Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white silent clip shows an intertitle that says, 'Now we have a glimpse of Melbourne. Note the view of St. Kilda Road, one of the world’s finest boulevards.’ This is followed by a series of long shots, showing the view south down St Kilda Road over Princes Bridge; trams and cars; Flinders Street Station; people leaving the station and waiting to cross Flinders Street; trains and tracks; and trains arriving at the station, with crowds both disembarking and waiting to board.

Educational value points

• The clip shows key sites in central Melbourne in about 1929. These areas have since changed significantly, and the footage provides a valuable glimpse of Melbourne’s history.

• The inclusion of the sites in the travelogue demonstrates the pride that Australians felt for their bustling cities, which developed during and following the boom period of the 1880s and 1890s. Ironically, this film was made just prior to the Great Depression when, even before the Wall Street crash, unemployment in Australia was at 10 per cent.

• The width of St Kilda Road, its plantings of elm and plane trees, as shown in the footage, as well as its enormous mansions, are all features that suggest the wish to establish something of an 'old world’ culture in colonial, white Australia. These features highlight Melbourne’s desire to construct itself in the image of a grand European city. Melbourne still prides itself on being the most European of Australia’s cities.

• While St Kilda Road is a significant part of Melbourne’s culture and identity the clip focuses on the road as a transport hub, featuring pedestrians, trams, motor vehicles and the trains that come in out of the busy Flinders Street Station. Despite many changes the road remains a busy tram route and still fulfils its initial purpose of linking central Melbourne with the popular beachside suburb of St Kilda.

• The film seems to take pride in the crowds of people flooding from Flinders Street Station and the hectic traffic on the roads, and this reinforces the importance of transport to the developing city’s infrastructure. Usage of suburban trains doubled between 1898 and 1917, while registration of cars, trucks and cycles doubled between 1917 and 1922. Melburnians were living in a city that was 'on the move’.

• Once praised for its grandeur and beauty, the boulevard still retains some of the charm of the 1920s, though most of its mansions were demolished prior to heritage controls. The key continuity is that St Kilda Road maintains an important civic function as the home of the city’s parades and festivals, including Moomba and the Anzac Day parade to the Shrine of Remembrance.

• Nostalgic footage of an iconic Melbourne location is included. From 1910 onwards, the clocks above the steps of Flinders Street Station have been Melbourne’s most popular meeting place, and it is still common to hear of people planning to meet 'under the clocks’.

• Travelogue of Eastern States is an example of a story from an Australian newsreel, a (generally short) film shown to accompany a feature film. Newsreels usually covered several stories, either from the recent news or of public interest. Early newsreels, such as the one shown, were silent and used intertitles to introduce each segment. They changed weekly to cater for the regular patronage of the cinema, and became widely popular in the 1920s. Newsreels form an important source of footage for later documentaries, as they provide not only contemporary visual images, but insights into the interests and enthusiasms of the period.