COUNTRY UPDATE

AUSTRALIA

 

BACK TO THE BEACH

 

Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck in On the Beach shot in Melbourne 1959. Photo from the Collection

during the weekend to buy over 40,000 non-Australian records.

        Manager of Collection, Graham Evans, said that the sale had in effect gone a long way to clearing the decks of non-Australian recordings. "We have given ourselves much more space, we have reduced a large storage bill and we will now use the proceeds from the sale to fill in the gaps in our Australian record collection."

        Graham says that he was sad to see the records go. "It would be nice to collect all the records in the world, but that is not feasible. As ScreenSound Australia, we have to concentrate on the Australian collection, and there is a vast number of Australian recordings we have to preserve and make available for people to hear."

       Of course, the Great Vinyl Sale is still not over. Public tender is being considered for the remaining records. More valuable records will be auctioned over the Internet late this year. For further information, contact Edith Ruth (612) 6248?2015); email: mailto:vinyl@screensound.gov.au

 

Courtesy of News From the Archive

Autumn 2000, ScreenSound Australia

        When ScreenSound Australia was making its popular video "Melbourne: Films of the Fifties," our Melbourne office became aware of an amazing 16mm home video shot at Canadian Bay, Victoria in 1959 during the production of On the Beach, the Hollywood epic starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire. The home movie was shot by amateur filmmaker Richard Goslin and has fascinating behind-the-scenes footage of the film's production. It was held by the Performing Arts Museum which kindly allowed it to be copied and for an extract to be used in the video.

        As luck would have it, Richard Groslin's son, Doug Brockfield, bought a copy of "Melbourne: Films of the Fifties" not knowing what was in it, and was amazed to see the footage and hear his father's voice. He found the footage very moving having lost contact with his father for a long period of time. He immediately contacted our Melbourne office, organized a visit and

 

was presented with a VHS copy of the film.

        Since then the home movie has developed a little of its own, largely due to the efforts of Doug Brockfield. It has been used ext-ensively by the Melbourne Inter-national Film Festival's Travelling Film Festival to publicize its showing of On the Beach, and the story was picked up widely by the Melbourne media. (The print of On the Beach came from the Screen-Sound collection, along with other promotional materials. Screen-Sound is also providing shorts and newsreels for the Travelling Film Festival at a number of screenings in regional Victoria.)

 

VINYL LIVES ON

        ScreenSound's Great Vinyl Sale held in February proved a huge success. More than 8,000 people (from all over Australia, and a few from overseas) turned up

 

 

 

  PACIFIC ISLANDS  
Port Moresby and Suva
conduct own trainings

 

        In May 2000, a series of two five day workshops on audiovisual archiving was conducted with participants attending from the National Broadcasting Corporation of PNG, PNG National Archives, Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, Fiji Ministry of Information Film & TV Unit, Museum of Fiji, Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association, and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. Funded by the Hoso-Bunka Foundation and the Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD), the workshops were conducted by ScreenSound Australia staff member Matthew Davies with support from AIBD program manager Joseph Marcel and presented an introduction to a range of preservation and collection

 

management issues. Group workshop sessions were structured to identify problems in the participant’s collections and to develop strategies to improve the preservation and accessibility of those collections.

       Digitization of audio material to CD-R is seen as a major strategy for both NBC and FBC, and the workshops focussed on costs, procedures, and advantages and risks inherent in the digitization process. Controlled storage for maintenance of magnetic video and audio tape is a clear priority for all participants, with currently available storage conditions ranging from quite good to very poor Fiji Ministry of Information

Continued on page 10

 

 

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January-June 2000