A historian has saved approximately 80 per cent of the historical footage stored at Mildura's original local TV bureau from being thrown out in a clean-out of the building.
Archival news footage taken of the town in the 1960s and '70s, documenting important local events such as flooding of the Murray River, has been salvaged from the former WIN TV building.
The other 20 per cent of the historical footage has been donated to other historians, including local man David Carson.
Local history enthusiast and founder of Frames of History Ian MacWilliams says he received a call from the station's staff manager Steven Menegaldo to rescue the documentation.
The establishment was occupied by Sunraysia Television 9 (STV8) in 1965, then was used by WIN News from 2006 before the station was forced to close in a statewide restructure in 2015.
"The footage goes all the way back to the STV8 days, when of course back at the start that was shot on 16-millimetre film, and eventually became tape all sorts of different type formats," Mr MacWilliams said.
"The original materials are news film, and then later on, there was news film and commercial film, which used to make the ads so all of that materials been stored at WIN TV, since it was on TV.
"That material has over time become available to me. I got hold of the 16 millimetre footage and last year in 2022 I've been able to get access to the remaining footage, which is mostly tape, all sorts of different tape."
Oftentimes, Mr MacWilliams said, videographers at STV8 and WIN News were responsible for capturing the only footage of Mildura events.
"It was then was the only source of local news because the stations weren't networked," he said.
"Everything was created for local TV. It was for local consumption so when something happened in history, a news item happened in town, STV8 was sent out and they filmed it.
"Pretty much every event that we've got as a news story would never be seen again if it hadn't been rescued because it's really the only footage if it hadn't been shot by a private person, that was the only coverage of the event."
Part of a bigger picture
The Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI) is working with partner institution Ballarat Television 6 (BTV-6) to save their archive under a similar circumstance.
Head of collections and preservation at ACMI Melbourne Nick Richardson said regional material was a critically important part of the national screen museum's collection.
"Congratulations to [Mr MacWilliams] for going and salvaging the footage," Mr Richardson said.
"We've been instrumental in taking quite a bit of that [Ballarat's] original footage from the past six years and attempting and beginning to preserve that.
"What's really important is that there's so much content out there that no single institution can hope to preserve so having a network of organisations and interested individuals who can share that burden, I think is really important.
"And there's an opportunity for us all to share our information around technology and how best to preserve that."
Mr Richardson said the regions were under represented in ACMI's national collection.
"Our earliest item goes back to the 1890s but certainly the majority of that Australian-based footage tends to focus on the bigger centres," he said.
"So the regional material is incredibly important. It gives us an insight into the social and economic history of those regions and I think it's a really fascinating way for emerging current and emerging generations to connect with the past and with their area.
"It's often been said that we can understand the personal look towards the future without fully understanding our past so the material is incredibly important to the country."
You learn from the past
Historian Pam Cupper grew up in Mildura and said she was delighted to hear about Mr MacWilliams' rescue project.
"I'd actually heard over the years that the material from the STV8 and WIN studios had been lost, or some of it had been lost anyway, so when I heard I was so delighted that a lot of the material seems to have been kept and hopefully now it's going to be maintained, which is such a great historical record," Ms Cupper said.
Ms Cupper said she was hopeful to see footage of inter-school debates in the 1960s recovered.
"And the [coverage of the] floods on the Murray River are really big at the moment and the marching girls were a phenomena in the late 1960s, early 1970s and I have become more interested in it from a historical point of view," she said.
"I don't have great kind of particular things that I want to want to see but I would like to see my old home as it was 50 years ago.
"It's important if you grew up there or you didn't grow up there. I'm a historian so I have a view that we can learn from the past."
