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The ad begins with a narrator stating that ‘in this day and age the secret of success is careful planning’. He espouses the importance of having a ‘plan for the future’, and draws parallels between the ‘affairs of the nation’ and the ‘life of every person’, between the ‘dreams of the nation’ and the various dreams of the ad’s target group. Images of architects and engineers designing buildings, ships, aeroplanes and factories are juxtaposed with images of young women, men and families and their aspirations: a ‘dream home’, a ‘modern kitchen’, a ‘modern car’, a holiday. The narrator promises: ‘Save as much as you can now and there will be happiness ahead!’ The ad ends with a final promotion of the Commonwealth Savings Bank as ‘the bank you own’.
Curator’s notes
At the time of this cinema promotion, it was the duty of every young Australian adult to acquire a home, settle down, start a family and build a new postwar nation. The ad appeals directly to this demographic – for whom home ownership had become the great Australian dream. The ‘dream home’ depicted may seem to some, by today’s standards, modest. Prior to the Second World War, the country was already suffering a housing shortage. In the years directly following the war, as the troops returned home and marriage rates surged, the shortage reached an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 homes needed. The lack of building materials and scarcity of skilled labour fuelled by the war didn’t right itself for some years. Between 1948 and 1952 the government was forced to legislate a limit on the size of newly constructed houses.
In the ad the narrator makes a promise of ‘happiness’, which the acquisition of the ‘modern car’ and ‘modern kitchen’ will bring. While it seems amusing, in reality these purchases were necessities for life in the new suburban housing settlements mushrooming in the outskirts of the major cities across the country. There, (predominantly male) paid workers were traveling unparalleled distances to and from their workplaces, giving rise to the new phenomenon of the isolated housewife. The ad features noticeably more images of women than men – a probable indicator that market research at the time suggested women were more likely than their male counterparts to be the managers of the household budget.
Finally the ad appeals to its audience to patronise the Commonwealth Bank because it’s the bank they own. These days, post economic rationalism and microeconomic reform, pleas to support government instrumentalities on the basis of public ownership are seldom made. The Commonwealth Bank is no longer Australia’s government-owned national savings bank, having been privatised in stages in the early 1990s. Nevertheless its role in achieving the high levels of young adult home ownership, boasted by Australia in the decades following the Second World War, shouldn’t be understated.
