Coogee Media

The Betrayer was a silent-era 1921 Australian-New Zealand film from director Beaumont Smith about an inter-racial romance between a white Australian and a Maori girl that was partly shot at Coogee. It is a lost film, so no copy seems to have survived, but its description indicates it had a very strange, socially awkward plot - so strange it is hard to imagine what the producers and writers were thinking of!

Frank Beaumont Smith
Frank Beaumont "Beau" Smith (1885 to 1950) was an Australian film director, producer and exhibitor, best known for making low-budget comedies. He made his first film in 1917, Our Friends, the Hayseeds. He went on to become one of the most prolific and popular Australian filmmakers of the silent era. His films included adaptations of works by Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. His 1933 comedy The Hayseeds featured the first screen appearance of Cecil Kellaway (1890 to 1973), the British/South African character actor.

Smith was famous for making his films quickly, sometimes completing shooting and post production within a month for budgets ranging from £600 to £1,200. His wife Elsie was often an uncredited contributor to his work, helping him write scripts. He was sometimes known as "One Shot Beau" or "That'll Do Beau".

Plot of the Betrayer
An Australian, Stephen Manners, travels to New Zealand and falls in love with a Maori girl. He goes home and she dies giving birth to their daughter, Iwa. Iwa is raised by her grandfather Hauraki, who explains to Manners what happens when he returns to New Zealand twenty years later. Manners decides to take Iwa back to Sydney, Australia, but doesn't tell her that he is her father.

Travelling with Manners is John Barris who Hauraki tells on his deathbed that Iwa's real father actually is a missionary, not Manners. Barris keeps this information to himself and makes advances towards Iwa which are stopped by Manners. Iwa tells Manners she is in love with him, so Manner explains he is her father and she returns to Rotorua. Barris' wife tells Manners the truth so he returns to New Zealand and is reunited with Iwa, this time as a romantic couple.

Scene from Betrayer with Cyril Mackay (Stephen Manners),
Stella Southern (Iwa) and Mita (Hauraki)

Strange Story Line
The original events must have happened about 1900 - so was it cinematically acceptable, in those staid times, for Manners to have sexual relations with the Maori girl and she in turn to have sexual relations with the missionary? When he returns to New Zealand, it seems to have been about 1920 and Manners, logically, could not have been a young man anymore. One moment Manners takes a young woman to Australia, without good reason, because he presumes she is his daughter who he has only just met, then they return to New Zealand, on the say-so of a third party, no longer as father and daughter, but as lovers. It is all too strange an idea!

Production
The movie was shot at Rotorua in New Zealand, the old Wentworth Hotel in Sydney city and at Coogee Beach. It was originally entitled Our Bit o' the World but this was changed out of fear audiences would think it was a travelogue. In 1922 Smith re-edited the film for the British market, adding a racecourse scene and a chase between a car and a train, probably taken from his earlier movie Desert Gold (1919). He retitled the movie The Maid of Maoriland, a title under which the film was re-released in Australia.

One reviewer commented on the scenes shot at Coogee:

It looks as if the good old surf is to be given due recognition by local film producers. A big proportion of Sydney spends its week-ends and all other possible times on the beaches, yet so far our moving pictures have shown dry times out west or equally dry times in the city itself. Now, however, two Australian producers are putting the surf on the screen. Many of the scenes for "The Betrayer," Beaumont Smith's latest ... were taken at Coogee. Here are Australian girls displaying their skill in the water, and gallant life savers all ready for rescues. The episodes on the beach are a decided contrast to certain other of the picture's incidents, which were filmed at Rotorua ...