[John Anderson Home Movies: Reel 2]

John Robert (Jack) Anderson (1924–1993) was a film distributor, cinema owner and photographer as well as an enthusiastic filmmaker in and around Ballarat in Victoria. Jack developed an interest in film very early at cinema shows and gained his first film experience while serving in WWII, photographing wartime conditions and aircraft involved in the defence of Australia’s north, including the aftermath of the Darwin bombing raid.

It was whilst working in photographic studios that Jack met his future wife, business partner and fellow film enthusiast Marie Bourke. Starting out by hiring films and showing them around regional Victoria, Jack and Marie established cinemas such as the Astor Cinema in Ararat, Bell Post Hill Drive-In in Geelong and the Southern and Northern Drive-Ins and Vegas 70 Cinema in Ballarat. In the 1970s, the Anderson family acquired and restored the Regent Theatre in Ballarat which would then become the first multiplex in regional Victoria.

Along the way, Jack filmed his family and friends activities and outings, horse racing, Ballarat street scenes, motorcycle scrambling and travel scenes on the road – an unusual and wonderful look at life in regional Victoria during the 1940s to the 1960s.

This film features a parade of cars, trucks and buses in Ballarat and a visit to a swimming pool where Jack includes some special effects of diving into the pool. There is also a scene where two women are posing for the camera next to a car. It becomes evident that the older stately woman is shy of the camera but the endearing younger woman is very confident as she clowns around in her very 1940s trousers and beret outfit.

This film was originally made using 9.5mm film.

Selected highlights list:
00:00:02:00 a parade of vehicles in Ballarat
00:00:50:00 two women stand in front of a car; one is joking around for the camera
00:01:05:00 at a swimming pool, a group of women onlookers watch a men diving into the water; the motion is reversed in a special effect so that we watch the diving in and back out of the pool
00:02:25:00 swimmers give an exhibition of the Australian Crawl (freestyle)