A trilogy of stories reflecting a socialist view of Australian life in the 1950s, with a particular focus on mateship. Joe Wilson's Mates, based on Henry Lawson's 'The Union Buries its Dead', shows union members in a country town holding a funeral for an unknown tramp who carries a union card. In Frank Hardy's A Load of Wood, men in a make-work job during the Depression assert themselves by stealing firewood from a farmer and distributing it to the poor. The third story, The City by Ralph Peterson, follows young lovers trying to make a life in the hustle and bustle of Sydney.
Based on Henry Lawson's poem 'The Union Buries its Dead,' Joe Wilson's Mates is set in a small country town during the 1890s. Joe Wilson is a stranger in town, with no known family or friends. When he dies, he is found to be carrying a union card, so the local members decide to honour one of their own with a decent funeral. The narrative sees the sweating union men making frequent stops on their way to the graveyard to rest, drink beer, and bicker.
Adapted from the 1953 short story 'The Load of Wood' written by Frank Hardy under a pseudonym, this cinematic adaptation is a bleak, almost Soviet-like tale of men suffering out the 1930s Depression in a country town. Although a group of unemployed men is given relief work on the grounds that they cannot afford to buy enough fuel to keep their families warm, two of the men decide to steal a truck-load of wood from a rich man's estate and deliver it to those in the town with a desperate need for warmth.
'Cecil Holmes’s Three in One (1956) represents one of the highpoints of postwar Australian cinema, reframing the common or characteristic theme of “mateship” within more explicitly leftist contexts. But what is most remarkable about the film – which is admittedly uneven in quality, possibly inevitably so considering its tripartite form – is its visual style, both reaffirming and transforming the common preoccupations commonly found in Australian landscape cinema. Also significant are the international models of filmmaking aesthetics that it openly draws upon, ranging from Soviet Montage to Italian neorealism. These plainly visible influences also betray Holmes’s cinephilia; he was a key figure in the New Zealand film society movement of the 1940s, and ran a company, New Dawn Films, that distributed European cinema later in the 1950s.' (Introduction)
'Enduring popular narratives posit the 1950s as a time of gendered oppression and conservative stability. While previous historians have pointed to the social and political changes of the period, their work has understood culture as a passive reflector of these transformations. Through analysis of four Australian films, this article argues that the contemporary cultural landscape was a dynamic space that actively negotiated between competing ideals. Exploring the representation of distinct albeit legitimate models of masculinity in these films, this article reveals the complex and unsteady gender order unfolding in the cultural world of the 1950s.' (Publication abstract)
'Enduring popular narratives posit the 1950s as a time of gendered oppression and conservative stability. While previous historians have pointed to the social and political changes of the period, their work has understood culture as a passive reflector of these transformations. Through analysis of four Australian films, this article argues that the contemporary cultural landscape was a dynamic space that actively negotiated between competing ideals. Exploring the representation of distinct albeit legitimate models of masculinity in these films, this article reveals the complex and unsteady gender order unfolding in the cultural world of the 1950s.' (Publication abstract)
'Cecil Holmes’s Three in One (1956) represents one of the highpoints of postwar Australian cinema, reframing the common or characteristic theme of “mateship” within more explicitly leftist contexts. But what is most remarkable about the film – which is admittedly uneven in quality, possibly inevitably so considering its tripartite form – is its visual style, both reaffirming and transforming the common preoccupations commonly found in Australian landscape cinema. Also significant are the international models of filmmaking aesthetics that it openly draws upon, ranging from Soviet Montage to Italian neorealism. These plainly visible influences also betray Holmes’s cinephilia; he was a key figure in the New Zealand film society movement of the 1940s, and ran a company, New Dawn Films, that distributed European cinema later in the 1950s.' (Introduction)
