Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows black-and-white, silent footage of slum housing in inner-city Melbourne in 1947. It shows the squalid interior of a house with crumbling plaster and holes in the wall that reveal the wooden lathes behind, boarded-up windows, peeling paint and wallpaper, and a cracked ceiling covered in cobwebs. The camera pans around a bedroom to reveal rubbish on the floor, a bed with the filling in the mattress spilling out and mildewy bedding infested by bedbugs. The clip also includes shots of the exterior of the house, and a small backyard with dripping tap, blocked drain, battered wash tins and a filthy outside toilet, where several children are seen playing.

Educational value points

• In the 1930s and 1940s slum housing in inner-city Melbourne was identified as a major problem by social reformers, particularly Oswald Barnett and Horace Hogben, who formed a committee to examine the 'shortage of low-price houses and the concomitant of rising rents’ (www.adb.online.anu.edu.au). The housing situation worsened during the Great Depression (1929–32), which brought the building industry to a standstill, causing a huge housing shortage. The situation was exacerbated by the Second World War (1939–45), which halted most civil construction as resources were diverted to the war effort.

• Workers’ houses in the inner city were usually terraced and consisted of two bedrooms and a lean-to kitchen. The few amenities available might include an outside tap and toilet and an outside trough but no hot water, internal bathroom or laundry. Residents used newspaper to replace peeling wallpaper, and a lack of adequate heating meant that, like the girl shown in the clip, people often stayed in bed all day during cold weather to keep warm. At the same time homeless families were living in far worse conditions in makeshift shanties and tents in Williamstown, Camp Pell in Royal Park and Dudley Flats in South Melbourne.

• The houses were often infested with vermin and insects and the film includes a close-up of a bedsheet that reveals bedbugs and the blood spots left by them. The slum abolition campaign run by the Brotherhood of St Laurence stressed that inner-city slums were an unhealthy environment in which to raise children and, significantly, the clip focuses on children playing on the street and in a squalid backyard, and on a toddler making her way down a dark corridor, paint flaking off the walls as she walks by.

• In 1954 the Brotherhood of St Laurence claimed that there were 7,500 dwellings in inner Melbourne that were so dilapidated 'as to endanger the health, safety and morals of its inhabitants’ (www.aifs.gov.au). In 1956, in response to the slum abolition campaign, the Victorian Government began slum clearance and initially constructed two- and three-storey flats. The Government then built high-rise apartments in the 1960s and 1970s; however, these brought their own social problems, including isolation and the difficulty of supervising children from upper floors.

• The Brotherhood of St Laurence was named after the patron saint of the poor and was founded in Newcastle, New South Wales by Anglican priest Father Gerard Tucker. In 1933 the Brotherhood moved to Fitzroy in Melbourne to work closely with the urban poor. During the Great Depression the Brotherhood offered support to the unemployed as well as spearheading the campaign for slum reform. Today, it continues to work to eradicate poverty and social injustice by providing social research and policy advice to governments about housing and other social issues.

• In 1946 Father Gerard Tucker commissioned a group of Melbourne filmmakers, the Realist Film Unit, to make three films exposing the poverty and squalor in which many of Melbourne’s working class lived. The films were intended to pressure the State Government to clear the slums and provide housing for low-income earners. Tucker toured the films, Beautiful Melbourne, These Are Our Children and A Place to Live, throughout Victoria, promoting them as 'the films the Premier dare not see’.

• The high cost of film in the 1940s meant that no post-sync soundtrack was added, so the films were silent. However, according to Elizabeth Coldicutt, a member of the Realist Film Unit, Tucker accompanied screenings with a 'witty and confrontational commentary, daring his audience to examine their consciences and join his “war on slums”’ (www.oldertenants.org.au). The films highlighted not just the existence of the slums and unscrupulous landlords willing to take advantage of the poor, but also the extent of poverty among sectors of the working class whose incomes were insufficient to cover even the basics of everyday living.

• The Realist Film Unit was founded by Ken Coldicutt and Bob Matthews in 1945 with the support of the Communist Party of Australia, which was quite active at the time. It aimed to produce documentaries in the socialist–realist tradition, which focused on issues of social justice. While Tucker did not share the filmmakers’ political beliefs, he recognised that they had in common a commitment to the eradication of poverty, the betterment of the working class and social reform. The film unit was the subject of John Hughes’s documentary The Archive Project (2006).