Government bonded teacher takes up his position in an outback town. He is brutalized by the male (‘ocker’) culture he finds there. School uniforms signify the return to civilisation. Coming-of-age, sexuality and family. Brother and sister lost in the bush, meeting up with an Aboriginal boy. Jill is a kindergarten teacher and Jack is a motorbike riding delinquent. Smiley at his bush school with fellow students, and teachers. Classroom scenes, teachers and Sunday school. The boy Smiley attends a bush public school. She is taught as if a white girl to separate her from her people. An Aboriginal girl raised by a white family, including her ‘home schooling’. One of the characters, Ann Rudd is a school teacher. School-aged children and a boarding school for the eldest. Young female teacher and a wide variety of real school children in each of the towns.
From poems of the 1870s set in rural NSW. In a one teacher Catholic bush school, a male teacher works with boys and girls. A priest teaches boys to box and demonstrates other athletic skills. Films considered by the author of this entry to be of most interest to historians of education are marked with an asterisk. Information given includes the title of the film, its year of release, its director and a very brief description of its themes or plot as it relates to schools, teachers and school students. Such films are historical artefacts of cultural significance in their own right, but their relationship to the results of scholarly research in Australian educational history are variable. In some cases, popular films, such as the seminal Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Devil’s Playground (1976) may have had an enduring and powerful effect on the ways that film audiences respectively imagine private girls’ schooling in the late nineteenth century, or Catholic boys’ schooling in the middle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless the representations of schooling in films such as those listed below may be a guide to both common and uncommon understandings about how schooling operated historically.
Very few of these films would have involved historians in their making although aspects of these films such as decisions about costuming and settings often were historically informed. The representations of schools, teachers and students in these feature films derive from a range of sources that include the creative imaginations of the writers, directors and actors, among many others, who made them.