Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows silent, black-and-white home movie footage of a war bonds street parade held in Adelaide, South Australia in 1941 during the Second World War. A succession of vehicles and floats are shown, including several personnel carriers, trucks with displays on the back, two fire engines and four decorated floats, each advertising some different aspect of the need for investment in war bonds. The last scene is of a decorated truck with a sign saying 'Uncle Sam lends a hand’.

Educational value points

• The focus of this clip is a parade promoting the purchase of war bonds. In early 1940 the Menzies Government introduced a plan for the Australian public to purchase war savings certificates, also known as war bonds. The certificates would raise money to help pay for the war effort and would be repaid with interest after the Second World War (1939–45). They were expected to mature from 16 shillings to £1 in seven years – a total increase of 25 per cent.

• Tax revenue and government-to-government loans proved insufficient to fund the War and in total, 12 major war loans were offered to the public from 1940 to 1945. At first the loans were promoted in a fairly simple way with posters, newsreel stories and colourful parades like this but by 1943 the Curtin Government was commissioning directors such as Charles Chauvel to make short films that urged Australians to undertake war work, live simply and buy war bonds.

• The clip gives an impression of the state of hostilities in the middle of 1941. Japan had not yet entered the War and there is no sense that Australia itself would soon be in peril. The dominant motif in the parade is the Union Jack. The Battle of Britain had been won and although the siege of Tobruk in North Africa was under way, the presence of John Bull, the bulldog and the lion (all symbols of Britain) on the floats signalled that Britain, with Australia’s help, was standing firm.

• One of the ways war bonds were promoted was by showing pictures or representations of what the money Australians invested was actually buying. In this clip, tanks, personnel carriers, field artillery, anti-tank guns, bombs, machine guns and ships feature prominently. Another promotional technique was a personal appeal from the troops in the front line and while slogans such as 'Help us’ do appear, their impact in this parade is muted.

• Signs such as 'America lends a hand’ register the fact that the USA, then officially neutral in the War, was in fact sending aid to Britain. The Lend-Lease Act of 11 March 1941 gave President Roosevelt the power to sell, lend, lease, exchange or give any article of defence to any country that he decided was vital to US defence. By the time of the parade, the aid was beginning to flow strongly. The USA entered the War in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

• While the presence of the fire trucks may appear curious today, at the time members of the fire brigade, in their bright red trucks and wearing their shiny brass helmets, were an indispensable element of any parade. In 1941 the helmets were not just ceremonial. They were still being worn to fight fires. Cumbersome and heavy, they offered little protection and fire fighters were known to have been electrocuted wearing them.

• Parades such as this attracted crowds because they were colourful visual spectacles. In the time before television, such spectacles, apart from sporting events, were uncommon. Although some of the displays on the trucks were unsophisticated, the floats were elaborate, requiring hours of work. The various military uniforms were real and the men wearing them were probably members of the armed forces, part of recruiting teams that toured the country seeking volunteers.

• The footage was shot by John Roberts, an indefatigable maker of home movies in Adelaide during the War, who was sufficiently prosperous to afford the expensive equipment and increasingly scarce film. Roberts’ film technique was straightforward. He set the camera in a fixed position and simply filmed the parade, as it passed by. Although sometimes out of focus, the edited footage successfully positions the viewer as one of the crowd.