Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

Addison Road Drop-In (1977)

Synopsis

A ‘process video’ by Tom Zubrycki that looks at some of the marginalised young people who come to the Addison Road Drop-In Centre in Marrickville. Many of them are on welfare benefits and the Drop-In Centre offers a safe space where they can foster relationships, engage their social skills, have a daily routine and learn to take responsibility for themselves.

Interviews with both the youth and centre staff are combined with images of the boys’ activities, and in some parts the boys take over the camerawork and commentary themselves (credited as the ‘Drop-In Gang’).

Curator’s notes

by Poppy De Souza

Addison Road Drop-In was made in an effort to help community groups of Marrickville decide on the occupancy of a large site that was formerly an army barracks. Today the Addison Road Centre (as it is now known) remains Australia’s ‘first, largest and longest-surviving community centre’ and runs a range of arts, cultural and community-based activities – expanding on its original function.

In Addison Road Drop-In – made a year after the centre opened – the young men who use the centre express their views about the place, including how they’d improve it, if they had the resources. The spontaneity and organised chaos that the boys provide is contrasted with the calm of staff member Tony, who provides an almost philosophical interpretation of the boys and what the centre means to them. In the end you get the sense that the limits of Tony’s understanding are bound up in his good intentions as a community worker and that the complexity, vitality and difficulty of the boys’ experience lies outside this. Nevertheless, it is clear that the relationships fostered and the dialogue the two sides have with each other contribute to the importance of community centres such as this.

This is one of a series of ‘process videos’ made by Tom Zubrycki in the 1970s that were highly collaborative, immediate and often filmed in a short space of time. Video access centres sprung up around the country at this time and utilised the then newly-developed video technologies (the open-reel portapak) to make films that addressed social issues. Zubrycki worked out of the Paddington Video Access Centre (now Metro Screen) and became involved in the community video movement that it fostered. Another Zubrycki video examining issues affecting marginalised youth is Collingwood Community School, about a community school set up in Collingwood, Melbourne. Zubrycki’s interest in people or communities on the margins of society (socially, culturally or economically) can also be seen in his feature documentaries Molly and Mobarak (2003), Homelands (1993) and Billal (1996).