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Clip description
As the Queen prepares to speak at a state banquet in Canberra, the nation gathers to listen. People dancing aboard ship, a stockman in the outback, Australian soldiers on exercise, a young family in their lounge room, businessmen in a club, an older couple – everyone stops to gather at the radio to hear the young Queen’s words.
Curator’s notes
This is a fascinating sequence partly because there is no film of the Queen speaking. It is in fact a creative response to a disaster – the footage shot at the state banquet was unusable, so producer Stanley Hawes had to come up with some creative way to illustrate the speech. The result is a classic piece of ‘constructed’ documentary-making, rather than what John Grierson defined as ‘the creative use of actuality’. All of these shots of people around radios have been set up by the camera teams with appropriate lighting, and were probably not filmed during the Queen’s speech. The audio could be laid in afterwards. They are a form of illustrated documentary, a technique that is no longer used in quite the same way, partly because it isn’t quite ‘real’.
Making the film presented many technical challenges. Most of the cameramen had no experience shooting colour, there was no laboratory in Australia capable of processing the film, so it had to be sent to England, and shooting at night outdoors, as in the beginning of the clip, presented its own challenges. Nevertheless, most of the film is spectacularly beautiful, emphasising rich colours, especially red. Kodak was unable to supply enough raw stock so Stanley Hawes chose Ferraniacolor, a rich stock that had become available from Italy in 1952. In the sequence on the ship we see the subtlety and concentrated saturation of these colours, the redness of the lipstick, the beautiful fading blue of the sunset, the realistic skin tones. The quality obtained in the film was exceptional.
The Queen’s message singles out migrants from Britain for special mention. ‘This country offers wonderful opportunities for men and women from the Old World, and to those in the United Kingdom, who seek wider scope for their talents, Australia may well seem the promised land…’ That’s an interesting sentence to dissect. Her Majesty appears to be saying that British migrants can expect a land of great opportunity, but the words ‘may well seem’ introduce a slight element of doubt. There had been a number of newspaper reports in Britain of disgruntled migrants returning to the UK after bad experiences in Australia. The Queen may have been trying to tell her subjects at home that their expectations might be too high, without saying anything that would upset her audience in Australia. The message is extremely carefully phrased. The speech would have been broadcast in the UK, as well as in Australia.
