Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip shows highlights of a women’s swimming carnival held at the Bondi swimming baths in Sydney in about 1931. It shows footage of various races in which records were ‘smashed’, including Edna Davey surging ahead in the ‘mile championship’, the relay race won by the Bondi Club, and Jean Cocks winning the 100-yard ‘Intermediate State title race’. Spectators are shown outside the clubhouse building. The clip, which is slightly damaged, includes intertitles.

Educational value points

• The clip shows a carnival organised by the Bondi Ladies Amateur Swimming Club, which formed in 1907 and by 1920 had about 200 members, making it one of the largest women’s clubs in Australia. The clip may show part of a carnival that was held on 28 November 1931 to mark the reopening of the Bondi Baths after the completion of a new two-storey clubhouse that replaced the old clubhouse, and improvements to the pool.

• The coverage of the swimming carnival is indicative of changing attitudes to women athletes competing in the public arena. In the previous decade many people, including feminist Rose Scott, opposed mixed bathing and felt that, for modesty’s sake, men should not watch women while they competed. Scott claimed that it would ‘lead to a loss of respect for the girls and the increasing boldness of the men’ (http://www.womenaustralia.info).

• The Bondi Ladies Amateur Swimming Club was formed in the early 1900s to permit women to compete against one another at the Bondi Baths, the most famous ocean baths in Australia. Constructed in 1887 at the southern end of Bondi Beach, the Baths became home to various clubs including the Bondi Ladies Amateur Swimming Club. As president of the New South Wales Ladies’ Amateur Swimming Association, Scott promoted women’s involvement in club swimming.

• In the 1920s and 30s swimming costumes were one piece and made of a dark knitted woollen material that was heavy when wet. In about 1905 bathers were required by state and council laws to wear costumes that extended from neck to knee, but by the end of the 1920s these restrictions had relaxed a little, with costumes inching up to the top of the thigh.

• Australia has a long history of successful women swimmers, dating back to 1912 when Sydney’s Sarah ‘Fanny’ Durack (1889–1956) and Wilhelmina ‘Mina’ Wylie (1891–1984) won the gold and silver medals respectively for the 100-m freestyle race at the Stockholm Olympics. This was achieved in spite of restrictions on the times during which women could swim and the cumbersome costumes they were required to wear.

• The clip shows that spectators at the carnival included both men and women, and that both male and female swimmers were by the pool, indicating that the Bondi Baths were no longer segregated. Men and women were initially expected to swim separately, but Margaret Whitlam, wife of former prime minister Gough Whitlam, remembers that the Bondi Club kept Thursdays for women only and Sundays for men only but had mixed swimming on Saturdays.

• Because camera equipment was so bulky, early newsreel reports generally recorded events such as the laying of foundation stones, funerals of national significance or, as in the case of this clip, sporting events, where coverage could be preplanned. By the 1920s newsreel production in Australia was thriving; however, few newsreels were archived and little pre-1930 footage survives.