The Hawaiian Holiday
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel, my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of Melbourne. For seven years during the 1950’s and 1960’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
As I used to drive my big, black BSA 500 motor bike around Waltham and Princess Street, up Kensington Road and Mount Alexander Road, I never thought that this would be the scene of some very interesting amateur movie making.
The environment was not normally conducive to film‑making of any kind. The slum houses were all narrow, only 18 feet wide, and most of the cast iron work and wooden lattice around the front of the houses possessed peeling paint, pickets were off the fence and windows were broken and stuffed with damp newspapers. The abattoirs, sale yards and the leather tanneries down near Debney’s paddock did not make for a sweet smelling backdrop for anything.
Yet those streets became the scenes of some of Australia’s greatest movie productions ‑ at least that is what we thought at the time.
We started by making colourful audio visuals recording scripts and then making 35mm slides to accompany them. “The Vision Splendid” leant very heavily upon the poem “My Country” by Dorothea MacKellar. It was far from anything we could see through the gritty and grimy smoke‑laden streets of the slums. We then produced some dramas with the scenes being acted out and photographed, with the scripts recorded on tape.
However, all of this paled into insignificance with the production of our first feature movie “The Hawaiian Holiday”. Running for 30 minutes this sound movie film occupied the young people of Newmarket and Ascot Vale for weeks on end. Teenagers who had been placed on probation for stealing cars and vandalism to public property became cameramen, actors, grips, script writers and sound recordists.
The script was written by a committee, and remembering that a camel is the result of a committee’s decision to design a horse, you can imagine what the script was like. All sorts of ideas were thrown in and out of it as the story emerged.
The theme was that Melbourne’s winter was so bad that the young people of the community decided to have a holiday in Hawaii, where the surf was inviting, the palm trees were waving gently in the balmy breezes and where the sun shone all day. In order to enjoy an Hawaiian holiday they had to find transport to get them there. A search of resources revealed that we had inadequate money. So the youth group decided to smuggle aboard public transport to take them to Hawaii.
Using trick photography and by removing the back seats of a Volkswagen car, we filmed 27 teenagers getting into a Volkswagen. Actually you did not see them getting out the other side. But by the time the car was loaded with bodies sticking out the sun roof, the windows and hiding underneath the front bonnet, the image was complete. Erratically the old Volkswagen careered off towards the local railway station where the 27 tumbled out of the car and tried to elude the ticket collectors on the railway stations. However, railway guards and ticket collectors and the station master, all co‑opted into the group of actors, succeeded in throwing out the young people. Back into the Volkswagen they once more climbed and drove to the Essendon Aerodrome. There they eluded security guards and airways officials to hijack an Ansett aircraft.
The co‑operation we got from the airport people was marvellous and an Ansett plane was made available for the young people to “hijack”. The cameras ground on as the young people staged the hijack attempt only to be eventually repulsed by flight engineers and airport officials. Escaping from the airport they once more climbed into the battered Volkswagen and careered off escaping the security forces and police towards the harbour.
Once more the harbourside officials were most co‑operative to a group of young film‑makers from the slum areas as they filmed the teenagers sneaking through the dockyards and attempting to board a passenger vessel as stowaways. Once more discovery led to flight, with the leader of the group accidentally being tipped overboard into the freezing Port Philip Bay. Emerging wringing wet, despair settled upon the assembled group. The battered Volkswagen took them back to the club house. There someone had an idea ‑ why not turn the club house into a piece of Hawaii? So the young people worked together to create palm trees, beaches, Hawaiian food and dressed themselves in grass skirts and had, in their own club house, an enjoyable Hawaiian holiday.
That film was actually the introduction to an evening attended by a hundred or more other young people who had gathered together in grass skirts and Hawaiian shirts to eat Hawaiian food and to celebrate in the midst of winter “An Hawaiian Holiday”.
As I run the old film through now and think of those young people working the cameras, the recording equipment, the lights, and vehicles and contemplate all the work that went into making the script and producing that movie film, I realize that what we were doing was not making films but making Christians.
The friendship that was engendered, the close bonds of working together making the scenery, the sets, preparing the food, making the grass skirts and the filming, both on location and in the club house, built relationships between those young people who were Christian and those who were not. It built relationships between girls and boys who found life partners in that same group. It built a bond between the church and a group of slum kids in trouble with the law and the community that led to many of those same young people becoming decent citizens, parents and community leaders today in the cities in which they live.
Our attempt at making films was amateurish. But when I see today teenagers sitting in pubs drinking alcohol because this is the only place where they can hear their music played by live bands, I realize how much better were those days when Hollywood came to the streets of Newmarket and we used film‑making as an excuse to create lasting bonds of friendship and Christian experience among the street kids of Newmarket.
That was the beginning. I continued making films, until I established Wesley Film Productions, Australia’s most successful multimillion dollar documentary film company, and produced 46 films made in a dozen countries around the Mediterranean Sea, at Gallipoli, in China and other places. These films were made in half a dozen different languages and screened to millions of people on television in scores of countries. And it all started in the slums of Melbourne.
We were far more successful in making Christians than films although I never realized that, when, after one of those nights of preparing for our film‑making I walked out into the heavy air which was blowing from the abattoirs, started my big black motor bike and headed back to the College of The Bible to continue training for the ministry thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
