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Clip description
Constance (Noeline Brown), James (John Meillon) and Sean (Mark Shields-Brown) visit Sydney’s famous Luna Park.
Curator’s notes
The finale of the mini-series revolves around the Commonwealth Games of 1974, which were actually held in Christchurch, New Zealand. Switching the location to Sydney enabled the producers to make full use of easily recognisable landmarks, as in this sequence set in Luna Park at Milsons Point.
This film montage effectively condenses a ‘family’ day out at the amusement park into two minutes of action. For a contemporary audience, it’s a fun glimpse of a Sydney landmark in the 1970s. These short scenes successfully convey without us being told through dialogue or voice-over that Sean’s second wish has come true – he’s been reunited with his mother. The moment where James recoils before the Ghost Train – a reminder of Sean’s imminent death – is unfortunately overplayed by Meillon, not helped by the melodramatic cut to a close-up of his face immediately followed by the leering skull. It’s ironic, given this sequence, that Luna Park was closed in 1979 because of a fire in the Ghost Train that killed seven people.
It is interesting to compare the sequence here to clip one in terms of quality of picture image. In 1974, long before the digitisation of videotape, location sequences like this were usually shot on film and transferred to tape before being edited. As it was difficult to get an exact match, what was shot on film, then downgraded in the telecine process, sometimes ended up actually looking slightly less sharp than the taped material. With the arrival of colour television, the differential between film quality and tape became much more obvious and it became a specialised job to grade film and dull its sharp images to match the more muted material shot in the studio on videotape.
