Case Study

Giving indigenous history back

National Film and Sound Archive

Maninpa-laju ngurrakarti means “we’re giving this back to its home”.

The Maninpa-laju ngurrkarti project, a preservation partnership between the National Film and Sound Archive and DAMsmart, was announced to coincide with UNESCO’s World Day of Audiovisual Heritage. Focusing on film and video of the Australian Indigenous experience over the past century, the project digitally preserved 360 hours of material from the NFSA’s enormous audiovisual collection. A project of this size would have been impossible without DAMsmart’s exclusive rights in Australia and New Zealand to SAMMA Systems for automated media migration.

Titles were selected from the past 100 years of film production and range from the earliest footage of indigenous Torres Strait Islanders (1898) to silent features like The Romance of Runnibede (1928) to the award winning feature film Ten Canoes (2006).

Whilst the traditional forms of preservation continue to enable the NFSA to maintain the original production format and original film experience, DAMsmart ‘s digital processes open up new opportunities for the management, use and enjoyment of these and other collections of moving images.

Working in collaboration with the NFSA, the project meets the 3 aims of collection, preservation and dissemination of Australia’s audiovisual experience, providing a unique balance between core preservation and availability of material to indigenous communities and to the wider public.

As digital technology becomes more available in remote regions, this digital preservation project will assist the NFSA to return images and sounds of special importance for specific indigenous communities across Australia. The NFSA has established relationships with a number of communities including the Martu, the Pitjantjatjara, the Walpiri, the Galwink’ku, the Yankunytjatjara and the people of Mornington Island.