National Film and Sound Archive: Melbourne Time Capsule: Marvellous Melbourne: Swanston and Collins Streets

National Film and Sound Archive

Melbourne Time Capsule: Marvellous Melbourne: Swanston and Collins Streets‘, NFSA website

A marvellous two minute point-of-view film from a tram trundling through Melbourne in 1910 (date picked exactly by our HH guru before he saw the caption, but then we all get lucky). The 1910 film may be compared with the 1913 book and one can even perhaps imagine Prime Minister Fisher strolling down to Flinders Street to catch the train to Albert Park. A similar film ten years later would have looked less carefree.

Other material in the time capsule includes Melbourne 1950s, Melbourne Cup 1896, and other slices mostly from the 1950s. Well worth a look.

The NFSA is one of the national cultural institutions that has suffered funding cuts in recent years. The Australian War Memorial has not been subject to the same efficiency regime.

The NFSA is also one of the national cultural institutions that is not on the list of places that school students coming to Canberra must visit if their school is to receive a subsidy under the Parliament and Civics Education Rebate (PACER) scheme. The mandatory sites are Parliament House, the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House and/or the National Electoral Education Centre. Not the NFSA, the National Gallery, the National Library, the National Museum, or the National Portrait Gallery, the cultural institutions that between them present a broad view of Australia, and not Questacon, which is about education in science and technology, the central planks of an agile and innovative future society.

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