This is a 58-year-old 16mm print - not a reconstruction, not a collection of historic stills, but an extraordinary record of the reality of the lives of some of the people of Fitzroy in 1946.

The print belongs to the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence. The Brotherhood came to Fitzroy in 1933, under Fr. Gerard Tucker's direction.

Fr. Tucker, according to a Monash writer, "organised relief of distress and declared war on slums".

This little silent film is one of a trio, part of Fr Tucker's war on slums.
The trio were:
Beautiful Melbourne
These are our children
A place to live.

The three films were made in 1946-47 and only three men were involved.

The first was Fr. Tucker of the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence, a man devoted to helping the people of Fitzroy who lived at the mercy of rapacious landlords.
He commissioned the films.

As well as the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence, in Young Street Fitzroy, there were the clubrooms and theatrette of the Victorian Amateur Cine Society, a group of amateurs using largely 8mm and super-8mm for home movies.

Jack Fitzsimmons won the Members' Cup of the VACS for Gaol Does Not Cure, an examination of chronic alcoholism and the Brotherhood's then unfashionable attitude to alcoholism and related problems.

The third man was Ken Coldicutt, one of thousands demobilised from the armed forces at the end of the Pacific conflict of WWII.

Let's examine the context in which this film was made: 1946 is the year immediately after six years of war, 1939-45.
Civilian life during those years included Manpower Regulations, whereby all able-bodied people were directed to jobs; there was food rationing, that is, coupons for meat, tea, sugar, butter and clothing; and there were no building materials, no building of dwellings. There had in fact been very little building during the 1930's before WWII, because of the Great Depression, 1929-1939.

Unemployment during the Depression was 30% of the male population.

Ken Coldicutt spent his stand-by time as air crew in the RAAF reading cinema history - whilst his mates played poker, or pool or chess - history of cinema from its scientific origins: Train entering the station, and GBS in his garden, to accounts of German, French and Russian silent feature films - such as Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Last Laugh, The Italian Straw Hat, The Mother, Earth, Battleship Potemkin, The General Line, Turksib and so on, and also following the development of British documentary film-making, and the function of the British Film Institute in London.

With Bob Mathews, in late 1945, Ken founded Realist Film Unit with the aim of producing challenging documentary films.

Fr. Tucker would have known of the valiant and effective work of the Communist Party of Australia's anti-eviction squads which operated in Newcastle and Sydney when he worked there during the Depression. He was therefore not afraid to engage a communist film-maker to contribute to his "War on Slums". He commissioned the three films made by Jack Fitzsimmons and Ken Coldicuttt.

The first Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement for finance to construct public housing was still two years in the future - 1948.

Jack Fitzsimmons was a tall man over 6ft, but Ken Coldicutt was about 5ft7, so when these two men went to reconnoitre locations in Napier Street for Beautiful Melbourne and the other films, they were at first mistaken not for plain clothes police but for landlords' agents, come to threaten another eviction.

Not just kids throwing stones, they had bottles hurled at them.

These appalling tenements were utterly vermin ridden - you'll see shots which look like grains of rice - the eggs of body lice - there were bed bugs and fleas - the film makers used DDT insecticide in their socks and trouser cuffs. In such poverty there were no food scraps - this may be the reason for no portraits of cockroaches.

Fr Tucker's vivid commentary when he screened these films always included the statement that such living conditions provided an ideal seed bed for developing communist attitudes.

Film maker John Hughes has researched a comparison of shots and sequences and has established that some interchange occurred.
I can say with confidence that the panning and tilting shots without moving object for the eye to focus on are Fitzsimmons', and the children and dogs are Coldicutt's. Ken had studied the anatomy of human vision: our eyes move horizontally in a series of muscular jerks, so without a moving object on which to focus, the eye automatically focuses on the leading edge of the shot and then searches for visual meaning within the panning or tilting shot, (home movies are full of such panning and tilting).

16mm stock at this time was very, very slow, that is, it needed a great deal of light.
In Napier Street power sources for lights for interiors were few and far between; many metres of heavy power lead and the power source had to be guarded from interference during shooting - one man on guard, one man setting up the lights and explaining what was needed to the tenants as actors; the cine-camera was of course hand cranked.

Jack Fitzsimmons and Ken Coldicutt produced for Fr. Tucker three short films designed to make their audience cry, to impel those who saw the films to seek the rationale for the organisation of a society, a social system which caused and allowed such suffering; to lead to political action for change and social justice rather than material success.

Realist Film Unit in Melbourne consisted, from 1945-47, of two people, Ken Coldicutt and Bob Mathews; Gerry Harant arrived in 1947; I arrived in May 1948, just in time to join the campaign which defeated Wilfred Kent-Hughes' Cinematographic Films Bill - he who described himself as Fascist without the shirt. Realist Film Unit in Melbourne was named after a British unit of the same name, a unit which pioneered the use of concealed camera through one-way glass, to observe young children who were thus unaware of their observers - their most famous series was Children Growing Up.

Making a film in 1946 was prohibitively expensive, so no post-synced sound track was made. Realist Film Unit made two 2-reeler sound films in 1947-48, (and went broke - but that's another story) and turned instead to screening rather than producing documentary films, becoming Realist Film Association, a militant and academic film society, unlike any other film society in its programs, with a membership of hundreds, a committee of management and a role in the establishment of the Victorian Federation of Film Societies, and later, the Olinda Film Festival.

What else?

Fr. Tucker travelled his films far and wide in Victoria, advertising them aggressively as 'The Films the Premier Dare Not See". He accompanied the screening with a both witty and confrontational commentary, daring his audience to examine their consciences and join his 'war on slums".

The word SLUMS - according to "When Fish had Feathers", there was a protest meeting in Collingwood in the 1940's about the terminology, which was seen as a slur. It was pointed out that it referred to the landlords and not the tenants. ("When Fish had Feathers" is a reference to fishing at night on the Yarra and liberating a bird or two from the chook shed of the Convent of The Good Shepherd).

Fr. Tucker respected the people who struggled for a life under such appalling conditions, as did the film makers.

The meaning of the spreadeagle shot: the film is running a bit fast because modern technology might 'fry' it, if it were slowed down to the speed at which it was shot, (that is, sixteen frames per second, silent speed) allowing the meaning of the spreadeagle to sink in. The Collingwood municipal depot in the 1980's also had a hut whose width was such that a man's fingertips with arms outstretched could touch each wall.

The Brotherhood's information draws attention to the sequence showing the Richmond public housing estate: to the contrast in living conditions, the nutritious nursery food, boiled egg at breakfast, glass of milk at bedtime, the bath with two taps, that is, hot water…….

Here today in 2004 we are still looking for more public housing, and campaigning to protect tenants from ruinous rent levels of up to 70% of their pension in the private rental market.

I commend to you: Beautiful Melbourne, 1946.

Elisabeth Coldicutt, May 2004.