Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white, silent clip shows an intertitle that says, 'Farming classes at Dookie Agricultural College’, followed by shots of returned soldiers herding pigs and feeding them at a trough. Men release chickens from a pen and pour food onto the ground for them. The next intertitle reads, 'Returned Soldiers commencing operations at Merbein’, followed by footage of a man cooking sausages over an open fire, with a billy hanging above. Three men then prepare, serve and eat food outside a tent.

Educational value points

• The clip shows several aspects of a scheme to retrain returned soldiers as farmers and place them on the land. After the First World War ended, returning Australian soldiers needed to find work, be reintroduced into the community and potentially make the same valuable contribution to Australia in peacetime as they had during the War. They are seen here learning farming and then occupying their blocks of land. Many returned soldiers, however, found the challenge of returning to society much more complex and difficult than is suggested here. Such scenes were at the heart of the 19th- and early-20th-century Australian myth of the land being the route to prosperity.

• The footage illustrates part of the scope of the Repatriation Department (later the Department of Veterans’ Affairs). The second government of Prime Minister William 'Billy’ Hughes passed the Australian Soldiers Repatriation Act 1917 to establish a repatriation service regulating assistance to returned soldiers and their dependents. A key role of this service was to return soldiers to productive civilian employment, with provision being made to train up to 20,000 men for new careers. By December 1919, 130,140 applications had been made for the range of benefits available under the repatriation scheme.

• One of the Repatriation Department’s most significant schemes was the Soldier Settlement Scheme, which involved returned soldiers being trained for farming and given a grant of Crown land. Although the Australian Government was responsible for the defence forces, the states were in charge of land settlement, and therefore developed and implemented separate soldier settlement schemes. The men shown here are part of the Victorian scheme, and were allocated land in places such as Merbein in north-western Victoria. While soldier settlement was intended to assist the soldiers, it was also intended to intensify farming activity and increase the agricultural output of the states.

• As early as 1925, the Victorian scheme had been recognised as a failure by a Royal Commission and by 1930 most of the settlement areas around Australia had failed. Although the scheme initially seemed generous and worthwhile, soldiers were insufficiently trained and lacked the financial capital required to succeed. Land parcels were often too small or of too poor quality for viable farms, and unforeseen changes in commodity prices adversely affected the market. While the Victorian Government blamed the settlers themselves, there was a public outcry about the scheme, which inflicted further suffering on returned soldiers who had already endured a war.

• The scenes shown are from an early public information film. Such films screened in cinemas around the country and were designed to advise the public on a range of subjects, informing attitudes and promoting the work of the government, with the aim of ultimately enhancing social cohesion and security. The example shown here highlights the need to reassure the public that the 'repatriation problem’ (or the question of what to do with returned soldiers who, without employment, might have become a social burden) was being well managed. This aim would have influenced the filmmakers in selecting what to film and in portraying an atmosphere of purposeful employment and general contentment.

• The clip includes early footage of Dookie Agricultural College, the second oldest agricultural college in Australia. The area on which it stands, originally part of the Noorilim people’s lands, was first divided into squatters’ runs and then partially reserved in 1875 as the site of an agricultural college and farm. The College opened in 1886, and from 1918 to 1921 ran full-time courses to introduce returned soldiers to life on the land, and short courses for those who already had farming skills. Dookie Agricultural College is still operating as a campus of the University of Melbourne.

• Early-20th-century techniques of animal husbandry are depicted. These scenes show a lack of mechanisation and are in marked contrast to 21st-century factory-farming methods. Ways of housing, restricting and feeding animals have changed significantly through technological and scientific innovations, with the result that managing much larger numbers of animals is less labour intensive and also potentially more profitable. Ironically, public concern about animal welfare has led to a return, in some cases, to more traditional farming methods, such as chickens, and more recently pigs, being allowed 'free range’, rather than being permanently housed in cages.

This clip starts approximately 7 minutes into the documentary.

This black-and-white, silent clip shows an intertitle that says, 'Farming classes at Dookie Agricultural College’, followed by shots of returned soldiers herding pigs and feeding them at a trough. Men release chickens from a pen and pour food onto the ground for them. The next intertitle reads, 'Returned Soldiers commencing operations at Merbein’, followed by footage of a man cooking sausages over an open fire, with a billy hanging above. Three men then prepare, serve and eat food outside a tent.