Australian Post-war Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors

This book is for Maddie and Ella Williams

Australian Post-War

Documentary Film

An Arc of Mirrors

Deane Williams

First Published in the UK in 2008 by

Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2008 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago,

IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2008 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons

Copy Editor: Rebecca Vaughan-Williams

Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-210-6

EISBN 978-1-84150-259-5

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction: Grierson Diminished

Chapter 1: A Realist Film Unit and Association in Australia

Chapter 2: Cecil Holmes’s Folk Politics: The Intertextuality of Three in One

Chapter 3: John Heyer’s International Perspective: The Overlanders, The Valley is Ours, The Back of Beyond

Chapter 4: The Neo-Realism of Mike and Stefani

Chapter 5: Settler Journeys

Filmography

References

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover image – Maslyn Williams (far right) and Reg Pearse (behind camera) on location shooting Mike and Stefani (1958). Courtesy Film Australia.

Prices and the People (1948) Realist Film Unit.

Betty Lacey (Elizabeth Coldicutt) filming 19?? May Day March in Melbourne. Courtesy Elizabeth Coldicutt and David Muir.

Bob Mathews filming demonstration, Melbourne 19??. Courtesy Mathews family.

Prices and the People (1948) stills.

Betty Lacey, Vic Arnold (pointing) Bob Mathews (far right) at Melbourne Film Festival at Olinda in 1952. Courtesy Mathews family.

Ken Coldicutt. Courtesy Elizabeth Coldicutt.

Cecil Holmes. Courtesy Film Australia.

John Heyer. Deane Williams collection.

Dan McAlpine (Chips Rafferty) and Mary Parsons (Daphne Campbell in The Overlanders (1946). Courtesy National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Tom Kruse (left), William Henry Butler (right) in The Back of Beyond (1954). Courtesy of National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Back of Beyond (1954). Deane Williams collection.

Damien Parer, Maslyn Williams, Frank Hurley and George Silk. Courtesy National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Mike and Stefani (1958). Courtesy Film Australia.

Mike and Stefani (1958). Courtesy Film Australia.

Mike and Stefani (1958). Courtesy National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Mike and Stefani (1958). Courtesy Film Australia.

Mike and Stefani (1958). Courtesy Film Australia.

Mike and Stefani (1958). Courtesy Film Australia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am greatly indebted to many people, all of whom provided support and advice and I wish I could thank everyone here. My first thankyou must go to Bill Routt for his endless patience, assistance and unique ability to provide encouragement. My thanks to Ross Gibson for his mentorship, for encouragement, accommodation and yarning in Sydney. Thanks to John Hughes for granting me access to his Realist Film Unit/Association collection that forms the primary material for Chapter 1 and for encouraging me to read Australian film historically.

Thanks to Paul Adams, Chris Long, Albert Moran and Angela O’Brien for access to their unpublished research; to Ken Berryman, Helen Tully and Zsuzsi Szucs at the National Film and Sound Archive for access to all the films and the interviews with John Heyer and Cecil Holmes and to Martha Ansara for her interview with John Heyer. Thanks to Aysen Mustafa, Leigh Astbury, Ina Bertrand, Rolando Caputo, Sally Carr, Felicity Collins, John Cumming, Graeme Cutts, Annie Goldson, Helen Grace, Kevin Hart, John Hess, Brian MacFarlane, Andrew Milner, Gaye Naismith, Tom O’Regan, Keyan Tomaselli and Constantine Verevis for their assistance at various times, all of which proved valuable. Thanks to Judy Adamson, Lloyd Edmonds, Edna Fitzsimons, Amira Inglis, Ed Schefferle, Dot Thompson, Catherine Duncan, Ken Coldicutt, Elizabeth Coldicutt, Gerry Harant, Bob Klepner, Joan Long, Anna Muir, Roslyn Poignant, Colin Dean, Eddie Allison and Don and Nicky Munro for providing accounts of their era. Special thanks to the late Cecil Holmes, Bob Mathews, John Heyer and to Gerry Harant for agreeing to be interviewed and for permission to use their words in this book and to the late Ron Maslyn Williams for permission to access the interview with Andrew Pike and Merrilyn Fitzpatrick held by the National Film and Sound Archive.

Different versions of some portions of this book have appeared in Metro 100 (1994), 104 (December 1995), and 129/30 (Spring 2001); Screening the Past Issue 2 (1997) and Issue 7 (1999); Australian Studies [UK] 17: 1 (Summer 2002); Filmnews 23: 9 (1993); Studies in Australasian Film 1: 1 (2007) and in two collections: Screening the Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film, edited by Ken Berryman (Canberra: National Film and Sound Archive [Australia], 1995); From Grierson to the Docu-Soap: Breaking the Boundaries, edited by John Izod and Richard Kilborn with Matthew Hibberd (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2000).

PREFACE

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Melbourne-based poet Bernard O’Dowd wrote a sonnet entitled ‘Australia’, in which he described the new nation as the ‘Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space’.

It’s a great line. Say it out loud a few times and you’ll never forget it. But don’t believe it. Argue with it instead. For one thing, Australia may well hakve been the first geographical space to appear in terrestrial time. But more to the point, this notion that Australia is isolated, abandoned, and desolately awaiting the news, it’s a notion only half right and it simply does not accord with the way human beings have always functioned here. Suspicion of outside influences is one defining characteristic of Australia, but the obverse is true too. The trade of goods and ideas has long been a mainstay of Australian society. For example, there have been centuries of interactions between Macassan sailors and North Australian Yolngnu people. Elsewhere in the continent, commodities and information were carried hundreds of kilometres along communication channels that were kept open for thousands of years. And in more recent times – once the Europeans had colonized the place – the newcomers maintained a kind of mania for connectedness, sending and receiving messages and merchandise back and forth to the larger world as if their lives depended on these transactions, which was indeed the case in the early decades of the settlement. Understood like this, the country has a history of remediation, a history that has been active, most likely, for many centuries.

By the middle of the twentieth century, documentary film was part of this history. Even as the documentary was in evolution and contestation worldwide, the Australian variant of the form was being imported and produced in multiple, surprising modes and sub-genres. With his new book, Deane Williams helps us see this creative unruliness clearly. In Williams’ account, we see how policy-driven nation-building vied with aesthetic envisaging and spiritual questing, how transnational commerce (the Shell company’s film units, for example) intertwined with the local chapters of socialist cultural troupes, how nationalists and globalists circled around each other and sometimes traded places. We see, in fact, a kaleidoscopic swirl of documentary activities happening in a place at a time within an economy where we have customarily been told nothing existed, or at least nothing other than dun imitations of British-style informational programs spoken over an illustrative spool of prosaic, evidentiary pictures.

Instead, following Williams’ investigation we see a documentary culture that was multifarious, ingenious and energetic. We see a culture defying its smallness and its supposedly marginal placement. We see a culture engaged with Asia, Russia, middle-Europe, the South Pacific, the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe as well as with its own indigenous and recently immigrant societies. Indeed we see a documentary culture that, for all its fragility and lack of industrial scale, was perhaps the least parochial of any in the world.

And in seeing this, we can’t help but see the world differently too. I mean the world of documentary film, of course, but also the world of nations, of international ideologies, of aesthetic and philanthropic movements, of money. And the world of devotion. For this is what Williams shows most strikingly: how the post-war documentary movement in Australia was lively with devotion, no matter how contradictory, no matter how antagonistic some of the strands may have been. As local film-makers addressed and adapted the documentary form, they reinvented it and remediated it and gave it back to the world in ways that force us to examine anew the entire global phenomenon of realist representation.

In looking closely at a small and seemingly insignificant site of documentary production, Williams has also given us a much broader vision. And he has offered it back to the world.

So the remediation continues.

Ross Gibson

Professor of Contemporary Arts at the University of Sydney

Sydney, May 2008

INTRODUCTION: GRIERSON DIMINISHED

In many of the international histories and accounts of documentary film John Grierson is afforded a substantial role. Numerous books on documentary film attribute to him the first use of the term ‘documentary’ in relation to film including Lewis Jacobs’s The Documentary Tradition, which contains a famous review of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana in which Grierson wrote ‘of course Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value’ (Jacobs 1979: 25). Forsyth Hardy contributes to the myth, eliding the study and production of documentary film and the subject of his biography, writing: ‘in the early thirties a new word and a new name began to appear with some regularity in the public prints of the English-speaking world. The new word was documentary and the new name John Grierson’ (Hardy 1966: 13). Grierson was a major contributor to the early writing on documentary. His essays in World Film News, Cinema Quarterly and Documentary Newsletter, not only served his purpose of drawing attention to the films, they also became part of the fledgling international network of cinema journals. Grierson’s assertiveness in ‘First principles of documentary’, ‘The E.M.B. Film Unit’ and ‘The course of realism’, all reprinted in Grierson on Documentary, were prominent contributions to the discourse of realist film and, of course, to the figure of John Grierson. For film communities outside of Britain, like Australia, these essays often preceded the availability of the films Grierson had been involved with and proffered a particular reception of the films. Not only were the films made by people such as Harry Watt, Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright, Arthur Elton and Alberto Cavalcanti under the banner British documentary movement understood as Grierson films, they were often understood through the vision for them that Grierson proposed.

One prominent way that Australian documentary (and to some extent feature) film production has been understood is in relation to a mythicized trip made by Grierson to this country. He visited Canada, New Zealand and Australia from 1938 to 1940 representing the Imperial Relations Trust who, Graham Shirley and Brian Adams write, employed him to report on ‘the style of official documentary work in each country and make suggestions about future activity’ (Shirley and Adams 1989: 165). Although Grierson visited and made recommendations early in the war, it was not until 1945 that the supposed effects of Grierson’s recommendations were seen to be implemented in Australia, although in a modified form: the establishment of an Australian National Film Board (ANFB).

In many general accounts, the emergence of the ANFB has often been directly associated with Grierson. In Projecting Australia, Albert Moran explains the ‘metamorphosis’ of the previous Film Division of the Department of Information into the Australian National Film Board in 1945 by writing ‘to understand this change, we must begin with the 1940 visit to Australia of John Grierson, the father of the British documentary film’ (Moran 1991: 2). Underpinning Moran’s understanding is a reliance on the figure of Grierson as a foundation upon which the discourse of documentary film in this country has been built. Similarly, Graham Shirley and Bryan Adams claim that ‘[t]he achievements of the Grierson movement were eventually to influence the documentary production of no less than ten nations’ (Shirley and Adams 1989: 165). However, Grierson was not well received in Australia. While the conservative Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies ‘agreed to co-operate with Grierson and provide him with whatever information he needed for his report to the Trust’ (Bertrand and Collins 1981: 98), his reputation counted for little in directly influencing government policy.

Grierson arrived in Australia expecting the same kind of courteous attention he had received in Canada, and on his arrival in Sydney he began well by having talks with representatives of the New South Wales Government. Ulrich Ellis, of the Commonwealth Department of Commerce, then escorted him to Canberra and Melbourne, where both host and guest became increasingly puzzled and frustrated at the politely distant reception and the difficulty of obtaining an interview with the Prime Minister. When Menzies finally did see Grierson they did not get on well: Grierson became convinced that nothing would come of it and that his whole visit to Australia was a waste of time. He did present two reports to the Australian government, a short and rather informal one and later a more detailed one. Both were tactfully critical of the situation he found: he commented that Australia was ‘well behind other leading countries’, but that the potential existed for great achievements. However, the response to these reports was as cool as to his personal representations. Ellis attributed this indifference variously to the personal incompatibility of Menzies and Grierson, to lack of interest in the Imperial Relations Trust, and to fear of trespassing on private enterprise. He also pointed out that the subsequent Labor Government showed no more interest than Menzies had. (Bertrand and Collins 1981: 98)

This is not to say that Grierson had no influence. As we will see, Grierson’s tenets for documentary were influential internationally and Australian documentary makers and lobbyists drew on them as models for institutional documentary such as that made at the ANFB. Yet Grierson was one influence among many.

For my purposes, the major influence of Grierson’s work may be said to lie in the stylistic attributes that emanate from what was understood to be the social needs of a country like Australia. Post-war Australia was envisaged as needing reconstruction as a nation and documentary film was to play a major role in this nation-building. Moran, in his ‘Australian documentary cinema’, reads the role of the ANFB’s productions through Grierson’s essay ‘First principles of documentary’.

It was felt that such a film should help to construct a unified nation by showing one part of the country to other parts. It was to focus on the kinds of social problems facing a particular part of the nation and would show how these were being overcome. It needed to get away from the cliches of ‘kangaroos, koala bears and fields of waving wheat’ and had instead, to focus on elements of Australia and the national experience not usually seen. Such a film was not to be imitative of British or American films and if it were to be dramatised, then actors rather than stars were to be used. In any case, the film should not have been studio bound but rather, it was to be shot on location, and of course, had to be documentary. (Moran 1983: 92)

Grierson’s letter ‘Memorandum to the Right Honourable, the Prime Minister’, the second report Grierson presented, written on a ship as he travelled to New Zealand, may be understood as a kind of manifesto for such a Film Board.

1. The film is a powerful medium of information and if mobilised in an orderly way under a determined government policy, is of special value to the Australian Government at the present juncture.

2. It could do much in the following vital matters:

(a) Break down sectionalism and induce a national viewpoint, by bringing alive Australia to itself in terms of films describing national effort and constructive contributions to the more important fields of national activity.

(b) Bring the disparate elements of the war effort together and create in the Australian mind an integrated view of the national war purpose and war effort.

(c) Bring into the public imagination the problems, responsibilities and achievements of Government.

(d) Project to other countries a view of Australia as a powerful and progressive people, fulfilling its responsibilities to a large new territory – a matter of great importance today in international information.

(e) By projecting Australia, contribute substantially to the ‘projection’ of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

(‘Memorandum’ in Moran and O’Regan 1985: 72–73)

This particularly loaded set of proposals represents Grierson’s position on Australia as a member of the Commonwealth, yet as we will see, the focus on the singular influence of these proposals slowly diminished with the consideration of other forces at hand at this time.

For example, although Albert Moran had mentioned in Projecting Australia that Heyer’s The Valley is Ours relied on Pare Lorentz’s The River (Moran 1991: 49), it seemed to me that there must be something more than simple imitation occurring here. My understanding of The Back of Beyond (1954), in particular, had, up until this point, been in relation to ideas of nation-building and Griersonian ideals for documentary. I had taken up Ross Gibson’s suggestion that a comparison with Night Mail (1936) may have proved useful (Gibson 1989: 83). These two suggestions led to comparisons with a whole set of landscape documentaries, particularly the work performed under Roosevelt’s New Deal such as the films of Lorentz, and those made by Joris Ivens, Robert Flaherty and Alexander Hammid. These films provoked a consideration of larger economic, political and cultural shifts in the Depression-era United States which, for me, suggested a model which was being remade in post-war Australia leading to the production of films derived from US models. In Chapter 3 I trace these textual similarities in Heyer’s The Valley is Ours and The Back of Beyond to Night Mail, Harry Watt’s Ealing production of The Overlanders (1945), Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1935) and The River (1936), Flaherty’s The Land (1942) and Hammid’s The Valley of the Tennessee (1944) in relation to New Deal and similar policies of social reform in post-war Australia.

Maslyn Williams’s Mike and Stefani is a film unlike much Australian institutional production in the post-war period. This film was not like the films of Heyer, for example, because it drew on a model for film-making that was less informational and more ‘humanist’. The film had been discussed by Moran in Projecting Australia as a neo-realist docu-drama (Moran 1991: 46), but I wanted to know more about this equation of a style of film-making, which I had associated principally with André Bazin and Roberto Rossellini, with Williams’s self-proclaimed post-war left Catholic world view. An exploration of the lineage to which Bazin belonged led me to Emmanuel Mounier, Roger Leenhardt and the journal Esprit through which the ideas known collectively as ‘Personalism’ were propounded.

As I have indicated already, there was a pattern of consistent remaking and transforming of international cinematic, institutional and cultural models emerging in the research, which had been couched in terms of ‘influence’, ‘reliance’ and ‘imitation’ by Australian film historians. In the last chapter of this book I address these concerns in relation to the broader settler culture of white Australia. I consider the processes of remaking and transformation not just as a result of the ‘colonial condition’ but as one predicated on the international, what we now call global, film culture that flowered in the post-war years. In essence all film cultures, internationally, imitated; everyone was imitating everyone else. In the conclusion I address the notion of settlement as one key to unlocking the way that the imitative character of colonial cultural production has been deemed simply imitative and therefore debased. I then go on to suggest suitable ways of thinking ourselves out of the binds of colonialism.

The understanding of Australian documentary film in the post-war years that I brought to this project was gleaned, in the main, from Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan’s ‘Two discourses of Australian film’ and Moran’s ‘Australian documentary cinema’ and Projecting Australia. Moran’s work enabled me to understand Heyer’s The Back of Beyond and Williams’ Mike and Stefani in relation to the discourse of institutional documentary and the way that these films were bound up in the nation-building milieu of the post-war years. It also provided a glimpse of the kind of mirroring that eventually led to my own historical work in this book. The emphasis that Moran’s work gave to institutional documentary, however, had not provided for the more ‘radical’ films of the Realist Film Unit and that of Cecil Holmes – films also ‘influenced’ by foreign and local models.

In their 1983 ‘Two discourses of Australian film’, Moran and O’Regan assert that they want to ‘challenge the various histories of Australian film that already exist’ and ‘to call for a different account of Australian film than that already entered into’ by Eric Reade’s The Australian Screen, Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper’s Australian Films 1900–1977: Guide to Feature Film Production, and Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins’ Government and Film in Australia (Moran and O’Regan 1983: 163). These books, they assert, present Australian film as ‘a homogenous object and the point of these histories is to offer a teleology of that object, an account of linear growth and development’ (Moran and O’Regan 1983: 163). Against this type of account they argue:

Australian film is not a single unified object but a series of different objects, differently realised. Australian film can be thought of as a series of different discursive constructions, the discourses occupying a series of different institutional sites that variously allow or impede the issue of the discourse as a set of filmic texts … There is no evolution or development across time. There is instead a series of different distinct constructions of Australian film having little or nothing in common with each other. (Moran and O’Regan 1983: 163)

Unexpectedly, Moran and O’Regan make no mention of Graham Shirley and Brian Adams’s Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years published in 1983, the same year as ‘Two discourses’. In some ways Australian Cinema represents a slightly different kind of history from the others – one in which Australian film history is a series of anecdotal moments often gleaned from oral accounts. Although presented in chronological order, Shirley and Adams’s history forms a more fragmented account of Australian cinema that includes, for example, all the Australian documentary films addressed in this book. Yet again their history is an overarching one spanning 75 years of Australian film culture in 280 pages all in the service of the feature narrative ‘revival’ of the 1970s. They write,

This journey through the first eighty years to 1975 documents some of the social, financial, political and artistic events which combined to make a fascinating story, culminating at a time when all these elements came together to provide a springboard for a more substantial and continuing Australian film industry. (Shirley and Adams 1989: viii)

Despite its fragmentary nature and attention to minutia, Australian Cinema is a prime example of an Australian film history that is ‘an account of linear growth and development’ (Moran and O’Regan 1983: 163).

Moran and O’Regan are interested in understanding the Australian cinema through a discursive shift from ‘Australian film as documentary’ in the period 1940 to 1960 to ‘Australian film as feature a narrative’ in the period after 1960. Their project is to provide a means of thinking themselves out of the paradigm of a unified national industry and to propose some reasons for the discursive shift from documentary film to feature narrative which has diminished the attention given to documentary film in academic writing in this country (Moran and O’Regan 1983: 163).

In contrast to this book, the discourse of documentary that they locate relied on Griersonian tenets to fulfil ‘social duties’ based on ‘the assumption of a universal humanism. People everywhere, so the argument goes, are human, just like ourselves, and therefore inherently deserving of our curiosity and interest’ (Moran and O’Regan 1983: