(Transcript from SBS World News Radio)
It's a race against time to save some of Australia's most unique cultural archives.
In the vaults of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Studies are tens of thousands of audio-visual tapes.
But the tapes are deteriorating and it's becoming increasingly difficult to play them.
As Thea Cowie reports, it's up to just a few men and plenty of improvisation to digitise the material before it's lost forever.
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What they lack in functioning equipment and funding, they make up for in ingenuity.
"In our library we've got 300 Senio cassettes and these machines I've got here are the machines we use to play them back. This machine here the slip rings and brushes are worn on it and we can't buy any more of these so what we did is looked around on the internet to see what we could find in the way of slip rings and brushes and we found a different arrangement which as you can see here is vertically, whereas this is horizontal, and Doug made up a carrier for the slip rings and then he made another plate to mount the brushes so now we're able to play these tapes quite successfully."
That's Senior Electronics Technician Rob Hansen.
He and colleague Doug Smith work a few days each week, maintaining and rebuilding the machines needed to play the tapes, many containing records of significant Indigenous cultural events.
Senior Audio Tech Doug Smith says to save the material the tapes have to be digitised.
And to be digitised they have to be played out on the original analogue equipment - most of it now obsolete.
"None of that equipment in manufactured today and most of it, if not all of it, is no longer supported by any of the manufacturers so therefore spare parts, service manuals and the know-how is quickly being lost."
The AIATSIS workshop is a veritable graveyard of more than 60 years' worth of audio-visual players.
The techs comb the globe in search of old machines and enough spare parts to put together one functioning player.
Doug Smith says it's also a race against time to save the tapes themselves, some of which date back to the 1950s.
"The recorded material, the tapes themselves, some of those have already failed too far to be recovered. Many of them have partially failed. We are able to recover some of those. Many of them have, what we call, hydrolised - have absorbed moisture over time and they've started to break down. We've got a process where we heat the tapes at a low temperature in a special oven to dry those tapes out to allow them to be played."
There's up to 20,000 audio tapes, 10,000 visual tapes, plus motion picture film, slides, negatives and photographs to get through.
And the men whose expertise is needed to digitise them aren't getting any younger.
Doug Smith again.
"Certainly none of the younger people coming through the electronics trades would know much about a lot of this equipment. It's all gone digital. If it's not on a card or something else they probably don't understand the concept of the tape medium."
In the May federal budget, AIATSIS received $3 million in funding to continue its digitisation process.
But the funding only lasts 12 months.
With so much work ahead of him, it's lucky Doug Smith doesn't see it as a chore.
"It's a real love, a challenge. But it's really fulfilling thing to get an old bit of gear that's failed and bring it back to operational stage or to modify it to suit youre requirement at the time. It's a bit of a hobby for us, I think. It can be a headache but it can be a bit of an interest and a hobby."
As they save a bit of old gear, they're also saving a culture which is considerably older.
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