Burning Weeds at Auburn

Burning Weeds at Auburn was a short actuality film shot by Ernest Jardine Thwaites in Melbourne using a home-made movie camera. This gifted but shy innovator was Australia's first film producer; he is not a household name and few of his achievements have been recorded. This book covers extensively Thwaites's short but intense period of film making from late 1896 to mid-1898. Only one, perhaps two, of his films have survived but fragments of other films can be found as photographs...
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Burning Weeds at Auburn was a short actuality film shot by Ernest Jardine Thwaites in Melbourne using a home-made movie camera. This gifted but shy innovator was Australia's first film producer; he is not a household name and few of his achievements have been recorded. This book covers extensively Thwaites's short but intense period of film making from late 1896 to mid-1898. Only one, perhaps two, of his films have survived but fragments of other films can be found as photographs printed from film and used in flip books. In October and November of 1897, Thwaites came into prominence when, with Robert Harvie, he filmed the Caulfield Cup, the Derby and the Melbourne Cup. Each of these films was screened to enthusiastic audiences on the same evening as the race. Cinematography was not the only area of Thwaites's endeavour; he applied his mechanical aptitude to the recording phonograph, the kinetoscope, the mutoscope and the pianola. To give context to his achievements, Burning Weeds at Auburn is book-ended by an outline of his family background and that of his wife, Theodora Thwaites. This book is as much a record of a quiet achiever and his family as it is a homage to Australia's first film producer.