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Over the years I got to know many collectors whose holdings, and whose vigilance,
yielded unique copies of Australian nitrate films that found their way into our Archive.
These included silent feature films like Franklyn Barrett’s The Breaking of the Drought
(1920), the second film version of the literary classic Robbery Under Arms (1920), the
daring Raymond Longford feature The Woman Suffers (while the man goes free)
(1918), Beaumont Smith’s The Adventures of Algy (1925), and comedian Pat Hanna’s
Waltzing Matilda (1934). Just as importantly, there were countless newsreels,
documentaries and advertising films which survived solely in private collections.

Collectors value their privacy but I will
mention two, both now dead, whom I
think would be happy to be remembered
in this context. John Scanes (the source
of Robbery Under Arms) was an
extraordinarily generous man who kept
his collection, and his projection set-up,
in his garage in an outer Sydney suburb.
He alerted me whenever his activities
turned up an interesting Australian title,
and this usually resulted in the reels
being added to the Archive’s collection.
He made me a welcome visitor to his
home, and we would sometimes spend hours sifting through parts of his collection.
Stacked in piles in his garage, each inviting can label might lead to a background story,
an examination on a rewinder or occasionally putting something up on the screen.
When we had room, I offered to store some of his nitrate in our vault in Canberra: many
of his unique films of European and American origin, some going back almost to the
turn of the century, were progressively repatriated to archives in their country of origin.

Harry Davidson was perhaps Melbourne’s best-known film collector. He had two
collections: the first was lost in a house fire sometime in the 1950s or 1960s (he was
never precise about the date). He started over and built a second, and his home was a
temple to his love of the movies: statuettes and relics from demolished theatres were
sprinkled around the house, jostling for space with the film cans and memorabilia
stacked in rooms and hallways, and the characteristic smell of nitrate film (and I confess
that it is a smell I love) was everywhere. Harry guarded his collection jealously, but in
the early 1970s he finally relented and lent me his precious print of The Exploits of the
Emden (1928) for copying, on my assurances that it would be perfectly safe and
returned to him promptly. The print was already showing signs of decomposition, and I
sent it for proprietary scratch removal treatment before copying. Unexpectedly, the
treatment reacted with the stock and advanced the deterioration. I hadn’t kept my
promise. It was years before Harry’s trust was recovered and he again gave us
access.
In about 1980, Harry died suddenly, leaving his widow Pat, and his infant daughter
Theda. We were able to purchase his collection of over 2000 reels. Many of its
considerable riches – which included a tinted print of Metropolis and unique copies of
some of Harold Lloyd’s earliest work – have since been distributed to archives across
the globe as part of the NFSA nitrate repatriation program of the 1990s. In every case,
the accepting archives undertook to identify the material in their records as being part of
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