For those seeking a simpler life, the way is often lit by our elders. Writer and photographer Hilary Burden meets Australia’s first female cinematographer, the daughter of Nubeena orchardists.
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“If you want to take my photo with this camera, I have to be looking down,” explains Dorothy Hallam. Her head is bowed over a folding Kodak Autographic Brownie No 2, won by her father in a raffle a century ago while returning to Australia on a troop ship after serving in World War I.
It was the smart phone of its day. When Eric Benjafield gave the camera he won to his daughter, “Doff”, it came to play a big part in her life. That camera went everywhere with her, first on the family orchard in Nubeena, and later at Friends School, Hobart. Inspired by a family friend, a keen photographer, the young girl went on to set up a dark room in the windowless cellar of her grandparents’ Albert Park house, where she learned to develop her own film under red torch light.
Without her father’s gift, who could say whether Dorothy would have ever been the ABC’s Tasman Peninsula news cinematographer from 1961-1983, working with her news correspondent husband, Maurice? With her dedication and passion, Dorothy went on to make 176 films over more than two decades, all meticulously recorded in her photo albums. There are films of peninsula life when families lived on orchards and fruit pickers were locals, films such as “Country women collecting wild flowers”, “Roaring Beach”, “Golf at Point Puer”, and scenes of Port Arthur when the caravan park was sited at the penitentiary, you could take a thermos and fish off the jetty, and sheep fed on the grass. The global significance of its convict past was yet to be realised.
There’s also “Tasman Island”, her 1966 film capturing families living on the island and children taking school lessons. Dorothy films the hair-raising journey off the island with its tall, vertical cliffs, via a wire haulage cable down to the landing where a flying fox meets her. Dorothy stands on the single plank of the flying fox, high above the sea, seeing everything through the viewfinder as she descends towards the waves crashing against Anchor Rock. She doesn’t recall the fear. “I had a camera in my hand, so I didn’t worry.”
Dorothy and Maurice Hallam bought their first 8mm camera in 1959, three years after television first appeared in Australia. A year later, television came to Tasmania, and it wasn’t long before Maurice sent some peninsula news to the ABC in Hobart. News editor Warren Denning approached Maurice to be the ABC correspondent for the Tasman Peninsula, signing Dorothy up, too, after seeing the quality of a film she’d made on a year’s work in the Benjafield family orchard.
Warren Denning had a vision for regional presence in news and became Dorothy’s mentor. An author and journalist, Denning received an OBE for his services to journalism, his despatches awarded “for their clarity of thought and freedom from the redundant”. He was also a kind and rewarding boss. Dorothy has saved his letters, typed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation letterhead, one expressing pleasure at their first assignment “hitting the target”.
“Of course there is much to learn,” writes Denning. “I have been in this news business 37 years and am still learning. But every job you do will teach you just a little more: actually you won’t go very far wrong if you get the camera closer in on what is happening. That, summed up, is the golden rule.”
Another of Dorothy’s ABC peers was cameraman Neil Davis who showed them how to use a light metre and exemplified the correspondent’s working rules: accuracy, objectivity and the facts, before he went on to become a celebrated war cameraman.
Two years ago, Dorothy was made an honorary member of the Cinematography Society of Australia and her sons, Gavin and Philip, are now in the process of gathering their mother’s rare films to send to the National Film and Sound Archive.
In the panic to tear down statues, you might wish to consider who you would want to replace them. Dorothy Hallam should be on that list. Australia’s first female cinematographer and mother of three, whose marriage lasted for 75 years (Maurice who died in 2013 always called her “the apple of my eye”). She was making films for television years before Germaine Greer had even thought of writing The Female Eunuch.
Did she ever have a sense of being a woman in a man’s world? “No, I didn’t,” says Dorothy, with the matter-of-factness of her 95 years. “I didn’t realise it at all. It just went ahead and I didn’t give it a second thought. I was always interested in photography and it just went on.”
While today’s technology equates to the parading of “me” on all platforms, Dorothy’s skill was always pinned on being behind the camera: a 16mm Bolex with three interchangeable lenses she and Maurice bought from late cameraman Warwick Curtis for £150. It’s one she also keeps, tucked in a cupboard in her Nubeena home, several kilometres from the orchard where she grew up. She laughs how once it went everywhere with her and now it feels so heavy she can hardly pick it up.
“Now I’ve got some sandwiches and a cake out there,” says Dorothy, leaving me at the dining table in the afternoon sun with Maurice’s memoirs. “He always had a way with words.”
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers - Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.
