Australia's Film and Sound Archive Adds YouTube Creators to National Collection

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) announced earlier this week that it will acquire 300 videos by 10 Australian YouTube creators through a new partnership with the platform. Creator Capsule, described by the NFSA as “a global first”, will preserve the videos alongside oral histories, contextual material and platform activities including views, likes and comments.

Describing itself on its website as “dedicated to collecting, preserving and sharing the sounds and images that shape Australian life”, the NFSA holds material ranging from recordings made in the 1890s to games and immersive digital works. The archive was founded in 1935, and the independent institution has collected individual YouTube videos since 2013. 

Creator Capsule marks a more systematic effort to document the platform and its communities. The selected creators are adventurer Beau Miles, children’s group Bounce Patrol, Natalie Tran’s communitychannel, maths teacher Eddie Woo, animation studio Glitch, motoring channel Mighty Car Mods, Yolŋu bushcraft group The Outback Boys, comedy duo Superbro (as they are billed by Netflix outside Australia), musician Tash Sultana and singer and beauty creator Wengie. Their channels have totalled 84 million subscribers and more than 36 billion views.

NFSA chief curator Meagan Loader said: “Audiovisual storytelling is the dominant form through which we now express, celebrate and negotiate identity. In 50 years, when Australians come to the NFSA to find the audiovisual stories that defined our time, they’ll expect to see YouTube.”

“Social” or “cultural impact” was central to the selection process, Loader explained in an article on the NFSA website. Curators also considered balance, craft and audience engagement, including how creators had been able to “take those communities from online into offline spaces” through live shows and other forms of connection.

As Jean Burgess, professor of digital media at Queensland University of Technology, told NFSA: “Certainly, there are many analogies we could make here—to popular music, subcultural or street expression, and so on, which were once considered marginal or illegitimate and now find themselves in museums.

“But cultural artefacts need not ascend to that level of institutional legitimacy to be significant—we know, for example, how important cultural ephemera (from soup labels to street signs) can be for adding texture to the historical record of a culture, evoking a sense of time and place.”

Voices not normally represented in traditional media are highlighted in the works acquired. The Outback Boys make unscripted adventure videos around Ramingining in Arnhem Land, often in Djambarrpuyŋu dialect and grounded in Yolŋu knowledge.

Meanwhile Chinese-Australian creator Wengie, whose videos range from beauty tutorials and DIY projects to music and gaming, told ABC News that she had never imagined entering an Australian collection: “Even though I’m Australian, when you look different, it’s hard to feel that way sometimes,” she said.

For some creators, YouTube has become a place for independently produced work to find an audience and eventually move into cinemas—for example, Backrooms, growing from Kane Parsons’s 2022 YouTube series into a feature he directed, has become A24’s highest-grossing worldwide release.

Glitch, one of the creators selected by the NFSA, has followed a similar path. Co-founded in 2017 by Thai-Australian brothers Kevin and Luke Lerdwichagul, the studio developed The Amazing Digital Circus with US animator Gooseworx after discovering her short Little Runmo on YouTube. The series finale premiered in cinemas in June.