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‘Film Australia’ in 1973. A total of 23 films reviewed in this book belong to this period. This period almost matches Moran’s third period of government production of ‘revitalised film unit and pluralism’ from 1964 to 1976. Moran (1989a) wrote,
Rattigan (1991) argued that the post-war period until the early 1970s was a barren time for local film production: There was no consistency in production, and no more than two or three films were produced in any one year. After the mid-1970s, however, Australia’s media industry moved to another period of film and television productions. Since 1975, Australian television had an increasing overlap with the Australian feature film production industry (Moran, 1989b). The renaissance of Australian feature films in the mid-1970s was termed by Rattigan as the New Australian Cinema. O’Regan (1989) saw, from the early 1980s, ‘the beginning of a rapprochement between the TV and film industries’ (p. 15) and the convergence of federal film policy, television, and cinema markets as well as television and film producers. This, in turn, contributed to a steady growth of both feature films and documentaries.
A total of 67 post-war migration documentary films are examined in this book. These 67 films have been collected by government agencies that have made them accessible to researchers. Some of the accessible items are stored in the form of 16mm or 35mm nitrate films and can be viewed by prior arrangement. However, some preserved material cannot be viewed by researchers at all. The major sources of the documentary films collected here are Screen Sound Australia (formerly named National Film Archive) and the Footage Library of Film Australia. Two films related to the Snowy Mountains Scheme were obtained from the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority. Most archival materials, on