Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip taken from a sponsored film Commonwealth Bank – The School Bank shows children being instructed in the Commonwealth Savings Bank in Martin Place, Sydney, on how to withdraw money from bank accounts. As a narrator describes the process there is footage of a man filling in the withdrawal form and receiving a numbered card in exchange for his passbook, which is put in a pneumatic tube and sent to another department. The children see the signature and account being checked. Finally the man receives his money from a teller.

Educational value points

• The clip reveals the time-consuming and labour-intensive banking processes that predated computerisation. In 1951 when the clip was made processes such as verifying signatures and checking to ensure that accounts had enough money to cover withdrawals were done manually and in a different part of the bank to the teller. Customers had to wait until the processes were completed and the information given to the teller before collecting their money and passbook.

• The pneumatic tube system, in which items in cylindrical containers are propelled through a network of tubes by compressed air or in a vacuum, is shown being used in a bank to transport documents. Pneumatic networks were once common in banks, department stores and post offices but most were abandoned in the early 1980s when information began to be transported electronically and when credit cards reduced cash handling in stores.

• The banking chamber, with its huge hall and pillars, signified the institution’s importance and authority in a pre electronic age when people had to visit the bank for almost all financial transactions. Even in small country towns, banks and post offices were among the grandest and most important buildings, the cornerstone of the community, symbolising the financial and commercial viability of the town.

• This clip illustrates the Commonwealth Savings Bank’s program to educate school students in banking processes and to encourage them to save. The film was part of the School Banking Program, which had been developed mainly for primary schools. Schools accepted students’ cash deposits into their passbooks on behalf of a bank that administered the program. Fee-free school banking was introduced into every state between 1907 and 1928.

• All of the staff members shown in the clip are male – at the time positions for women in banks were very restricted. When women were first employed in banks during the First World War they were not allowed to handle cash or have contact with the public. Until the Second World War less than 10 per cent of bank staff were women, but many women were employed during the post-War banking boom. By the late 1960s women made up the majority of the bank workforce.