Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip from the ABC television series The Land That Waited shows a montage of paintings and drawings accompanied by narration, describing how the early colonists of New South Wales longed for home and viewed Australia through British eyes. The first part of the clip focuses on the colonists rejecting the Australian landscape and gradually building the new colony in the image of England. The final part of the clip focuses on an image of a potted primrose brought from England being ‘adored’ by crowds of nostalgic colonists.

Educational value points

• This clip presents a nationalist historical interpretation that argues that the reluctant colonists of NSW were so mentally dislocated by their removal to Australia that they were unable to appreciate the new land and tried instead to create an ‘Antipodean England’. The script was written by Australian poet, columnist and editor, Max Harris (1912–95), who believed that most non-Indigenous Australians in the 1960s still viewed Australia in such a way.

• The images in the clip were selected to reinforce the point of view put forward in the narration and this led to some illustrations being included from places and times other than early Sydney. The cottage and flower garden, for example, were those of artist John Glover and were painted in Tasmania in 1836. A Primrose from England was painted in England in 1855 by Edward Hopley about an event supposed to have occurred in Melbourne two or three years earlier.

• Most images show Sydney in its first few decades, with the works of early colonial artists represented. They include A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove (1794), the earliest oil painting of Sydney and possibly painted by convict artist Thomas Watling. The images show the topography of early Sydney as viewed by the new arrivals, the growth of the settlement, the heads and coves of the Harbour and the huge sandstone rock outcrops of the Rocks area.

• Viewer interest in the clip is largely created and sustained by the use of the varied cinematic techniques of the rostrum camera to enliven the clip’s ten still images. The rostrum camera consists of a moveable camera placed above a moveable platform on which the still images are placed. Its ability to zoom in and out as well as traverse the image is illustrated in the clip, with the editing of the primrose sequence enhancing the camera’s ability to take us inside the image.

• While most of the colonists were dismayed (not driven to the edge of insanity as the narrator suggests) by the differences between Britain and NSW, some were fascinated. Even as the colonists gradually established the small settlement seen in the clip, some found time to paint and collect specimens of the unique fauna and flora. A few established relations with the local Indigenous people. Many more sought to exploit the economic opportunities the colony offered.

• The point of view of the narration is reinforced by the orchestral score composed by well-known Australian composer and the ABC’s federal editor of music at the time, John Antill (1904–86). The long primrose sequence in particular is sustained by his music, which effectively evokes the colonists’ longing for ‘home’. Although best known for his work Corroboree, first performed in 1946, Antill composed scores for numerous documentaries.