[KenRa Films Present: the Kenneth Rankine Home Movie Collection: Reel 10]

Kenneth Carruthers Rankine (1890 - 1968) was a keen amateur cinematographer and filmmaker. This collection of his home movies has been donated to ACMI by Kenneth’s granddaughter. The collection represents a wonderful slice of life in Australia; with contents including scenes of everyday life, major family occasions, holidays around Victoria and views of Melbourne.

This film shows tugboats assisting ships into the piers at the Port of Melbourne and stars the “James Paterson” boat on which Kenneth is filming. The scenes in the reel show a lost world of shipping and the manual labour of port operations. The reel ends with the ‘James Paterson’ tugboat at the dock.

Selected highlights list:

00:00:30:00 title card ‘Pushing and Pulling’ and “starring James Paterson and Norman C. McBain”. Shortly after, we see a tugboat named ‘James Paterson’.

00:03:31:00 scenes of the workings of the tugboats in assisting ships in and out of port, stoking the engine fires, ships crews looking down from the great height of their vessels whilst the tugboats manoeuvre around them.

00:03:45:00 shots of boats and water and a large ship ‘Pipiriki’ leaving a pier and being towed by a tugboat from where Kenneth is filming, presumably on the ‘James Paterson’; we see shots of a harbour and ships and boats passing by as well as one the tugboat operator at the wheel.

00:04:07:00 we see the ship ‘Sanoma’ followed by men working lines on the tugboat alongside the ship.

00:07:55:00 ‘Melbourne Star’ ship, the ‘Wombat’ tugboat and ‘River Murumbidgee’.

00:09:15:00 we see a close up of rope work by the crew of the ‘Clan Macaulay’.

00:10:05:00 shows a great closeup shot of workers chatting on the tugboat.

00:11:50:00 a good shot of one of the dockside piers.

00:12:13:00 sequence from this point shows a ship hoisted into dry dock - Kenneth uses shots of the boat stop signal, a dry dock supply shop and the pier to emphasise the dry dock surrounds.

00:13:00:00 the scene changes to night time on the water followed by some passenger ships.