Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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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.