Work Commonwealth on Film

Hello, London.

Hello, Lagos.

It is with much pleasure that I greet you,

the representatives from the parliaments of all the lands

within our Commonwealth family of nations,

which enjoy a responsible government.

It has different ties of race, faith, language, and finance,

and yet the Commonwealth is there.

It cannot be stated exactly, but it lives and works.

Well, it should mean there are relations between everybody

of sharing, and giving, and taking.

Each Commonwealth meeting is a celebration of continuity

in community, and each is also a challenge

to find the ways to advance

that common purpose.

Prince Philip said the Commonwealth must train young people for

skilled work.

We could no longer afford to let them drift into dead-end jobs.

My plan generally is to improve the standard of living

for my family and myself,

and I believe I'm best able to do it in England.

London Airport, 1st July, 1962,

an historic day for the Commonwealth as the first of its citizens arrive

who do not automatically have free entry into the United Kingdom.

An act variously described as shabby, tragic, or distasteful

but necessary, comes into force

and Commonwealth citizens queue with aliens.

Thousands were already here at Southampton on Saturday.

The last ship to reach Britain from the West Indies

before the new act anchored in the Cowes roads.

Aboard were 420 people, some with families, some penniless,

some skilled.

The last of the enormous flood of permanent immigrants that's been

arriving this past two months.

Do you have a job to come to?

Well, actually, no.

I'm expecting to work and study, meanwhile,

but I think I will get a job quick with the profession that I possess.

-What is that, what do you do?

-Plumbing.

Well, I would like a job with a newspaper firm or

with a radio network or something like that. I like journalism.

Although many have no jobs to go to, and some even have no

relatives here, Britain, for them, is the land of opportunity and hope.

There have been schemes like London Transport's

for training Barbados' busmen.

The conductors are interviewed and tested in Barbados.

2,500 have come over in the past six years.

They are still a small minority of London Transport's employees,

but they are a remarkably faithful one.

They train at Chiswick.

Spread yourselves around so that you can see the fare board.

Now, set your machines to sixpence.

ORD - Ordinary means adult, as you know.

Set your machines to sixpence.

One revolution of the handle is one ticket.

Tear with an upward movement.

Issue one sixpenny ticket, please, all of you. That's right.

That's it.

Now, this time, I want you to set your machines to three pence,

three pence and six thrupenny tickets, please.

-I'm a motor mechanic.

-Yes?

-If I go to Australia, can I be sure of work?

I'm sure you can't fail,

there's plenty of work in Australia for a skilled man.

If you have any preconceived ideas

about Australia and Australians, what we are like,

and what we sound like, come and have a look at Coonawarra.

WORKERS SING

No Waltzing Matilda in this song, is there?

Yet it's sung by Australians.

New Australians.

This is a small, wine-growing district in South Australia.

The estate wasn't doing at all well,

and the owners looked for an Italian family with wine-growing experience.

They found the Versaces. All over Melbourne they were doing odd jobs.

Now they are all together again,

and the wine they grow is theirs into the bargain.

Vincenzo, Julio, Antonio - children, brothers, cousins,

and in-laws.

Julio has done so well that

he's even been back to Italy lately to bring back a wife.

Allow me to introduce Julio to you.

I'm Julio Versace. I'm Italian.

I work with Mr Williams.

And we look after the vineyards, and he looks after the wine.

I have all my family here, my father,

mother, young brother, and a wife too.

When we took this vineyard here, this was like a bush.

And now it's looking well,

and give us good production for the future.

This is one of those success stories

dear to the heart of scriptwriters everywhere.

The difference here is, it's perfectly true.

The vintages are bigger and better,

150 acres of vines producing claret, hock, and sherry.

The Versaces have bought a new motor car.

And if there's an example of better fitting in anywhere,

I'd like to hear of it.

Two Kenyas -

the Kenya enjoyed by tourists...

..and another Kenya which we don't usually see or notice.

Mary Kalwali has six children.

They are poor by our standards, but they're not the poorest in Kenya.

Mary has one good dress

and her children are not yet severely undernourished.

As in most of the world,

it's the women who do the bulk of the work on the land.

They live to the east of India,

these children of Sonar Bangla, Golden Bengal.

-TRANSLATION:

-When I see the other

children going to school, dressed in nice, new clothes,

I want to be like them, do what they do.

I feel like going to school with them in the morning to study with

them and perhaps become successful like them in the future.

I'd like to become a doctor when I grow up,

but I don't think it's possible.

I have to work because we need the money.

Roona is 11

and works up to 90 hours each week in the local cigarette factory.

-TRANSLATION:

-I go to work soon

after I get out of bed at six or seven in the morning.

But first, I have a wash.

Then I put a little oil and water on my head and comb my hair.

After that, I have a little tea and bread,

and then I go to the factory and sit down to my work.

After making 1,000 cigarettes, sometimes only 500,

I get up and go to my mother for a drink of water.

Then I come back and start working again.

The heat makes me sweat. I itch all over my body and I get a headache.

I feel sleepy but I can't sleep.

All those lights burning overhead, it's almost enough to boil you.

But if I lie down, then the foreman calls me.

-TRANSLATION:

-The youngest are only eight, upwards from there,

up to 50 or 60. There are both women and men.

And even the children, who come with their mothers,

they also work.

Do you recruit these children?

No, we have not recruited them, their mothers make them work.

What can they do?

The women earn ten or 12 taka each per day,

and children also earn another five or ten takas each.

That helps them to buy more food.

Today, the Annanaks live with other Eskimo families at the George River

which flows to the Arctic coast of Ungava Bay.

Their closest neighbours are at the tiny settlement of Fort Chimo,

100 miles to the west.

Now, you know that your nearest neighbours at Port Burwell

have no trees at all?

They have no wood for firewood,

and they have no long trees for making sled runners from,

and they have no wood to build anything with.

We were talking with them just a day or two ago

and they said to us,

"When you're at the George River, would you ask the people there

"about something that we have been thinking about?

"We need the wood that they have at the George River

"and we know that the people there

"have no food in the winter time quite often.

"They have no food for themselves and they have no food for the dogs.

"And at Port Burwell there's lots of food, lots of seals."

And the people there thought that if

you gave them some trees and some wood,

that they would be able to give you some meat for yourselves

and meat for your dogs.

And that way you'd both be better off.

Now, every March,

when the snow is still hard enough to make travel easy by dog team,

all the George River men set out for their logging camps,

100 miles inland along the river.

They're loggers now, working on a piecework basis,

with 3,000 trees to cut and haul and drive.

When I went to these outlying islands of Fiji,

we sailed away to this island of Kambala.

The beaches are so blindingly white that when you walk along them,

you simply can't open your eyes wide, without very real pain.

These women, squatting on the beach in the fierce tropical sun,

were preparing to go fishing in the lagoon.

And they're blackening their faces

with charcoal as a protection against

the glare reflected from the coral sand and the surface of the sea.

Their first job was to find the best spot for fishing among the

towers of coral that rose up from

the white sandy bottom of the lagoon.

The tops of the towers, flattened by the waves,

are only a few feet from the surface and make excellent platforms

on which to stand, while you break your hooks and sort out the lines.

Usually, all you have to do

is to dangle your bait in front of the fish that you've selected.

It bites, and up it comes.

Though, sometimes, not quite all the way.

But when you have caught one,

you kill it by biting it in the back of its neck, and then you

store it in the coconut leaf basket at your waist, which holds the bait.

In a few hours, you can catch a basket full of fish of the most

brilliant colours, sufficient to

provide an excellent meal for all your family.

That's a road train,

setting off down the longest road in the world, to travel 1,000 miles.

It'll cover the distance from London to Lisbon, or from Brighton

in Sussex to Inverness and back, and in that distance,

passing two hamlets and one road junction.

This is a town called Alice.

Alice Springs in the very centre of Australia. It's at the northern

end of the railway line, up from Adelaide.

So everything going to the Northern Territory and to the capital,

Darwin, upon the Timor Sea,

has to travel along this thin strip of bitumen,

going due north for 964 miles.

You really find it easier driving in bare feet, do you?

Yes, well, why we drive in bare feet is that our feet are cooler

and it's not so stiff when we're on the pedals.

Don't you get corns or something?

No, but the bottom of your feet are pretty hard.

What are your other problems, as far as heat's concerned?

Mainly tyres, the tyres get hot and more likely to blow.

If we keep driving with them flat, they catch alight,

likely to burn the load of the truck.

If they catch the floorboards of the truck, set the other tyres alight,

burn the whole trailer, truck, the lot.

I suppose the monotony of these tremendously long,

straight roads must be a worry for you.

Oh, yeah, you get lonely and get a bit tired of it,

so you pull a book out and have a read.

You read when you're driving?

Have a read of the book while we're driving along on the straights.

I don't believe it.

Yeah, I've got a couple of books there in the cabin.

How often do you look at the road while you're reading?

On the straight stretches you might go one or two minutes,

it might be three minutes.

This is the end of the road - Darwin.

It was yesterday morning when that land train left the Alice,

1,000 miles away at the beginning of the road

and now the two bare-footed drivers have got three days off

in this steaming, humid, Turkish bath of a town,

before setting off, once again, on the longest road in the world.

The immigration boom touched new heights in a novel way.

About 80 people made history at London Airport, on the first flight

of the Great Airlift, inaugurated by the Canadian Government.

From Heathrow and Prestwick,

25,000 will fly to begin a new life in the dominion.

The fare - £71.10, about half the normal cost.

Canada can't have too many good type people from Great Britain.

Would you like to tell me why you want to go to Canada?

Well, I've always wanted to go and also I've got my family over there

and I just don't think there's any future in this country.

-Are you married?

-Yes.

-Is your husband keen on going?

-Oh, yes.

Has he got a job out in Canada?

Erm, well, no, but my sister has rang up a few butchers,

he's a butcher, you see,

they'd be pleased to accept English butchers over there.

-I see. Are you looking forward to a good job in Canada?

-Yes.

Those not lucky enough to get on the Airlift

put their names down for the sea passage.

The feel of being there already comes, to the younger ones,

at any rate, as they wait to give their particulars to the official.

Last year nearly 52,000 left Britain to settle in our oldest dominion.

Not without trepidation, some of them. It's not a step anyone can

take lightly, but many a man's mind has been set at rest

by the information officer.

How about income tax?

The Canadian rate of taxation is about a half to a third

of what you pay in this country.

On my present wage of £15 a week, with two children,

how much would I pay?

In that tax bracket, you'd pay absolutely no tax at all.

What about the general standard of living?

You'll find that very much higher than in the United Kingdom.

-What's your type of work?

-Roof tiler.

Do you think you'll get a good job in Canada as a roof tiler?

Well, I don't think I can do any worse.

The immigration ship looks like a passport to a land of promise.

All going aboard must have felt that way.

They're useful people who are immigrating,

no question of unloading the riffraff.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the rest are getting best

quality men and women, and it's good luck we wish all of them!

For gold, some men will live in any country, however hot,

however arid, however old and barren.

And there is no older or more barren land than

the Northwest of Australia.

Wally Nichol, the most respected prospector in Marble Bar,

now works out his retirement in a store.

He came through the town 30 years ago, smelt gold and stayed.

What sort of a place is it like to live in?

Awful!

Just plain awful!

But there's a lure in gold and minerals.

Anybody who's done any prospecting or been associated with gold

and minerals has in their make-up

a lure to bring them back and

they always say, "Well, I missed it this time but next time I'll get it."

Why the lure of gold? Why especially gold?

It's the only thing I know anything about.

It's just about the toughest thing to work, though, isn't it?

Oh, yes...it's pretty tough going.

How many people have made their fortune out of it, up here?

There's a few but not too many, not too many.

-How many have you known?

-Only a few, count them on your hand.

This is where Bernie Hebbard has his bed.

His home is made of chicken wire, spinefex grass and corrugated iron

and presided over by his woman.

-Some there, is there, Bernie?

-Yes, gold here.

-That gives you an ounce to the tonne.

-An ounce to the tonne.

That point of gold. See it?

Oh, yes, up at the top there.

Now, how profitable is an ounce to

-the tonne to you?

-£15 per ounce.

And how long does it take you to get a tonne?

Oh... Average about two tonne a day.

If the prospector doesn't really make a big killing,

why does he go on, in the bush and this heat?

I think it's that fever that I spoke about.

He just can't avoid going on because there's another

El Dorado around the corner.

There's a funny world here, if it won't be the gold that'll be

cutting out, it'll be the men that'll be cutting out.

The ground will beat the men.

MUSIC: "Click go the Shears" by Martin Wyndham-Read

# Down by the bar the blind shearer stands

# Grasping his glass in his thin, boney hands

# His eyes are on the barrel, which is now lowering fast

# He works hard and drinks hard and goes to hell at last

# Click go the shears, boys, click, click, click

# Wide is his blow and his hands move quick

# And the ringer looks around and is beaten by a blow

# And curses the old snagger with the blue-bellied Joe. #

MAN SINGS BANGLADESHI FOLK SONG

Abdu Rahman, a fisherman, lives in the middle of the Brahmaputra River,

in Bangladesh, the largest river delta in the world.

After a hard night's fishing, Abdu Rahman sails a further four hours

to the embankment market to try and sell his meagre catch.

Ever since trading began along the west coast of Africa,

the port boys of Accra have been famous throughout the world.

The capital's lack of facilities for the unloading of large ships

made their repeated journeys a picturesque necessity.

THEY SING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

Because Accra is a port without a harbour, all the goods have

to be transhipped into surfboats for the last mile or so into shore.

It's a laborious and costly way of doing things.

The men belong to the Fante tribe, tough and well built,

the fishermen of Ghana.

The Fante tribe are a fiercely independent people.

Up to now, they've resisted pressure

to make them belong to the state structure of trade unionism.

Everything comes into Accra on the surfboats, passengers included.

The loads carried by the surfboats in the reverse direction,

out to the waiting ships, consist primarily of one commodity - cocoa.

To join one of the surfboats on the journey out to the ships is

to spend an exciting and sometimes dangerous 20 minutes.

Dipping their three-pronged paddles rhythmically into the water,

the Fante crews push their boats along at a surprising speed

against the heavy, oncoming breakers.

With the surfboats tossing about in the waves,

loading can be a perilous business.

You need a strong sense of self-preservation.

But the days of the surfboats are numbered. It's said that some of the

Fante won't be sorry to see the last of them - they'd rather go fishing.

THEY SING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

To many, perhaps, their impending departure will be regretted,

for they symbolise the past. Soon, new harbours will be complete.

The port boys and their surfboats will be but a memory.

THEY SING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

If you'd like to learn more and trace the progress of the English language

across the Commonwealth, through an interactive timeline, go to...

..and follow the link to the Open University.