Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a policeman introducing a teenage boy to the Police Boys’ Club in 1939 and depicts some of the activities available at the Club such as wrestling, gymnastic work and boxing. A voice-over extols the benefits of the Club to individual boys and society in general, and explains that the volunteers at the Club aim to keep the boys off the streets, provide them with encouragement and assist them to find work. The black-and-white clip is from an item that appeared in the newsreel series Australia Today.

Educational value points

• The first Police and Community Club, known as the Police Boys’ Club, was established in Sydney in 1937 by the New South Wales Police Service and the Rotary Club of Sydney. It was founded in an attempt to reduce the rising level of juvenile crime in the inner city. The clubs today are open to girls as well as boys and continue to provide recreational activities such as boxing, wrestling, basketball, dancing and holiday camps. They aim to help young people become good citizens.

• The Great Depression (1929–33) caused Australia to suffer great economic hardship and social dislocation. The Australian economy depended to a large extent on exports, particularly wool and wheat, and exports fell by 50 per cent because Britain, Australia’s biggest trading partner, was also affected by the Depression. Unemployment was widespread, in 1932 reaching a high of 29 per cent, one of the highest rates in the world. People were evicted from homes they could no longer afford and farmers were forced from the land.

• The Depression brought the housing condition of inner-city slums, particularly those in Sydney and Melbourne, to the attention of the wider community. In 1936 the Slum Abolition and Rehousing Board in Victoria examined 7,000 houses in inner Melbourne and found that 6,000 of them were unfit for human habitation. By 1941, the Victorian Housing Commission had demolished 1,586 houses and built 1,279 new houses. By contrast, in New South Wales at the time there was little slum clearance and no large-scale housing schemes.

• Australian cities were among the first in the world to develop low-cost housing for working-class people in the suburbs. Governments viewed the eradication of slums and the building of houses in the suburbs as being part of urban reform. Factories in the inner suburbs closed and the onset of mass car ownership along with the postwar prosperity of the 1950s also encouraged people to move to the suburbs.

• The Police Boys’ Club has produced a number of Australian sporting champions. Jimmy Carruthers (1929–90) was a boxer who became world champion in the bantamweight (51–54 kg) division. Ron Miller (1941–) was a professional wrestler and Tim Cahill, the Everton and Australian soccer mid-fielder, played soccer with Balmain Police Boys’ Club.

• Rupert Kathner (1904–54) was a writer, director and producer of Australian newsreels and feature films. He produced 13 editions of a newsreel series called Australia Today (1938–40). Rather than the usual light newsreel topics, the series covered darker subjects such as poverty, inner-city slums, unemployment, illegal gambling, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency and alcoholism. The Pyjama Girl Murder Case (1939) was part of this series and was one of the first non-fiction films about a real crime produced in the world.

• Alma Brooks (c1910–88) was the cinematographer and coproducer, with Rupert Kathner, of Australia Today. She was one of Australia’s and the world’s first female cinematographers, of whom there were very few, but she never received screen credit as such. She used fictionalised male names, including Al Brooks. The story of her filmmaking partnership with Rupert Kathner is the subject of Hunt Angels (2006), a film written and directed by Alec Morgan (1953–) and produced by Sue Maslin (1959–), which won three Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards in 2006. She is also credited as scriptwriter on Wings of Destiny (1940) and as associate producer on The Glenrowan Affair (1951).

• Australia Today was an independent newsreel series that presented images of social issues in Australia. The two major newsreel producers, Fox Movietone News and its Australian competitor, Cinesound, presented sanitised and carefully selected stories, ensuring that none of their newsreels would project information or treatments of a controversial nature.