John Mack’s film footage of the World War Troop Trains was presented by John Mannion during the Film Maker in Residency 2009.

John Mack is in his nineties now,  and has been a South Australian photographer and cinematographer. As a young bloke he worked in a photographic firm in Adelaide and began working with moving images soon after that. Mack became involved in the amateur cinema movement in South Australia during the 1930s and 1950s. During the Second World War he was an army staff sergeant and was posted to the Northern Territory where he was involved with the Australian Army Education Service. It was during this time that he filmed his footage of the troop trains moving through Quorn.

Mack filmed with a small Bell and Howell double 8 mm camera for which he made his own double 8 mm film from found 16 mm RAAF aircraft gun camera film stock, splitting it down the centre with a home-made razor blade splitter. Mack used an old sewing machine in Darwin to punch the extra set of sprocket holes needed to convert 16 mm into double 8 mm film (16 mm film has half as many perforations as double 8 mm) for his camera. This illustrates Mack’s ingenuity and resourcefulness at a time when it was difficult to get hold of film stock because of the war. I’ve often heard of ‘air aces’ who shot down many enemy aircraft, but never asked how these were verified, They had to be witnessed or captured on film. The 16 mm gun camera held only a short roll of film and was mounted on the inside of the right wing and behind the propeller, hence the “flickering”. The “shaking” or movement in some of the film is due to the camera mount and the shock of four .50 calibre machine guns firing just a few feet away. The camera would automatically start filming when the guns were fired and would stay activated for a few seconds after firing stopped. The camera could also be manually switched on, pilots often used their gun cameras during bomb runs to help verify hits on target. The films were processed through the RAAF. Basically this historical footage filmed by John Mack captures WWII Australian defence force personnel travelling on the old Central Australian Railway from South Australia to the Northern Territory. it is home movie shot in 1942-43 about ‘Norforce’ army days in the Territory and WA. It includes footage of Quorn, Edwards Creek, Oodnadatta, Parachilna, Irrapatanna, Mataranka, Katherine and the Adelaide River. at Hayes Creek, NT and Wyndham in WA. Mack also films some of the Australian landscape including the Devils Marbles and the near-deserted town of Wyndham in Western Australia shortly after being bombed by Japanese forces. . The original footage is with the National Film and Sound Archive. John Mack’s son, John as in city camera store got his father to add audio to the footage in 1985.

John Mack has given two people permission to screen his film in public, oral historian / film maker John Mannion and film historian David Donaldson.

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