This is a short piece to register the death last Thursday (January 26, 2023) of Dorothy (Dof) Hallam, to honour her memory and to celebrate her extraordinary career.
In her later life, Dorothy Hallam was a friend of mine. She was known as Dof and she died on Thursday at the age of 97. And it’s weird to feel her gone, she was such a presence.
Dof was a female pioneer of the Australian film industry, although she didn’t realise it. She was also an orchardist, farmer and mother to three children. But it was to do with her work as a film-maker that I came to know her best.
I have no recollection of how I came upon Dof’s films, but I had been a friend of her daughter-in-law, Lynn, at high school, and when I moved here to the Tasman Peninsula we re-connected. I swiftly became aware of Dof’s work, and transferred some of her old family album 8mm colour material to video, and edited it into a short film which I set to Vivaldi and called Four Seasons on the Farm. It was a bit of a local hit.
It was later that I found out that Dof had shot about 150 16mm sequences (mostly black and white) for the ABC which had gone to air between 1961 and 1981. And it transpired that Dof had been the first female to shoot film for the ABC.
It took a while, and some considerable expense, but eventually the ABC Archives Department found about 60 of the films that Dof had shot, and we digitised them. They are astounding. And, because Dof, and her husband, Maurice, recorded the sound of the voice-over off the TV, we have been able to re-construct about 28 of the original presentations.
They are, I suggest, a unique record of a rural area of Australia undergoing extreme change. The apple industry collapses when Britain joins the Common Market; the chicken meat industry rises, really because of the efforts of two (MacDonald) brothers; and tourism becomes the Tasmania’s major economic driver.
And all this is documented by Dof – beautifully.
When you sit in an editing suite, and you look at images, you look at a shot, trying to make up a sequence, and you yell at the screen, “Hold on that! I want 10 seconds more!” And Dof always gives you that. She had an eye and a feel for cinematography that was astounding.
And she was a lovely, generous person.
Valé Dof – the great, pioneering cinematographer and lovely, strong woman. I hope we’ll see her like again.
James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
