[John Anderson Home Movies: Reel 3]

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 contains street scenes in Bendigo, a drive to the Tambo River in Gippsland Victoria, looking for mushrooms in a farm paddock, some spectacular hairstyles and wonderful 1940s clothes.

This film was originally made using 9.5mm film.

Selected highlights list:
00:00:23:00 a tram moves along a street with shops in the background in Bendigo
00:00:34:00 glimpse of a ‘Bendigo’ advertising sign on a building
00:00:40:00 palm trees and a lake in the Bendigo Botanic Gardens
00:00:57:00 sign for ‘Bendigo Bitter Beer’ on a building
00:01:07:00 cows in a slightly hilly paddock and then a house on the hill
00:01:45:00 a car parked on a bridge and a river before the sign ‘Tambo River’
00:01:47:00 a small group of a child, two women and an older man who appears to be a farmer climbing through a wire fence into a paddock. The farmer uses the old method of a foot holding down the lower fence wire and a hand holding up the top wire for his companions to get through the gap comfortably
00:02:14:00 as the women are holding baskets we can presume the group are in the paddock to collect mushrooms; the women both have wonderful, thick curly hairstyles
00:02:30:00 the camera is filming from inside a car travelling down a country road
00:02:47:00 a scene at the races where two women are surprised by and smiling at the camera