When 27 tonnes of Australian archived photographs taken by some of the country's most well known artist photographers were unearthed in an American warehouse in 2017, a mission to repatriate them began.

Just 30 Gundagai photos that were taken for the Fairfax Media group newspapers in the 1970's and 1980's survived and are now being shown in their first public viewing in Australia at the Gundagai Library during November.

The story of how they came to be unearthed reads like a Hollywood movie script and involves the FBI, fraud allegations and a number of photos, with some very recognisable Gundagai faces, lying stranded in an Arkansas warehouse. The photographs, around 2 million in total, were taken for Fairfax publications such as the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and the Financial Review, dating from the early 20th century to the 1990’s.