Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

The Colony (2005)

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clip Rebellious women education content clip 1, 2, 3

Original classification rating: PG. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

The settler women rebel against the clothing conventions of the early 19th century. Each feels that she can’t work alongside her husband and children unless she is able to adapt those ridiculous European dresses to the environment. So the women take their scissors to the 19th century and feel freer and much more able to participate in the backbreaking work of their new colony which, although hard, is making them all fitter and less tired.

Curator’s notes

by Janet Bell

History is brought alive as we see the female settlers facing the difficulty of having arrived in this new world of heat and flies while forced to wear the conventional clothing of the old world. These contemporary women solve the problem with 21st century ingenuity, although such a rebellious approach would have been unthinkable to 19th century women. It’s also interesting to conjecture that most colonial women would have been burdened with a birth every year or so for all their child-bearing years. If they survived childbirth, they would have spent most of their time looking after a brood of children as well as trying to assist their husbands on the land.

This clip benefits from having extended interviews with the participants. We get to know them and how they are coping with their living conditions. It’s essentially fly-on-the-wall television where we don’t see or hear who is asking the questions. This less obtrusive approach has the effect of the people talking directly to the viewer and so we become more emotionally invested in them. It’s also not without its humorous moments which lighten the otherwise earnest history lesson.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows a group of people taking part in a ‘living history’ television series set in the Hawkesbury River region of New South Wales. The women discuss the need to modify their impractical traditional garments so that they can assist with the building activities. Bugs in the potato patch present a problem for one of the families but eight piglets offer future opportunities for trade and food.

Educational value points

  • This clip shows some of the women explaining that they have dispensed with their traditional colonial women’s clothing because they felt too constrained by it to carry out physical activities such as building work. However, their 19th-century counterparts would not have had this freedom from the social conventions of the time, which dictated that women dress according to European fashion, although the free settlers may not have had access to high-quality garments.
  • Although the families in this clip were provided with clothing supplies for the project, the original settler women would have been responsible for making their families’ clothing, including mending their shoes and providing all manner of linen goods for their households.
  • This clip shows the daily activities undertaken by participants in The Colony, Chris Hilton’s educational living history project, which sought to create ‘a microcosm of our history in present time’ (www.australiantelevision.net).Three years’ pre-production research on conditions in NSW between 1795 and 1815 informed the project, which involved selected applicants from the UK and Australia, including Aboriginal families, living in the bush for 4 months.
  • In the latter half of the 20th century, historians became more interested in the lives of ordinary people of earlier times, which this living history project attempts to re-enact. Narratives of ordinary lives, along with the influence of feminist thought on studies of history, have increased the value placed on the experiences of women in domestic and other roles. However, historians have found it difficult to find evidence relating to women’s everyday lives.
  • Despite the research supporting this living history project, such immersion programs are likely to be limited in terms of an authentic re-creation of history for reasons that include the skills and preconceptions of the participants, advisers and organisers, the temporary nature of the experience, the necessary avoidance of physical and psychological risks, and the demands of being filmed for television. In this clip participants’ reluctance to wear traditional dress is such a limitation.
  • Finding bugs in the potato patch and the unruly behaviour of the Hohnkes’s pigs may illustrate some of the daily frustrations of Australia’s colonial pioneers, who in this area at the turn of the 19th century were usually given 40 hectares of land, tools, and two convict servants per family. They were supplied with food for a year, during which time they had to establish a farm that might both support them and produce additional food to trade.
  • This clip was taken from an episode of a six-part series of 1-hour programs, The Colony, which was produced by Hilton Cordell Productions, based in Sydney, NSW. It was nominated for a Logie Award for Most Outstanding Documentary Series in 2006.
  • The acclaimed Australian actor Jack Thompson (1940–) narrated The Colony. Thompson is well known for his roles in many Australian feature films and television series. For his role in Breaker Morant he won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actor in a Lead Role in 1980, as well as a Cannes Film Festival Best Supporting Actor award. In 1995 Thompson received the Raymond Longford Award.
  • After The Colony screened on Australian television and just 2 weeks before it was due to air on the History Channel (UK), South Yorkshire participant Carina Stephenson, who appears in this clip, committed suicide. The media speculated that it was somehow a result of her role in the series. However, her mother said that their experience in the series had been positive.