This excerpt is drawn from Life In Australia, a series of promotional films produced in the mid-1960s for the Department of Immigration, aimed at enticing European immigrants to Australia. Considering this goal, the imagery presented was nostalgic and picture-perfect, often eliding the decade’s actual sociopolitical developments.

An interesting aspect of the Melbourne instalment is its nighttime sequence. Along with shots of historic areas of Melbourne’s CBD, there’s a focus on night workers: power plant employees switching on the city lights, cleaners vacuuming cavernous offices after-hours, and the running of a church.

The outcome is a specific image of a Christian-focused, electric Melbourne – it’s a fascinating example of the era’s government filmmaking style, and how Australia wanted to present itself to the world at the time. Although the view is narrow, the clip captures the people who kept our largest modern cities running through the dark from the 20th century to now.

Explore more of After Dark – a Deep Dive into Australian nightlife that draws on decades of material from the NFSA collection.