SOUNDTRACK TO A NEW LIFE

Dulcie Holland is best known for her books on music theory. But in a career spanning nearly 70 years, she also composed music for documentaries promoting Australia's postwar immigration strategy.

- JULIE IHLE

DULCIE HOLLAND’S EARLY piano lessons as a six-year-old always started with an impromptu botany lesson. She would take some of the native flowers that flourished in her garden along to her piano lessons, where her teacher’s father would identify them. Throughout her life she took pride in reciting the curly botanical names of Australian plants.

Decades later, she would play her own role in educating immigrants about this strange and faraway land. She composed the music for a series of postwar documentaries that promoted Australia as a place to live and educated would-be migrants about the virtues of their new home.

Dulcie Holland was my grandmother, and it was through discussion of these films around the family dinner table in suburban Sydney that I first recall learning about her musical career. The notion of new Australians” sailing from Europe and watching these films on board ships sounded impossibly exotic to me.

Between 1945 and 1965 more than 2 million people emigrated to Australia mostly from war-torn countries as part of Australia’s great populate or perish” push. Although the government initially targeted Great Britain, it quickly realised that to sufficiently increase the population they would have to widen the net. Arthur Calwell, minister for information 1943-49) and Australia’s first minister for immigration 1945-49) embarked on a program of promotional documentaries aimed at recruiting more immigrants.

The films were initially made by the Department of Information’s Film Division, which had wartime filmmaking experience, before becoming part of the Australian News and Information Bureau within the Department of the Interior. In 1956 the Film Division was renamed the Commonwealth Film Unit, the precursor to Film Australia.