Entertaining children: The 1927 Royal Commission on the Motion Picture Industry as a site of women’s leadership

[Extract] Mrs John Jones, president of the Victorian Women’s Citizen Movement, presented the above evidence to the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia in 1927.² Jones compared the exploited children with exploited ‘natives’—both presumably requiring protection in the form of benevolent control. And it was a particular type and class of woman who could provide such control and guidance. For the women reformers, and also men, who appeared before the commission, the cinema was understood as a public arena in which a novel visual language was spoken