Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip from a silent black-and-white home movie shows footage taken by a tourist, Robert Minter, in a village in Java in the early 1930s. The clip shows different tasks associated with growing and processing rice: men toss rice from side to side in a long sack; a group of women and children pose in front of tables with rice on circular trays drying in the sun; water buffalo pull a plough in a paddy field, and women plant rice and pound the grains in a long wooden trough. In one sequence, young boys dance for tourists while women play traditional instruments.

Educational value points

• The clip shows how an Australian tourist of the 1930s represented rural life in Java. The filmmaker selected scenes of the villagers’ everyday working lives, based around growing and processing rice, to represent what would have seemed exotic and interesting to a wealthy urban tourist from a first-world country. Glimpses of the well-dressed tourists serve to emphasise the contrast between their world of wealth and the world of Javanese villagers.

• The clip provides evidence of the labour-intensive methods of processing rice that were practised in Java in the 1930s. The rice is shown being dried in the sun and vigorously shaken in bags to separate the husks. The separated rice is then pounded by hand. Water buffalo plough the wet fields with a wooden plough, and farmers plant the rice by hand in the water.

• In Java cultivation of rice in flooded rice paddies, as practised in the 1930s and recorded in the clip, has remained largely unchanged from the earliest evidence of cultivation in the 8th century until the present day. The division of labour seen here, in which women hand-plant the seedlings and men prepare the land, and the use of water buffalo for tillage are practices that are still in use in the early 21st century.

• Angklung, the instruments being played to accompany the children dancing, are widely used throughout South-East Asia but most prominently in Java. They are bamboo-tube rattles set in a wooden frame. Sound is produced when the frame is shaken and the tubes slide back and forth. Traditionally played in ensembles, angklung can produce different pitches of sound according to segments cut into the tops of the tubes.

• The clip illustrates the way the presence of tourists and their cameras affect the behaviour of people in the scenes being filmed. Activities that may be part of everyday working lives are staged for their benefit. The villagers become performers. The demonstration of winnowing is explained by a tourist guide. Children gather and view the camera with curiosity. In the staged dance, children direct their movements to the camera.

• The tourists seen in the clip were part of a tourist boom to Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies, that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. Having deterred foreign tourism in the 19th century the Dutch East Indies colonial government began to support and encourage foreign tourism to Java, Bali and Sumatra in the 20th century, seeing it as a potential source of income. The 1920s and 1930s brought many international visitors on oceanic cruises.