Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Australians embraced film from the beginning. Edison’s
‘‘kinetoscope’’ 31 mm film-viewers arrived in Sydney in
November 1884. Over the next five months, twenty-five
thousand Australians viewed the machines. In 1898,
Henry Lawson’s ‘‘The Australian Cinematograph’’ was
published, and the story’s imaginative use of color and
movement encouraged the film historian Ina Bertrand to
describe it as ‘‘Australia’s first screenplay.’’ Lawson’s story
appeared two years after Australia’s first film, Passengers
Alighting from the Paddle Steamer ‘‘Brighton’’ at Manly,
which was filmed by the Frenchman Marius Sestier
(1861–1928) in October 1896. However, it was Sestier’s
next venture the following month, at the Flemington
Racecourse in Melbourne, that captured the public imagination when he filmed a number of races, including the
Melbourne Cup race of 1896. Unfortunately, Sestier did
not believe that there was much future in his occupation,
and he left the country with the negative; it was not until
1969 that a copy of the film was presented to the National
Film Library in Canberra.
Early film production came from an unlikely source,
the Limelight Department of the Salvation Army.
Beginning in 1891, the Limelight Department, under
the supervision of its chief technician, Joseph Perry
(1863–1943), developed slides to accompany religious
presentations (it ‘‘officially’’ opened on 11 June 1892).
In 1897 Perry began using motion pictures, and he
established Australia’s first film studio behind the
Salvation Army’s Bourke Street headquarters in
Melbourne, where Commandant Herbert Booth scripted
and directed ‘‘feature length’’ presentations of oneminute films and slides. The most well known was
Soldiers of the Cross, a lecture on the Christian martyrs
that consisted of 15 one-minute films and 220 slides, first
screened on 13 September 1900. The popularity of these
films encouraged the Salvation Army to undertake secular projects, and in 1901 it produced a thirty-five-minute
film, The Inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth,
on behalf of the New South Wales government.
The Story of the Kelly Gang, Australia’s first fully
integrated, secular, fictional narrative film, appeared in
1906. Stage productions dramatizing the exploits of
Australia’s most famous bushranger, Ned Kelly, were
common even before his hanging in 1880, and J. & N.
Tait, which held the stage rights to the exploits of the
Kelly Gang, encouraged the Melbourne chemists Milliard Johnson and William Gibson to make a film on Kelly’s
life up to the point where he was captured by the police
at the Glenrowan Hotel. With a budget of £1,000, filming took place over a series of weekends in the bush
around Melbourne. Although the running time at the
first screening on 26 December 1906 was reported to be
forty minutes, advertisements for the film claimed its
length to be approximately four thousand feet, or sixtyseven minutes, provoking speculation that this was the
world’s first feature film. The film enjoyed great success
in Australia and Britain, where it was advertised as the
longest film ever made. It also encouraged the development of the ‘‘bushranging genre,’’ Australia’s most popular
film genre until it was banned by the New South Wales
Police Department in 1912. The police justified the ban
on the basis that bushranging films ridiculed the law and
transformed lawbreakers into heroes. The police claimed
that such films would have a negative effect on children
and teenagers. The ban lasted until the 1940s.
Australia was a prolific producer of relatively long
films between 1906 and 1912. For example, in 1911,
when the film industries in the United States and Britain
concentrated mainly on short films, more than twenty
Australian films exceeded three thousand feet, with nearly
half of them greater than four thousand feet. This boom
in local production did not last, and during World War I,
Hollywood began to dominate Australian screens. By
1920, Australasian Films controlled nearly three-quarters
of local exhibition under its Union Theatres banner, and
it demonstrated only a sporadic interest in local production. Its main competitor, Hoyts Pictures, was even less
interested in local production. In the 1950s Hoyts and
Australasian’s successor, Greater Union Organisation,
was joined by a third national chain, Village Theatres,
which became active in the financing and distribution of
Australian films in the early 1970s.