History will show it as one of the most far-sighted heritage decisions made by the Hawke government
— Barry Cohen, The Life of the Party (1987)
When the National Film and Sound Archive threw a party for its fortieth birthday this month those with long memories might have recalled prime minister Bob Hawke opening its new headquarters in October 1984. “We are all at the beginning of an exciting adventure,” he told those gathered at Canberra’s former Institute of Anatomy building, which had been refurbished for the new organisation.
Four decades later, the speeches ranged over the evolution of the NFSA’s collection, its place in Australia’s institutional pantheon, and its antecedent history as part of the National Library. Arts minister Tony Burke especially noted the timeliness of its creation as a separate entity in the 1980s. But little was said about the how and why of what happened at that time.
We tend to treat our memory institutions as taken-for-granted features of our naturally evolving social infrastructure. But there was nothing inevitable about the NFSA’s creation. Rather, its ultimate arrival turned on happenstance and a public stoush that became the stuff of legend.
Movie films and sound recordings were inventions of the late nineteenth century and Australians embraced them wholeheartedly. We were the first country to record its formal birth as a nation via the new medium — courtesy of the Salvation Army’s Limelight Department camera at the federation ceremonies in Sydney — and in the Melbourne of 1906 we went on to invent the concept of the feature-length drama.
We were early, too, in realising the value of preserving these audiovisual documents. In 1935 federal cabinet established the National Historical Film and Speaking Record Library, a joint undertaking of the Commonwealth National Library, as it then was, and the Department of Commerce’s Cinema Branch, the government production unit of the day. But the outbreak of the second world war put this promising start on ice.
At the end of the war the National Library joined the new federal network of government-funded 16mm film lending libraries by setting up a film division in Canberra. The division inherited the surviving elements of that prewar archival enterprise, and in 1953, with the identification of a print of the 1919 Raymond Longford/Lottie Lyell film The Sentimental Bloke among those elements, the slow rediscovery of the nation’s film history began. Working in their own time, division head Larry Lake and his successor Rod Wallace waged a search-and-rescue effort to recover what they could of that history. A future administration of the National Library would burnish its credentials by reinventing this personal crusade as a heroic corporate myth.
In truth, Larry and Rod were swimming against the tide. In an institution primarily concerned with books and papers, films were of inferior status. Funding for the embryonic archive was minuscule. Flammable nitrate films were stored in disused explosives bunkers rather than in controlled environments, and not until 1973 were any full-time staff allotted to this archival function. That’s when sound recordings, neglected since the war years, also began receiving tentative attention.
The film division was always a bolt-on to the National Library. Professionally dissimilar and administratively self-contained, it gained no value from the connection. When I joined it in 1968 as a young librarian I soon learned it was considered a career dead end.
So what was it doing in the library at all? The first person to openly raise that question had been division head John O’Hara in 1951. He called for its release from that “hostile administration,” and was sacked for his temerity. It was still a live issue, though only privately voiced, two decades later. By then, however, a reviving film industry and film culture was beginning to see the problem O’Hara saw.
It was the new Association for a National Film and Television Archive which, in 1974, publicly called for the National Library’s film archive to be reconfigured as an autonomous institution in line with international best practice. It was clear that Australia was now seriously lagging in this field, and as other players joined the discussion, and one report led to another, the voices grew louder. In 1981 arts minister Bob Ellicott finally made the National Library Council sit up and listen, and it established an Advisory Committee on the National Film Archive comprised of industry leaders.
By then I was head of the library’s film activities, and my deputy Mike Lynskey, who led the small film archive unit, served as secretary to the committee. Its members analysed the archive’s needs and ultimately proposed that an independent consultant should propound on development options, including the possibility of the archive’s organisational autonomy. On the recommendation of the National Library’s director-general, Harrison Bryan, the firm of Nicholas Clark and Associates was contracted for the study. As the study progressed, though, committee members reached the view that their only use had been as window dressing, and that Clark’s conclusions had been preordained by the library.
The archive’s activities yielded regular good news stories in the media, and when journalist Fia Cumming came looking for a new one, Mike and I took her into our confidence. Whistleblowing wasn’t a word then, so when her article “Film Rescued But Archive in Trouble” appeared in the Bulletin on 16 August 1983 we were ostracised within the library. Among those who read the article, though, was Bob Hogg, senior adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke. He drew it to Hawke’s attention — and was instructed to “fix it up.”
Somehow a copy of Clark’s still confidential report landed on the doorstep of the Australian Film Institute — literally in a plain brown wrapper — and the AFI quickly convened an emergency film industry summit. Its detailed communique condemned the report and called for separation of both the film and the sound archives from the National Library. The observing journalists, representatives of the advisory committee and Bob Hogg witnessed the full force of the industry’s anger.
In the war of words that then erupted in the media, in parliament and via ministerial correspondence, the library and its allies mount a rearguard action in defence of its empire, warning darkly of unidentified “sectional interests” coveting control of the film and sound archives for commercial purposes, and of disaffected staff seeking power and plum positions in a new institution. The spectre of a completely dismembered National Library hung in the air.
After arts minister Barry Cohen announced he would put the archive’s future before cabinet, the wrangling and delaying tactics spread behind the scenes. The objections of the Library Council, then chaired by federal Liberal Party president Jim Forbes, could not be lightly dismissed by a young Labor government. As Hogg 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.” Less politely, an adviser to attorney-general Gareth Evans opined that the library’s “record in preservation and service is lamentable, and exceeded only by its capacity to tell simple, gross and outrageous lies to its staff, the public and the media.”
The rearguard action failed, and on 26 March 1984 cabinet decision 2982 created the NFSA, relieving the library of the relevant functions and assets. Barry Cohen announced the decision in parliament on 5 April.
On 10 April Harrison Bryan assembled library staff for a briefing on the decision. Here was the moment when a neat line could have been be drawn under the saga, allowing everyone to move on in new circumstances that had yielded, not incidentally, an expanded resource base. Bryan declared that the Library Council accepted, without question, a decision properly made by government after the council had been given every opportunity for input, and it would loyally implement it.
He added, though, that there was no point in commenting on the farsightedness of the decision or “the way it was arrived at,” subtly inferring that the process had been illegitimate and that disloyal staff were to blame. There was a crisis of confidence in the library, he said. Harsh things had been aired in the media: “the library has been smeared, and some of that smear sticks.” The possibility that the smear might have been self-inflicted was not open to discussion.
The well would be further poisoned when the library’s 1983–84 annual report was released in November. It reinforced the “sectional interests” claim and hypocritically blamed the now disbanded advisory committee for the Clark report, since it had, technically, chosen Clark as the consultant.
It is impossible to kill a good conspiracy theory, and the scuttlebutt that somehow the library had been deceitfully robbed of its film and sound archives spread insidiously in the profession and bureaucracy, ending up in oral histories and printed publications and continuing to circulate even today. This was aided and abetted in retirement by Bryan himself, from whose writings this 1988 quote is a sample:
That operation had all the characteristics of rape: the cynicism, the utter lack of scruple and the plain treachery that accompanied that particular crime against society. We were outgunned and outmanoeuvred. We were rolled by experts.
The National Library Council has never distanced itself from Bryan’s views or attempted to correct the record.
The cabinet decision required the new institution to vacate National Library premises as soon as possible. But the Hawke government had inherited a heavy deficit from its predecessor, so when Barry Cohen came back with a proposal to erect a $10 million building to house the new organisation he was not entirely surprised that the treasurer gave him short shrift. Paul Keating “smiled at me, as only he can,” Cohen remembered, “and suggested I try again in another five years.” It seemed the NFSA was to be a separate institution but still housed inside the National Library. This was not at all a good idea for a new body that needed a separate physical identity.
In politics, as in life, timing is everything. From his ministerial contacts, Cohen learned that the Australian Institute of Anatomy was ceasing operations and its headquarters could be up for grabs. “It immediately occurred to me that the building, with its upturned saucer shape and superb theatre facility, would be an excellent site for the NFSA,” Cohen wrote in his memoirs. We newly minted NFSA staff were despatched post-haste to check out the iconic anatomy building and reported back that it would be highly adaptable to our needs. Cohen wasted no time in securing it. We were unaware that we were working at cross purposes.
After we had started to move across from the National Library into our new home, Cohen set out on his first official visit to view his prize. He got agitated when his driver took what he thought was a wrong turning. That’s when he learned that he had not given us, as he thought, the Shine Dome of the Academy of Science, but an entirely different — and much more suitable — edifice. His double take as he got out of his car was a moment I’ll never forget.
It’s a story Cohen loved to tell against himself, the perfect example, he said, of Cohen’s law: All the good things governments do are by accident. •
