor pool area) abound.

One of the fantastic things about edited home movies is their often creative use of title cards and intertitles. They reveal the personal investment put into creating a cohesive narrative or sequence and reveal a little about the character of the creator. The title cards in this home movie all have colour picture postcards as their background, each carefully picked to suit the style of place which follows. The title card for this segment, for example, is extremely apt – a row of smiling beachgoers.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows silent home-movie footage of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast in Queensland around 1960. It opens with an intertitle that reads 'Surfers Paradise’ placed over a picture postcard of smiling beachgoers. The clip cuts between shots of two- and three-storey holiday units and motels, with names like Golden Sun and Winter Sun Motor Inn, with holidaymakers in swimming pools, and footage of the streets around Surfers Paradise including shops, bars, and restaurants such as the Cafe Cathay. It concludes with a shot of the beach.

Educational value points

  • Surfers Paradise is the most famous of a number of beaches along a 57-km strip of coastline in southern Queensland now called the Gold Coast. People holidayed at the seaside village of Elston, as Surfers Paradise was called prior to 1933, as early as the 1880s, but it began life as a tourist resort when Jim Cavill opened a 16-bedroom hotel called The Surfers Paradise in 1923. Cavill, with the support of locals, lobbied to change the name of the village to Surfers Paradise. By the 1950s it was being promoted as a family holiday destination.
  • Surfers Paradise experienced a property development boom in the 1950s that saw the construction of large beachfront holiday apartments and motels to cater for the rapidly expanding tourist market. This development coincided with an easing of building regulations. The first high-rise was built in 1959 and in the 1980s the Gold Coast again experienced a real estate boom, driven in part by huge Japanese investment that transformed the beachfront into a strip of twenty- to thirty-storey high-rise apartments and hotels.
  • The development of Surfers Paradise reflects broader social changes taking place in Australia in the decades following the Second World War when increased incomes and greater leisure time meant that more Australians began to travel and take domestic holidays. Paid annual holidays increased from two weeks in 1945 to three weeks in 1963 and to four weeks in 1974. Mass domestic tourism was also enabled by widespread car ownership, the advent of the motor hotel or 'motel’, and improved roads.
  • The 1980s development boom on the Gold Coast was accompanied by state government corruption and property investment scams, which by the late 1990s had deterred many investors. However the Gold Coast has again undergone a resurgence and in September 2005 it was estimated that $42 billion worth of new development was under construction or in the planning stages. In 2005, Q1, the world’s tallest residential building, was completed at Surfers Paradise. The Gold Coast has a population of about 500,000 people and is now the sixth largest urban aggregation in Australia.
  • In the 1950s, Chinese restaurants such as Cafe Cathay flourished throughout Australia. For most Australians at the time, a meal at a Chinese restaurant was their first and often only experience of Asian food. The spread of these restaurants was partly due to an increased number of Chinese migrants resulting from changes to the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, but is also attributed to US servicemen stationed in Australia during the Second World War whose patronage of Chinese restaurants encouraged Australians to follow suit.
  • Amateur filmmaking increased in popularity after the introduction of the 16-mm camera in 1923 and the 8-mm camera in 1932 as relatively inexpensive alternatives to the conventional 35-mm film format. However these cameras were still priced beyond the reach of most people and it was not until Kodak introduced the more affordable Super 8 format in 1965 that home-movie making became widespread among different social groups and accessible to those on low incomes.
  • The footage exemplifies typical features of the home-movie genre. The camera is hand-held with resulting instability of the image. Editing is achieved 'in-camera’ simply by turning the camera on and off and the content is shown in real time. Travel and domestic life, particularly celebratory events such as birthdays or weddings, comprise the main subjects of home movies, although work and mini-dramas also feature.
  • Although historically regarded as amateur and only of interest to their creators and immediate family, home movies such as this one have now gained the status of historical documents. Home movies have increasingly been sought out to help reconstruct history, for example in documentaries and museum displays. They are a record of the lifestyles, cultures and traditions of everyday Australians, but can also provide diverse perspectives or alternative histories.

Thanks to the generosity of the rights holders, we are able to offer Surfers Paradise from the home movie McKenzie, Roger and Kent, Bernie: Silent Car Trip Australia as a high quality video download.

To play the downloadable video, you need QuickTime 7.0, VLC, or similar.

You must read and agree to the following terms and conditions before downloading the clip:

australianscreen is produced by the National Film and Sound Archive. By using the website you agree to comply with the terms and conditions described elsewhere on this site. The NFSA may amend the 'Conditions of Use’ from time to time without notice.

All materials on the site, including but not limited to text, video clips, audio clips, designs, logos, illustrations and still images, are protected by the Copyright Laws of Australia and international conventions.

When you access australianscreen you agree that:

  • You may retrieve materials for information only.
  • You may download materials for your personal use or for non-commercial educational purposes, but you must not publish them elsewhere or redistribute clips in any way.
  • You may embed the clip for non-commercial educational purposes including for use on a school intranet site or a school resource catalogue.
  • The National Film and Sound Archive’s permission must be sought to amend any information in the materials, unless otherwise stated in notices throughout the Site.

All other rights reserved.

ANY UNAUTHORISED USE OF MATERIAL ON THIS SITE MAY RESULT IN CIVIL AND CRIMINAL LIABILITY.

This clip is available in the following configurations:

File nameSizeQualitySuitability
mckensil3_pr.mp4 Large: 25.3MB High Optimised for full-screen display on a fast computer.
mckensil3_bb.mp4 Medium: 11.9MB Medium Can be displayed full screen. Also suitable for video iPods.

Right-click on the links above to download video files to your computer.

Thanks to the generosity of the rights holders, we are able to offer this clip in an embeddable format for personal or non-commercial educational use in full form on your own website or your own blog.

You must read and agree to the following terms and conditions before embedding the clip:

australianscreen is produced by the National Film and Sound Archive. By using the website you agree to comply with the terms and conditions described elsewhere on this site. The NFSA may amend the 'Conditions of Use’ from time to time without notice.

All materials on the site, including but not limited to text, video clips, audio clips, designs, logos, illustrations and still images, are protected by the Copyright Laws of Australia and international conventions.

When you access australianscreen you agree that:

  • You may retrieve materials for information only.
  • You may download materials for your personal use or for non-commercial educational purposes, but you must not publish them elsewhere or redistribute clips in any way.
  • You may embed the clip for non-commercial educational purposes including for use on a school intranet site or a school resource catalogue.
  • The National Film and Sound Archive’s permission must be sought to amend any information in the materials, unless otherwise stated in notices throughout the Site.

All other rights reserved.

ANY UNAUTHORISED USE OF MATERIAL ON THIS SITE MAY RESULT IN CIVIL AND CRIMINAL LIABILITY.

Copy and paste the following code into your own web page to embed this clip: