Finding Bernice
Producer-Director Liz Crow
50 minute documentary-fairytale
Being shot on mini-DV
In production
[d]
As a child, my family told me tales of a relative long-lost. Bernice: first generation Australian and born of a wayward father who was run off to the colonies. At the age of 20 and back in the Roaring Twenties, Bernice donned swimming costume and goose grease to swim the 270 kilometres of Melbourne Bay.
And now here is my own small child - born to the water and soon to take her first strokes. For them both, I plan to piece together the story that is Bernice and then pass it on to this, the next generation. I will film the process, weaving it with oral history, fact and drama, and tinting it with a child's perspective.
Finding Bernice will tell the story of an ordinary woman who did a remarkable thing and became a symbol of time and place. Her story will be told as documentary-fairytale, made of truth, detection and storytelling, spanning continents and generations to uncover a history that belongs to everyone.
I picture her striking out across the expanse of Bay, a small rowing boat keeping pace as she ploughs on in the face of all doubters. 1920s Australia is newly independent, bursting with pride but filled with contradictions: the fat of the gold rush and the crash of the 1880s, votes for white women, but Aboriginal women's children taken from them by the state. Where does Bernice fit? Who was she? Why did she do it and what came after? Women were stepping out in the '20s, but still what she did remained risqué and risky. Where did she find the courage and how do we take some of it with us?
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This page last modified: 07 Sep 2007