[Charles Hayes Home Movies: Reel 5]

The Charles Hayes Home Movie Collection is a collection of home movies originally made on 8mm and 9.5mm film between the 1940s and 1970s by Charles Edward Hayes (1914–1993). The resulting footage shows us the life of a family living in Heathmont in Melbourne’s south east with their many pets and farm animals, their family holidays and gatherings, their suburb and their cars as well as scenes from Melbourne at the time.

This film opens with a ‘red rattler’ train at Lilydale station, in Victoria. It is Christmas Day in 1970 and the filmmaker’s daughter Elenor Peach and her husband Ron are boarding the train. The ‘red rattler’ was the name affectionally given to the ‘Tait carriage’ wooden-bodied electric trains that ran in metropolitan Melbourne, Victoria, from 1919 to the early 1980s (named after the then Commissioner of Railways Sir Thomas Tait).

Most of the film captures a holiday around regional Victoria and include great examples of holiday life in the 1970s, such as men’s and women’s bathing suits, sunglasses, sunhats, beach umbrellas, surfing, picnics and station-wagon cars for travelling and camping at a creek among Australian tea trees.

Originally made using Standard 8mm film.

Selected highlights list:
00:00:02:00 a wonderful close-up of a ‘red rattler’ train pulled up at a station
00:00:25:00 a group of holiday makers sitting on camp chairs next to a creek
00:00:35:00 collecting water from the creek
00:00:57:00 close-ups of the holiday makers including a wonderful example of a handmade 1960s/1970s gingham smocking hat
00:01:50:00 a young woman in a bikini bathing suit and bathing cap enters the fast running creek water
00:02:12:00 swimming and a close-up of the 1960s/1970s rubber bathing cap which is covered in pink flowers
00:02:18:00 looking through insect netting to a man holding a baby (which lends an interesting effect)
00:02:45:00 young men in ‘cut off shorts’ fixing a Holden model car
00:02:53:00 lovely intergenerational picture of a very young baby held by an elderly age man who is wearing braces (rather than a belt)for his trousers of an earlier era
00:03:17:00 swimming along the creek and sitting on the bank
00:04:22:00 focus on a full head of hair ‘curlers’ as used at the time
00:04:29:00 views of rocky terrain and bush and a woman with a camera takes a photo of the filmmaker
00:05:45:00 rock climbing and views the Grampians mountain range (Geriwerd, Gariwerd) in Western Victoria
00:08:19:00 views of the township of Stawell in regional Victoria
00:08:58:00 title ‘Seascape’ written in sand followed by views of the sea and coastline, likely to be around the coastal town of Lorne in Victoria
00:09:55:00 surfboards strapped to a van followed by golfing on a cliff overlooking the sea
00:10:05:00 views of surfers in the water, a swimmer walking from the sea to her towel and the group of holiday makers sitting on the sand under a beach umbrella
00:10:46:00 taking a shot through a camera on a tripod on the sand
00:11:38:00 colourful beach umbrellas and bathers with a car of the era in the background
00:12:37:00 a roadside picnic
00:12:57:00 wonderful example of decorative sunglasses of the era
00:13:17:00 title ‘The End’ written in the sand