Lilias Fraser

Lilias Fraser (19 April 1930 – 26 October 2004) was one of Australia’s first women documentary filmmakers. She made over 40 films between 1957 and 1996, including the early indigenous land rights documentary, This is Their Land. In 1999 Fraser was awarded the Cecil Holmes Award for Services to Directing.

Fraser was the mother of two children who also worked in film: Claudia Castle, best known as a director of music videos for such artists as The Saints, Midnight Oil and INXS, and Jane Castle ACS, an environmentalist and multi-award-winning filmmaker and cinematographer.

Background Lilias Eve Fraser was born in Brisbane in 1930. Her parents, Claude Archibald Fraser and Marjorie Gladys Robina Leitch were married in 1925. They had four children, Lilias being the second oldest. In 1923 Claude Fraser opened what is considered to be the first self-service grocery store in Australia, Brisbane Cash and Carry (BCC), ultimately expanding BCC into a highly profitable chain of 32 stores. Lilias Fraser attended Somerville House, a Presbyterian and Methodist girls' secondary college where she was school captain and became friends with future arts administrator Betty Churcher.

1950s In 1952, Fraser and Betty Churcher set off for London, at that time a key destination for artistic Australians, fleeing what they regarded as a difficult climate for the arts at home. Churcher studied painting at London’s Royal College of Art. Fraser enrolled in the Photography Department, Guildford School of Art and Photography, headed by Ifor and Joy Thomas who are regarded as having laid the foundations for a generation of successful and influential photographers and film directors.

After returning to Australia, Fraser made her first documentary, a short which she shot single-handedly on Stradbroke Island, entitled The Beach (1957). In her oral history for the National Film & Sound Archive, Fraser recalls that this was one of the first films the CFU shot in 16mm rather than 35mm and that she wrote the voice over and also edited it, ‘because in those days we did everything. Stanley said, "Nobody can make any films unless they learn to edit."'. Despite this promising beginning and encouraged by director John Heyer, she left the CFU to enroll in a French national film school, the Institut des hautes etudes cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris.

By this time, Fraser had met her future husband Norman Castle, who resigned from his job in the public service and followed her to France. There she became involved with Le Groupe des Trente, a new-wave attempt by Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and others to revive documentary. and then moved into directing, becoming one of a handful of women to direct films in Australia at that time.

In February 1961, Fraser, by then pregnant with her daughter Claudia, married Castle and they began making films together, sometimes taking first one and then two children with them on location. Castle acted as producer and promoter while Fraser wrote, directed and edited. In her oral history for the National Film & Sound Archive, she recalls that on occasion she did some of the photography herself, most notably for Waterbirds of the Inland (1965), positioned in a bird hide at Lake Narran, far northwest NSW, resting her camera on her pregnant belly.

1970s – 1980s In the early 1970s Fraser continued to make sponsored documentaries through Fraser-Castle Productions and also directed children’s television for the ABC. Although she had been offered steady directing work at the ABC, the hours would have conflicted with the demands of being a single mother and Fraser continued making sponsored films through her own company which offered greater flexibility.

In 1979, in the aftermath of the break-up of her marriage and business, there were debts to pay ‘all over town” She later said that this, as she was nearing fifty, was the beginning of her political education. to the activist educator appearing thirty years later in the pages of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative’s newspaper, Filmnews. The Co-op offered her not only politically stimulating activities but also friendship with the next generation of independent filmmakers. Fraser started hiring young cinematographers on her documentaries, most notably future Oscar-winner Andrew Lesnie.

During the 1980s, Fraser continued making sponsored films but also took on short contracts in training and distribution. Significantly, Fraser worked at the Australian Film Television & Radio School as Coordinator of their Industry Training Scheme for Women with the aim of enabling assistants in camera, sound, directing and producing roles to move into higher positions.

1990s and beyond Although Fraser’s sponsored film work was coming to a close, she now had the opportunity to produce and direct a documentary different in both content and form from those she had been making for most of her career. The result was Women of the Iron Ore Frontier, photographed by her daughter Jane Castle ACS.

The film is the story of four women in the mining town of Newman located in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. Through the lives of these women, the documentary looks at the realities that Fraser had observed but was not able to include in her sponsored films: isolation, women’s unemployment, industrial disputes and racism. Women of the Iron Ore Frontier was selected for screening at the prestigious French Documentary Festival Cinema du Reel, which celebrates the presence of the filmmaker’s point of view.

By the mid 1990s, Fraser’s film production work had come to an end. In her retirement, she helped her daughter Claudia with her grandchildren and between 1994 and 1996 co-produced the feminist documentary by Film Co-op associate Jeni Thornley, To the Other Shore.

In 1999 Fraser was awarded the Cecil Holmes Award for Services to Directing by the Australian Screen Directors Association (later known as the Australian Directors Guild).