Australian
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Home (c.1936)

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There's no place like home education content clip 1, 2

This clip chosen to be G

Clip description

The workmen, who live in shanty-style houses, also have dreams for a better home. As a child sits and draws a picture of a house, her picture is transformed (by a dissolve) into an architect’s sketch and then a realised house. A range of home styles and types are then shown. A voice-over narration tells us that this development contributes to the country’s growing prosperity. Builders laying the bricks of a house and the rafters of a roof are shown to be in an ‘inspiring’ form of employment. This is followed by another sequence of houses – the places that people come home to at the end of a day well spent. As the people go inside and the front gates close, the voice-over can comfortably say, ‘this is indeed my home’.

Curator’s notes

by Poppy De Souza

Home is more than just bricks and mortar. Here, the home – both the idea and the reality – is the ‘reward of years of striving’ and its importance lies both in human fulfilment and as a contributor to the nation’s growth and prosperity.

Home was made by the Rural Bank of New South Wales and presumably the point of this film was to illustrate that this prosperity is partly facilitated by the services that the Bank supplies to its customers – the home lovers and home builders everywhere to whom this film is dedicated.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip promotes home building and ownership in the mid-1930s. A narrator characterises home ownership as a reward for hard work, part of Australia’s ‘golden legacy’ that also aids the country’s ‘growing prosperity’. A series of images contrasts shanties with the new homes that will replace them. Over shots of houses under construction the narrator praises those who plan, design and build them. He concludes by describing home ownership as the fulfilment of ‘man’s’ desires. The clip comes from a film sponsored by the Rural Bank of New South Wales.

Educational value points

  • This clip shows how elements of language such as metaphor, repetition, leading questions and heroic imagery can be used to persuade. The everyday is valorised by describing it in lofty terms, thus home ownership is part of Australia’s ‘golden legacy’, the sound of builders at work is ‘a paean of praise that fills the land’ and the narrator asks is ‘any job more inspiring?’ This style of language is typical of films sponsored by the Rural Bank of NSW at the time.
  • The persuasive voice in this clip is reinforced by shot selection, integrations such as fades and wipes, and busy upbeat orchestral music. The before-and-after dissolves from the child’s drawing to architectural plan to the bricks-and-mortar work suggest the heroic. This is reinforced by camera pans up the walls of houses to give the structures a monumental quality and the repetition of images such as gates shutting, suggesting that home ownership is the norm.
  • The sponsored film Home from which this clip is taken was made at the end of the Great Depression (1929–35), which had resulted in record unemployment, the collapse of the housing industry and many thousands of people defaulting on their mortgages or unable to pay rent and so becoming homeless or living in shanties such as those depicted in this clip. At the time this film was made Australia was experiencing a slow economic recovery.
  • The recovery of the building industry, devastated by the Great Depression, is reflected in the emphasis the clip places on the builders’ return to work. In 1932 at the height of the Great Depression 60 per cent of people in the industry were unemployed, while building approvals in Sydney fell to 688. In 1936 when this film was made, about 5,500 building permits were issued in Sydney and overall unemployment had fallen from a high of 29 per cent in 1932 to about 10 per cent.
  • In 1932, in an effort to solve the housing shortage, the NSW Government made affordable home loans available through the Rural Bank of NSW. Following the collapse of the Government Savings Bank of NSW, its rural banking and advances for homes departments were redistributed to the Rural Bank of NSW, a bank founded by the state government that had previously only provided loans to farmers.
  • Telling a story was a common device in sponsored promotional films shown in cinemas at the time and while audiences often found such promotional films as interesting as feature films, they would have realised that, in spite of the hyperbole, the housing industry was still only operating at about 70 per cent of pre-Depression levels and that many of the houses shown in the film had been built in the 1920s.