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Townsville cameraman awarded for rescuing historical film archive
ABC North Qld By Nathalie Fernbach
A Townsville cameraman who saved decades of
north Queensland media history from the bin,
has been recognised with the State Library of
Queensland's John Oxley Library Award.

Paul Lyons was working as a videotape operator
for QTV television station in 1992 when he
discovered the station's tape and film archive.

"If I got all my work finished I would grab an
old reel, lace it up and sit down and watch the
history," Mr Lyons said. PHOTO: Paul Lyons with some of the film that is
too degraded to save; a lot of the collection is un-
marked and has not been watched for decades.
As management and broadcast media changed,
Mr Lyons said the archive was no longer valued
and management started to dispose of old footage. Mr Lyons said he would hide tapes away in
quiet corners of the building to try to preserve them.

"I would get early morning phone calls from my
spies — They are trying to throw out the archive
again," Mr Lyons said. "I would scream into the
station and secretly pull the items out of the mini
skip bins and throw in some empty cardboard
boxes on top to look as though the archive was
in there." Irreplaceable footage destined for the
dump.
The archive comprised more than 5,000 video
tapes and more than 250,000 feet of 16 mm film. Some of the material saved
The thousands of hours of footage include the
city's first television broadcast of 1962, Queen Elizabeth's visit in 1970 and the devastation of
Cyclone Althea in 1971.

Mr Lyons finished working at the station in 1999 but was smuggled back in by staff when archive
clean outs were imminent. About 10 per cent of the collection has been digitised and the material
will be made public through a special portal on the Townsville City Libraries website.
Full story and more pictures at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-01/vintage-
media-salvage-paul-lyons/11165322

Acknowledgement: ABC News on line

MT Comment: A familiar story to many film collectors - It would be an interesting exercise to
somehow work out just how much of our film history has been saved by collectors and
historians from management who can only see the cost of storage and have no interest in
preserving our past!

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