Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This silent black-and-white clip with intertitles shows the Rudd family fighting a bushfire on their selection. The clip opens with the whole family, including the women, fighting the fierce bushfire with tree branches and sticks. Flames reach the fence around their crops and the exhausted ‘Dad’ tells the family that they have been beaten by the fire. The family then head off, except for a young son who, oblivious of his father’s despair, admires the fire. Dad can only think of the unrewarded work and struggle he has endured in trying to feed his family. He returns to the house with a sense of hopelessness.

Educational value points

• Bushfires such as the one shown in this clip have long plagued settlers in Australia. Bushfires can be caused by lightning strikes, sparks from farm machinery or cars, escaped campfires or discarded cigarettes, or they can even be deliberately lit. Because the leaves on eucalypt trees contain stored oils the trees are highly combustible and burn like petrol when there is a fire.

• The ‘selection’ in this clip is land that was selected and purchased as a result of the Land Acts of the 1860s. The government wanted to encourage small-scale farming to cope with the number of people leaving gold fields after the surface gold had run out. ‘Selectors’ were distinct from the squatters, who had taken often large tracts of Crown land to graze livestock on, frequently becoming very wealthy and influential. There was hostility between wealthy squatters and struggling selectors.

• The members of the family in On Our Selection are portrayed as examples of the ‘battler’, a popular Australian national symbol or type, a fiercely independent person who faces up to adversity while maintaining resilience and a sense of humour. This Australian type, which is found in other films such as The Overlanders, battles on with a tough pioneer spirit despite drought, floods, a harsh environment and problems with authority.

• Raymond Longford, the director of this film, wanted to achieve a realistic effect in both the fire scenes and in the acting. He was determined that the acting should look naturalistic rather than over-rehearsed. He is quoted as saying, ‘I’m making an Australian picture, and I want the people in it to be real Australians’ (www.nfsa.afc.gov.au). To achieve this he relaxed his direction and allowed the actors considerable freedom in their acting.

• Australia was one of the pioneers of filmmaking, yet this clip is taken from one of the few early Australian films that have been preserved. The first film shot in Australia was Melbourne Cup (1896). The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), Australia’s first commercially produced feature film, is believed to be the first feature-length narrative film made in the world.

• Silent films, such as the one from which this clip is taken, were not really silent, either at the time they were being made or when they were projected. When the films were being made, the sets and locations were very noisy and sometimes music was played to inspire the actors’ performances. When the films were projected they were accompanied by live music, which could come from a single upright piano, a full orchestra, or Wurlitzer organ, which could also provide sound effects.

• Raymond Longford (1878–1959) was a director of early Australian silent films. The first film he directed, as well as starred in, was The Fatal Wedding (1911), with Lottie Lyell (1890–1925), and the two formed a successful professional and personal partnership. Between 1913 and 1921 Longford made 16 feature films. The Australian Film Institute’s Raymond Longford Award, a lifetime achievement award for contributing to the enrichment of Australian culture, is named in his honour.

• Steele Rudd (1868–1935) was the pen-name of Arthur Hoey Davis, who wrote On Our Selection, a series of sketches originally published in The Bulletin magazine and based on the experiences of selectors, people on the land. The characters in earlier stories were realistic but developed into stereotypical caricatures of rural people and situations.

This is a silent clip with intertitles.

Intertitle: To save the fence that was round the cultivation was what was troubling Dad. Right and left they fought the fire with boughs.
Men frantically beat at the fire with tree boughs. The fire rages on around them. The men try to save the fence but are forced back by the smoke. Dad is consoled by other members of the family.
Intertitle: ’It’s no use, boys. It’s got us beat.’

Dad’s son stands with Dad.
Intertitle: ‘Dad, d-d-don’t yeh think it’s a splendid sight?’
The son points at the fire.
Intertitle: Dad didn’t answer. He was thinking about how all his toil, struggle and worry had been rewarded, and how he was now going to keep the wolf from the door.

Dad buries his head in his hands. His son smiles, enjoying the fire. Men enter the house, looking despondent. Mother stands beside a table, trying to comfort the men as they walk past. A young woman sits at the table, also looking unhappy. Dad lingers outside a bit longer, rubbing his hair with his hands. When he enters the house Mother clasps his hand and he sits down, almost collapsing, at the table. Mother tries to comfort Dad but he is inconsolable.
Intertitle: ‘Don’t worry? When there’s not a bit to eat in the place, when there’s no way of getting anything, and when, Merciful God!, every year sees things worse than they were before.’