With their new three-part series Australia: An Unofficial History, SBS have cracked open the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) vault and brought forth the long forgotten Australian government films of the seventies, letting modern audiences see how Australia was viewed through the lens of Film Australia and how educational films helped trigger discussions around society. Australia: An Unofficial History is embedded with pristine archival footage, featuring films from the era like Donald Crombie’s Do I Have to Kill My Child? and Peter Weir’s Whatever Happened to Green Valley?, alongside societal documentaries which took audiences into the homes of mums who were forced into being stay at home wives while their husbands went out on motorbike trips for the weekend.
Audiences are guided by screen legend Jacki Weaver, social commentators like Benjamin Law, Zoë Coombs Marr, Jazz Money, and more, through the history of Film Australia. Each of these commentators brings a fresh perspective to the footage they watch, while others, like Gary Foley, Philip Noyce, and Jacki Weaver, are able to reflect on their role in the work that was made during the seventies. As one of the subjects says in the series, ‘if you can entertain, you can educate,’ and that’s certainly something that was achieved with the films in the Film Australia collection.
Australia: An Unofficial History then becomes more than a dive into history, with the role of the NFSA becoming an integral part of how stories are told on screen. The series then continues the archives eagerness to be interrogated – a word that I use deliberately – and explored, as we’ve seen with the films of Sari Braithwaite, whose [censored] reflected on what has been removed from cultural history, to Jazz Money’s Winhanganha, which explores how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices have been collected, curated, and presented on screen through Australian film and TV history.
It's that notion of interrogation that opens the following discussion with Bronwyn Dowdall, the Senior Manager, Enterprises at the NFSA. Bronwyn talks about the role of the NFSA, the scope of the collection, and the history of Film Australia.
I encourage you to watch Australia: An Unofficial History on SBS and SBS On Demand now. I also encourage you to read this comprehensive history of Film Australia on the NFSA website here.
It's also worthwhile noting that the NFSA Player has selections of the collection available to rent. Find out more here.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I'd love to start talking about what it means to be able to open up the collection to a form of interrogation for a series like Australia: An Unofficial History?
Bronwyn Dowdall: We do work with a whole range of people. We're super busy all the time just providing access to different collection materials, but with this particular series it gave us an opportunity to look at quite a specific part of the collection. This project let us look specifically at those films from the 1970s that were produced by Film Australia.
Some films were produced for an educational audience, so they've never been screened on TV. They weren't made for that purpose, so I think your use of the word ‘interrogation’ is actually a really appropriate one, because when the team were doing the research on the 1970s collection, they really were interrogating what each title focused on and what it brought to our understanding of Australia at that time, and perhaps pulling out some of those stories that were little known.
That period in Australian history was actually one of quite significant social upheaval, so these films, while they were made for an educational audience, are really fantastic documents of that time. Of course, because they had the government production office, Film Australia, producing them, they were really balanced and really nuanced. People opened up and shared their lives with the camera and with the crew, and that's what comes across.
On a fundamental level, when films like these enter the archive, how would they be catalogued? What terms would have been used to catalogue their place in the archive?
BD: Because this is the Film Australia collection, it's treated slightly differently to material that comes into what we call the National Collection. Film Australia became one of the foundational agencies that created Screen Australia. They went over and became part of Screen Australia with the Film Finance Corporation and with the Australian Film Commission. Then in the early 2010s, the film Australia library was pulled out of Screen Australia and merged with and given to the National Film and Sound Archive, and along with that, all of the library including all of the Film Australia titles. There's over 3000 complete titles in the Film Australia collection that all came over.
At that time, we had quite a full cataloguing area. What we found with a lot of those titles is that they were fully shot-listed, and that makes searching for those clips or segments within those titles much easier than what it would be if we were just given a title and some tags. So, you can look for a particular issue or a saying or a person or a place and it's likely to come up. That kind of intensive cataloguing continued until about 2014.
For the most part, that collection is really well documented. If it was part of a series, it will be listed under that series. Keywords were kind of a thing, but tags certainly weren't. For example, if there was a documentary about baby health centers, the key words would be ‘babies’ and ‘health centers’ and the year, those sorts of things. So, you could kind of isolate what you were looking for in that way.
One of the things which is discussed in the series is that they saw the emergence of the ‘trigger’ film, which is a film designed to trigger a discussion, not the definition of the term trigger as we now know nowadays. You mentioned the societal upheaval before, and that is reflected in the kind of drive of a discussion that could change society by presenting real life stories on screen. Can you talk about the importance of showing these stories on screen in a sensitive way?
BD: That's an interesting question. I think that comes down to the deftness of the crew that were involved in that, because it's actually the relationships you build with the subjects, you need people to trust you and that you're not going to throw them to the wolves and that you respect them and you respect their story. It's crafted in a way that I think makes the audience wonder, ‘what happened to that person?’ ‘Where did they come from?’ ‘What does that mean when they did this?’ So it's not presenting a series of facts, it's really kind of crafting this nuanced and oftentimes very personal story. I think that is a testament to the direction, to the crew involved, the script writers.
It's kind of fundamental that they weren't meant to hit you over the head with ideology. They were really meant to make you think. I think having that educational kind of focus for some of them, not all of them, really was the key. It was to make school kids think about an issue. It's a real shame there aren't more.
Shifting over to talking about the quality of the footage. It's so wonderfully presented. It feels like it's just been screened for the first time. What was the physical quality of the film like?
BD: Largely the films were shot on, I'm going to say, 16 mil film, which means we can preserve them and we can reproduce them in high definition. We can't do it in 4k because 16 mil just doesn't lend itself to that. I think because the material has not been used and used and used over time, you do find that films that haven't had high usage are pretty pristine, you know? They're beautiful, really sharp when you see them, and I think that was the case in a lot of these films.
In your work with the NFSA, has it surprised you about some of the things you have gotten to see? Does it feel like these are stories that we should still be telling nowadays? Has it surprised you what the NFSA has in its collection?
BD: No, it hasn't surprised me. It continues to please me. It does talk to the importance of archives, especially audio visual archives, because people can sometimes think, ‘Oh, well, audio visual, like TV or film or whatever it's kind of nice stuff, but it's not solid history.’ But it actually is.
They're audio visual documents of a time, of that place, of an attitude, of a discussion. I think you need that audio visual record to complement, say, a written record or a photographic record, that actually brings it to life and provides a context to that history, and that is really hard to beat when you're looking at something in audio visual format. I continue to find it magical.
It's so important for understanding what happened and what came before us. You can see a photograph of somebody standing still, and you look at their clothes, and you think, ‘that's a great record,’ but when you see those same people walking around and interacting with one another, it's just a different kind of experience.
So I continue to be wowed by it and really pleased that it exists. I'm a fan of the audio visual form which is why I wanted to work here.
What I've appreciated about the NFSA is the way it’s been made available for creatives to interrogate it. I’m thinking of Sari Braithwaite’s [censored] or Jazz Money’s Winhanganha, and then with a series like Australia: An Unofficial Story. How important is it to have people engage with the NFSA and the archive in a way that questions what is in the archive itself?
BD: I actually think it's crucial. It's crucial for people to come into the archive and, like you would come into any place, don't accept the face value of it, like ‘that's there and that's okay.’ What interests me is always what goes beyond that, and that's where the archive is really brought to life. We don't want to see the same stories over and over. We want to see different stories, and we want to hear different stories about what the past can tell us about today, and you can only do that through the interrogation of a different mindset or a different discipline. It's absolutely vital.
We see ourselves not as a dusty old archive, but as a place that's dynamic and vibrant. It's people coming into the archive from all sorts of disciplines with all sorts of objectives and really interrogating the material to tell their story; either to support a thesis or to prove that it wasn't right and why it wasn't right. So doing that kind of historical research through an audio visual lens is what particularly interests me.
It's absolutely vital to keep the archive as a living, breathing collection. I'm referring there to not only the Film Australia collection, but to all the wonderful things that we hold in the archive. We count the items as we digitise or acquire them, and we're up to just over 4 million items, so there's a lot of content within the collection. You can imagine all the stories that we're just waiting to help people tell.
For filmmakers or storytellers who are interested in engaging with the archive, what process would they follow?
BD: One of our key focus areas is the production industry. We would first encourage people to go on to our website, look at the catalogue, do a bit of mucking around there, and to bring their patience with them because it's not a catalogue like Google. It's an institutional catalogue. So, interrogate that according to your research area or the subject of your documentary or podcast or whatever it is you're making. People will see that you can pop items of interest into a list, and then you can submit them, and they come through to my team. We then get in touch, and it starts from there. So, it starts from some initial research on behalf of the requester, and we pick that up and work with them to deliver what we can.
I'm so excited by what you've been able to do and the stories that have been uncovered, which then allows for the recontextualisation of Australian history and Australian storytelling. I was so moved by what I got to see in this series. It is getting to see history retold in a captivating manner. It was fantastic to also hear the commentators, like Benjamin Law or Zoë Coombs Marr, say ‘I've never seen this or heard of this before.’ It's just absolutely wonderful. I'm so grateful this series exists.
BD: I'm so glad that you really loved it and that you connected with it in that way, because I think that was everyone's objective. It uncovers stuff that people either didn't know about or they'd forgotten. One of the things that stands out for me is the title that Jacki Weaver is in, Do I Have to Kill My Child? It was groundbreaking in the 1970s to have a documentary film about an issue like that, where women were really not at the forefront of most stories. Things like post-natal depression and needing assistance with your kids wasn't part of the conversation, no one spoke about that at work. It wasn't out there like it might be today. I always find that story wrenches at your heart, and you just think, ‘far out, if Film Australia hadn't made that. Would anyone have made it?’