Cade Lucas
Old news is good news for the Werribee Historical Society which is bringing decades worth of local newspapers back to life.
The society is digitising thousands of film negatives and newspaper clippings from the Werribee Banner, the predecessor to the Wyndham Star Weekly.
“It takes an extreme amount of time and effort” said Werribee Historical Society vice president, Lisa Heinrichs, of the work required to transform analogue content into digital.
Ms Heinrich said digitising the more than 30,000 photo negatives the society had received was particularly laborious.
“It’s very painstaking because the digital film has to be loaded into a holder in the scanner and each strip of negatives is one scan. We’ve probably got years ahead of us,” she said.
To preserve this link to Werribee’s past, the society have reached out to its present, with younger volunteers coming on board through it’s social media pages to help with the restoration process.
Among them is 23-year- old Werribee local, Jacob Glover, who is digitising the negatives and uncovering some long forgotten local history in the process.
“He’s the first to see them (the photos) and bring them to life in decades, and has made some mind blowing discoveries,” Ms Heinrichs said.
“For instance we had a negative for the opening of the cinema at Werribee Plaza when it first opened.
“They had actually advertised for staff and there was this huge queue of people applying for a job at the cinema.”
While the negatives date back to the 1980’s, the newspaper clippings are from the early 1900’s and were collected by prominent Werribee identity, Mrs McNaughton.
“She was an interesting lady” said Lisa Heinrichs of the women whose collection was donated to the society.
“She clipped out a lot of stories about the local churches, so there’s a lot of stories about churches as well as anything pertaining to local families in the area.”
Digitising them is another new volunteer, 32 year old Amy Li, and Ms Heinrichs said the age and fragility of the clippings made her task even tougher than Mr Glover’s.
“You have to wear gloves and be very delicate removing it from the folder and placing it on the bed of the scanner. It can just crumble in your hands.”
