NFSA blog entries for December 2010

All great summer playlists start with He’s My Blonde Headed Stompie Wompie Real Gone Surfer Boy and end with Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta’s Summer Nights.

Share the memories of your favourite summer tunes with us on our Facebook page and we will add them to our playlists.

The veteran Australian newsreader James Dibble has died in Sydney at the age of 87.

For many, he was the voice of authority and integrity, the Australian equivalent of the much revered Walter Cronkite, 'the most trusted man in America’ who, for 19 years, fronted the news desk of ABC America.

In offering my congratulations to the Sydney: City of Film management committee for their successful bid, I would also like to reflect for a moment on why Sydney so richly deserves this honour.

We are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the earliest known surviving film of Test cricket in Australia with a new digital video master. The restored 1910 film is complete with the original orange-tinted intertitle and available for the first time at the correct film speed of 16-frames per second. It can be viewed on the NFSA YouTube channel and is likely to be seen in an upcoming edition of 7.30 Report about English cricketer Percy Fender’s home movies during the 1928-29 Ashes tour of Australia. Fender’s films capture what is believed to be the earliest known footage of cricket legend Donald Bradman.