1930 - 1975

For decades, Cinesound Productions was the epicentre of Australia’s filmmaking industry. It launched its first studio in 1930, at 65 Ebley Street, Bondi Junction – the site of the present-day Spotlight store. Its producer-director Ken G. Hall dreamt of establishing a film industry for Australia and of employing both overseas and local talent. He drew on Australian themes and literature, and two of his early successes were On Our Selection (1932) and The Squatter’s Daughter (1933). In the 1930s, a number of female Australian actors, including Shirley Ann Richards – who between 1937 and 1939 starred in six films – became household names.

Ken, who became known as Australia’s Cecil B. DeMille, ceased making feature films during World War 2 but had luckily also invested in making newsreels. The staff members at Cinesound’s laboratories continued to develop footage from throughout the world, and the American Army Signals Corp used their services to make its newsreels and instructional films. The newsreels, from either Cinesound Productions or Fox Movietone News, were screened before the main feature in all Australian movie theatres.

The most famous Cinesound newsreel contained footage of the Pacific War’s New Guinea campaign, which lasted from January 1942 to war’s end in August 1945. In 1943, camera operator and commentator Damien Parer won Australia’s first ever Academy Award, for his nine-minute black and white documentary Kokoda Front Line!, which he and Ken co-produced.

Today, 4000 of the studio’s newsreels are held at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive, based in the inner-Sydney suburb of Pyrmont. According to UNESCO’s Memory of the World international register, “These films for many years were the only means of audio-visually depicting major events such as wars, elections, floods, bushfires, sporting events and national news, and thus played a vital part in reflecting the nature of Australia over almost half a century.”

After 1945, feature-film production became difficult, not only for financial reasons but because a new major shareholder of Union Theatres, through which Cinesound had shown its movies, refused to screen them. Cinesound made several films, but they had limited box-office success.

Cinesound’s Ebley Street studio, at which more than 100 people worked, remained home to Australia’s movie industry for 45 years. The studio had a floor space of more than 20,000 square feet and was well equipped by not only Cinesound Productions but various film and TV production companies. It was all ‘Lights!’ and ‘Action!’ till the newsreels stopped whirring in 1975.

Courtesy the National Film and Sound Archive, Cinesound Movietone Productions, State Library of New South Wales and Waverley Library Local Studies Collection.