Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Dame Nellie Melba singing the national anthem ('God Save the King’) at the 1927 opening of the first national Australian Parliament House, now Old Parliament House, in Canberra. A medium shot shows Melba singing on the front steps of the building, surrounded by official invitees. The camera pans across the dignitaries assembled on the top of the steps, including the Duke of York, who is standing to attention and saluting, with the Duchess of York at his side. The band is shown playing and then the clip cuts to a medium shot of the Prime Minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, delivering his address. The clip concludes with a shot of the Duke and Duchess (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). It is silent and black and white.

Educational value points

• The clip shows images of the official opening of Parliament House in the newly built national capital, Canberra, on 9 May 1927. After Federation in 1901, Federal Parliament met in the Victorian Parliament House in Melbourne until a parliament house was built in Canberra. The newly constructed Parliament House in the national capital was a modest building that was intended to house the Federal Parliament only until a permanent structure could be built.

• Footage of famous Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba is included. Melba, who at 67 was at the end of her career as a leading international operatic star, sang the anthem, 'God Save the King’, at the opening ceremony. She requested that no-one join in while she sang the first verse of the anthem and she was then joined by the crowd and the Canberra Philharmonic Society in a spirited repeat of the verse. Melba later complained that she was drowned out by the planes flying overhead.

• This footage was shot for the newsreel Australian Paramount Gazette. In this period, two newsreels, a local and an international, were screened in Australian cinemas before the feature film. These early newsreels were silent but used intertitles. Newsreels were issued weekly and were a chief source of news prior to the advent of daily television news broadcasts in 1956. By the 1920s newsreel production in Australia was thriving, however few of these newsreels were archived and little of the pre-1930 footage survives.

• Part of the formal proceedings at the opening of Parliament House is shown. The proceedings, which included addresses by the Duke of York and by the Prime Minister, a performance of the national anthem by Dame Nellie Melba, and a united religious service conducted by the heads of the Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, were broadcast via radio to more than 1 million people across Australia. The absence of a representative of the Roman Catholic faith is notable, as approximately one-quarter of the Australian population adhered to this faith.

• The presence of the Duke and Duchess of York, who represented the British monarch, and the naming of the foyer of the building 'King’s Hall’ after King George V (whose statue takes centre place in the foyer) revealed the depth of Australia’s allegiance to Britain and to the Crown in this period. In his address, the Duke said that 'one feels the stirrings of a new birth, a quickened national activity, of a fuller consciousness of your destiny as one of the great self-governing units of the British Empire’.

• Later, when Prime Minister Stanley Bruce addressed the Duke in the Senate Chamber, he continually stressed Australia’s attachment and devotion to the 'mother country’. By 1927, the 'White Australia Policy’ had been in place for 26 years and more than 90 per cent of the Australian population was of British descent. It was not until 1949 that the restriction on immigration began to be relaxed.

• The parliament building is a leading example of the work of the first federal government architect, John Smith Murdoch. While it was criticised for its lack of grandiosity and was irreverently dubbed 'The Wedding Cake’, Smith Murdoch’s fairly plain 'stripped-classical’ design, which made use of simple geometric forms (an aesthetic that was also applied to the interior), came to be regarded as handsome and functional. The design is similar to Smith Murdoch’s other Canberra buildings, including Hotel Canberra and the public service buildings known as East and West Blocks, now all heritage-listed.

• While the building was intended to house Federal Parliament for no more than 50 years, it functioned as Parliament House until 1988, quickly becoming overcrowded and needing numerous additions and alterations. After the new Parliament House opened in 1988, Old Parliament House became a museum and a temporary home for the National Portrait Gallery.