A Letter from veteran Oz film supporter and enthusiast David Donaldson - NFSA RESTORES WEBINAR, CAPTAIN THUNDERBOLT, THREE TO GO

      Greetings to film friends who may be interested in Restoring old Australian films. 

NFSA WEBINAR

 The NFSA's Chief Curator Gayle Lake has long been concerned with Restoring at National Film and Sound Archive. Gayle will retire soon. The Friends of the Archive have secured a talk by Zoom on 14 April when Gayle will discuss the Archive's NFSA Restores Program, including how films are selected for the program, the research involved and the restoration process itself. There will be time for a Q&A at the end. Here is a chance to hear what goes on behind-the-scenes and ask the questions you've always wanted to ask.

 

            The webinar is free but you will need to book to receive the Zoom link.

            WHEN: Sunday 14 April, at 2pm AEST FREE BUT BOOKING ESSENTIAL

             https://www.trybooking.com/CLFHQ

For more information about this event, please check the Friends of the NFSA website, here. 

CAPTAIN THUNDERBOLT HAS BEEN FOUND

Back in the 1950s, I saw the New England and Sydney production of Captain Thunderbolt at its one-week city release and twice later.  At a session in 2010 at Art Gallery of NSW, the Archive named Captain Thunderbolt as first in its Most Wanted list, since the full release film had been considered lost.

Now, thanks to searching by independent archivist Michael Organ, a full-length print in 35mm was located in Prague. It is currently in Canberra and being examined as to restoration possibilities. 

Treating the film as a theatrical feature, much has been written over the years about some remarkable merits. The annual award of the Australian Directors Guild carries the name of the director, Cecil Holmes. The award of the Australian Cinematographers Society carries the name of Ross Wood. 

Not only, though, is the film significant as a creative outburst in Sydney in that meagre film time of 1951. It came out of essentially a Radio background and Associated Productions further had a pioneering place in Television. No wonder it was chosen as Most Wanted!

To my mind, a re-presentation could take place in the Sydney Film Festival in June 2025 (a 70-year anniversary). ....AND at Armidale where the Australian premiere was held..... AND perhaps at Cockatoo Island, the site of the thrilling escape sequence. Much work and thought will be needed before any of that can happen. Many people and authorities will have to contribute.

Several interesting links appear below. If you would like further information, please Reply to filmart@dodo.com.au with your current email address and your telephone number. I will send you the Fact Sheet by Graham Shirley and then construct a special list of such friends of the film.

         CINEMA REBORN PRESENTS THREE TO GO

Thinking of restorations, Cinema Reborn will return to Sydney and extend to Melbourne in May. There will be a restoration of Three To Go, Gil Brealey’s 1971 production that gave drama-directing opportunity to three young directors. 

Book In Melbourne if you click Cinema Reborn at the Lido

Book in Sydney Cinema Reborn at the Ritz  

 

Thanks for your interest and hoping you will Reply as a Thunderboltian.

David Donaldson 

08 8267 5069

filmart@dodo.com.au 

Discoverer Michael Organ’s comprehensive blog https://postersmo.blogspot.com/2023/09/captain-thunderbolt-1951.html

and reproducing many news pieces 

https://postersmo.blogspot.com/2023/11/captain-thunderbolt-historical.html

Graham Shirley’s 2010 article 

https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/captain-thunderbolt-and-the-search-for-lost-films

David Donaldson’s analysis of a key moment 

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2014/key-moments-in-australian-cinema-issue-70-march-2014/looking-for-captain-thunderbolt-cecil-holmes-1953/

 

 

 

 

THE BIRTH OF THE NATIONAL FILM & SOUND ARCHIVE - Cabinet Documents published by the Friends of the NFSA

40 YEARS ON – CABINET DOCUMENTS CHART CONTROVERSIAL BIRTH OF THE NFSA

 

 

To commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), the Friends of the NFSA are publishing the original Cabinet documents recording the creation of the institution on 26 March 1984. Nine days later, on 5 April, Arts Minister Barry Cohen would announce this in Parliament.

 

The new NFSA took over the film and sound archiving responsibilities, collections and staff that had, until then, been part of the National Library of Australia. The film, television and sound communities had long advocated for separate institutional status and greater resources to protect the nation’s audiovisual heritage, matching the model more commonly followed overseas. Conversely, there were also strong voices favoring retention of the status quo. 

 

Ray Edmondson, then head of the Library’s Film Section, has never forgotten the fervid atmosphere of the time. “By mid-1983 the issue was looming large in the media and Parliament and moving towards a crisis point. I was among those who favoured creating a separate institution.” 

 

The new Hawke Government embraced the challenge and determined to establish the NFSA, despite dissenting arguments from the Departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Finance, the Public Service Board, the National Library and Australian Archives. These are all documented in the Cabinet submission, and make interesting reading today. 

 

Development of the submission over several months was led by the Prime Minister’s Senior Advisor, Bob Hogg, who recalled: “It was a rather instructive period for myself in observing at close hand the bureaucracy working to thwart the clear objective of the Government. Fortunately, in this case their efforts were not productive.” 

 

Forty years on, the NFSA’s global stature has amply vindicated that original vision.

 

 

 

The documents can be accessed on the Friends website:  http://www.archivefriends.org.au/images/stories/2024/Cabsub-March-1984.pdf

 

Further information: 

Contact Friends’ President,  Ray Edmondson  Phone  0413 486 849  Email ray@archival.au  

The 2023 Rod Wallace Memorial Lecture - Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking AM FASSA speaks on Burnt files, lost files, and denials of public access: censoring Archives and the falsification of history

Ray Edmondson, President of the Friends of the National Film & Sound Archive writes: "Many of you will know of Jenny Hocking through the “Palace Letters” saga, which is now the subject of a forthcoming film.  On 28 November 2023  at 6 pm for 6.30 pm at the Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive, Jenny will deliver the 2023 Rod Wallace Memorial Lecture for the Friends of the NFSA on 28 November at the NFSA’s Arc Cinema. Her subject is   Burnt files, lost files and denial of public access: censoring archives and the falsification of history . If you will be in Canberra on the date, I recommend it! But please book first!"   

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Professor Jenny Hocking

In bringing to life the story of Gough Whitlam, his government, and its dramatic dismissal by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, archives have played a central role. From Gough Whitlam’s early film appearance as a tuxedo-wearing extra in Ken G. Hall’s Broken Melody, his spontaneous knighting of Dame Edna Everage in Barry McKenzie Holds his Own, to the Queen’s secret correspondence with Kerr about the dismissal, the collections of the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Archives among others, have revealed a rich history of Gough Whitlam and the dismissal.

Jenny Hocking’s successful four-year High Court battle against the Archives to secure the release of the Queen’s correspondence with Kerr was a great victory for history, a highpoint in public access and transparency and the harbinger of an important recalibration of the history of the dismissal. However, it also highlighted the great damage to history done by the failure to release such critically important archives. The denial of access to the ‘Palace letters’ allowed a false version of the dismissal history to circulate unchallenged, one in which the Queen played no part in Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam.

The release of the Palace letters in 2020 changed the history of the dismissal irrevocably. It also revealed a disturbing pattern of archival obstruction beyond just denials of access to public documents. From the destruction of Gough Whitlam’s ASIO file, Kerr’s burnt Royal letters of support, to the missing telephone logs, lost guest books, these innovative denials of access raise deep concerns for archives and for history. With the National Archives now imposing restrictions on researchers’ access to its records it’s time to ask, whose archives are they? In this important and thought-provoking lecture Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking asks, ‘whose archives and whose history, is this - theirs or ours?’ 

   

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THE ROD WALLACE MEMORIAL LECTURE

The Friends of the NFSA have established the Rod Wallace Memorial Lecture as an annual tribute to a pioneer of audiovisual archiving in Australia.

Roderick J. Wallace AM (1916-1997) was a founding staff member of the Film Division of the (then) Commonwealth National Library, joining it as a cataloguer in November 1945. He became head of the Division in 1956, and a decade later he was promoted to head the emerging Special Collections area of the National Library, embracing not only films, but music, sound recordings, materials conservation, photography, pictures and maps. During the 1950s he guided the development of Australia’s non-theatrical film library network across all states, with the Film Division as the central member. In the 1960s he conducted, in his own time, the first national crusade to track down what survived of Australia’s early film history – conducted, of necessity, by laborious research and letter writing, since there were no pathways to follow . In the early 1970s he oversaw the creation of the National Library’s film archive and sound archive staff units. In all of these areas he was an innovator, pioneer, skilled negotiator, advocate and mentor. A quiet achiever, he retired in 1977. He had laid the foundation for the eventual creation, in 1984, of the National Film and Sound Archive as a separate institution, an event that he regarded as one of the great moments of his life.

Each year a distinguished speaker will be invited to prepare and deliver the Rod Wallace lecture. It will be a public event, open to the public and recorded for subsequent dissemination. The topic of the lecture is left to the speaker, with the suggestion that it reflect an aspect of the preservation and dissemination of the audiovisual heritage - taking that term in its broadest interpretation.

CINEMA REBORN DECEMBER NEWSLETTER - Pasolini's SALO, Cinema Reborn 2023 dates, the Sight & Sound Poll, Kim Williams delivers the Rod Wallace Lecture, Volunteers, Charitable Donations.

This is the final Cinema Reborn Newsletter for 2022. We hope that you have enjoyed the April season plus the additional Cinema Reborn collaborations with the Ritz for the Pasolini season and the Italian Institute of Culture for the Pasolini Roundtable. 

PASOLINI AT THE RITZ

The final film in the Pasolini season, and the director’s final work before his brutal murder in 1975, screens at the Randwick Ritz. Sunday 11 December at 4.00 pm. SALO is the only Pasolini film to feature in either the Critics’ or Directors’ Poll just published by Sight & Sound. It came in at Number 72 in the top 100 of the Directors’ list. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy in 1944 remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in. 

SALO will be introduced by Professor Catharine Lumby, Chair of the Media and Communications Department at the University of Sydney. Her expertise includes matters relating to gender equality, cultural diversity, sexual violence prevention, young people and media, social media, and media content regulation.

Screens once only. For information on tickets, censorship classification and session times

Click on this link

CINEMA REBORN 2023

Our dates for 2023 are 26-30 April. Once again the season will be presented at the grand old, and recently renovated Ritz Cinemas at The Spot in Randwick. We have already confirmed about two thirds of the program from the film-making nations of Italy, Italy, Germany, USA, France, Ukraine, United Kingdom and South Korea. Many of the films will screen twice including weekday daytime sessions. We'll be announcing full details of the program in mid-March 2023.

THE SIGHT AND SOUND POLL OF THE GREATEST FILMS EVER MADE

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Many of the people who voluntarily give their time to Cinema Reborn, particularly as note-writers and presenters were invited to participate in the recent Sight & Sound Poll for the greatest films of all time. Six of the 100 films selected have been shown in previous years at Cinema Reborn and seventeen of the directors whose films were chosen have featured in our programs. We were particularly impressed that the film we chose to open this year's season Claire Denis' Beau Travail, came in at number 7. If you would like to pore over the full details of the top 100 click on this link to the BFI site.  And if you are curious to see some of them Sydney's Golden Age Cinema has announced a program of thirty three of the top 100 beginning on December 29.

Cinema Reborn will be presenting a couple more of the top 100 in its 2023 program.... Just saying.

KIM WILLIAMS DELIVERS THE INAUGURAL ROD WALLACE LECTURE AT THE NATIONAL FILM & SOUND ARCHIVE

Ray Edmondson the Chair of the Friends of the NFSA writes: "To restore the tradition of landmark lectures at the NFSA, the Friends of NFSA have established an annual lecture series in memory of archival pioneer Rod Wallace. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Kim Williams AM in the NFSA’s Arc cinema on 17 November and titled Why bother? Reflections on the duty of care to Australians’ creativity.

"For the full effect I strongly recommend watching it on YouTube  and catch the entire proceedings, interspersed with video and audio clips. Kim offers a sweeping overview of our audiovisual heritage, as well as a critique of the NFSA’s situation and its need for a coherent and transparent selection policy."

VOLUNTEERS FOR CINEMA REBORN 2023

Cinema Reborn is on the hunt for a small group of volunteers to assist in managing our screenings  at our 2023 season from 26-30 April. Duties might include checking tickets and assisting at the Information Desk. In compensation free tickets to screenings (work one, get one free) can be offered. Volunteers will don a Cinema Reborn T-shirt for identification. This might be something for young people and film students especially. If you would like to put your name down, or pass this to somebody you know  please do so. All responses to info@cinemareborn.org.au

CINEMA REBORN CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Cinema Reborn is an organisation devoted exclusively to exploring the Cinema's heritage. It is managed and organised by a group of dedicated film professionals here working solely on a voluntary basis to assemble an annual selection of cinema classics from around the world.

Cinema Reborn is designed to attract both Sydney residents and visitors from other states and New Zealand. It forms part of a unique network of international events devoted to screening the cinema's past and has built relationships with film archives and long time production houses around the world. Each selection will be having its Sydney premiere in the unique surroundings of one of Sydney's few remaining art deco picture palaces.

The costs of assembling and presenting Cinema Reborn, notwithstanding the hundreds of hours freely donated by Committee Members, volunteers, writers and presenters, are such that box office revenue cannot cover the cost of acquisition of titles, freight and logistics, venue hire, additional professional support from projectionists and staff, and the production of supporting print and online material. Cinema Reborn has relied, since its inception, on the generosity of donors who support our aims and are committed to the annual project of bringing cinema classics back to a big screen in perfect new digital copies. Without such support the event could not be presented.

To make a tax deductible donation to support our work CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL FUND

Have a happy and safe holiday season....

 

A NEW NATIONAL CULTURAL POLICY - Some extracts from the submission made by the Australian Media Oral History Group

Set out below are a couple of key responses submitted by the Australian Media Oral History Group in response to the Federal Government’s calls for submissions from interested parties for a NEW NATIONAL CULTURAL POLICY. 

 

The website sets out the following aims:

 

A new National Cultural Policy is needed to establish a comprehensive roadmap to guide the skills and resources required to transform and safeguard a diverse, vibrant and sustainable arts, entertainment and cultural sector now and into the future.

Our starting point will be Creative Australia, the national cultural policy launched by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013.

This new policy will be shaped by the diverse voices of the Australian arts, entertainment and cultural sector around the 5 goals of Creative Australia which have been distilled to the following pillars:

·       First Nations: recognising and respecting the crucial place of these stories at the centre of our arts and culture.

·       A place for every story: reflecting the diversity of our stories and the contribution of all Australians as the creators of culture.

·       The centrality of the artist: supporting the artist as worker and celebrating their role as the creators of culture.

·       Strong institutions: providing support across the spectrum of institutions which sustain our arts and culture.

·       Reaching the audience: ensuring our stories reach the right people at home and abroad.

 

 

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Access to Australia’s cultural memory,  and the lessons and education which follow, can only come about if our great national recording and collecting institutions are adequately resourced and are able to ensure access to their holdings for all who come  after by the use of the most modern, efficient and cost effective technology.  Such access will require the maintenance of well-resourced infrastructure (Buildings, IT systems, storage facilities) but also the maintenance of adequately trained and informed staff. 

By definition, the task of a collecting institution grows ever greater, as newly-created material is added to existing collections - and as the range of technologies used to create and access the works continues to expand.

The great Australian collecting institutions (NAA, National  Library National Gallery, National Museum, National Portrait Gallery and the National Film and Sound Archive) have for many years faced existential threats to their ability to carry out these central tasks. Long term commitments are required to ensure their continued ability to serve the people.

 

… Australia should be at the forefront of international expertise in the long and costly process of bringing Australia’s history, its stories, its myths and its poetry to Australia’s and the world’s citizenry. This can only be done by Governments and institutions, large and small, having the capacity to reach these audiences. Without an audience the creation of our cultural life and the values personified therein have no purpose.

The Federal Government should wholeheartedly embrace a responsibility  to support both the creation of our cultural life via support of artists, creators, teams, production units and the physical infrastructure needed for their work, (including schools, training institutions and academies) but also the physical and intellectual infrastructure need to ensure that the artists’ output reaches an audience and is not swamped by the output of other nations. 

 

If the need is identified the Federal Government should be prepared to give long term support but also prepared to use its constitutional powers to impose requirements, quotas and any other useful measures to ensure that Australian voices are heard.

 

The building block of access to and the availability of our national memory through the collecting institutions is a basic requirement of such activity.

 

In particular, AMOHG supports the maintenance of reasonable fees paid by the NFSA and other appropriate National, State and specialist archives to professional oral historians who research, record and transcribe oral histories on these institutions’ behalf. We are, however, concerned that access fees as currently charged by the NFSA are acting as a disincentive to use the collection and are inherently unfair.

 

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If you would like to read the full submission CLICK HERE  If you would like to know more about AMOHG, or if you are interested in participating in our activities, please contact us here.

AMOHG is an independent, voluntary association of professional media practitioners, oral historians, academics, archivists, journalists, critics, reviewers and others. The Group aims to encourage and conduct oral histories of practitioners in audiovisual media and those with a significant memory or knowledge of the social histories, operations, cultures and sub-cultures of audiovisual media production and reception.

Vale Colin Bennett - A valued film critic at the Age in Melbourne, friend to many and a serious contributor to the development of an Australian film industry

It sometimes takes the test of time for us to appreciate the lives and contributions made by a very few people who genuinely made a difference. 

I first encountered Colin Bennett's name when my mother decided to add The Age's Saturday edition to our weekly newspaper deliveries. That added it to The Sun, the biggst selling newspaper in Australia, the Sporting Globe, and The Herald, the biggest selling and most respected afternoon newspaper in Australia. The latter was a broadsheet no less. They both employed high quality journalists - most memorably E W Tipping, Keith Dunstan, Frederick Howard and Alf Brown. Times have changed.

As someone who spent a lot of time in his mid-teen years going to the Padua, the Western, the Liberty, The Empire, the Plaza and the Alhambra - all within walking distance or a short tram or bus ride, a revelation then occurred when each Saturday there would be a long essay in the The Age Literary Supplement devoted to such matters as film censorship, an Australian film industry, the Melbourne Film Festival or the offerings at cinemas I'd never been to - The Australia, The Savoy, the Curzon, the Brighton Dendy. 

Still I just read about these things apart from bravely venturing all the way into the city by tram and dodging school sport to see, on Bill Hannan's additional recommendation Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu.

It wasn't until I got to university that I started to see all those films and do all those things Colin Bennett got us excited about. Then he0 turned up at a MUFS night season to see something or other and I was more than a bit in awe. Things got trickier then because the university film societies of the day were all trying to seek out the films that Cahiers du Cinema wanted us to see - Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford, Raoul Walsh, Jerry Lewis.

Colin was much more sympathetic to the left-wing humanism of Sight & Sound with its focus on Brit and other realists, Bergman, Bunuel, the daring Poles like Wajda and other dissenting voices from Eastern Europe, the famous Russians like Eisenstein.

But from those times in the 60s through to 1980, the moment when Neil Jillett manouevred Colin right out of The Age and the standards instantly dropped, you never stopped reading him and never stopped being impressed by the fervour with which he espoused the causes of Australian film-making (notwithstanding the bagging he gave Tim Burstall's Two Thousand Weeks), the ending of the Menzian nanny state where idiot Liberal Ministers used to make fools of themselves banning books and films at the direction of the Chief Censor the fabulously nicknamed One-Armed Dick Prowse. (One Ministerial dope even got up in the Parliament and lamented how he had make a decision to ban the Kama Sutra and "it had placed him in a very difficult position").

Colin covered it all, provoked arguments, advanced causes, remained supremely affable, sucked on that pipe of his and was never deterred. I hope when he left the Age and left film criticism he did it with a sense of pride and achievement because he had earned that over two and half decades.

Back in 2016 I published a piece on this blog called Remembering Colin Bennett. Peter Hourigan added his thoughts.. When I read it again the memories flooded back. You can read it if you click here. That caused a minor flood. Contributions were received from Adrian Martin & Rod Bishop, Scott Murray, Michael Campi & Bruce Hodsdon, and Richard Brennan & Brian Kavanagh. Colin responded here. Click and go through to the memories

Peter Hourigan, Colin Bennett, NFSA Melbourne office, 2017

Then back in 2017 Peter Hourigan and I were able to sit down and record some of Colin's memories. Later that year I described it as the moment when hopefully I made my peace with the legendary Colin Bennett. An interview with Colin by Peter Hourigan and I for the NFSA’s oral history program provided the opportunity to say sorry for the very shabby way his departure from The Age was ignored by the Melbourne Film Festival all those years back in 1981. The interview and the discovery (and publication) of Colin’s memoir (on this blog) were highlights not to be forgotten.

If you are curious about the memoirs then click on this link

People have been sending things to me and posting things on Facebook. Here are the first couple. I'll post more as they are received,

From film-maker Phillipe Mora: That is sad news indeed. Colin was an early friend of my family. When Melbourne was a cultural desert in the Fifties my parents and Colin were the kind of intellegentsia that congregated and created modern Australia. His distinguished family and deep cultural knowledge made him the important critic in the creation of the Australian film industry. Hanging out at the Balzac and Mirka cafe he met all the nascent players in the arts. Personally he was very encouraging to me as a baby film maker.  He was the un-Les Patterson and he was sorely needed. His contribution is uncalculable.

Adrian Danks Posted this on Facebook: Very sad to hear of the death of the extraordinary Melbourne film critic, Colin Bennett, after a very full life. He left reviewing in the early 1980s, but his tenure at THE AGE in the 1950s, 60s & 70s is one of the great runs of any Australian film critic & set the stage for wonderful periods there inhabited by Adrian Martin & Jake Wilson (though I still have a grudge with Bennett for leaving too early & leaving us stranded with the appalling Neil Jillett for 15 formative years). I hardly read any of Colin's reviews when they were first published - by the time I was an adult he was gone by a few years - but have rediscovered his writing over the years. He was the central figure (along with Sylvia Lawson) in the recent essay I published on Bergman's reception in Australia. His writing always demonstrated a deep knowledge of overseas opinions & trends but was never beholden to them - he would have been such a lifeline during an era when the patterns of film distribution & exhibition in Australia were idiosyncratic at best (& where important films were often censored). I've also just finished a final draft of a book on international production in Australia (with Verevis) in which he appears more than any other writer of the time under discussion (1946-75). He was always a supporter of the local industry, but also - essentially - an astute critical voice. In some respects he was a symbol of the strength of film culture in Melbourne; always sensitive & alive to the film he was reviewing & always questioning of received wisdom. Having read many of his reviews & longer pieces in recent times - he was kinder to the epochal elements of Kramer's ON THE BEACH than I would have been, but his long review said so much about the time & space of its release in Melbourne - a collection of his work would make a fascinating read. I never met him, but wish I had - a critic's critic who was a trusted & sophisticated voice for a mainstream paper (that's always been a rare thing).  

Further comments welcome. Send them to filmalert101@gmail.com and they will be published.

Zali Steggall gets some answers to her Questions in Writing regarding the Governance and Funding of the National Film and Sound Archive..and who knew the NFSA had a new Chair and Board Member

Here the answers folks. It only took three months. ..and that's the first I'd heard of these appointments. I now discover that Paul Fletcher announced them on Christmas Eve when we were all paying attention. 

"Ms Elliott has distinguished leadership experience developed through senior financial and private sector roles. She is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Propel Group Pty Ltd, a Non-Executive Director of St Johns Ambulance Australia (VIC), and also holds Directorships at dorsaVi Limited and Wiltrust Nominees Pty Ltd. as Trustee for the Edward Wilson Estate.

"Mrs Brogden brings more than 25 years' commercial experience with companies including Macquarie Group and Ernst & Young and more than ten years in organisational psychology. She is currently the Chair and Commissioner of the National Mental Health Commission, and Chair of Mentally Healthy Workplace, Governor and Interim Chair for Queenwood School for Girls, Chair of Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance and Director for Be Kind Sydney."

Full press release here

Question No. 678

Zali Steggall asked the Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts, in writing, on 18 October 2021:

 

1.         In respect of the two vacancies, including the chair, currently on the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) board, will the Minister: (a) ensure that the new appointees satisfy one or more of the following criteria: (i) background in the management of memory institutions, especially audiovisual archives, and their relevant professional disciplines; (ii) academic standing in the history disciplines, especially the history of the screen and sound media; and (iii) active professional connection with the screen and sound industries; and (b) seek an amendment to the National Film and Sound Archive Act 2008 to specify that future appointments to the board should satisfy the above criteria.

2.         Given that, in real terms, the budget allocation for the NFSA from the Government has declined about 20 per cent over the past decade, and that to restore it to the actual level of a decade ago will require a permanent increase of $6 million per annum in base funding; will the Government commit to such a restoration.

3.         As the NFSA is required by its Act to work to the ‘highest curatorial standards’, and given that in 2010-11 the NFSA’s approved staffing level (ASL) was 220, while its current ASL is 164, will the Government commit to restoring its ASL back to 2010-11 levels.

4.         Given that the Government has provided an emergency allocation of $5.5 million over 4 years to enable basic-standard digitisation of at-risk magnetic tape audio and video recordings to be completed before 2025, will the Government apply an additional, ongoing increment of this size to the NFSA’s budget allocation beyond 2025.>

 

Mr Fletcher – The answer to the honourable Member’s question is as follows:

 

1.    The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia Act 2008(the Act) does not specify criteria which must be satisfied by persons appointed by the Minister to the Board. The Government has no intention to amend the Act to establish such criteria.Prior to appointing a person, the Minister gives regard to the skills and experience that person can contribute to the NFSA and its Board.

 

The Act provides that the Board is responsible for ensuring the proper and efficient performance of the NFSA’s functions. The Board has power to do all things necessary or convenient to be done for or in connection with the performance of its duties.

 

For the purposes of the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013(PGPA Act), the Board is the accountable authority for the NFSA. It has responsibility for leading, governing and setting the strategic direction for the NFSA, including:

• promoting the proper (efficient, effective, economical and ethical) use and management of public resources;
• promoting the achievement of the purposes of the NFSA;
• promoting the financial sustainability of the NFSA; and
• establishing appropriate systems of risk management and internal control, including measures directed at ensuring officials comply with the finance law.

 

All National Collecting Institution Boards and Councils benefit from having members drawn from various sectors. 

 

In relation to NFSA Board vacancies, I have recently appointed Ms Caroline Elliott as Chair of the Board and Mrs Lucinda Brogden AM as a Member, each for a term of three years.

 

Many of the staff engaged by the NFSA would satisfy one or more of the criteria suggested. 

 

2.    In 2021-22, the National Collecting Institutions within the Arts portfolio are collectively receiving over $300 million in funding from the Australian Government.  This is a strong reflection of the importance this Government gives to the National Collecting Institutions in preserving and making accessible Australia’s culture and history.

 

Since 2017-18, the Australian Government has announced additional funding to the NFSA of almost $60 million, for digitisation, capital works, financial sustainability and COVID-19 support. This includes $41.9 million over four years from 2021-22 to preserve and store 240,000 at-risk audio-visual items, which was announced by the Government on 3 December 2021.

 

3.    The NFSA’s average staffing level will increase over the period 2021-22 to 2024-25 by 21.5 to support the digitisation and storage of at-risk audio-visual collection material.

 

4.    As noted in response to question 2, the Government announced on 3 December 2021 that it would provide the NFSA with an additional $41.9 million over four years from 2021-22 to digitally preserve and store 240,000 at-risk audio-visual items held by the NFSA and seven other National Collecting Institutions. Around 220,000 of the items to be preserved are held by the NFSA. The NFSA will also receive $6.5 million per annum from 2025-26 to meet the ongoing storage costs for the preserved material. 

 

This funding will protect important elements of Australia’s audio-visual history from being permanently lost due to material deterioration as well as the risks posed by obsolete playback equipment and the loss of skills needed to maintain it.