Preserving our history

Those of you that have ever shot film will know the feeling of absolute horror and stomach churning nausea at seeing negs being mistreated.

Negatives are precious.

The earliest negs in the collection are glass plate...and obviously very fragile.

Once they are damaged or destroyed that is it…there is no coming back…it’s final.

At one point in my career it was a large part of my role to look after The Advocate Newspaper’s neg archive and it just reinforced my belief that negs were sacrosanct. The archive is made up of 294,000 neg packets (most of which contain multiple negatives) that represent the social history of the North-West Coast from about 1953 to 2000. I estimate well over 1 million images. There is no other record like it. It can never be replicated or replaced.

I estimate there are over 1 million images, in varying image formats, in The Advocate negative archive.

I hope I am conveying how strongly I feel about this collection.

In recent times (there is no other way to say it) the negs have been neglected and at times mistreated.

Because the photography department has been fully digital since 2000 the negs are very rarely thought about, let alone accessed. A large percentage of the staff wouldn’t even know they exist.

While still employed at The Advocate I initiated a potential “rehousing” of the collection to the Burnie Regional Museum. It would ensure the negs were well taken care of. Stakeholders agreed it was a logical solution…the museum already house the significant Winter Collection…however, sometimes things don’t go to plan due to outside influences.

One of my disappointments was that this hadn’t happened by the time I finished up at the paper. Who was going to carry on my crusade?

Yesterday my fears were allayed. Grounds for celebrating…It was confirmed the handover is going ahead.

I am thrilled. I am relieved. I am about to get very busy.

The Burnie Regional Gallery and Burnie Regional Museum are to run concurrent exhibitions to mark the momentous occasion…and I have been asked to curate…what an honour.

To be involved in such a way, with something that I am so passionate about, is just brilliant.

In the future, being able to look back and say that I played a significant part in ensuring the safety of this unique collection fills me with pride.

It is quite probably the most important thing I have achieved in my photographic career.

Until next week…