Australian
Screen

Clip description

A man is ready to leave for his night shift at the munitions factory when his young daughter, Topsy, runs up to him. Her mother has said that he works 'awful hard making bombs’ so that the Germans can’t attack them. As he departs, a voice-over narration (spoken by John Tate) explains that the man is going to 'join his army at the factory front’. Other men of various ages arrive at the factories for work, including a pastor. Munitions factory workers make weaponry for the fighting as the narrator concludes, 'this shining thing in the soul of free men Hitler cannot command or conquer’.

Curator’s notes

This clip is from the opening moments of the film. The dramatised family scene in which young Topsy calls her father a 'big soldier boy’ protecting her, her mother and Teddy from the German bombs cleverly sets up the relationship between the war effort overseas and the workers at home making weapons. The viewer might assume that 'Teddy’ is the stuffed toy that Topsy is holding. We find out later he is actually her older brother (see clip two) who, like his father, works daily shifts at the munitions factory to defend the freedom of the nation. The montage of factory interior shots showing workers sweating and toiling over heavy machinery links the tools of war to the human labour that creates them.