Australian
Screen

This remarkable colour footage captures the excitement that the Children’s Library Movement mobile library brought to school children in the 1940s. The travelling library serviced children from the ages of five to fifteen living in the Hornsby Shire region including schools at Middle Dural, Glenorie, Galston, Arcadia, Berrilee, Mooney Mooney, Brooklyn, Cowan, and Berowra.

Travelling Library is a simple and affecting depiction of the library’s impact on children. It covers part of the mobile library’s trip to the schools in the area. At each stop, children are shown scrambling into the back of the truck and emerging with library books in their hands; or sitting around the grounds in trees or perched on fences with their heads buried in a book.

The Children’s Library and Craft Movement (later Children’s Creative Leisure Movement) was founded in Sydney 1934 by Mary and Elsie Rivett. By 1949 the movement had twenty-six centres and was a ‘major provider of free children’s libraries in New South Wales’. The movement also produced a film about the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre as seen through the eyes of children called A World for Children. The movement emphasised the importance of children’s access to play, leisure and learning.

Experimental filmmakers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill made a series of films about children and the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre in the 1950s and 1960s. They deposited a number of films made by the Children’s Library and Crafts Movement with the National Film and Sound Archive including Travelling Library and A World for Children.