Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This silent clip illustrates the activities of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), first through a narrative of three young women joining a VAD and then by showing the activities of the VAD, based in the Sydney suburb of Drummoyne. Intertitles assist in telling the story, which begins with three young women looking at a magazine cover featuring a VAD nurse. Having obtained their certificates, they are shown practising bandaging at an outdoor VAD meeting. The meeting culminates in a demonstration of first aid being administered to a boy after a staged accident.

Educational value points

• The clip portrays the activities of the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) that the Australian Red Cross and the Order of St John had established during the First World War. Members received instruction in first aid and home nursing and initially worked without pay in hospitals and convalescent homes. Members received more medical training during the Second World War and provided nursing as well as other support services on both the home and war fronts.

• Despite the light-hearted demeanour of the young women this film appears to be a patriotic appeal to women to join a VAD in support of Australia’s war effort. In 1943, the year the film was made, Australia was engaged in a war with an uncertain outcome. In 1942 the Japanese had captured Singapore and bombed Darwin, and their submarines had attacked Sydney Harbour. It seemed that Japanese military forces might soon invade Australia.

• This ambitious home movie uses a number of film techniques to convey its narrative. A young woman browses through a Women’s Weekly magazine, an intertitle notes ‘Here is an idea’ and a shot reveals the magazine’s cover, showing a woman in a Red Cross uniform. The clip uses cropping of images and camera angles – ‘over the shoulder’ in the view of the magazine cover and from a low angle to depict the rows of marching women – to direct the viewer’s attention.

• The clip provides an example of an amateur documentary produced in 1943 using colour film, which did not come into common usage until the late 1940s. The 1930s saw the introduction of 8-mm film, the introduction of sound capability for home movies, and colour film for amateur use including the introduction of Kodachrome in 1935. Despite these developments the popularity of home-movie making was checked for the duration of the Second World War.

• The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, which inspires the young woman and her friends to join the VAD, actively promoted women’s participation in the war effort during the Second World War. Relinquishing its role of promoting the virtues of domesticity for women, it ran articles about female war workers, encouraging women to work in such areas as munitions and in the Women’s Land Army.

• Voluntary Aid Detachments, such as the Drummoyne one shown here, were first administered by committees in each state and then by a central council. By 1928 the Ministry of Defence was administering them in recognition of their function as part of the Army Medical Corps reserve. In 1948 control of the VADs was returned to the Australian Red Cross and St John Ambulance Service. VADs remain active in New South Wales as the Voluntary Aid Service Corps.

• Australian women have been directly involved in war service since 1898 when 60 nurses from NSW served in the South African (Boer) War. In the First World War more than 2,500 Australian Army Nursing Service Reserve nurses were involved in active service. Tens of thousands of women joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air, Naval and Army services during the Second World War, fulfilling a range of duties that included nursing.

• Unpaid voluntary work by women of all ages increased during the War and work for voluntary groups, generally undertaken by the middle and upper classes who could afford the time to join these organisations, took on a new social meaning. Its ideology – voluntarism – was to play a crucial role in bolstering the traditional gender division of labour.