Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This clip shows some of the manufacturing industries that operated in the Victorian regional city of Geelong in 1957. It begins with a sequence of manufacturers’ signs, then moves to scenes of workers performing a range of skilled and unskilled roles at different locations, including a car factory, textile mill, cement works, distillery and tractor and harvester plant. A cheerful string and wind composition plays in the background. In the final scene a voice-over confidently states that Geelong is the most 'industrialised city in Australia per head of population’.

Educational value points

• This clip is an example of a type of Australian promotional documentary filmed to inform cinema audiences here and possibly overseas about aspects of Australian life, and to attract visitors and new residents to particular locations in Australia. Documentaries such as this one were produced from the 1910s until the late 1970s and the places shown were always presented as up-to-date and progressive.

• As in this example, the best of this genre of films from the late 1950s were well funded, often by local Chambers of Commerce or large companies, enabling producers to use contemporary music scores, well-scripted narration and, most importantly, colour film – the latest innovation. Colour film was first used by an Australian filmmaker in the feature film Jedda, released in 1955.

• The clip projects an image of a confident manufacturing sector in Geelong, indicative of the dramatic growth in manufacturing being achieved in Australia throughout the 1950s and 60s. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the annual expansion of manufacturing productivity in the period was almost twice that of the economy as a whole, and the sector’s proportion of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reached a high of 29 per cent in 1960.

• The footage reveals how labour intensive Australian manufacturing was at the time. Unskilled workers are shown rolling barrels and loading bags, while skilled workers engage in manual 'pick and place’ tasks such as unloading injection moulding machines and spot-welding. By the 1980s tasks such as these had all been automated. The clip also reveals a lack of safety equipment, such as goggles and hard hats.

• Many of the companies featured in the clip have since vanished from Geelong, casualties of the economic conditions in the 1970s and 80s and the resulting rationalisation of the Australian manufacturing sector that saw its proportion of total GDP fall to 18 per cent in 1985. The sector was hard hit by international economic recession combined with increasing competition from newly industrialised Asian nations and fluctuating exchange rates.

• The City of Geelong is an example of the work of the Australian branch of the Shell Film Unit, set up in 1948 under John Heyer to make documentaries that established a connection between the multinational company and Australia. The Shell Oil Company initially sponsored documentary productions and then began producing its own. Shell has maintained a particularly close connection with Geelong since establishing a petroleum refinery there in 1954.

• The producer of this film, John Heyer (1916–2001), was one of Australia’s most distinguished filmmakers. His crowning achievement was the outback masterpiece The Back of Beyond, made in 1954, which won the Grand Prix Assoluto at the Venice Biennale. Heyer was awarded an OBE in 1974 for his achievements in cinema.