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  • Seeing the Sights in Paris

    Video

    A party of young women show a group of smartly dressed British, Australian, American and New Zealand soldiers the sights of Paris. Insignia on the women’s clothing suggests they are from the Red Cross. In this excerpt, the group walk along a concourse toward the Eiffel Tower. A pan around the party of sightseers shows a smiling, cheerful group. Later on, the group is in front of the Hôtel de Ville, before all climbing into a truck.

    When the Armistice was signed in November 1918, there were 56,000 New Zealanders overseas or at sea. Demobilisation was a carefully planned manoeuvre with most troops and nurses returning home during 1919 – though the last New Zealanders did not return home until 1921. Troops were anxious to leave and so, to counter rising tension as soldiers waited to hear when they could go home, activities such as the Inter-Allied Games and sightseeing parties were designed to keep the men occupied.

  • Goodbye to Blighty

    Video

    The evocative title for Pathé Gazette No. 535 says it all – Liverpool Good-bye to ‘Blighty’ – (New Zealand Soldiers Leave England with their Wives).

    This short, 23-second clip, shows a passenger ship lined with New Zealand soldiers and their wives, waving goodbye. Quay-side friends and family members wave farewell – among those on shore are several New Zealanders identifiable in their lemon squeezer hats.

    For New Zealand servicemen who had married ‘war brides’ – predominantly women from Britain and Europe – where possible the Defence Department arranged for the passage of both wives and children so that they could go to their new home on the demobilisation ships with their Kiwi husbands.

  • Peace Day Parade

    Video

    A Peace Day Parade at Woonona in New South Wales on 19 July 1919, claimed to be the best procession in the state outside of Sydney.

  • Civilian clothing for returned soldiers

    Video

    Towards the end of the war the Australian Red Cross focused on helping integrate returned service personnel into work and society. This clip shows women at the Red Cross making and sorting clothes for returned soldiers.

  • Trench Fever

    Video

    Although unconfirmed until after the war, one of the biggest enemies that soldiers faced was lice! They thrived in squalid, unhygienic trench conditions and were carriers of bacteria – causing the mysterious disease known as trench fever, along with typhus and scabies. And they made men – already suffering under appalling conditions – unbearably itchy, irritable and depressed!

    To try and combat this, the work of the Medical Corps included sanitation “cleansing stations” where men were able to bathe and their uniforms and blankets were steam-cleaned. Watch as freshly bathed soldiers, wrapped in blankets, hand in their uniforms for cleansing in the Fodden Lorry Disinfector.

  • The Rose of No Man’s Land

    Audio

    A sentimental song composed as a tribute to Red Cross battlefield nurses.

  • Photos after the first conscription ballot

    Video

    Shot on 16 November 1916, the day of the first World War One conscription ballot held under the Military Service Act of 1916, this film shows the female and male staff of the Government Statisticians Office, all dressed in their Sunday best, posing for the camera on the roof of Routh’s Building in Wellington. The New Zealand Truth described the ballot as “An Epoch Making Event in New Zealand’s History” and “the first gamble in human life”. It was also pointed out that the women who are seen in the film, who drew registration cards for the ballot, could possibly “draw their sweetheart’s cards as time goes on”. (Truth, 18 November 1916, p.6)

  • "The first gamble in human life"

    Video

    In 1916 the New Zealand Government introduced conscription (compulsory enlistment for military service), to reinforce the shrinking numbers of men volunteering to serve in WW1. All men eligible for service were then required to register their names and other details, such as age and marriage status. This silent film clip, shot by the government’s own cameraman, shows the first-ever ballot at the Government Statistician’s Office, to determine which registered men would be selected for war service. The registration cards are laid out in boxes on long tables. Their numbers are transferred onto wooden balls which are placed in a rotating tumbler and randomly selected.

    Conscription was politically contentious, and the film shows a party of journalists invited to view and report on the first ballot. They include Harry Holland, reporting for the labour movement paper, the Maoriland Worker. He had been imprisoned for sedition, for speaking out against conscription two years ealier in 1914.

  • “Brave Women Who Wait”

    Audio

    For the war effort to be successful, it was not only men who needed to be recruited. The women on the home front also had to show their commitment, so they were also the target of propaganda campaigns. Brave Women Who Wait reminds the general population that while the men may be dying on the battlefields, the women were also making sacrifices at home.

  • Charlie Chaplin at the Sydney Show?

    Video

    Was Charlie Chaplin at Sydney’s 1916 Royal Easter Show? Yes, but not the real Charlie Chaplin. Just one of thousands of impersonators, as Chaplin’s worldwide fame grew.

  • Neptune’s Daughter

    Video

    In Neptune’s Daughter, an “eight-reel spectacular pictorial triumph” made by Hollywood's Universal Studio, Australian celebrity Annette Kellerman plays a mermaid who swears vengeance on the fisherman who trapped and killed her little sister in their nets. Transforming into a human, she seeks the King with the intention of killing him as his laws were responsible for the death. After being discovered, Annette makes her escape and is thrown back into the sea where she realises that she is in love with the King.

    Kellerman was internationally famous for long-distance swimming and became a life-long advocate for women’s fitness. It was claimed she had the exact physical measurements of the Venus de Milo statue. Neptune’s Daughter showcases Kellerman’s aquatic skills as well as her “perfect” figure, which was shown, “in the nude—beautifully, chastely in the nude”, as Australian Theatre Magazine commented. She also pioneered changes to female swimwear, even though her close-fitting athletic bathing suit provoked a 1907 arrest for indecency in Boston, USA.

  • Even Major-Generals die in battle

    Video

    The sombre 1915 funeral procession of Major-General Sir William Bridges, killed in action at the Dardenelles. Filmed in Melbourne after Bridges’ body arrived home months after his death.

  • Nurses remember the sinking of the Marquette

    Audio

    Three New Zealand nurses - Elizabeth Young, Mary Gould and Jeanne Peek (née Sinclair) - recount their experiences of the sinking of the troopship S.S. Marquette on 23 October 1915. The nurses were part of the New Zealand No. 1 Stationary Hospital unit, which was sailing on the troop transport from Alexandria, Egypt, to Salonika (Thessaloniki) in Greece, when their ship was struck by a torpedo from a German U-boat.

  • HMS New Zealand arrives in Auckland

    Video

    When HMS New Zealand visited the City of Sails in late April 1913, tens of thousands of Aucklanders turned out to welcome her both on land and, as this film shows, at sea. 

    The film captures the size of the battleship as it steamed into Rangitoto Channel towards the port. The New Zealand Herald newspaper memorably described its “three massive funnels, then all the huge grey bulk of battle-cruiser... sullenly majestic, awful in portent, relentless as death itself.” Waitemata Harbour is shown packed with at least 200 spectator craft full of curious men and women and laden in bunting: “… ferry-boats and steamers crowded on their sterns, intrepid men and boys lugged at the oars of tiny dinghies and rowing boats, rowers in outriggers joined in the procession until so great was the traffic of the bewildering array of craft that the water was churned into white-crested waves and the smaller craft were tossed about like so many corks.”

  • Schoolgirl life and love during the war

    Audio

    There was a sharp divide between rich and poor in New Zealand at the time of the First World War. Marjorie Lees, the daughter of an upper-class Wellington family, was attending boarding school in 1914. Young women of her social status faced a restricted life, with very few options apart from marriage once they left school. But like young people from all walks of life, she was soon to experience the heartbreak of war.

  • Penny trails and white feathers

    Audio

    During WW1, those at home were encouraged to support the men at the front by donating money or goods to the war effort. Colin Franklin-Browne recalls watching fundraising parades and penny trails (lines of coins which the public were encouraged to add to) on Wellington’s streets in 1914-15. He also remembers the dark side of this patriotic fervor. Women’s patriotic groups sent white feathers, symbols of cowardice, to men who had not enlisted. The women targeted pacifists, men not yet in uniform and even those unable to enlist for medical reasons.

  • Mrs Barnard’s gingernuts

    Audio

    Six of Helena Barnard’s eight sons went away to fight, and she sent them care packages that included the gingernut biscuits she used to bake for them to take on tramping trips. The gingernuts were a welcome change from the notorious Gallipoli diet of tinned bully beef and ship’s biscuits. They lasted well and quickly became favourites with the boys at the front. Many wrote to Mrs Barnard asking her to provide their own mums with her recipe. Her gingernuts became famous and are quite possibly the original ANZAC biscuit. This interview was recorded around the time of Helena Barnard’s 100th birthday.

  • Treating Gallipoli’s wounded – Dr Agnes Bennett

    Audio

    The Australian-born and New Zealand-based doctor Agnes Bennett refused to let routine sexism keep her out of the war. She offered her services to the New Zealand Army as soon as war broke out but was turned down because she was a woman. Undeterred, she paid her own passage to Europe, intending to join the French Red Cross. In May 1915 she was sailing through the Red Sea when word reached the ship of the casualties arriving in Egypt from the Gallipoli campaign. She disembarked at the next opportunity and began working in the over-stretched military hospitals of Cairo, with the status and pay of an army captain. Dr Bennett recalls her wartime experiences in this recording, made in 1959.

  • Verdun Buns – a Red Cross cookbook

    Audio

    Ena Ryan was born in the prosperous Wellington suburb of Kelburn in 1908. In this 1985 interview she leafs through a cookbook produced during the war as a fundraiser for the Red Cross.  The recipes and advertisements reveal the social upheaval the war brought to communities back home, from florists advertising speedy service for last-minute weddings (before men departed overseas) to recipes for cooking for invalids. Some recipes were contributed by the public, and Ena is appalled that one woman named her recipe ‘Verdun buns’, after the horrifingly destructive 1916 Battle of Verdun.

  • Flower power

    Video

    It was the most spectacular parade that the South Island town of Nelson had ever seen. Daffodil Week, a fundraising campaign to provide comforts to troops serving overseas, took place in September 1916, and the highlight was the grand parade and crowning of the Flower Queen. The streets were decorated with flags and from early morning children were selling buttonholes (small posies of flowers), while stallholders sold cut flowers, ferns, plants, seedlings, sweets and produce.

    In this short film the impact of World War One is evident. The floats and organizations are marshalled by uniformed soldiers, and the streets are lined with members of the local Territorial infantry battalion. The Rt. Rev. William Sadlier, the Bishop of Nelson, can be seen in a frock-coat in the crowd. The annual Flower Queen, elected by popular vote, was Miss Hazel Win. Altogether £780 (or NZ$100,000 today) was raised for Christmas presents for the boys at the front.

  • New furs from Georges

    Video

    While a bitter war raged on the other side of the world, some wealthy Melbourne residents carried on with their lives just as usual. This 1915 newsreel item shows women modelling expensive fur coats, stoles, muffs and hats for Georges Department Store in Collins Street, Melbourne. Georges was a 'favoured spot with most of the smartest people in Melbourne'. The furs shown here would have been beyond the reach of most Melbourne residents at that time. As the war progressed, public condemnation of excessive or wasteful fashion became more prominent in the press.

    Originally silent, this footage has had the 1911 song Every Girl is a Fisher Girl added.

  • Fundraising for the war effort, Sydney

    Video

    Various wartime fundraising and recruitment activities are seen in this film from about 1916, shot from outside the General Post Office in Martin Place, Sydney, after rain. In pavilion-style tent stalls, Red Cross workers sell ribbons, flowers and other produce. The top-hatted Governor of NSW, Sir Gerald Strickland, walks among the crowds. Many AIF troops are shown in this clip, their humour in evidence in a shot of a young male civilian being ‘accosted’ and compelled to enlist, while others pretend to take his measurements for a uniform.

  • The turkey, the eagle, the lion and the dove

    Video

    'The War Zoo' is the original title of this animated cartoon by the renowned Australian caricaturist Harry Julius. The miserable fez-wearing turkey represents the battered Turkish forces. The ferocious German eagle is approached by the ‘dove of peace’ and the British lion, ‘still the king of all’. Cartoons like this one, screened about 1915, were a direct and light-hearted form of war news and propaganda for the public at home.

  • Comforts for the troops

    Video

    Throughout the war Federal Government House, the magnificent Melbourne residence of Australia’s Governor-General, was a central depot for Red Cross supplies for Australian troops serving overseas. Medical supplies and clothing, and small luxuries such as soap, tobacco and fruitcakes (known as ‘comforts’) were donated by the women of Victoria and delivered to Government House. Its ballroom became a warehouse and factory where goods were received, made, checked and despatched by volunteers, and the stables were converted into a workshop for making furniture and crutches. This silent film clip shows the first shipment of Red Cross supplies being loaded on to motorised and horse-drawn vehicles and leaving Government House for despatch to Australian soldiers in Egypt.

  • The naming of the capital

    Video

    Australia’s federal capital was purpose-built from 1909, since neither Sydney nor Melbourne would agree to the other city becoming the capital. The new capital was named ‘Canberra’, apparently from the name of the indigenous people of the area. The capital’s name was kept a secret until it was read out by the Governor-General’s wife, Lady Gertrude Denman.

    This film shows the ceremony on 12 March 1913 when the new-born federal capital was formally named. Governor-General Lord Denman and PM Andrew Fisher are seen proceeding to the saluting base where the Australian Light Horse, field battery and lance regiments and Royal Cadets are lined up for inspection. Many of the men in this footage would not return from Gallipoli, the Western Front and other battlefields.

  • ‘Australia prepared’ – making ammunition

    Video

    ‘The Amazing Micrometer’, a machine measuring to one 40,000th of an inch, is one star of this 1916 film, made at Australia’s Colonial Ammunition Company. Many of the factory’s workers are women, symbolising a community united in the war effort and highlighting women’s vital contributions on the home front. They are seen making .303 cartridges, packing them in cases, and filling a soldier’s bandolier (ammunition belt). This is an extract from an hour-long documentary showing how Australia ‘made and equipped the expeditionary forces’ to contribute to the Allied cause during the Great War.