DAVID ADAMS writes about the founding of the National Film and Sound Archive…
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The NFSA website. |
Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive – repository of more than two million moving images, recorded sounds, documents and artefacts – is this month marking 30 years since its creation.
The NFSA was established in 1984 when the then Minister for Home Affairs and Environment, Barry Cohen, announced its creation as an autonomous body for collecting, preserving and sharing the nation’s audio-visual heritage on 5th April of that year.
The organisation moved into its new home – a 1930s Art Deco building previously occupied by the Australian Institute of Anatomy in October that year. The building was officially rededicated by Prime Minister Bob Hawke on 3rd October the same year.
The collection, which numbers more than two million items, has its origins in the National Historical Film and Speaking Record Library established by the federal government in 1935 and managed from 1946 by the Commonwealth National Library’s (later the National Library of Australia) Film Division.
Among the 2,165,000 items in the NFSA collection – which can be visited at its Canberra location or some of which can be found online – are 516,000 moving images, 444,000 recorded sounds and 1,205,000 documents and artefacts.
As well as the 1943 Oscar for the film Kokoda Frontline and costumes from Muriel’s Wedding, the collection includes the car that split in half in the movie Malcolm, the crown and throne presented to Graham Kennedy in 1969 and 1972 respectively, and the world’s first feature length film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, which dates from 1906.
The oldest items in the collection include The Hen Convention (a sound recording on a wax cylinder dating from 1896), Australia’s earliest surviving moving image shot at the Melbourne Cup carnival and the Lumiere film Workers Leaving the Factory and – both of which date from 1896 – as well as ‘magic lantern’ projectors which date from the early 1800s.
A timeline of the 30 years of the NFSA can be found here.
If you have something you’d like to know the origins of, simply send an email to [email protected].
