Eighty years ago three little Christchurch girls took part in a Shirley Temple look-alike competition that sparked a lifelong Kiwi love affair with the curly-topped, dimpled cherub ... and led to a surprising university research project decades later.
The researcher, Associate Professor Geoff Lealand from The University of Waikato, will share the New Zealand fans' story - and Shirley's - this Friday during a keynote address at the XVIIth Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (FHAANZ) Conference.
The conference will be held at QUT's Gardens Point campus in Brisbane from July 1 to 3 and unite scholars, archivists, educators, policymakers, filmmakers and post-graduate students of screen studies and screen history.
Professor Lealand's journey with Shirley and her octogenarian look-alikes began with the discovery of an old scrapbook in a Christchurch antique store.
"Constructing this story has involved extensive research in New Zealand, which has included archival research, interviewing and re-tracing the history of Shirley," he said.
"It has also been a journey for me, in that I once had scant regard for Shirley but now have considerable respect for her and a better appreciation of her central role in American film history."
The conference will also include a book launch on Thursday for the second edition of the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2 (2015), edited by QUT's Dr Ben Goldsmith and Dr Mark Ryan, and Professor Lealand.
A public film screening of the 1976 Australian bushranger film Mad Dog Morgan will also be held at GOMA on Wednesday evening.
Highlight talks on this week's Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand Conference program will include:
- Stuart Cunningham, The Emerging New Screen Ecology (Wednesday keynote)
- Tessa Dwyer, Dubbing Mad Max (Thursday, session 5)
- Ben Goldsmith, Is Everything Awesome? The LEGO Movie, Global Film Production and the Australian Film Industry (Thursday, session 4)
- Emma Somogyi, Meaningful immortality: human qualities of the post-millennial on-screen vampire (Thursday, session 6)
- Samantha Lindop, Female Subjectivity and the Femme Fatale in Born to Kill, (Thursday, session 6)
- Geoff Lealand, In Love With Shirley Temple: Hollywood, New Zealand and cultural memory (Friday keynote)
- Phoebe Macrossan, One Direction and the musicalization of everyday life (Friday, session 7)
- Elizabeth Ellison and Mark David Ryan, A dangerous place: the function of the beach as a setting in Australian horror movies, (Friday, session 8)
- Kathleen Williams, Eulogies for the Video Store: How Digital Audiences Historicise the Practices and Objects of VHS (Friday, session 8)
- Alexa Scarlata, A Stream Come True? Australian Audience Interaction with Net-Based Video Delivery Services (Friday, session 8)
Media contacts:
- Mechelle McMahon, QUT media officer, media@qut.edu.au
- After hours: Rose Trapnell, 0407 585 901
