The extraordinary build-up of fossils in South Australia’s World and National Heritage-listed Naracoorte Caves spans at least 350,000 years and provides rare evidence of Australia’s distinctive fauna and the way it has evolved.

Discovered in 1969, the site covers 300 hectares and gives scientists a snapshot of Pleistocene life in south-east Australia.

Only four per cent of the site has been excavated and already scientists have discovered 100 species, a quarter of them extinct, including the marsupial lion, a giant kangaroo and a wombat-like animal the size of a four-wheel drive. 

Did you know:

• The Naracoorte Caves in South Australia had been a popular tourist destination for over a century before the fossil mammal site was discovered there in 1969.

Australia's Heritage: National Treasures with Chris Taylor is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

This clip features a still from the collection of the State Library of South Australia: B 59995.

Narrator Rachel Perkins re-tells stories from the Dreamtime and historian Professor Marcia Langton of the Yiman-Bidjara Nation, historian Professor Janet McCalman and writer Bruce Pascoe of Boonwurrung Heritage weigh in on the unique prehistory experience of Australian Indigenous peoples. Summary by Sophia Sambono.

What is Australia’s greatest book? In the National Library of Australia there is a 743-page volume that could lay claim to the title.

It is Lieutenant James Cook’s journal, written on board the Endeavour during his trip down under in 1770.

Warren Brown leafs through these precious pages to discover Cook’s first impressions and trace the beginning of Australia as we know it today.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

On 25 January 1788 the First Fleet enters Sydney Harbour. Narrator Rachel Perkins and historian Professor Marcia Langton of the Yiman-Bidjara Nation convey the Indigenous point of view of this event. Emeritus Scholar Inga Clendinnen describes attempts by the Aboriginal people and the British soldiers to meet on peaceful terms. Summary by Sophia Sambono.

Since it fluttered above a group of rebellious gold miners at the 1854 Eureka Stockade, the flag of the Southern Cross has become a symbol of democracy and defiance.

The flag – and the National Heritage-listed Eureka Stockade Gardens – remain potent symbols of Australia’s only revolution, a battle that was over in less than 30 minutes and claimed 38 lives.

Whether the revolution is interpreted as the birth of Australian democracy or a middle-class tax revolt, it was without doubt a defining moment in Australia’s history.

The flag is on public view at the Eureka Centre in Ballarat, on long-term loan from the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

Did you know:

• At 30 shillings per month (the equivalent of three dollars per month in Australian decimal currency), the miners licence on the Ballarat goldfields of 1854 was twice the average weekly wage.
• The battle of the Eureka Stockade on 3 December 1854 lasted less than half an hour, but it claimed 38 lives – 33 miners and five soldiers.
• The Eureka flag was sewn in silk by three women and first hoisted at Bakery Hill in 1854.
• Eureka Oath of Allegiance: 'We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties'.

Australia's Heritage: National Treasures with Chris Taylor is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

There was enormous public and media speculation about which group would be first to cross the continent's interior: the Victorian-backed Burke and Wills party or South Australia's Stuart expedition.

'Stuart Crosses the Continent' is an excerpt from the film A Wire Through the Heart, the third episode of the three-part series entitled Constructing Australia, produced in 2007.

From violent cop killer to a champion of the working class, bushranger Ned Kelly is a solid gold Australian icon and folk hero.

By the time Kelly was captured in June 1880 after the famous siege at Glenrowan – a precinct included on the National Heritage List – the bearded bushranger had won the hearts of Victorians.

When he was sentenced to hang five months later for the murder of three police officers at Stringybark Creek, 30,000 people signed a petition demanding clemency.

The iron armour that saved – or some might say cost him – his life is preserved as a national treasure in the State Library of Victoria.

Did you know:

• Ned Kelly’s suit of armour was half his own body weight.
• Before being hanged at the Melbourne Gaol Ned Kelly uttered his famous words, 'Such is life'.
• Twelve days after Ned Kelly was hanged in 1880, Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who sentenced him to death, himself died as a result of a carbuncle on his neck.

Australia's Heritage: National Treasures with Chris Taylor is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

In the documentary Utopia Girls, historian Dr Clare Wright guides us through the fascinating story of how Australian women became the first in the world to gain full political rights.

This clip tells the story of the marathon overnight session in the South Australian Parliament in 1894 that led to women being granted the vote. 

It also explains how, thanks to a political miscalculation by conservative voters, South Australian women – including Aboriginal women – received full political equality and became the only fully enfranchised women in the world at that time.

Some sort of federation of the Australian colonies had been suggested as early as 1846.

Ferocious political struggles over the shape of the new nation continued to the eleventh hour.

'The West and Federation' is an excerpt from the film Pipe Dreams, the second episode of the three-part series entitled Constructing Australia, produced in 2007.

You can find all three titles from the Constructing Australia series in the NFSA Online Shop.

In 1908 the site of the nation’s capital was chosen as a compromise between rival cities, Sydney (NSW) and Melbourne (Vic).

It was decided that Canberra was to be a wholly planned city. An international contest attracted 137 entries from 15 countries and in 1912 led to the selection of a design by Chicago (US) architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin.

The Griffins’ plan featured geometric motifs such as circles, hexagons and triangles, and was centred on axes aligned with significant topographical landmarks. The foundation stone was laid on 12 March 1913 and construction commenced soon after.

On the morning of Wednesday 12 March 1913, 500 invited guests, over 700 mounted and artillery troops and a public crowd of over 3,000 locals came to witness the formal naming of Canberra.

Foundation stones were laid by Governor-General Lord Thomas Denman, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher and the Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley. The national anthem was played and Lady Gertrude Denman announced the chosen name for the new-born federal capital.

This digital restoration of the film, with music by Elaine Loebenstein, includes beautiful, clear images of guests arriving to watch the ceremony. Many of the troops seen in the film would soon be sent to fight overseas during the First World War.

The film, directed by Raymond Longford and shot by Ernest Higgins, ends with a long panoramic sweep from Mt Pleasant taken the day after the ceremony.

How did a lifeboat, left to rot on the shores of Gallipoli, come to have pride of place at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra?

Curator John White tells the story of this little boat’s tumultuous journey as Warren Brown helps us imagine what it was like for those first Anzacs on the day that helped forge Australia’s identity.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Construction began in 1923 and the Sydney Harbour Bridge was completed in January 1932.

The greatest engineering challenge of its day anywhere on Earth, Peter Lalor, author of the book The Bridge says 'Everything associated with the project was without precedent, right down to the rivet sizes. Nobody had used rivets that large. Nobody had used that construction method on a bridge that large. Nobody had used steel pieces that large. So it was putting a man on the moon basically.' 

Excerpt from The Bridge, 2006 - Film Australia Collection © National Film and Sound Archive. 

Notes by Beth Taylor

Stream The Bridge on NFSA Player

This clip examines the situation for women in the 1930s Depression when many were forced to work as the men in their families were unemployed. Denied equal pay and still being paid piece-rate wages, women were then vilified and unfairly blamed for causing unemployment. The clip finishes with a segment from the feature film Caddie. Summary by Adrienne Parr.

How did a New Zealand-born horse become one of Australia’s most loved and enduring icons? Political cartoonist and columnist Warren Brown visits Melbourne Museum where the legendary Phar Lap – or at least his preserved hide – stands in a glass case.

Curator Elizabeth Willis explains why this big red horse won our hearts and the circumstances around his mysterious death.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

One of the most poignant objects in the Australian War Memorial is the battered survivor of our worst-ever naval disaster. What happened to this liferaft and why is it so special?

Warren Brown talks to curator John White about this tiny, war-ravaged float from HMAS Sydney whose entire crew of 645 was lost when the ship sank after a mysterious battle off the West Australian coast in 1941.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Various media from 1942 – posters, newsreels and promotional films – show the recruiting campaign for the Women’s Land Army. In interview, Tige Hunter explains why she joined up. Summary by Susan Lambert.

More than 300,000 migrants had their first taste of Australian life at the Bonegilla Migrant Camp in Victoria before moving out to transform Australia socially and culturally.

Established in 1947 to house postwar immigrants, the National Heritage-listed property was a spartan former army camp with the most basic facilities. Isolated and primitive, it was freezing in winter, hot in summer, had shared bathrooms and laundries, and pit latrines.

Riots erupted in 1952 after the suicide of three young residents triggered widespread dissatisfaction with the standard of living. Conditions improved soon afterwards and the camp continued operating until 1971. Today, Block 19 is all that remains of 28 blocks.

Did you know:

• Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre originally covered over 130 hectares.
• To end the 1952 riot the Australian Government sent in 200 soldiers as a show of strength.

Australia's Heritage: National Treasures with Chris Taylor is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 Prime Minister Robert Menzies declared Australia was also at war.

In 1941 he flew to Britain (the first Australian Prime Minister to fly overseas rather than go by ship). En route he visited Australian troops in Singapore, and realised how vulnerable Singapore was to attack. In Britain he asked Prime Minister Churchill to increase Singapore’s defences, but without success. Menzies also reluctantly committed Australian troops to what became a disastrous campaign in Greece.

Menzies also saw the devastation of the German bombing campaign on London and other major cities. He took his wind-up film camera everywhere he went, and his very personal record of the visit includes strikingly informal footage of a young Princess Elizabeth.

On his return to Australia in 1941 he lost the confidence of members of Cabinet and his party who believed he was an electoral liability and he was forced to resign. As an Opposition backbencher during the war years, he helped create the Liberal Party and became Leader of the Opposition in 1946. At the 1949 federal election, he defeated Ben Chifley’s Labor Party and once again became Australia’s Prime Minister.

Robert Menzies (1894–1978) was Prime Minister of Australia twice: from April 1939 to August 1941 and December 1949 to January 1966. Robert Menzies’ camera is held at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

The Prime Ministers' National Treasures is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Northern Territory Art Gallery Curator Franchesca Cubillo talks about the life of acclaimed Arrente artist Albert Namatjira (1902–59) and his citizenship granted in 1957.

This clip comes from a 2007 Talkback Classroom forum on ‘Indigenous representation’. The students participating were NT Year 12 students Brendon Kassman, Danielle Lede and Esmeralda Stephenson from Casuarina Senior College, Darwin.

The learning journey involved students exploring the collection of Aboriginal art and material culture at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin and interviewing senior curator Franchesca Cubillo. 

Talkback Classroom was a forum program run by the Education section of the National Museum of Australia. At each forum a panel of three secondary students, selected from schools Australia wide, interviewed a leading decision-maker. They also participated in a ‘learning journey’, researching the issue being explored by the forum and interviewing relevant people in the community. 

This project was developed in partnership with the National Museum of Australia.

The disappearance of our seventeenth Prime Minister at Cheviot Beach sparked countless conspiracy theories and ultimately overshadowed his political accomplishments.

At the height of the Cold War, with the Vietnam War escalating, Holt moved Australia’s focus away from Britain and more towards America – substantially increasing Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. His impromptu speech on the White House lawn declaring himself ‘All the way with LBJ’ indicated his support for US President Johnson.

Holt’s prime ministership represented a major social shift from the tradition and conservatism of the Menzies era, to that of the ‘swinging sixties’. One of the hardest working of Australia’s Cabinet ministers, after 32 years as a parliamentarian, Harold Holt reached the prime ministerial office in 1966.

As Immigration Minister in 1949, Holt had taken initial steps towards a non-discriminatory immigration policy in Australia by allowing 800 non-European refugees to stay and permitting Japanese war brides. Following the introduction of a revised Migration Act in 1958, Holt as prime minister further relaxed restrictions that had previously blocked the entry of non-European migrants. The Migration Act 1966 increased access to migrants other than those from Europe, including refugees fleeing Vietnam, and was the beginning of the dismantling of the 'White Australia’ Policy.

In 1966 he brought in Australia’s conversion to decimal currency. The following year, on 27 May 1967, Australians overwhelmingly answered ‘yes’ to removing the discriminatory clause in Australia’s Constitution under which Aboriginal people were not counted in the census, and in changing the Constitution so that the Commonwealth parliament was empowered to legislate for Indigenous people.

Holt also brought Australia into the ‘space race’ with the construction of the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, and the joint US-Australian communications station at North West Cape, Western Australia.

In September 2005, the Victorian State Coroner found that Holt had drowned while swimming. The Coroner had previously been unable to investigate a death where a body was never found. Harold Holt was the third prime minister to die in office after Joe Lyons (1939) and John Curtin (1945).

The items left in Holt’s briefcase are a significant time capsule of his last days as Prime Minister: a pair of socks, theatre tickets, his tax returns and a couple of combs.

Harold Holt (1908–1967) was Prime Minister of Australia from January 1966 to December 1967. Harold Holt’s briefcase is held at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra.

The Prime Ministers' National Treasures is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) has fought for the rights of Aboriginal people to be recognised in line with other civil rights movements occurring overseas. A referendum is called in 1967 for the public to make a choice. In this clip we see archival footage of Faith Bandler and Sir Doug Nicholls, who were instrumental in the fight for Aboriginal rights.

Writer Bruce Pascoe of Boonwurrung Heritage and historians Professor Marcia Langton of the Yiman-Bidjara Nation and Professor Gordon Briscoe of the Maraduntjara Nation give their unique perspectives on the outcomes of the referendum. Summary by Sophia Sambono.

Jean Curthoys, Anne Summers, Edna Ryan and Marjory Thomas talk about feminism and their quests for a better education. Summary by Adrienne Parr.

Aboriginal elder and teacher Douglas Bon remembers Eddie Mabo and the landmark land rights case he fought.

Narrator Rachel Perkins sets the scene for the apology to the Stolen Generations given by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 13 February 2008. Interwoven are the personal experiences of Sue Gordon AM of the Yamatji Nation and Sam Dinah of the Noongar Nation. Summary by Sophia Sambono.