Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows an excerpt from a dramatised documentary made to recruit tractor (bulldozer) drivers to work on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. It opens with a stockman in the Snowy Mountains deciding to sign on to the Scheme. He is then shown confidently operating a bulldozer, while a voice-over of the foreman indicates that he is a good driver and that men from a range of backgrounds can be suited to this job. The clip ends with shots of Joe Wallace, an Indigenous Australian operating a bulldozer. The clip has no dialogue but includes the voice-overs of the stockman and the foreman.

Educational value points

• This is an excerpt from a recruitment film made for the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority (SMA). Built between 1949 and 1974, the Scheme was the largest single engineering project undertaken in Australia and required a massive workforce. In response to a post-Second World War skills shortage, the SMA ran a huge recruitment campaign, both in Australia and internationally. A labour force of more than 100,000, 30 per cent of whom were Australian and 70 per cent of whom were either migrants or temporary residents from overseas, worked on the Scheme.

• The Scheme was made possible, as indicated here, by advances in heavy construction machinery. The International TD-24 bulldozer, or crawler tractor, shown in this clip was used throughout the Scheme. While it is dwarfed by today’s bulldozers, it was the largest machine of its kind when launched in 1947. The TD-24 had a 180 horsepower engine and was in production until 1959. The Scheme required a large fleet of modern, heavy, transport vehicles including bulldozers to move massive amounts of rock and earth and clear the way for roads.

• Parallels are drawn in this excerpt between the stockman and AB 'Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River. The mythical figure of the rugged and resourceful bushman became associated with the Snowy Mountains region after the publication of Paterson’s poem in 1895. Like this bushman, the stockman is willing to 'lend a hand’ when needed. The clip infers that rather than losing his identity by signing on to the Scheme, the new recruit is a modern version of the bushman, who exchanges his real horse for an 'iron horse’ that has the 'strength of a couple of hundred horses’.

• The clip depicts a mountain stockman endorsing the Scheme, something that may have been designed to tackle scepticism about the project and allay fears that it threatened the livelihood of stockmen in the region, while at the same time suggesting other employment possibilities for them. The SMA initiated a concerted public relations campaign to explain the complexities of the scheme and promote its benefits. Given that the Snowy Mountains landscape would be dramatically altered, the stockman’s ready endorsement of the Scheme and his wish to play a part are significant in presenting the two groups as natural collaborators.

• An Indigenous Australian worker is described as 'full-blooded’, a racial classification that is now regarded as offensive and as a social construct. There are no records of the number of Indigenous Australians who were employed on the Scheme; however, it was common in those days to refer to Indigenous Australians as 'full-blood’ or 'half-caste’. Today, an Indigenous Australian is defined as a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as such and is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives.

• The Jindabyne township and thousands of hectares of surrounding land, which included farms and homesteads, were flooded to make way for the Jindabyne dam, and residents were relocated to a new site overlooking the dam. The Scheme included the construction of 16 large dams, 7 power stations, a pumping station, 145 km of interconnected tunnels and 80 km of aqueducts used to divert water from the Snowy Mountains for use in power generation and irrigation.

• The scripted voice-overs of the stockman and foreman may have been used in place of dialogue because in 1948 it was difficult to record sound and image simultaneously on location, as the film camera and audiotape recorder had to be linked by a cable. Sound and image must be recorded at the same time to be synchronised. In 1967 crystal sync eliminated the need for a cable by using a crystal oscillator (electronic circuit) in both camera and recorder to synchronise the operating speeds of the equipment.