Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip shows activities at the Addison Road Drop-In Centre in Sydney in 1977 and includes viewpoints of youths and workers from the Centre. In the first sequence the young people take over the camera and film a street scene, providing a commentary that reveals a cynical view of authority. A community worker then talks about the political awareness of the youths and how it would be easy to manipulate their distrust of authority. Finally, the clip focuses on the Centre’s mechanics workshop and its positive influence on those who participate.

Educational value points

• The involvement of the youths in filming, as seen in the first part of the clip, is representative of documentary filmmaker Tom Zubrycki’s pre-1980s work. This type of collaboration with his subjects was a way of including them in the project and engendering a sense of trust. While the shaky camera work is indicative of their lack of experience with a camera, the young people clearly have fun, for example using wild pans to follow the parking inspector.

• The boys’ view about how power works on the streets reflects the opinion of many young people who are homeless or long-term unemployed, and their cynical view of authority is revealed in the inference that the parking inspector is corrupt. While this cynicism is indicative of a political awareness, the youth worker suggests it also exposes a sense of alienation that extreme political groups could harness and misuse.

• Drop-in centres need to find ways of engaging young people who are disaffected and alienated from mainstream society. As seen in the clip the mechanics workshop at the Addison Road Centre met with a positive response from young men at the Centre, many of whom had cars or were interested in cars. The workshop provided them with a focus as well as skills that gave them a sense of achievement and that they could use in the wider community.

• In the 1970s drop-in centres evolved as a response to homelessness, unemployment and an increase in substance abuse among youth. Most of the centres were not purpose built but occupied sites provided by the community or local government. The Addison Road Centre was established in 1976 on the former site of army barracks.

• Zubrycki refers to Addison Road Drop-In as a ‘process video’, a term he uses to describe videos that involved the collaboration of the community they documented, recorded events as they unfolded and were made quickly, often in a few days. These videos were constructed for a purpose and were used as a lobbying tool. Addison Road Drop-In was made to support the push to allow the youth centre to remain housed at the Community Centre at Addison Road.

• The clip provides an early example of Zubrycki’s work and of the themes, such as social justice and giving the marginalised a voice, that have continued to inform his work. Zubrycki says: ‘… I’m also inspired to tell stories about ordinary Australians – stories that have been traditionally ignored by the mainstream media, and that need to be told’ (http://www.tomzubrycki.com). Addison Road Drop-In was one of the first Australian documentaries to focus on youth alienation.

This clip starts approximately 9 minutes into the documentary.

A parking police officer is booking a motorist.
Member of the Addison Road Drop-In As you can see now, we have a ‘brown bomber’ standing there, booking this man – now he’s accepting a bribe! As you can see, across the road there is a pig’s car, and he has not booked that. This goes to show what they do for the Service. I think a bit of prejudice there, don’t you?

Inside the centre.
Staff member The kids are aware of what’s going on, to some extent. I think that your general awareness means that you become politically aware anyway. I think that political awareness is being aware of who pulls what strings, who does what, who’s got the money, how it’s used, who gets manipulated and how they get manipulated. It wouldn’t be very difficult to get some of the kids involved in drop-ins and youth activities in this area involved in, um, in fairly militant political activities. OK, it wouldn’t be difficult to do that. But I think that that would be very much an abuse of the kids. And I think it – I think it’s important that they survive, both in social, political and material, basic physical terms. That they survive in a fairly anonymous way, so they can get the tools for themselves. I think that’s important. I think the political awareness comes from there.

Inside the mechanics workshop. Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish you were here’ plays on the radio of a car being worked on.
Director How are the kids going, Ray? How’s the workshop going?
Ray, community worker Oh, good. Yeah, good. Ever since the advent of Gregory, star mechanic. And his never to be forgotten handsome brother. Things are going really well.
Director Are the kids making use of it?
Ray Um, yeah. Yeah. Previous kids who we found hard to get involved in other things have turned out to be quite inspired mechanics. So we get people here, sort of, at all hours busting the doors down to come in and… and fix their cars.