All About Olive
Clip 2: Back to school
2 min 47 sec (
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Taken from the documentary All About Olive (2004)
Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be PG
Availability of the complete title
Curator’s clip description
At 105 years old, Olive Riley goes back to her school in Broken Hill to meet the current students. Parts of Olive’s early life are re-enacted. Corporal punishment was practiced in the school. Olive remembers pushing another pupil who was annoying her and knocking the girl out.
Teachers’ notes
provided by The Le@rning Federation
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This clip shows 105-year-old Olive Riley returning to her school in Broken Hill in western New South Wales, to talk to the students. Olive recalls details of her schooldays during the early 1900s, as contemporary footage and black-and-white archival stills are shown. Olive meets the current students and regales them with anecdotes about her student days. They are particularly intrigued by her description of being caned. Through a re-enactment, Olive tells a colourful story about how she dealt with a girl who taunted her about her red hair and the consequences of the incident.
Educational value points
- The filmmaker, Mike Rubbo, met Olive Riley while researching a subject that fascinates him, ‘the centenarian phenomenon’, which relates to people over 100 years of age who are mentally robust and still living their lives to the full. The clip shows Olive to be lively, sharp-witted and spirited as she fully engages her young audience and challenges the stereotype of elderly people as frail, absent minded and uninteresting. Rubbo’s research suggests that centenarians are the fastest growing age group in the world.
- Historically, corporal punishment in Australian schools was permitted as ‘lawful correction’ and the clip presents firsthand a student’s experience of receiving corporal punishment in the early 1900s. Currently in Australia, corporal punishment is still practised in some jurisdictions. Although most Australian states and territories have legislation, regulations or policies in place to ban the practice, these are not binding on non-government schools.
- Interesting questions about the nature of bullying and appropriate ways to deal with it are raised. Olive’s story of being bullied highlights the potentially serious consequences of her actions in knocking the bully out cold. She is threatened with the possibility of being sent to a reformatory, which would have meant being separated from her family.
- The clip uses dramatic re-enactment to effectively depict an incident from the past and in one instance the re-enactment is filmed from Olive’s contemporary point of view, creating an interesting juxtaposition of a centenarian in the present watching herself in the past.
- All About Olive is an example of a style of documentary in which the filmmaker is highly interventionist. Rubbo’s strong off-screen presence, as he verbally interacts with Olive, and his use of re-enactments are quite unlike a traditional ‘cinéma vérité,’ fly-on-the-wall approach, in which the filmmaker aspires to be an unobtrusive observer. Olive herself intervenes during the filming of a re-enactment, taking a director’s role and indeed, for her efforts in this documentary, she has been nominated for a Guinness World Record as the oldest co-director in the world.
- Australian filmmaker and painter Mike Rubbo worked as a documentary film director for the National Film Board of Canada between 1970 and 1990 where he made Song of Yellow Skin, Waiting for Fidel, Daisy, and Solzhenitsyn’s Children.
