Restored newsreel archive puts a vanished waterfront back on Saturday screens
Twelve hours of 1950s harbour footage, cleaned frame by frame, will play weekly in the old customs house — with the original, slightly wrong, commentary left in.
The reels had sat in a salt-damaged tin. A university lab spent four years on them. What emerged is not nostalgia so much as inventory: cranes, fish boxes, a dog that appears in six different shots.
Curators kept the voiceover, including a date that historians say is off by a year. “The error is part of how the city remembered itself,” said archive lead June Pell.
Tickets for the first three Saturdays sold out in ninety minutes. Standing room will be first come, first served, in a room that still smells faintly of rope.
