Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent home-movie footage from the 1950s shows the Royal Queensland Show (the ‘Ekka’, as it is known locally). It focuses on crowds of smartly dressed people, including uniformed sailors and schoolgirls enjoying various entertainments. Scenes include people in dodgem cars, on a miniature train and on a merry-go-round. A young boy sells kewpie dolls and other show mementos. Boxers and spruikers urge people to enter the boxing tent. The final scenes, filmed from high vantage points, show buildings and crowds of people.

Educational value points

• The people visiting the Queensland Show during the prosperous years of the 1950s were taking advantage of newfound leisure time and increased prosperity after the privations of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Employment was high, people had more money to spend and the show provided inexpensive and varied entertainments to a wide cross-section of the public.

• The footage shows some of the activities offered during the 1950s in a sideshow alley, an important part of any Australian agricultural show. Some of the amusements, including dodgem cars and merry-go-rounds, have endured. Others, such as miniature railways and boxing tents, have disappeared. In the second half of the 20th century rides became more technologically sophisticated and largely replaced the tents and booths of the past.

• Travelling boxing tents featured troupes of mainly Indigenous boxers who fought challengers from the audience. The fights provided employment, but it is also claimed that many boxers were underpaid and suffered health problems resulting from their injuries. Some notable boxers including Jerry Jerome (1874–1943), the first Indigenous boxing champion, began their careers as tent boxers. Boxing tents were banned in most of Australia after 1971.

• Conservative dress conventions that persisted until the 1960s are apparent in the clip. Family members are dressed formally as required by social tradition for attending a special event such as a day out at the Queensland Show. The clothing styles for men and women are distinctly different. Hats and gloves are worn by many, and children are dressed in modified versions of adult clothing or in school uniforms.

• Although the footage focuses on amusements and rides, agricultural shows are traditionally held to exhibit aspects of rural economy and country life to city dwellers. In 1876, the first Queensland Show (then named the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland’s Exhibition) demonstrated Queensland’s prosperity and progress to the other Australian colonies just 17 years after the founding of the colony.

• Two of Australia’s boxing champions, Les Darcy and Dave Smith, are celebrated on the advertising hoarding for the boxing tent more than 30 years after the height of their fame. Darcy (1895–1917) won 46 of his 50 professional bouts in the ring and at just 19 was middle- and heavyweight boxing champion of Australia. Fifty years after his tragic death in the USA, flags flew at half-mast in Australia.