Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a range of manufacturing activities taking place at the Swallow and Ariell biscuit factory in Melbourne in 1932. Almost all the scenes in the clip depict female workers engaged in the production or decoration of biscuits, cakes or other 'dainty confectionary’. The tasks include operating light machinery, icing biscuits, decorating cakes, wrapping and packaging biscuits, and pasting labels on biscuit tins. Male workers are shown making biscuit tins. Each scene is accompanied by commentary praising the process and the quality of the product.

Educational value points

• The clip gives an indication of the methods of production and the low level of mechanisation in a large Australian food factory in the early 1930s. While some semi-automatic machinery is shown, there is no evidence of a full production line in operation and most of the footage depicts work being performed by hand. When machinery is used, the narrator is excited by its novelty, focusing on its 'fascinating precision’ or its noise and power.

• A Day in a Biscuit Factory is a 12-minute promotional film for Swallow and Ariell products and the target audience is clearly women who want to serve high-quality biscuits and cakes without making them themselves. The language used by the narrator hammers home the message. The company’s biscuits are, for example, 'soon to be served by discerning hostesses who take pride in the presentation of attractive refreshments’.

• Swallow and Ariell was established by Thomas Swallow (1827–90), who began manufacturing ship’s biscuits in Port Melbourne, Victoria, in 1854. In the same year he went into partnership with Thomas Harris Ariell (1832–75), setting up the first machine-equipped biscuit factory in Melbourne and developing a range of biscuits. After Ariell’s death, Swallow entered into partnership with Frederick Thomas Derham (1844–1922). The Derham family was still managing Swallow and Ariell in 1932 when the film was shot.

• The clip illustrates a division of labour along gender lines that was common in the food industry at the time. Fifteen women and one man are shown operating light machinery and doing by hand those jobs requiring expertise, dexterity and speed. Men operate powerful machinery and elsewhere in the film they are shown moving heavy equipment.

• The narrator implies a hierarchy of labour, describing the male workers undertaking repetitive work as 'highly skilled operatives’ whilst not mentioning the female workers, even though the intricacies of their cake decoration required high levels of skill. Their work is depersonalised, with the narrator using phrases such as 'nimble fingers busily engaged’.

• Several occupational health and safety issues are revealed in the clip, including the lack of ear protection in a very noisy workplace and the use of machines without hand guards. Such practices went largely unchanged in factories until the introduction of Australia’s first occupational health and safety regulations in South Australia in 1972.

• While most biscuits in the 1930s were packed in large grocer’s tins and weighed out in the shop for each customer, some were sold in separate packs, similar to today’s self-service packaging. Uneeda cracker biscuits were an example, and the clip shows how a pack of Uneeda biscuits was created in the 1930s. Everything was done by hand. The biscuits were lined up, weighed and wrapped, first in wax paper and then in the outer paper packaging.

• Swallow and Ariell recognised the promotional value of film and had earlier commissioned a silent film about their factory, released around 1925. For A Day in a Biscuit Factory the company turned to Herschells Films to make a 'talkie’. At about the same time as this film was made, Herschells Films joined the Melbourne Herald newspaper in a short-lived venture to produce Australian sound newsreels.

• The soundtrack of the clip, consisting solely of a voice-over, provides an example of the early use of sound film in Australia. No factory sounds appear to have been recorded and there is no background music. The declamatory style of the voice-over, the rather unusual emphasis on particular words and some over-long pauses indicate that the filmmaker was still coming to grips with sound.