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Tuesday, 26 October
NFSA Celebrates World Audiovisual Heritage Day 2010
On Wednesday 27 October, the National Film and Sound Archive will celebrate UNESCO’s
World Audiovisual Heritage Day: the official theme for 2010 is "Save and Savour Your
Audiovisual Heritage - Now!"
The NFSA is celebrating World Audiovisual Heritage Day 2010 by highlighting how it saves
and encourages all Australians to savour our national audiovisual heritage.
NFSA discoveries within the Corrick Collection of French and English early cinema titles,
many of which were believed to have been lost, highlight the importance of preservation of
audiovisual material.
The Corrick Collection includes more than 135 films produced in the earliest years of the 20th
century by the Corrick Family Entertainers, a musical troupe which toured Australia-wide
and internationally between 1901 and 1914. The collection includes the only known copies
of some films and provides an insight into audiences first moving image experiences. The
NFSA is growing closer to completing restoration of the rare collection, producing quality
35mm prints so audiences can experience cinema as it was intended.
Audiences are encouraged to savour the collection both in person and online.
The Australian Mediatheque, at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image in Melbourne,
has been an outstanding success, providing audiences with a wealth of Australian and
international screen culture history, spanning film, television, digital culture, recorded sound
and video art.
The collection as an educational resource is backed by the progressive delivery of curated
educational introductions to Australian film titles through the NFSA’s online portal,
australianscreen online (ASO). Adding 200 titles to the collection in the last year alone, ASO
enables teachers, students and researchers to access quality information and footage from
the earliest Australian film and television to today.
On World Audiovisual Heritage Day 2010 ASO is celebrating the inclusion of Chez les
Sauvages Australiens (1917), in its collection of Indigenous material. The French silent film
with intertitles offers rare footage depicting young Aboriginal men performing a spear
throwing ritual for the camera, men in dugout canoes, a close-up of traditional body scarring
and a family using rafts to cross the water. Other new items include added Ningla A-Na,
documenting the Black movement in 1972 and the first and last recordings of Tasmanian
Aboriginal songs and language (Fanny Cochrane Smith (1903)).
The Coordinating Council of Audio-Visual Archives Associations (CCAAA), which was
designated by UNESCO as the lead implementing body to organise the yearly celebration,
has established a special website for the joint use of the different non-governmental
Notes for Editors/Journalists
Interviews available with the National Film and Sound Archive’s Senior Curator, Meg Labrum
For enquiries, images and to arrange interviews, please contact Sarah Mason on
phone: Tel: +612 6248 2173/ 0401 666 567 or visit the NFSA website: www.nfsa.gov.au
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