Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows silent home-movie footage of Ballarat taken around 1960. It shows 'Shell House’, which features mosaics made from shells depicting Australian icons, the insignia of various Australian defence forces and a celebration of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. A huge mosaic Imperial crown is seen on the front lawn. The clip opens with a shot of Ballarat’s town hall, and includes footage of the city’s wide avenues and historic buildings that date from the boom era that followed the discovery of gold in the area.

Educational value points

• Ballarat was established as a town in 1852 after gold was discovered. It was the site of the world’s largest deposit of alluvial gold, and almost a third of all gold found in Victoria came from its rich quartz reefs. The gold rush brought some 20,000 miners to the Ballarat goldfields, and within two years the population had doubled to 40,000. The town grew rapidly, fostered by the land boom as well as the gold rush, and was declared a city in 1870. Today Ballarat is Victoria’s largest inland city.

• Many of the buildings shown were designed in the ‘boom style’, an ornate and grand style of Victorian architecture popular between the 1880s and 1900s. Boom-style buildings borrowed from a range of architectural styles including neo-Gothic, Romanesque, Tudor and Italianate and were intended to display wealth and civic pride. Turrets, towers and arches were features of the style.

• 'Shell House’, seen in the clip, was the work of owner Arthur Pickford, who decorated his family home with the shell mosaics and opened it to the public in the 1950s. On his death Pickford left the home to the Salvation Army, of which he was a member. The popularity of the house may reflect not only its originality but the dearth of other local tourist attractions at the time – Sovereign Hill was not opened until 1970.

• One of the buildings in this footage has a temporary sign that reads 'Begonia Festival’, suggesting that McKenzie and Kent’s visit may have coincided with that event. An annual event, the Begonia Festival was introduced to Ballarat in 1952 and today is still regarded as Victoria’s premier provincial celebration of horticulture.

• In the 1950s and 1960s increased incomes and greater leisure time meant that more Australians were able to travel and take holidays. Paid annual holidays increased from one to two weeks in 1945, then to three weeks in 1963 and finally to four weeks in 1974. Mass domestic tourism was also facilitated by widespread car ownership, the advent of the motor hotel or 'motel’ and improved roads.

• Amateur filmmaking increased in popularity after the introduction of the 16-mm camera in 1923 and the 8-mm camera in 1932 as relatively inexpensive alternatives to the conventional 35-mm film format. However these cameras were still priced beyond the reach of most people and it was not until Kodak introduced the more affordable Super 8 camera in 1965 that home-movie making became widespread among different social groups and accessible to those on low incomes.

• The footage exemplifies typical features of the home-movie genre. The camera is hand-held with resulting instability of the image. Editing is achieved 'in-camera’ simply by turning the camera on and off and the content is shown in real time. Travel and domestic life, particularly celebratory events such as birthdays or weddings, comprise the main subjects of home movies, although work and mini-dramas also feature.

• Although historically regarded as amateur and only of interest to their creators and immediate family, home movies such as this one have now gained the status of historical documents. Home movies have increasingly been sought out to help reconstruct history, for example in documentaries and museum displays. They are a record of the lifestyles, cultures and traditions of everyday Australians, and can also provide diverse perspectives or alternative histories.