Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip shows two early modes of transport in the Northern Territory, as well as the Victoria River Downs cattle station in 1940. It opens with a donkey team pulling a wagon along a dirt track, while an Indian hawker is shown with his camels laden with goods. The final sequence is of the main homestead and surrounding buildings, including the store, at the Victoria River Downs station. Indigenous women at the station line up to receive their weekly rations. The clip includes commentary and a romantic musical score.

Educational value points

• Prior to the expansion of road and rail systems, donkey and camel teams were used in the outback to transport goods between the 1890s and 1920s, although a few donkey teams were still operating when this footage was shot in 1940. Donkeys were well suited to the rough and dry conditions of outback Australia. Each team consisted of between 36 and 72 donkeys, could pull wagon loads that weighed up to 8,000 kg and travelled about 16 km a day.

• Camel trains, such as the one shown in this clip, were vital to the development of inland Australia, not only bringing supplies to remote stations such as Victoria River Downs, but also hauling equipment for the construction of major projects such as the Overland Telegraph Line. As railway and road systems developed, camel trains were used less frequently and disappeared in the 1940s. The camel handler shown in this clip may have been one of the last of his kind.

• Camels were the preferred draught animal in the outback because they were reliable, fast and economical. Camels can go for eight days without water, carry four times as much as a horse, travel up to 32 km a day and cross rough ground inaccessible to wagons. Camel trains usually consisted of 20 to 30 pack animals, linked by ropes from tail to nose, but the train shown in this clip is smaller.

• Some of the camel handlers, known as cameleers, were Indian such as the one in the clip, although they were usually referred to as Afghans. They brought with them a wealth of knowledge about the care of camels. Cameleers led a nomadic life and usually worked in pairs, although the small train shown in this clip only required one handler.

• The clip combines footage of a donkey team and a camel team and a close-up shot of the face of an Indian hawker travelling in a dry and dusty landscape with the sounds of soft orchestral music to romanticise, and present as exotic, life in the outback. Through the Centre, the film from which this clip is taken, is a sponsored film made for the Shell Film Unit to map a tourist route from Perth to Darwin and then to Adelaide.

• The Victoria River Downs station, as with other large cattle stations in remote areas of the NT, relied on Indigenous men and women for its workforce, but they were paid less than non-Indigenous employees. Before 1968 it was illegal to pay an Indigenous worker more than a specified amount in goods and money, and in some cases government benefits for Indigenous employees were paid into the pastoral companies’ accounts, not to the individuals.

• The language in this clip is an example of racist attitudes held by white Australians towards Indigenous Australians at the time. The term ‘gin’, which was used by non-Indigenous people to describe Indigenous women, is derogatory and dehumanising and positions them as the ‘other’. The joke about the ‘maids’ day off’ is made at the expense of these women, many of whom were employed as domestic workers in homesteads on cattle stations.

• The remoteness of the Victoria River Downs station meant that it had to be largely self-sufficient and, in addition to the homestead and store shown in this clip, it included a manager’s house, kitchen, mess, offices, single men’s quarters, garage, saddlery and blacksmith. In the 1940s supplies were delivered several times a year by truck, although the occasional camel train may still have visited the station.