Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip shows a hay or grain crop being reaped and bound into sheaves first by hand and then by machine. A man in late-19th-century dress is shown cutting the crop with a scythe while a group of women dressed for the same period collect and bundle the stalks into sheaves. An intertitle that reads ‘How it is done today’ introduces the next sequence, which shows a horsedrawn reaper cutting and binding the crop.

Educational value points

• The clip uses 'before’ and 'after’ sequences to promote the benefits of mechanisation by demonstrating that it is much faster and more efficient to use a mechanical reaper and binder than cutting and bundling by hand. The shot of a crop in a vast field that appears before the clip cuts to the mechanised reaper and binder at work was probably included to demonstrate that mechanisation enabled farmers to crop larger areas of land.

• The reaper and binder shown in this clip was produced by the H V McKay Pty Ltd works in Sunshine in Melbourne, a company established by Hugh Victor McKay (1865–1926) in the late 1880s to manufacture the Sunshine stripper harvester and other farm implements. By the 1920s the factory was the largest in Australia and reputedly the biggest manufacturer of agricultural machinery in the southern hemisphere.

• The reaper and binder featured cut the grain or hay and packed it into a bundle, a job that prior to mechanisation required at least two labourers. The large reel on the left of the machine collected the stalks and held them against the blades of a cutting bar. The stalks were deposited into the ‘dropper’, a slotted frame behind the cutting bar, and were then packed into bundles that were tied with twine by a binding attachment on the right of the machine.

• Reaping and binding by hand is slow, arduous and labour-intensive work. Prior to the 1880s in Australia, grain and hay crops were cut manually using a scythe, a long-handled implement with a long curved single-edged blade. The cut stalks were then collected and tied into sheaves, or bundles. It took about 35 h of manual labour to reap 1 ha.

• In the 1920s, when this footage was shot, cameras were cumbersome and film was silent and black and white. The size and weight of the camera meant that filmmakers were limited to using long, static takes – for example, in this clip the camera has remained fixed, while there are no close-ups and only two small pans across a wheat field.