Historical prints found in the US state of Arkansas will soon be on display at The Bradman Museum.
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The museum recently secured 35,000 vintage prints, which documents all Australian cricket series from 1920 to 1975.
The collection is historically significant as it represents the continuous Sydney Morning Herald press photos of first class match-related cricket images before, during, and well after the Bradman era in NSW.
Essentially the collection captures all big-cricket played in NSW for the majority of the 20th Century.
So how did the Bradman Museum get a hold of this collection of historical prints?
It’s a long story.
The photos were found in an old warehouse in the southern US state of Arkansas.
American man Daniel Miller owns Duncan Miller Gallery, a specialist photography gallery in Santa Monica California, and in a series of complex moves he became the new owner of every one of the prints.
In 2013, Fairfax Media sent all the original prints to a photo scanning operation, Rogers Photo Archive, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
John Rogers, who owned Rogers Photo Archive went bankrupt before the job of scanning the Fairfax prints was complete.
The bankruptcy lawyers who took control of Mr Rogers case made sure that the scanning was complete and Fairfax Media received all the digitised prints.
Daniel Miller then bought the Fairfax collection of prints.
Mr Miller decided the cricket photos would be best appreciated by cricket fanatics, and the decision was made to send them to the Bradman Museum.
Bradman Museum collections manager Andrew Summerell said it was exciting to receive the contact from Mr Miller.
“He was very much looking for someone who might be interested in the prints as he understood the importance to Australian culture, so Cricket Australia was contacted and it all went from there,” he said.
About 25,000 prints are expected to arrive at Bradman Museum next week.
“These prints are an important visual representation of cricket in and around Australia and a great example of wonderful news photography,” Mr Summerell said.
The first step for the museum will be to sort through the large array of prints.
“When we get them here we will go through them and ultimately decided what we can display this Summer, which will be a collection of Ashes photos,” Mr Summerell said.
Mr Summerell said the museum would also look at displaying the prints on the Bradman website.
“We just want people to see these wonderful photographs,” he said.
Holman Industries has pledged financial support to enable the Museum to move forward with confidence, in ensuring that all cricket related prints are secured by the Bradman Museum.