Wednesday 2 December 2020 | 1 pm – 2 pm

Online via Zoom, Reserve tickets to receive webinar link

From the earliest days of film in Australia, travelling film exhibitors brought entertainment and news to even the smallest communities. Some filmed mostly factual records of a town and its people. But others were part of a trend of so-called ‘home talent’ or ‘community’ filmmakers who travelled the countryside making fictional films funded by and starring a town’s leading citizens and their families. Graham Shirley will follow a brief overview of Australia’s travelling film exhibitors with a more detailed look at the home talent films made across the continent. The presentation will look at how a stock standard script called The Adventures of Dot was repeatedly filmed as its itinerant directors and cameramen visited town after town.

About the speaker:

Graham Shirley has worked as a director, writer and researcher on Australian historical documentaries. He has conducted numerous oral histories and is co-author of Australian Cinema: The First 80 Years (Currency Press, 1983 & 1989). From 2006 to 2014 he worked for the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, initially as a senior curator and subsequently as NFSA Historian. In mid-2014 he returned to freelance researching, writing and consulting. He is an RAHS councillor and a member of the Professional Historians Association (NSW & ACT).

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