Fairfax Media's decision to ship up to eight million historic New Zealand news photographs and negatives to Little Rock, Arkansas, for "digitising" has proved perilous. Two years on, the digital archiving is yet to be completed, an unknown number of the photographs have turned up on eBay.com for sale and Rogers Photo Archive (RPA), the company involved, is now in receivership facing at least 10 lawsuits totalling more than $94 million.
Fairfax Media has gone to court to recover the archives - which also include the photographic records of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and other Australian publications. Observing from the sidelines is the Ministry of Culture and Heritage which allowed the export of this taonga, even though, under the Protected Objects Act, it had the power to refuse the export of photos more than 50 years old.
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