A massive and irreplaceable archive of historically significant photographs is up for sale on the open market, after a lengthy ordeal abroad that almost saw them destroyed.
Dubbed the Fairfax Archives, in 2013 the collection of 1.4 million photographs was sent by Fairfax Media to the United States to be digitised.
However the company carrying out the digitisation later became linked to sports memorabilia fraud, was raided by the FBI and later bankrupted.
The collection of images, as well as others from Australian newspapers, were seized and held as collateral on a US$14 million loan, and were in danger of being destroyed.
An L.A-based gallery has since bought the entire archive, and is putting some of the photos up for sale.
Described by historians as the country's "national photo album", the archive spans from 1840 to 2005.
It includes historic moments like the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, the aftermath of the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake and Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mt Everest - as well as royal visits, Auckland's Queen St and 40,000 pictures of the All Blacks.
So where should the Fairfax Archive ideally end up?
And what does the sale of the collection mean for the preservation of our history?
Kathryn speaks to Daniel Miller, the owner of Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles and Dr Paul Moon, a professor of History at AUT who was asked by Duncan Miller Gallery to help identify the images.
