Zoom Interview with Meg Labrum

This interview was conducted on May 6, 2020.

victoria duckett (vd):

Thank you for making the time to speak with me. I will begin by asking when the NFSA [National Film and Sound Archive] first started to respond to COVID-19. Was it in February or March? I'm thinking of all the other disasters that were happening in Australia as well, because basically we have had these since the beginning of the year.

meg labrum (ml):

I would also link it with all the other disasters that have been happening. The NFSA, like all of Canberra, has been dealing with fire, then we had hail. Actually, most of the cars at the archive got written off because we were directly in the line of the hailstorm when it hit [January 20, 2020]. It was extraordinary. And then COVID-19 came after that. So, in fact, with the fire period—where we were massively affected by smoke in the atmosphere—that was the beginning of having to deal with emergency procedures. These are physical emergency procedures for the organization in terms of the safety of the staff and in terms of confirming the safety of the collection. We did have some days that we had to shut down operations.

By the time the coronavirus came, it was massively significant, but we were already geared up for it. In public service terms, there is the necessity for there to be very, very detailed emergency plans in place. The biggest thing, I suppose, was the unknowability of just how long the impact of coronavirus would be. This has been the thing that the organization has had to address. I'd say probably in the weeks leading up to us really seriously shutting down—that would be from March onward. We closed our doors to the public in late March, and staff began to work significantly remotely from home by the beginning of April.

vd:

I had not really thought through the hail and, before that, the fire. Obviously, we had a dreadful summer in Australia. In terms of your own collections, you're saying there were days where, already before COVID-19, you couldn't go in?

ml:

In terms of the entire organization—ranging from the administration offices to the vaults and so on—we had to make a call and that was based on air quality measures and so on. This meant that decisions were made about our public spaces. And, ironically, some of our public spaces where we had the Game Masters¹ exhibition were actually more habitable than the enclosed office spaces and the technical studio areas as well.

So those decisions were about staff conditions, primarily. And we did say—ironically, at one stage—that we had fire, we had hail, and there was pestilence coming our way. Yes, we just needed the plague of locusts, which I understand are happening in Africa. I heard a dreadful news story: about sixty-kilometer-wide clouds of locusts are descending on African nations. So it's been a very weird time, Victoria.

vd:

I remember when I started teaching film history at the beginning of the year, telling my undergraduates that we've just come out of the fires and that, as a film historian, we are so familiar with fires. You know, that's part of the material heritage, perhaps more than any other art form. There used to be fires in the theater, obviously, as well. But I think we're so familiar in terms of losing history through fire. Did the fires impact the collection at all?

ml:

No. This is one of the beauties of all of these very, very detailed professional sorts of plans for exceptional conditions. The vaults have all sorts of controls over them. The process of assessment and testing and securing the collection is pretty refined at this stage.

vd:

OK. From my perspective, teaching, I felt like I had about two weeks of semester and then we went straight into this COVID-19 period. Because you are a national archive, how do decisions get made about when you shut? [End Page 108...