Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip shows scenes from a 1920s Christmas party that also appears to be a celebration of Wally Albion’s fifth birthday. The party is in the garden of the Albion family home in Sydney. Among the guests are a large number of children wearing party clothes and an older man playing Santa Claus. Various scenes show children on a seesaw, skipping around a Christmas tree and performing dances in costumes. Wally stands on a table to cut his cake and in the final scene wears an elaborate costume and blows soap bubbles at the camera.

Educational value points

• The clip provides a glimpse into the ways an affluent Australian family celebrated Christmas and a child’s birthday in the 1920s. The abundance of toys and food and the quality of the clothes worn by the guests suggest wealth. The children behave in an orderly way as they stand together and play organised games, demonstrating the expectation of good behaviour at the gathering.

• Wally’s appearance reflects the style of the just-past Victorian era in which boys under the age of 5 often wore dresses and had long hair. At about 5 they began to be dressed in short trousers or ‘breeches’. Wally’s long curls and short-panted knickerbocker suits indicate that at 5 he is still being dressed as a very young child.

• The filmmaker has constructed a narrative featuring Wally as the central character in a celebration. The camera focuses on Wally – alone and in the various group activities – beginning with a staged awakening as he is lifted out of a miniature bed. He participates in the entertainment provided for guests and is the focus of attention in the cake-cutting scene. The story ends with Wally in costume blowing soap bubbles in a scene staged for the camera.

• Young girls in the clip put on various dance performances, demonstrating accomplishments learned at a time when a good marriage was seen as the main goal for young women. Girls’ education emphasised 'lady-like’ qualities such as graceful movement, elegant deportment and educated speech. Young upper-middle-class girls attended private girls’ schools where etiquette, deportment, elocution and dancing were seen as important skills.

• This intimate recording of a domestic event is a rare example of a 1920s home movie and it provides information about Australian cultural life and traditions of the time. The staged scenes, the participants’ awareness of their roles in front of the camera and the mounted camera set in place to record the unfolding events show a high degree of professionalism on the part of the home filmmaker.

• The tableau at the end of the clip that has Wally sitting on a stool and blowing soap bubbles through a clay pipe indicates the influence at the time of a particular visual image, ‘Bubbles’ by John Millais (1829–96). Wally’s hair is in golden curls and he wears what appears to be a velvet suit with a white ruffled collar. His pose and appearance have been carefully constructed to resemble the child in Millais’s painting, used in a long-running Pears Soap advertisement.