A growing backlog of duplicate and unverified archival images held by Bendigo institutions has forced a reckoning over how the city manages, attributes and replaces its visual heritage records.
4 min read
Bendigo's cultural institutions are facing a concrete administrative problem that has been quietly building for years: thousands of duplicate, mislabelled or unverified images sitting across disconnected digital archives, with no agreed process for replacing or retiring them. The question now is who decides what stays, what goes, and who pays for the work.
The issue has sharpened in 2026 because several organisations — including the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street and the Bendigo Regional Archives Centre — are mid-way through digitisation upgrades that have exposed the scale of the duplication. When two or three scanned versions of the same photograph exist under different catalogue numbers, staff cannot easily determine which version is the authoritative record, which is a derivative, and which should be deleted or replaced with a higher-resolution original.
The stakes are higher than they might appear. Under Victoria's Public Records Act 1973, public institutions have legal obligations around the retention and disposal of government records, including image files. Getting a deletion wrong — removing what turns out to be the only surviving copy of a historically significant photograph — is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is an irreversible loss. For a city with significant Aboriginal cultural heritage, including Dja Dja Wurrung sites documented in visual records held by the Bendigo Historical Society on Pall Mall, the margin for error is effectively zero.
La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, on Edwards Road, has a stake in this too. Its library and research collections include regional photographic holdings that overlap with both the Art Gallery's archive and municipal records. Without a shared deduplication protocol, the same image can be attributed differently across three separate institutions — creating confusion for researchers, journalists and the public who rely on those records.
The City of Greater Bendigo adopted a Digital Asset Management Strategy in 2023, but implementation has been uneven across council departments. Council's own internal review, scheduled for completion in the third quarter of 2026, is expected to identify how many image files across its systems are flagged as probable duplicates. That figure, when it lands, will determine the budget request that goes to councillors later this year.
Three choices now sit in front of decision-makers, and all of them have a cost attached.
First, institutions need to agree on a shared metadata standard. Without a common tagging system — something like the Dublin Core standard used widely in Australian state libraries — comparing records across the Bendigo Art Gallery, the Historical Society and La Trobe's holdings is essentially manual work. That means staff hours, which means money.
Second, any image earmarked for replacement rather than deletion needs a source. In some cases, a higher-quality original can be sourced from Photography Studies College-trained community archivists who have been working with regional collections. In others, the original negative no longer exists and a replacement image — shot to match the documentary intent of the original — must be commissioned. Commercial photography in Bendigo currently runs at roughly $150 to $400 per session for archival work, depending on complexity, according to standard industry rates for regional Victoria.
Third, and most politically fraught, is the question of Aboriginal cultural heritage images. Some photographic records held across Bendigo institutions depict Dja Dja Wurrung people, country and ceremony. The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, which holds formal recognition under Victoria's Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010, has an established interest in how those images are managed, replaced or withdrawn from public access. Any deduplication process that touches those records without community consultation is an institutional failure waiting to happen.
The immediate practical step is a meeting — reportedly being organised for August 2026 — that would bring together representatives from the City of Greater Bendigo, Bendigo Health (which holds its own historical image collections related to the Bendigo Base Hospital precinct on Lucan Street), La Trobe Bendigo and the Historical Society. The agenda, as understood by this masthead, will focus on whether a joint working group can produce a shared decision framework before the end of the financial year. That framework, if it gets written and endorsed, becomes the blueprint. Without it, each institution keeps making ad hoc calls — and the backlog keeps growing.
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Published by The Daily Bendigo
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