Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip shows footage from the Second World War, including Australian soldiers at a train station and on a troopship, soldiers in North Africa, and others engaged in battles on land, sea and in the air. The narration emphasises the Red Cross’s role in supporting troops. A Red Cross nurse bandages a wounded soldier in hospital while the narrator appeals to the audience to help the organisation. The clip concludes with a montage of the work carried out by Red Cross volunteers, most of whom are women. The scenes are edited together using an integration in the shape of a cross.

Educational value points

• They Serve was made to promote the work of the Australian Red Cross Society (ARCS) in supporting Australian troops overseas, and to encourage civilians to join the Society as volunteers and contribute to its fundraising. During the Second World War the ARCS’s Field Force served alongside military medical services. The ARCS also provided medical supplies as well as sending food and clothing parcels to troops serving overseas and to prisoners of war (POWs). The ARCS helped families trace wounded and missing soldiers, and after the War repatriated Australian POWs.

• In They Serve, images of war, accompanied by stirring music and assertions that the Red Cross was supporting Australian troops overseas, were designed to appeal to people’s patriotism and sense of duty. Enormous resources were needed to support Australia’s involvement in the conflict, and the film’s message echoed that of the Government, which urged civilians to be 'all in’, or to work hard and make sacrifices for the War.

• As in the First World War, the ARCS trained women as Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) to provide basic nursing and domestic services in general hospitals, field hospitals and convalescent homes, and they proved to be a valuable auxiliary to both the civilian and military medical services. VADs also served as clerks, ambulance drivers, radiographers, dental orderlies, storekeepers and laundry staff. In 1941, after approval was given for VADs to serve overseas, they were sent to Britain, Cairo, Gaza and Sri Lanka and also worked on hospital ships.

• During the Second World War thousands of Red Cross volunteers gave hundreds of hours of their time to make items such as bandages, surgeons’ gowns and masks, surgical stockings, and pyjamas for use in hospitals in Australia and overseas. Women also worked in Red Cross stores, checking that the goods conformed to the required standard and coordinating the delivery of supplies.

• According to Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia, 1788–1978 (E Windschuttle, ed, Fontana, 1980), during the War, voluntary work, which was taken up most enthusiastically by the middle and lower-middle classes, acquired a new social significance. The ideology of voluntarism 'was to play a crucial role in bolstering the traditional sexual division of labour’, helping 'to set the parameters in which the battles for equal pay, conditions and opportunity were waged, especially in the later years of the war’.

• The International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, which later became the International Committee of the Red Cross, is a humanitarian organisation founded in 1863 in Geneva to provide medical care to those wounded in armed conflict. The Australian Red Cross Society, which was initially a branch of the British Red Cross, was formed just after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. Today, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has national societies in nearly every country and provides humanitarian aid in both peacetime and war. Non-Christian countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan elected to use the name Red Crescent Society because of the association of the cross with Christianity.

• At the end of They Serve the narrator says that the Australian Red Cross shows 'mercy where war shows none’, which reflects the Red Cross’s philosophy. The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is guided by seven principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality. The commitment to impartiality and neutrality means that the Movement does not take sides in hostilities and does not discriminate on the basis of nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or politics. It is independent of government and relies on volunteers to carry out its work. In 1919 it was established that only one Red Cross Society or Red Crescent Society could exist in each country, and that the national societies would work cooperatively as a global group.

• The Red Cross emblem, which is derived from a simple colour inversion of the Swiss flag, is intended to safeguard the armed forces’ medical units and the Red Cross personnel working with them from attack in conflict zones. The Red Crescent is the equivalent official protection symbol adopted by many non-Christian countries. These symbols are recognised by the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements, the first of which dates back to 1864, that establish rules for the treatment of prisoners of war, and of sick and wounded soldiers during war. The Red Cross was instrumental in the development of the first Convention, which is seen as signalling the birth of international humanitarian law.