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Australia Today: Police Boys' Club
Title:
Australia Today: Police Boys' Club
NFSA ID
1373
Year
1939
Courtesy
Enterprise Film Co.
Depicting the family life of a young boy in the poorer suburbs of Sydney, this newsreel touches on society’s responsibility to offer its youth a better future.
A young boy is taken to the Police Boys Club. Its aim, according to the narration, is to ‘keep boys off the streets’. It shows the boys working in the gym, boxing, and socialising in a safe environment. Later, a suburban residential area with comfortable housing and manicured lawns is shown in contrast to the high density terraced housing of clip 1.
The Police Boys Club (a predecessor of the Police and Citizens Youth Clubs that exist today) was jointly established by the NSW Police Service and Rotary Club of Sydney. The first Police Boys Club opened in Woolloomooloo, Sydney in 1937, to assist boys to be ‘good citizens’ and offer them an alternative to a life of crime in a safe and productive environment.
Cinesound and Movietone News both produced various newsreel segments on the Police Boys Club during their years of broadcast, but they focused mainly on the sporting events like judo and boxing, rather than the wider social context for the Club’s existence.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.