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After an evening’s dancing in the ballroom at the Medlow Bath Ritz in the company of Bea (Victoria Longley), Stevie (Linda Cropper), Marcus (Philip Sayer), Tip St James (Yves Stening) and Bill Seward (Andrew Tighe), Angus (Bruce Hughes) finds Lesley-Anne (Melanie Salomon) in the garden, on her own.
Curator’s notes
The scene in the garden is an important moment for both characters. Angus realises he is still an outsider, like the normally gauche Lesley-Anne.
The ballroom scene is typical of director Neil Armfield’s choreography of crowd scenes, which he handles with ease and grace both here and in later sequences set in wartime Sydney. The glimpses we get of Australian interiors, customs and fashions in the 1930s and ’40s are fascinating in their colour and detail. A ballroom very like this one still exists at the Hydro Majestic Hotel in Medlow Bath. Here, as in the fictional Medlow Bath ‘Ritz’ owned by the St James family, ‘tea dances’ were a common event in the 1930s.
