A fragile and irreplaceable collection of 79-year-old photos held by CSIRO is at risk of instantaneous combustion if an agreement to preserve the fragile collection is not arranged.
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The Stanley Fowler image collection is made up of around 13,000 nitrate-based negatives and 600 prints of the pristine Australian coastline, including rare aerial photos and a historical documentation of the fishing industry from 1936 to 1947.
The federal government is calling on two institutions, CSIRO and the National Archives of Australia, to "ensure the collection is accessible for this and future generations".
"This is a valuable collection which Minister Macfarlane has asked CSIRO to work collaboratively with other agencies on," a spokesman for the Minister for Industry and Science said.
Nitrate-based negative is known to spontaneously combust when it reaches a certain level of deterioration.
The collection will eventually succumb to this fate if the negatives are not frozen, a task that CSIRO does not have the facilities to achieve.
The collection has been stuck in a limbo between storage and conservation for the past 15 years.
The CSIRO has always had the collection permanently in its care in storage, but, since 2000, conservators at the National Archives have expressed interest in the collection for preservation.
Rob Birtles, the former archives analyst, has moved to a new division in CSIRO.
He remains one of the only people in the organisation to have worked extensively with the collection.
Mr Birtles said the delay of the transfer of the collection was due to government agencies "having resource issues".
He said CSIRO has provided a stable environment for the collection for years, however the film has started to deteriorate - unless they are frozen.
"Because the majority of the collection is the negative format, if we were to lose that, to me we are losing something which is irreplaceable," Mr Birtles said.
Mr Birtles said digitising the collection and making it available to the public would be ideal, .
"Digitising such a mass amount of images does take time … in the meanwhile we do have this set of negatives which are slowly deteriorating," he said.
"Ensuring the negatives are put under the proper conditions to reduce their degradation would be the number one [priority]."
Despite discussions to transfer the historically significant items, a date has not yet been set for their handover.
Mr Birtles said discussions had recently been struck up to organise a meeting between the National Archives of Australia and CSIRO for this month.
A National Archives spokeswoman said the collection had substantial heritage significance.
"The archives will continue working with CSIRO on progressing the transfer and preservation of this valuable collection," she said.
"Final assessment of the collection is being done and there is quite a bit of work to be completed to prepare these important and fragile images for transfer."
