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Brenton Stacey
Public relations officer

An Avondale College lecturer has appeared on a national radio program to speak about how Australian filmmakers portrayed diggers on screen during the Great War.

Dr Daniel Reynaud's interview with Antony Funnell of The Media Report aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National today (April 24). Daniel, a senior lecturer in history, is the author of Celluloid Anzacs, the first study of how the Anzac legend has been portrayed in Australian film and television over 80 years.

"The Great War Anzac representation was generally of a city boy, often quite upper class-he was officer material-and very, very pro-English . . . which is quite a dramatic difference from today's bush Anzac," Daniel (pictured) told Funnell. . . . "Australian nationalism and British imperialism were generally perceived as one and the same thing. So, a patriotic Australian was truly British."

The conversation covered the style and popularity of the nearly 20 films about military engagement produced in Australia during the war. All began as derivatives of those produced in Britain and most were box office failures. Daniel noted, though, how a film called The enemy within, produced in 1918 and starring sportsman and actor Snowy Baker, helped renew interest. "It looked like a war film to the authorities but looked like a popular adventure film to everyone else, so you could pick and choose your own reason for going to see it."

Daniel also used his role in the partial reconstruction of Australia's first Gallipoli movie, The hero of the Dardanelles, to speak about the blurring of real and reconstructed footage. Reviewers praised the 20-minute silent film, produced in Sydney 1915, for its realism. "Of course, no one making the film had been to Gallipoli, so how did they know what it was like?" asked Daniel. "But to them, it felt real."

The Media Report is a weekly half-hour program that takes a critical look at the latest developments in the communications industry. The program featuring Daniel is entitled, "The media at war: then and now." It is available as streaming audio and as a podcast from www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/.

Credit: Ann Stafford