Canberra (dpa) – A house catches fire and the chances are the occupants will risk life and limb trying to save photo albums, diaries and home videos from going up in smoke.
As with individuals, so with nations – both tend to set great store in sounds and images from the past, our shared memories, the national balance sheets of success and failure.
Ron Brent, chief custodian of Australia’s national tape collection, sees his job as not so much preserving the past as looking after the social capital of the present.
“We all recognize the value of understanding who we are and why we exist. If you don’t acknowledge the culture, you don’t pass on the values,” said Brent, director of government-funded ScreenSound Australia.
Canberra-based ScreenSound has amassed a collection of more than two million bits of audiovisual material from the 1890s to the present day.
Australia is lucky. It hasn’t had the huge social upheavals that in countries like Indonesia and Cambodia that have led to the bleaching of the national record.
In Indonesia there is only a gritty bit of tape of Sukarno and Hatta proclaiming independence on August 17, 1945. In Cambodia, during their reign of terror, the Khmer Rouge tried their best to destroy anything that predated Year Zero.
Australia’s problem is not the paucity of the collection but the superabundance of sounds and images that could be collected.
With not hundreds but thousands of films and sound recordings published every year, television networks now backed by any number of pay-TV channels, ScreenSound has to be very selective.
And who’s to judge what will turn out to be important, to be iconic?
Said Brent, “Whereas the written record catches what’s in the recordist’s mind, incidental film footage catches what’s there”.
So the policy is to collect as much as possible, to harvest the lot rather than pick and choose what might become important.
For example, a recently unearthed film strip of the New South Wales country town of Grafton in the 1920s shows not just the main street and its shops but breastfeeding women, schoolchildren without shoes and facts of life that it never occurred to the cameraman to record.
We learn things about Australia 80 years ago that people at the time took for granted and probably never bothered to consciously record – like breastfeeding, like going to school without shoes.
ScreenSound, set up in 1984 and funded with 18 million Australian dollars (9.3 million U.S. dollars) a year, is not a repository but a library.
Seven out of 10 Australians see or hear something borrowed from the collection each year.
Said Brent: “TV is a very responsive medium. If 70 per cent of the population are using our library, it says the collection is very valuable”.
An IBM computer and a proprietary software program called MAVIS (Merged Audio Visual Information System) has made access easier for television stations and other users of the archive.
More than a quarter of the collection is now cross-referenced by MAVIS so that those calling up a sequence of Cathy Freeman lighting the Olympic cauldron at the 2000 Games will likely get a link to natural gas production.
Despite this bow to the digital age, Brent insists that preserving originals is important not just migrating everything to binary code.
As a service to other archives in the region, ScreenSound helps out with migration. For example, it has just recorded onto modern video stock a stash of two-inch tapes of Malaysian television shows.
