Addison Road Drop-In

Clip 1: Young people and the Drop-In

Taken from the documentary Addison Road Drop-In (1977)

Original title classification not rated – this clip chosen to be PG

Curator’s clip description

A member of the Addison Road Drop-In provides an on-the-spot commentary on a parking policeman or ‘brown bomber’ booking a motorist on Marrickville Road.

Inside the recreation room at the centre, the young men play pool and muck around while one of the staff talks about the awareness of the kids, the sense of ownership and responsibility that the centre fosters and its social and political survival.

Inside the mechanics workshop, the director talks to another community worker about the positive impact the workshop has had on some of the boys less likely to engage in other activities. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here plays on the car radio.

Curator’s notes

An interesting sequence that, despite loose hand-held camera work and some blurry images, gives a snapshot of the kids from three different angles: their own perspective; through the eyes of staff member Tony; and by their day-to-day activities. In the first instance, one of the young men openly talks about a parking policeman in a mocking and antagonistic way. This reveals the way in which marginalised youth often feel targets of people in authority. Tony speaks about political awareness being about knowing ‘who pulls what strings’ and ‘who gets manipulated and how they get manipulated’, indicating that he thinks the kids are pretty switched on to what’s going on around them. The final sequence in this clip inside the mechanics workshop conveys a sense of interest and engagement by some of the boys and suggests that involvement in recreational or skill-building activities comes from providing activities that have a direct relevance to them.

Lauren Williams, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

This page is printer friendly

This black-and-white clip shows activities at the Addison Road Drop-In Centre in Sydney in 1977 and includes viewpoints of youths and workers from the Centre. In the first sequence the young people take over the camera and film a street scene, providing a commentary that reveals a cynical view of authority. A community worker then talks about the political awareness of the youths and how it would be easy to manipulate their distrust of authority. Finally, the clip focuses on the Centre’s mechanics workshop and its positive influence on those who participate.

Educational value points

The involvement of the youths in filming, as seen in the first part of the clip, is representative of documentary filmmaker Tom Zubrycki’s pre-1980s work. This type of collaboration with his subjects was a way of including them in the project and engendering a sense of trust. While the shaky camera work is indicative of their lack of experience with a camera, the young people clearly have fun, for example using wild pans to follow the parking inspector.

The boys’ view about how power works on the streets reflects the opinion of many young people who are homeless or long-term unemployed, and their cynical view of authority is revealed in the inference that the parking inspector is corrupt. While this cynicism is indicative of a political awareness, the youth worker suggests it also exposes a sense of alienation that extreme political groups could harness and misuse.

Drop-in centres need to find ways of engaging young people who are disaffected and alienated from mainstream society. As seen in the clip the mechanics workshop at the Addison Road Centre met with a positive response from young men at the Centre, many of whom had cars or were interested in cars. The workshop provided them with a focus as well as skills that gave them a sense of achievement and that they could use in the wider community.

In the 1970s drop-in centres evolved as a response to homelessness, unemployment and an increase in substance abuse among youth. Most of the centres were not purpose built but occupied sites provided by the community or local government. The Addison Road Centre was established in 1976 on the former site of army barracks.

Zubrycki refers to Addison Road Drop-In as a ‘process video’, a term he uses to describe videos that involved the collaboration of the community they documented, recorded events as they unfolded and were made quickly, often in a few days. These videos were constructed for a purpose and were used as a lobbying tool. Addison Road Drop-In was made to support the push to allow the youth centre to remain housed at the Community Centre at Addison Road.

The clip provides an early example of Zubrycki’s work and of the themes, such as social justice and giving the marginalised a voice, that have continued to inform his work. Zubrycki says: ‘… I’m also inspired to tell stories about ordinary Australians – stories that have been traditionally ignored by the mainstream media, and that need to be told’ (http://www.tomzubrycki.com). Addison Road Drop-In was one of the first Australian documentaries to focus on youth alienation.