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National Film & Sound Archive’s

Most wanted collection works

Surviving scene from 'Captain Thunderbolt’ (1953) NFSA: 7629

The NFSA’s curatorial teams are continuously searching for key works that are needed for the national
audiovisual, documents and artifacts collection.

Here is the current list of works we are seeking. If you can help us please contact collection@nfsa.gov.au or
phone 02 6248 2000 and ask to speak to a senior curator about the NFSA’s Most Wanted.

Film
• Across Australia with Francis Birtles (Francis Birtles, Richard Primmer, Australia, 1912). This
film covered adventurer Birtles’ epic bicycle ride from Sydney to Darwin, including dramatised
interaction between Indigenous people and early white settlers.
• Every missing silent-era feature film directed by Franklyn Barrett, including Know Thy Child
(Franklyn Barrett, Australia, 1921). Praised in its day for its subtle handling of the sensitive
theme of illegitimacy, this adult drama featured class differences in an urban setting.
• Bliss (Ray Lawrence, Australia, 1985). We hold a duplicate negative, the final mix, prints and
video copies of this film, but the original negative is currently lost. This negative has not been
seen since it was sent to New York for the film’s US release in the mid-1980s.
• The Burgomeister (Harry Southwell, Australia, 1935). One sequence survives from this second
Australian feature adaptation of the stage melodrama The Bells, the first having been directed by
WJ Lincoln in 1911.
• Captain Thunderbolt (Cecil Holmes, Australia, 1953). We hold what is believed to be a 53-
minute television edit version of this bushranger film depicting Captain Thunderbolt as a folk
hero. The original 35mm theatrical release had a running time of 69 minutes.
• Cinesound Varieties (Ken G Hall, Australia, 1934). Featuring well-known Australian musical
and comedy stars, this 48-minute film did well at the box office in Australia and England. It is
now the only one of director Ken Hall’s dramatised works that is almost entirely lost.
• Fellers (Arthur Higgins and Austin Fay, Australia, 1930). One of Australia’s first part talkies, a
World War I drama that featured Arthur Tauchert, star of The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond
Longford, Australia, 1919).
• Jewelled Nights (Louise Lovely, Wilton Welch, Australia, 1925). Louise Lovely, Australia’s
first major star of Hollywood films in the 1910s and early 1920s, returned home to co-direct and