Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows silent home-movie footage of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast in Queensland around 1960. It opens with an intertitle that reads 'Surfers Paradise’ placed over a picture postcard of smiling beachgoers. The clip cuts between shots of two- and three-storey holiday units and motels, with names like Golden Sun and Winter Sun Motor Inn, with holidaymakers in swimming pools, and footage of the streets around Surfers Paradise including shops, bars, and restaurants such as the Cafe Cathay. It concludes with a shot of the beach.

Educational value points

• Surfers Paradise is the most famous of a number of beaches along a 57-km strip of coastline in southern Queensland now called the Gold Coast. People holidayed at the seaside village of Elston, as Surfers Paradise was called prior to 1933, as early as the 1880s, but it began life as a tourist resort when Jim Cavill opened a 16-bedroom hotel called The Surfers Paradise in 1923. Cavill, with the support of locals, lobbied to change the name of the village to Surfers Paradise. By the 1950s it was being promoted as a family holiday destination.

• Surfers Paradise experienced a property development boom in the 1950s that saw the construction of large beachfront holiday apartments and motels to cater for the rapidly expanding tourist market. This development coincided with an easing of building regulations. The first high-rise was built in 1959 and in the 1980s the Gold Coast again experienced a real estate boom, driven in part by huge Japanese investment that transformed the beachfront into a strip of twenty- to thirty-storey high-rise apartments and hotels.

• The development of Surfers Paradise reflects broader social changes taking place in Australia in the decades following the Second World War when increased incomes and greater leisure time meant that more Australians began to travel and take domestic holidays. Paid annual holidays increased from two weeks in 1945 to three weeks in 1963 and to four weeks in 1974. Mass domestic tourism was also enabled by widespread car ownership, the advent of the motor hotel or 'motel’, and improved roads.

• The 1980s development boom on the Gold Coast was accompanied by state government corruption and property investment scams, which by the late 1990s had deterred many investors. However the Gold Coast has again undergone a resurgence and in September 2005 it was estimated that $42 billion worth of new development was under construction or in the planning stages. In 2005, Q1, the world’s tallest residential building, was completed at Surfers Paradise. The Gold Coast has a population of about 500,000 people and is now the sixth largest urban aggregation in Australia.

• In the 1950s, Chinese restaurants such as Cafe Cathay flourished throughout Australia. For most Australians at the time, a meal at a Chinese restaurant was their first and often only experience of Asian food. The spread of these restaurants was partly due to an increased number of Chinese migrants resulting from changes to the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, but is also attributed to US servicemen stationed in Australia during the Second World War whose patronage of Chinese restaurants encouraged Australians to follow suit.

• 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 format 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, but can also provide diverse perspectives or alternative histories.