Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a series of linked dramatised vignettes that compare Australian attitudes towards food shortages during the Second World War. In the jungle a wounded soldier is shown receiving a food drop. Next, two women packing dehydrated food indicate they wouldn’t eat it. The third scene showing soldiers eating emergency rations is in contrast to a fourth scene of businessmen demanding a steak in an up-market restaurant. The final vignette shows men in a bar complaining about rationing while the barman reminds them of Australia’s obligations to others in wartime.

Educational value points

• The film from which this clip is taken is an example of a war propaganda film directed at an Australian audience. From 1942 onwards, the Curtin Labor government’s Department of Information commissioned a series of short films from Australia’s leading film producers, including Ken Hall and Charles Chauvel, to bolster the civilian population’s commitment to producing war supplies, spending less, buying war bonds and consuming less food.

• The imposition of food rationing was an essential component of the Curtin Labor government’s plan to fight what it called the 'battle of supply’ and in its 'All in!’ austerity campaign. By mid-1943 the ration of tea was 450 g per five weeks, sugar was rationed at 900 g and butter at 450 g a fortnight. In early 1944 meat was rationed at 900 g a week. Some of these amounts were later reduced. Rationing of beer was also introduced and, as seen in the clip, was highly unpopular.

• Except for butter and milk, the rationing complained of by various characters in the clip was not particularly severe. In Britain, as the barman comments, rationing was much more stringent. Butter, sugar, meat, tea, margarine, cheese, rice, canned fruit, condensed milk, eggs and many other items were all rationed. At the time of the film’s production, the blockade of Britain by German submarines was at its height and shipping convoys supplying Britain did so at great risk.

• As illustrated in the clip, Australia had a range of competing priorities for its food resources in 1943, the highest of which was the need to feed its own troops in New Guinea. It then had to maintain a reasonable dietary allocation for its civilian population. It also had responsibilities by contract and tradition to make available as much food as possible to Britain. Finally, it had entered into a formal undertaking to feed US forces in the south-west Pacific.

• Women played an important part in Australia’s war effort, not least of which was the effort to produce, conserve and supply food. Not only did most women save food in the home, grow vegetables and keep chickens but also many worked in dehydrating plants, food-processing factories and on assembly lines packing rations, as shown in the clip. Some thousands also joined the Australian Women’s Land Army to grow and harvest crops.

• The clip uses a mixture of actuality footage filmed on the Kokoda Trail by cinematographer Damian Parer (1912–44) and dramatisations by actors in the studio to convey its message that rationing was a necessity. The film’s tone is fairly didactic and while it may have had the desired effect on a 1940s audience, the histrionics and emotional background music of the first vignette, for example, would be rejected as heavy-handed by audiences today.

• The persuasive appeal of the last vignette is heightened by the careful crafting of the dialogue. The barman counters antirationing arguments by pointing out how much worse things are in Britain and Greece, delivering the coup de grâce with the comment about cats. Calling the Greek famine into the argument was a fairly blatant piece of propaganda since the Allied blockade is thought to have been as much to blame for the famine as the German occupation.

• Almost 1 million Australian men and women served during the Second World War. They fought against Germany and Italy in Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa and against Japan in Malaya, Singapore, Rabaul, Ambon, Java, Timor, Borneo, New Guinea and Bougainville.