About the NBN Television Collection

The photographs

Photos in this series of articles are from various NBN staffers, private collections, and historic archives. Viewers past and present finally get to see the operations of “Channel 3” (as it was fondly known) and the daily tasks of those who worked there. These photo essays look inside Australia’s most successful regional television station, one that out-performed even larger metropolitan networks in its six decades of largely independent operation. Anecdotes, quotations, and educated guesswork fill space between the increasingly spectral images. As the station’s pioneers fade into history along with crumbling celluloid records, memories of still-living staff grow blemished by time. Within a decade or so broadcast media will be an irrelevant curiosity. The young will ask why so much time, effort, and equipment was spent on such elaborate video podcasts. They should know that broadcast television is the fabric of their online culture - and a yet inconceivable milieu to follow. In curiosity they might look at this musty archive... hopefully in wonder.

Credit

Early in-house photography was performed by Des Barry and Lloyd Hissey. Many other people would have assisted in that role, and we would like to know of any deserving credit. For example, Steward Osland and Robert Stubbs took a great deal of photographs, both for sales and promotions use. Their names surely belong to many images. During early decades, the expense of quality cameras confined this record to what are clearly official recordings. But when digital cameras gained popularity and almost every department and every staffer could easily generate collections. These typically remained on computers or memory devices. Therefore, the 'official record' has dissipated into chaos after year 2000 and imagery has become a cheap commodity. Nothing celluloid exists for this century, and the few digital snaps that have been supplied will mostly illustrate the Mosbri Crescent studio surrounds and internals. Contributions of photos and storytelling are welcomed, with your generosity, that we might fully tell the story of NBN Television.

Terms of Use

Almost the entire collection presented here was scanned from original negatives, taken before digital cameras became commonplace. They are watermarked Newcastle on Hunter with a Creative Commons share-alike non-commercial licence.
 

Watermarking verifies our source was a physical negative, and not copied from the Internet. It establishes Creative Commons status for those wishing to re-use images. Should you wish to use these on the Internet you are free to do so under the same Commons licence conditions. A link back to this site, or to the article, would be appreciated. If reproduced elsewhere, an acknowledgement would be nice. 

If you want a particular photo without the watermark, please ask throsby at newcastleonhunter dot org. He will assent. But ~ Under the licence you cannot use any imagery from this web site commercially. However, businesses appearing in photos can reasonably use them to illustrate their own history in the region. Naturally, duplicates were widely distributed by the company over the years and might appear on other websites and Facebook groups, especially from former staffers.