Caddie

Clip 2: ‘Life’s a bugger’

Taken from the feature Caddie (1976)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be M

Curator’s clip description

Caddie (Helen Morse) calls off her relationship with bookmaker Ted (Jack Thompson), after she is warned off by Ted’s steady girlfriend. At the boarding house where she lives, the landlord and his wife (Pat Evison) tell her she’ll have to go, because her children are misbehaving. On the tram home, her friend Josie (Jacki Weaver) tells Caddie of the outcome of her visit to an unlicensed abortionist.

Curator’s notes

The film has a remarkably frank approach to discussion of difficult social problems, which is why the two women are shown discussing Josie’s abortion while they’re travelling on a tram (in the days when Sydney still had them). There’s also a strong sense of the film’s female camraderie in this scene, and of the richness of working-class language, which Caddie is learning to use.

Paul Byrnes, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows barmaid Caddie (Helen Morse) ending an affair with SP bookmaker Ted (Jack Thompson) because he already has a girlfriend. The Norrises, with whom Caddie is boarding, ask her to find other accommodation because her two young children are too much trouble. On the tram home from work, barmaid Josie (Jacki Weaver) tells Caddie about her miscarriage after an illegal abortion. Caddie tells Josie that she is looking for new work because she has broken up with Ted.

Educational value points

Single women had many difficulties finding satisfactory work and accommodation as well as child care in the late 1920s, when there were few social welfare benefits available. The stoicism and camaraderie of the thoroughly working-class Josie, who deflects Caddie’s concerns about her health after an illegal abortion with ‘I’ve got to pay the rent, haven’t I?’, stresses this socioeconomic and female perspective.

The scenes in this clip focus on the difficulties of life during this time for single women. Abortion was illegal, so those wishing to terminate a pregnancy not only had to seek an illegal abortion, with all the health risks that this entailed, but also needed to continue working. Caddie’s decision to leave her job is also a major one at a time when work was hard to find and there were no child endowment or social security payment schemes available.

In the early 20th century there was government censorship and a prohibition on broadcasting certain words, such as contraception, in an effort to maintain guardianship over public morals. Even during the 1950s and 60s it was illegal to advertise condoms or to publish any information about birth control. In the tram scene, Josie makes a face at an eavesdropper on her conversation with Caddie about her abortion, which she refers to as a ‘miscarriage’.

Caddie is set at a time when there was widespread poverty, no reliable contraception and the Offences against the Person Act 1861 was the basis for Australian laws totally outlawing abortion. Women wishing to terminate a pregnancy needed to seek out potentially dangerous ‘backyard abortions’, which were generally performed in unsanitary conditions and often by people with little medical experience.

Caddie exhibits two themes common to 1970s New Australian Cinema: period reconstruction and, as in some other films produced at about this time such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and My Brilliant Career, presentations of female points of view. Caddie’s slice-of-life realism has a genteel woman-centred literary quality but Caddie herself is a classic Australian underdog with initiative, an overwhelmed battler who is easy to sympathise with.

The film from which this clip is taken was adapted from a memoir, Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid (1953), which contained a rich social history of Sydney in the 1920s. In the original print version the main character is working class, but in the film, primarily due to the choice of Helen Morse to play Caddie, the character was written as a middle-class woman who falls on hard times.

Australian authors Dymphna Cusack (1902–81) and Florence James (1904–93), who co-authored Come in Spinner (1951), which also dealt with poverty, discrimination, abortion and death, encouraged their housekeeper to write Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid, a memoir about her experiences as a barmaid and sole parent of two in the 1920s in Sydney.

Helen Morse (1948–) won both the AFI Award for Best Actress in a Lead Role and the San Sebastiàn Best Actress award in 1976 for her performance in Caddie. At about this time she had acted with Jacki Weaver (1947–), who also appears as Josie in Caddie, in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and with another star of Caddie, Jack Thompson (1940–), in Peterson (1974).

The fine cinematography in Caddie won Peter James an Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS) Cinematographer of the Year award in 1976, an award that he won again in 1991 and 1993. He entered the ACS Hall of Fame in 1979, was nominated for an Emmy award in 2004 and won three AFI Best Achievement in Cinematography awards, in 1985, 1986 and 1992.