The Vapour Trail

I must admit I’ve never really been interested old films, or film history. People could talk about Alfred Hitchcock or Bette Davis or Metropolis or The Third Man, and it would draw barely a flicker of interest. Not long ago, I started reading around the edges of the massive scholarship on film’s relation with melodrama (drawn by an interest in melodrama), and mostly I’ve been unmoved or even vaguely annoyed by its references to films I’ve never seen, and to the stills of characters fixed in a rictus of desire or fear or shock (like the one below) which appear in so much of this work.

Still from The Cat and the Canary (1927), from filmwolf’s flickr photos.

Very recently, however, I’ve realised that I simply can’t be interested in late 19th and early 20th century theatre without finding out about the development of film in the same period. When I was in Mitchell Library the other week, I was reading newspaper reports of all the suburban vaudeville-cum-picture houses opening up in 1910s Australia: Harry Clay’s Newtown Bridge Theatre (now the eyesore known as The Hub across from Newtown Station in Sydney) being a suggestive example. I’ve also been reading Robert Allen’s account of the way second-tier vaudeville managers became successful in American cities in the first decade of the 20th century by creating hybrid vaudeville/film shows in less-than-swank venues. So the people attracted to these shows were seeing Keystone comedy reels as well as comic acts and acrobats, and it’s useless to cordon off the one from the other and say (as I have until now) that film isn’t my thing.

On top of that: last night I was listening to Ira Sachs talk about Married LIfe, a film set in the 1940s which he directed and co-wrote and is just hitting Australian cinemas now. He had such an acute sense of cinematic history, such an articulate, coolly impassioned sense of the place of his film in it, that it made me rue something of my ignorance.

The Australian Historical Association conference in Melbourne was overly big and unwieldy, as always: it is always less rewarding to go to something with masses of parallel sessions like that than to a smaller affair. The best part of the conference for me in this regard was the Network for Research into Women’s History, organised by Penny Russell: a day’s session on ‘Feminism and Sexuality’. There was a sense of collegiality and even intimacy there which was absent from the rest of proceedings.

In particular, Susan Magarey gave a wonderful and even hilarious paper on the sexual experiences and attitudes of second-wave feminists in Australia, herself included. Many of the people she was talking about were in the room: people who came of age in the 1970s, so to speak, and were either laughing or blushing as she went along. That was quite special. I had the sense, though, that there were far more of Susan Magarey’s peers in the room than there were women in their thirties like me or younger. And I can’t remember any men at all in Susan’s session (there were perhaps three in the session in which I gave my paper earlier in the day).

The Network for Research into Women’s History needs younger men and women to sustain itself in future. So if you have it in mind to come to the day session at the Australian Historical Association’s conference on the Sunshine Coast in July 2009, let me know. I will be organising it, on a theme yet to be decided. Suggestions welcome.

More things my grandmother remembers of her childhood in Nundle. Her uncle Cecil Reichel and Kitchener Hall, who ran a garage and milk bar-and-lolly-shop respectively, used to set up at the Town Hall as a cinema every now and then, at the very end of the 1930s. Perhaps every six months they’d show a Charlie Chaplin reel – they’re the only ones my grandmother recalls playing, anyway. They watched silent films even though the talkies had hit the cities some years beforehand. If she remembers rightly, Nundle didn’t even have electricity then. Her enterprising uncle and partner must have had a generator to play Charlie Chaplin at all. The kids would all cram onto wooden benches up the back, and one of the sensations that still strikes her was the after-dark cold once they poured from the Town Hall – the whole town and surrounding district. She and the woman looking after her at the time would head up the hill, breath steaming, away from the gaslight of the hall into blackness.

As well as the occasional medicine show, busking actors would sometimes set up in the oval beside Nundle Town Hall. My grandmother remembers men playing ukeleles or guitars, and a clown in the full Grimaldi outfit: white face, red cheeks, frilled neck, suit covered with spots, performing comic tumbling and sleight-of-hand routines. Sometimes these strolling actors would set up a tent on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon; sometimes they would simply rig up a stage and perform in the open, every kid in the vicinity milling round.

Some time ago now I decided to turn oral historian with my grandmother, pumping her for facts about medicine shows. I didn’t get the chance to begin until the week I spent in Sydney recently (just got back to Brisbane actually, after a week also in Melbourne), grabbing the chance for a late-afternoon session. We talked nineteen to the dozen, if I’ve remembered that expression rightly, and I hope for many sessions more.

My grandmother was born in 1933 in Hanging Rock, in rugged country just out of tiny Nundle, north-west New South Wales, Australia. Nundle was a town which had seen thronging crowds during the nineteenth-century gold rushes, but had well and truly dwindled by the time of the Depression in her youth.

Nundle valley from the Hanging Rock look-out

As a small kid, at the end of the 1930s and very early 1940s, my grandmother remembers husband-and-wife teams coming to Nundle and setting up on a platform or the back or a cart on vacant land near the Town Hall. The wife would draw clusters of kids by hanging toffee apples from strings and arranging contests to eat them, or inviting people to seize a sixpence with their mouths in a bucket of flour, hands bound behind their backs. Once a crowd had gathered, the husband would shout out a sing-song spiel about the wonders of the panacea they were peddling. It cured gout, he would say; it healed this, it salved that. ‘And people would buy it’, my grandmother said. ‘There wasn’t a doctor in Nundle then – there’d been quacks before that, but no doctor. Everyone had medicines they’d bought some way or another’.

My grandmother also remembers door-to-door peddlers coming all the way out to their place at Hanging Rock, perhaps hitching a ride with the mail run, and otherwise getting about on foot. (Such a huge amount of effort for what must surely have been a paltry return). The peddlars would string a box-shaped case around their necks which snapped open to reveal serried rows of bottles and ointments. On top of that, everyone in the district had a medicine box of their own, bought from the Red Cross and full of bandages and books with anatomical information from which she learned a risqué thing or two.

During my grandmother’s childhood, there was also a travelling dentist who took rooms in the hotel at Nundle (the Peel Inn, I think it was called) and pulled teeth for a couple of weeks at a time. He was a drunk, and scary because of it. But people like my grandmother’s stepmother went to him anyway. They would wait their turn in the hotel foyer, listening, perhaps, to the groans of other people inside his room. And afterwards, they would return home ruefully, balled handkerchief in fist, their gums full of blood and air.

At Mitchell Library this week, I’ve come across a collection of photographs from the late 1920s and 1930s in inner-Sydney and Newtown. The photos were taken by Anthony Swinburne, a man with an evident hankering for the raw life of inner-urban yards and industrial kerbsides, and for the life of the stage.

The people Swinburne depicts are all cafe staff and vaudeville actors, hauled before the lens on a break and snapped in a slapdash moment before rushing back to work. The theatrical world he photographs is a far cry from the glitzy images of Gaiety Theatres, Ziegfeld girls and Keith vaudeville stars that you find in the promo-shots and posters and gushing memoirs of the 1920s. They show women in ill-fitting bloomers and bathing caps standing against a brick wall with the gritty asphalt and warehouses of Newtown visible to one side. Or men in rumpled shirts against a fence with broken palings, and some girl in a spangly leotard, arms upraised in a revue-dancer’s pose, the ragged grass of a back-lot behind her.

Swinburne’s pictures have been taken on some kind of little Kodak or Box Brownie camera. They’re small, badly reproduced, often blurred or half-obscured by shadow. I wish it wasn’t so expensive to order them from the library: I want their smudged impressionistic pathos to mull over, having something of their graininess and down-at-heelness in mind as I read of accounts of ’sparkling’ Tivoli actors and gleaming-legged revue girls.

Reference

Anthony Swinburne, photographs. Mitchell Library, Sydney, Pic. Acc. 4836