Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip is from a film sponsored by the Rural Bank of New South Wales to promote home building and ownership. Accompanied by jaunty music and images of a timber mill and the production of bricks and roof tiles, a narrator explains that these industries enable people to realise the dream of owning their own home. The narrator is then shown explaining to a young woman and her husband (not visible) that by building homes people help create jobs in the building industry. He uses flowery rhetoric to represent Australians as ‘a nation of home lovers’.

Educational value points

• The narrator uses persuasive language to represent home building as a hallmark of civilisation and progress. Phrases such as an ‘unending stream of building bricks’ that will ‘endure against the ravages of time and weather’, and a ‘cavalcade of home building’ suggest that the spread of home ownership is inevitable. The home is also described as not merely a shelter but a monument to self, which ‘must be a delight to [man’s] eye and pay tribute to his pride’.

• The film sets up a scenario in which a building and loans officer advises a young couple with whom the target audience can identify. The credibility of the officer is established by making him a fatherly figure who responds genially to the young woman. She is posed with her face tilted towards him, placing him in a position of authority but also giving the impression that she is eager to hear what he has to say.

• By describing Australians as ‘a nation of home lovers’ the clip identifies home ownership as part of the national psyche. After the Second World War owning a home on a quarter-acre block in the suburbs was referred to as the ‘great Australian dream’. The importance of this aspiration was underlined by a 2007 National Australia Bank survey that found that more than 90 per cent of 16- to 24-year olds identified buying a home as their biggest goal in life.

• In the 1930s about 50 per cent of households either owned or were purchasing a home, giving Australia one of the highest rates of private home ownership in the world. While home building was largely halted by the Great Depression and slowed by the Second World War, by 1961 the rate of home ownership had risen to about 70 per cent. Today rising house prices and interest rates are increasingly excluding people from the housing market.

• While Australia had high levels of home ownership even in the early 1900s, banks generally only gave home loans to buyers who had a 30 per cent deposit. However, in the 20s and 30s federal and state governments, in conjunction with the banks, made affordable loans with low deposits available to low income earners. An increasing population, slum housing in inner city areas and migration were all factors in the expansion of the outer suburbs.

• While the narrator’s contention that home ownership will provide jobs in the building industry is part of an argument designed to persuade viewers to take out a home loan, the building and construction industry does make a major contribution to the Australian economy. Today it provides about 20 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2004–05 it contributed about $860 billion to GDP and incorporated more than 1 million housing-related businesses.