The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, the NFSA, is a working archive. It is also one of the most under-used research tools available to an Australian journalist. If you write about Australian culture, history, crime, politics, media, sport, music, or television in any capacity, you should know how to use it.

The NFSA is based in the old Institute of Anatomy building in Canberra, on the northern edge of the Parliamentary Triangle. Its collection runs to roughly three million items: film, video, sound, documents, photographs, posters, costumes, props, and the paperwork that sits behind them. Some of the collection is online. Most of it is not. All of it is accessible to the public with the right request.

What the NFSA holds that a journalist might actually want

Original news footage. Every major Australian news event back to the 1910s. If you are writing about the 1975 Dismissal, the Tampa affair, the Beaconsfield mine collapse, the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, the 2000 Olympics, you will find raw footage and finished bulletins at the NFSA that you will not easily find anywhere else.

Radio. ABC archives, commercial radio, pirate radio. Interviews, phone-ins, serials, current affairs. A writer working on a feature about John Laws or Caroline Jones or Derryn Hinch can reconstruct conversations from raw tape rather than press clippings.

Television. Every format, most of the era. The full run of Four Corners. The original This Day Tonight tapes. Simon Townsend's Wonder World!. Old game shows, old quiz shows, old soap operas. A TV journalist researching a profile of an older presenter will often find material the presenter themselves has lost.

Oral histories. The NFSA runs a structured oral history program. Interviews with filmmakers, broadcasters, reporters. If you want to hear how Betty Churcher talked about the National Gallery, how Simon Townsend talked about Wonder World, how Peter Luck talked about This Day Tonight, the NFSA has it on tape. Those interviews are primary source material for any feature.

Home movies, amateur film, ephemera. Undervalued and massively useful. An amateur wedding reel from 1964 Broken Hill contains street scenes, fashion, cars, weather, and background faces no professional bulletin would have bothered filming.

How to actually use it

Start online. The NFSA catalogue is at nfsa.gov.au/collection. Search by topic, title, person, or decade. Not everything is viewable online, but the catalogue tells you what exists. Once you know something exists, you can request access.

Visit the research centre. The Canberra building has public viewing stations. Book ahead. Tell them what you want. A research archivist will help you locate material and, for broadcast purposes, advise on licensing.

Pay for access or use a press enquiry. Journalists writing features may be able to view and cite material free of charge. Commercial use (broadcast, streaming, documentary) requires a licence. Rates are negotiable, especially for small productions. The NFSA is not chasing profits. It is trying to keep the lights on and the archive preserved.

Cite it properly. The NFSA has a specific citation format: title, year, NFSA accession number, date accessed. Use it. It makes your piece credible and it helps the archive track how its material is being used.

Where to start

Good entry points: the curated collections at nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated. These are thematic groupings built by NFSA staff. Simon Townsend's Wonder World has its own curated collection, for example. So does Bob Hawke, so do the Ash Wednesday fires, so does the Don Lane Show.

The NFSA blog is also useful. It regularly surfaces unusual material with context explaining what the item is and why it matters. Working reporters with a tight deadline use the blog as a research shortcut.

Why this matters

Journalism in Australia has a memory problem. The metro papers that would have commissioned context pieces from their library staff mostly do not have library staff any more. The ABC online archive is a shadow of what the organisation holds on tape. Much of the material that Australians assume is somewhere online is actually only available at the NFSA.

If you are writing a feature on an Australian cultural subject, before you open a browser, think about whether the NFSA has what you need. Quite often it does. Always credit them. And if you are lucky enough to live in Canberra, visit in person. The archive staff are among the most helpful people in Australian cultural work. They want their collection used.

Simon and the NFSA

My father's Wonder World archive, including tapes, scripts, photos, production notes, and the scrapbooks he kept through the run of the show, is held at the NFSA. The curated collection is the best public starting point for any writer researching the show or children's television in 1980s Australia.