A Study Guide by Marguerite O'hara
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http://www.metromagazine.com.au http://theeducationshop.com.au A STUDY GUIDE BY © ATOM 2018 ISBN: 978-1-76061-197-2 MARGUERITE O’HARA OVERVIEW Ladies in Black is a feature film about the lives of several women who work in a Sydney department store. Set in the summer of 1959, when the impact of European migration and the rise of women’s liberation is about to change Australia forever, a shy schoolgirl (Lisa) takes a summer job at the prestigious Sydney department store, Goode’s. There she meets the ‘ladies in black’, Patty, Fay and the exotic Magda. The impact A classic Australian story about they have on each other will change all their love, hope and the perfect dress lives. Beguiled and influenced by Magda, the vivacious manager of the high-fashion floor, CONTENT HYPERLINKS and befriended by fellow sales ladies Patty and Fay, Lisa is awakened to a world of 3 SYNOPSIS possibilities. 4 CURRICULUM GUIDELINES The film is based on a novel by Australian 5 BACKGROUND INFORMATION born Madeleine St John, The Women in Black, and directed by Bruce Beresford 5 THE AUTHOR, THE DIRECTOR AND who met St John as a university student in THE PRODUCERS the 1960s and became her literary executor 6 KEY CAST AND CREW after she died in 2006. The film is a comic and affectionate picture of Sydney life in the 7 ADAPTATION FROM BOOK TO SCREEN late 1950s. It shows a 21st century audience how life for women and men has undergone 8 PRE-VIEWING DISCUSSION POINTS changes over the past 60 years. 9 POST-VIEWING QUESTIONS Ladies in Black is a story threaded through 2018 © ATOM 16 QUESTIONS with universal themes that still resonate today. 17 REFERENCES AND RESOURCES 2 SYNOPSIS AS 1959 AND THE RESTLESS POST-WAR BOOM DECADE DRAWS TO A CLOSE, SHY LISA MILES (ANGOURIE RICE), 16, TAKES A SUMMER JOB AT THE GRAND SYDNEY DEPARTMENT STORE GOODE’S, WHILE AWAITING THE RESULTS OF HER FINAL SCHOOL EXAMS. There she meets the ‘ladies in black’ of the 5th floor; Fay landed her an enviable position at Goode’s. Baines (Rachael Taylor) and Patty Williams (Alison McGirr), who work in Ladies’ Cocktail; and the elegant but aloof Lisa’s goal is to attend the University of Sydney, if she can Magda Szombatheli (Julia Ormond), who manages the convince her stubborn father Mr. Miles (Shane Jacobson) Model Gowns high fashion boutique. to sign her scholarship application. Mr. Miles sees no point whatsoever in higher education, especially for women. Lisa Lisa is initially entrusted to Fay and Patty, and the slightly wants to be a poet or an actress, and Magda recognises a awkward young girl who wears clothes made by her fellow creative spirit in the girl. mother Mrs. Miles (Susie Porter), is targeted with their casual disdain. Slowly, though, Lisa begins to reveal her in- Magda begins to teach Lisa about style, introducing her to telligence and quiet self-belief to her co-workers in Ladies’ European culture. Lisa falls in love with ‘Lisette’, an elegant Cocktail, as well as to Miss Cartwright (Noni Hazlehurst), creation in Model Gowns that speaks to her of confidence the buttoned-up but highly capable fashion department and boldness. floor supervisor. As Lisa grows from a girl into a self-assured and positive Lisa and her great potential are most recognised, however, young woman, she herself becomes a catalyst for change by Magda, who escaped her native Slovenia in the politi- in the lives of the ladies in black; Fay, disillusioned by cal maelstrom following World War Two. She landed in Australian men, is introduced to Dostoyevsky’s novel Anna an Australian refugee camp, where she met her dashing Karenina by Lisa and to the debonair Hungarian Rudi (Ryan © ATOM 2018 © ATOM Hungarian husband Stefan (Vincent Perez), and where she Corr), opening a door to her own self-awareness; and Patty reoriented herself to this strange new place. Her tenac- finds a way to embrace her physicality and reignite the ity and her stories about working in Paris before the war passion with her distant husband Frank (Luke Pegler). 3 CURRICULUM GUIDELINES Ladies in Black would be suitable for middle and senior secondary students. It presents a story from almost 60 years ago set in Sydney at a time in Australia when society was changing and women were embracing the opportunities for changes in their lives. Australian History This is Australian history of the immediate store and those who worked there, and post-war years when many young also through looking at the different way women’s lives changed as they were of life of recent arrivals from Europe who better educated (stayed at school longer enriched Australian life and culture. and/or moved on to tertiary education) and less inclined to accept the often repressive At Year 10 level, students study aspects and authoritarian aspects of a patriarchal of the modern world and Australia. One society. While marriage, having children study (ACDSEH144) focusses on the and living a stable life in the suburbs migrant experience. Students look at the remained the goal of many young women, waves of post-World War Two migration, others were looking for something more investigating the countries that were the than this – higher education, financial source of migration. independence and choices about their future. The film’s story explores several They also look at the contribution of aspects of a changing society, partly migration to Australia’s changing identity through the world of the department as a nation (ACDSEH147). Culture and Society By reading stories, looking at photos and a small group of women and men in watching films and documentaries set in Sydney as Australia moved into the 1960s. earlier times and places, we can begin Education, migration from Europe, the to understand why living in Australia increased availability of the contraceptive has changed so much since the middle pill, the beginnings of teenage culture and of the twentieth century. The 1960s are identity and a general relaxation in life after often characterised as a decade of social the war years when rationing and stringent changes, not just in Australia but in many economic and social controls limited the other countries. Ladies in Black uncovers opportunities for adopting real change. how some of those changes affected Gender Studies - Women, Work and Relationships Relationships between men and women in the late 1950s and 1960s, there were began to change as more girls and women the beginnings of calls for equal pay and stayed at school longer, went on to further for child care, the two things that enable study or worked in jobs alongside men, women to live fulfilling and independent as many had during the years of World lives, whether married or single. War Two. While not a lot of women could claim complete financial independence © ATOM 2018 © ATOM 4 BACKGROUND INFORMATION The Women in Black is Madeleine St John’s first novel, published in 1993 when she was 52. It is the only one of her four novels set in Australia. The story is set in the Ladies’ Frocks department of Goode’s Department Store in Sydney, thought to be based on David Jones, a department store still operating in Australia. Ladies’ Frocks department included sections specialising in Evening Wear, Cocktail Frocks and Model Gowns. The Second World War ended in 1945. The 1950s and 1960s was a time when people from different parts of Europe whose lives had been disrupted and destroyed by war and political interference in their countries, im- migrated to more stable places such as Canada and Australia, where they were generally welcomed for their skills but still regarded with suspicion and some resentment for being ‘different’ and unable to speak English ‘properly’. This first wave of migrants in the 1950s changed Australia for ever in almost every aspect of life – culturally, linguistically, intellectually. The Slovenian woman Magda, her Hungarian husband Stefan and their young friend Rudi introduce Lisa to a differ- ent way of life. European countries including Slovenia and Hungary came under the control of countries with anti-democratic regimes at the end of the Second World THE AUTHOR, War, including Germany and later the Soviet Union. Many THE DIRECTOR AND people from these regions whose lives were massively THE PRODUCERS disrupted by war and foreign occupation left their home- lands to resettle in countries like Australia and Canada in Sue Milliken, one of the producers of Ladies in Black had the 1950s. They brought with them their cultures, beliefs, worked with Director Bruce Beresford on a number of his foods and education. They were often characterised as earlier films, including The Fringe Dwellers, Black Robe, “Continentals” because the countries they came from Paradise Road and Sydney: A Story of a City. After, at were referred to by Australians at the time generically Beresford’s suggestion, reading Madeleine St John’s The as “The Continent” – shorthand for “The Continent of Women in Black in 1994, Milliken acquired an option on the Europe” (much as later migrants from Vietnam, Laos, film rights. Like Beresford, she was drawn to the themes Korea and China were referred to as ‘Asians’). in the story about people’s inborn prejudices against foreigners. The book has a very strong point of view about intol- erance and ignorance, explains Milliken. The Anglo Australians in the book aren’t bad people, but they don’t understand that these new people are the same as they are, and that each side has something to learn. You can change people’s perceptions with humour, whereas if you lecture them they’ll often turn away.