Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent clip shows the Trans-Australia Express and the Nullarbor Plain in 1940 and is part of a travelogue of a train journey made by Will Alma. It begins with shots of drivers and engineers making adjustments to two locomotives, followed by an image of a map on which a line is traced from Kalgoorlie to Port Pirie. There is also footage shot from the train of a cluster of houses and flat red earth stretching to the horizon. At Ooldea, Indigenous people are shown selling souvenirs to passengers. Five intertitles introduce scenes throughout the clip.

Educational value points

• The 1,700-km Kalgoorlie–Port Pirie crossing of the Nullarbor on the Trans-Australia Express was one of the world’s great rail journeys. It exposed passengers to the Nullarbor and its Indigenous peoples and to isolated railway settlements such as Cook and Ooldea. Because passenger air travel was still in its infancy in 1940, the Trans-Australia Express was the only practicable way to travel between Perth and Adelaide.

• One reason for the legal doctrine of 'terra nullius’ (nobody’s land or empty land) remaining unchallenged for so long is exemplified in the clip – many non-Indigenous Australians, including Will Alma, did not recognise Indigenous people as being inhabitants of the land. Without any awareness of the contradiction, one of Alma’s intertitles reads: ‘… the territory we now travel is practically unoccupied’, while another states: 'On the Nullarbor Plains … live many Aborigines’.

• The filmmaker’s comment that the local Indigenous people were 'pitiable beings unable to adapt themselves to the White Peoples [sic] mode of living’ reflects a racist belief widely held by non-Indigenous Australians in 1940. Indigenous people were seen as a ‘remnant race’, innately ‘primitive’ and unable to change. Subsequent footage, however, reveals the local people’s adaption to the economic opportunity presented by the passengers’ desire for souvenirs.

• As one intertitle points out the Nullarbor has no permanent freshwater streams. As such, the permanent water source at Ooldea was particularly important to the operation of the railway; until exhausted, water from the Ooldea soak was pumped directly to the railway siding. Water storage was also critical in the design of locomotives. In 1938 new locomotives, one of which is seen here, entered service on the Nullarbor. They could pull huge tenders carrying 56,360 L of water.

• The Indigenous people seen in the clip would have included the Southern Pitjantjatjara people, the custodians of the land around Ooldea, and people from further north who were drawn by rations available at the United Aborigines Mission at Ooldea (established in 1933). The Southern Pitjantjatjara people include the Tjarutja people (now known as the Maralinga Tjarutja people) as well as the Pila Nguru people (also known as the Spinifex people).

• The transcontinental rail line required continual maintenance, especially the replacement of rotting timber sleepers, and so a series of small settlements to house railway workers and their families developed along the line, such as those shown. The settlements were so remote that all of their requirements were brought in on a twice-weekly supply train dubbed the ‘Tea and Sugar’. The Trans-Australia Express stopped at some of the settlements to take on water or coal.