Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white silent clip from a documentary filmed around 1911 shows crowds of travellers leaving and entering Footscray Railway Station in Melbourne. The footage is shot by a stationery camera positioned alongside a confectionery store and facing the station footbridge. Long unbroken panning shots show children in school uniform, men going to work, women coming and going, alone and with small children. Some passers-by regard the camera with curiosity.

Educational value points

• The clip is an informal snapshot of daily life in 1910 in an Australian city. It is a rare record of working people in early 20th-century Melbourne, showing men arriving for work in the local factories. Children on their way to school in school uniform are unaccompanied by adults. Women and men arrive for work, the men carrying work bags. The men, women and children are not posing for the camera and although clearly aware of the camera continue on their way.

• Daywear clothing of the Edwardian period is worn and reveals a contrast between the conservative styles of men’s clothing and the more comfortable fashions now being worn by women. The tight-laced corsets and crinoline skirts of the preceding Victorian era are not seen here. Hemlines have risen from floor to ankle length. Fabrics are softer and some women wear skirts and blouses. Almost all the men wear identical dark suits with some variation in the hats.

• Children’s fashions of the time are shown in the clip. The boys’ short-legged sailor suit remained popular, the outfit completed with a straw hat. Little girls often wore starched pinafores trimmed with ribbons, with a bonnet and black stockings. Girls’ skirts were shorter than their mothers’ until they ‘came out’, or became adults. The young women seen in the clip wear large floppy hats like their mothers’.

• The film techniques shown in the clip reveal the limitations of early film equipment, which was heavy and cumbersome to set up. The camera remains in the same position throughout to provide a view of pedestrian traffic. The lens could not be adjusted for close-ups, but is set to achieve maximum depth of field so those passing across the walkway are in focus as well as those closer to the camera. Twice the camera pans slightly to the left to follow the travellers.

• Some indication is given of the novelty of film and filmmaking for Australians at the beginning of the 20th century by the reaction of those in the clip to the camera that is recording them as they pass by. Filmmaking was still relatively new in Australia, even though the first Australian feature film was produced in 1906 and by 1910 films were available as a regular source of entertainment in some cities.