Film - Malcolm McKinnon, 'Chronicle of a Country Life', 2011

Some rare communities are fortunate to have in their midst someone who takes the trouble to make a record of events, to be persistently there on the scene with their camera running and then to process and collate and look after the recorded material.

John Teasdale was around movie cameras all his life. His father was a keen cinematographer and John inherited a passion for the moving image.

I met John Teasdale only once, not long before he died, but mainly I know him through his films.

John Teasdale’s films are a record of working life on a family farm and also a record of community life in a particular part of rural Victoria. Like all good social history, this material is locally specific but it also has a broader resonance, evoking a vivid sense of lives lived in small, dry-land farming communities in many parts of country Australia.

Teasdale’s camera is there to record the evolving culture and technology of broad acre farming and the continuity of work that connects generations of a family to the same cultivated piece of ground.

It’s also there to chronicle every facet of the Rupanyup Agricultural Show, all aspects of local sporting life, commemorative parades down the main street of the town, celebrations and dances in the community hall, the closure of the local telephone exchange…

In all of this there is recording of the social terrain, a recitation of names and faces and a testament to the implicit value of life with all of these people in this particular place…

Film - Malcolm McKinnon, 'An Eye for Film', 2011

Dawn Teasdale:

There’s footage of John as an eighteen month–two year old boy around, so that’s back around 1937–’38. His dad took that, and John was always looking at the camera trying to learn things from him. He was doing it from a very early age…

Peter Teasdale:

Every time you went somewhere he always had the thing, and when he was using film I reckon he didn’t experience the things he’d been to until two weeks later when the film got posted back to him from being processed. I often think he didn’t experience things that he went to first hand because he was too busy filming it. Just as well he did probably, and he really got a lot of satisfaction out of doing it I think.

He knew that a roll of film might have only had seven or eight minutes or something, so the stuff you did, you had to make sure it was good stuff. Nowadays most people have got some kind of video camera or something, whereas back even when I was growing up there wasn’t a great percentage of the population had the stuff and even fewer knew how to do it to any standard at all.

Dawn Teasdale:

When the TV came on in 1956 he applied to the ABC to become a stringer cameraman, which was someone who shot local footage of news stories. The ABC also used to have a “banner film” before a five-minute regional news of a night time for the country viewers and he took a lot of those.

He certainly loved his camera, and sometimes I think that people thought he was a nuisance but now they’re quite happy to have a film night and watch them back.

Peter Teasdale:

Well, perhaps he’s not someone we would have considered an artistic person I don’t think, but he had an eye for what would look good on film anyway!

Film - Malcolm McKinnon, 'Farm Toys', 2011

Ackland’s are a local manufacturing firm, and they made all these cultivators and things. Dad got on very well with the Ackland family and he used to drive the tractor at demonstrations at local field days and that for them. They’d often bring out these new or updated versions to our place to try out, somewhat frustratingly because we had one of their really, really early ones that was a back-breaking machine to fold up. Every so often Ackland’s would turn up with one of these pretty flash hydraulic fold-up things that didn’t take much folding up. We’d have it for half a day and then they’d take it away again, and I couldn’t talk Dad into buying one for anything! We’d go back to using the old manual lift-up thing, and Ackland’s would sort of see how it worked and then take it back and modify it a bit after Dad had sort of given his impression of it. It probably frustrated them a bit that he never actually bought one either perhaps! Much later on we bought one second-hand at a clearing sale, when it had faded a bit and it wasn’t worth quite as much money…

Looks like we’re using an old plough there, you can see on our original block, the one that the family first sort of started off on here. I think that’s the same plough that my grandfather used and his grandparents might have used, been converted over to put on a tractor. I remember doing all those sort of jobs, and I’d be doing something and Dad would take the opportunity to come and film a bit of it. We did a lot of that sort of stuff. Nowadays we’ve got tractors that steer themselves up and down the paddock, and you set the climate control on 22 degrees or something and, yeah, I’d hate to have to go back to something that small nowadays.

That shot there you can see he’s obviously climbed up the top of the silo, hanging on with one hand I suppose while he’s filming with the other one. And that job, again, loading all the bags on the truck, (it’s) something we don’t do any more, it’s a lot less labour intensive, so it’s good to have it all (on film).

The toy tractor was mine, but Dad actually made a couple of things. That combine was one which he’s made out of a bit of timber and some old wheels that were laying ‘round the farm somewhere. He also made a little scarifier out of some square tube which I can remember him making. He bought a scarifier and (then) he minaturised it himself and made one – he would have put a lot of effort into that.

Film - Malcolm McKinnon, 'A Heavy Foot', 2011

Well, I used to work at McCracken’s Garage in the main street of Stawell. John’s Dad and John and his sister came down and they bought this horrible red and white FC station wagon, horrible colour. (They had a lot more to pick from, but they like that.) Anyway, they went off in it and I never thought anymore of it.

Months down the track we were at a dance at Deep Lead in the school there, and John turned up with a couple of other Rupanyup people. We discovered we knew one another and we started going out, much to my parent’s disgust when they found he was a fast driver. They discovered he had seatbelts in his car and I wasn’t to go if I didn’t wear the seatbelt.

I think most of the Teasdale family have got what you’d call a heavy foot, sometimes myself included…

Well, I think he might have been showing off a bit there!