Australian Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows black-and-white photographs of filmmaker Jeni Thornley’s maternal family in Tasmania between 1921 and 1945. The photographs are combined with Thornley’s narration and quoted correspondence to trace the family’s history through a period of great social change. Thornley’s mother, Winifred, is shown growing up with her siblings and later at school. The clip concludes with a letter in which a niece of Thornley’s grandmother reminisces about her childhood in Invermay. The clip includes intertitles and music.

Educational value points

• Documentary filmmaker Jeni Thornley describes her work as an 'exploration of the past and its meaning in the present’. In Maidens, from which this clip is taken, Thornley traces the period from 1900 to 1969. She examines three generations of her maternal family, 'a chain of mothers’ whose lives centred on marriage and family – the only option for most women in that period. She lingers on moments, such as school days, when women 'were alone with each other’, which, the film suggests, presaged the 'sisterhood’ of the women’s liberation movement.

• Like Maidens, many of the feminist documentary films made between 1970 and the early 1980s emphasised women’s personal experiences, favouring autobiographical discourse and oral histories and eschewing an 'authoritative’ or controlling voice-over. Thornley’s subjective first person voice-over and her familial subject matter corresponded with the desire of feminist filmmakers to enable women to tell their own stories in their own voices.

• The movement of members of the Lette clan to cities was part of a population drift from country areas that occurred in the 1920s, brought about in part by the harshness of rural life and falling commodity prices. Men in particular were forced to move into cities in search of work. This, and the mortality rate of men during the First World War, saw the decline of the extended family unit that had been a feature of rural life. In many instances farms and other rural concerns that had depended on the labour of extended family to remain productive were no longer able to sustain a large number of people.

• The smaller families of Thornley’s grandmother’s generation reflected a nationwide trend that saw the average number of births for women under the age of 45 drop from about seven in 1900 to three in the 1920s. So concerned was the New South Wales Government that in 1903–04 a Royal Commission was convened to investigate the declining birth rate. A decline in infant mortality as a result of improved living conditions and enhanced public health awareness also meant that parents were less likely to have large families as a precaution against the early deaths of some of their children.

• The Wall Street crash in the USA in October 1929 led to the collapse of advanced economies around the world and to the Great Depression (1929–39). Australia’s dependence on the export of primary products such as grain and wool and reliance on overseas loans meant that it was one of the countries worst affected. Unemployment reached a peak in 1932 when 29 per cent of Australians were officially out of work. Day-to-day life was a struggle for many families, and men often left home in search of work. Birth rates also fell in this period, as more children meant extra mouths to feed.

• By 1939 schooling was compulsory for children between the ages of 6 and 15 years of age in most Australian states. Compulsory schooling meant that Winifred Butcher received a very different education from that of many rural children of her mother’s generation, for whom learning to work the land was considered more important and practical than a formal education. At the time, girls’ education focused on domestic duties and the preparation for marriage and motherhood.

• Jeni Thornley’s award-winning documentaries include To the Other Shore (1996), a diary film about motherhood, the co-directed feature For Love or Money (1983), a history of women and work in Australia, Maidens (1978) and A Film for Discussion with Martha Ansara and the Sydney Women’s Film Group (1974). These films have been hailed as 'landmark films in the history of Australian feminist cinema’ (Collins, 'The experimental practice of history in the filmwork of Jeni Thornley’, 1998, www.latrobe.edu.au).

• Jeni Thornley has worked in a variety of capacities in the film industry, including as researcher, script editor, camera operator, film valuer, manager of the Women’s Film Fund (AFC), and documentary coordinator and assessor (AFC). She is currently a sessional lecturer in documentary film at the University of Technology in Sydney, where she is completing her doctorate film, Island Home Country.

• Maidens, with its combination of subjective first-person voice-over, family photographs, correspondence and snatches of feminist folk music, is an example of a film that is made largely in the performative documentary style. Performative documentaries are often autobiographical, and emphasise the subjective and emotive qualities of memory and experience in shaping our understanding of the world. These documentaries tend to use the subjects’ personal perspectives, as well as the filmmaker’s, to appeal to the emotions of viewers.