The Library

From its creation, the Club established a library of records and books to enable members to access, listen to and understand folk music and dance not easily available in Darwin or even Australia.

While the Club may have started off purely acoustically at the old Gun Turret, it quickly acquired sound equipment to overcome crowd noise and Wet Season storms – and to record performers for posterity. Initially this was all recorded on cassettes.

Later the Club established the Folk Show on the Top FM Radio broadcast from what is now Charles Darwin University, which led to a wider range of records and eventually CDs being acquired.

After 40 years of collecting and recording the Club has a library comprising books and other publications, cassettes of Sunday concerts, special guest concerts and Festivals, records and CDs.

At the last count there were approximately:

The Club has recently begun to review this collection, initially removing duplicate publications and records. The next stage was to prioritise recordings and determine whether it is feasible to convert them to digital format, given that much of the material is likely to be of interest to the State Library and Territory and National Archives.

In 2015 the Club and the National Library of Australia (NLA) agreed that the NLA would digitise about 210 cassette and other tapes that were recordings of weekly Club and visitor concerts at the Gun Turret and other venues. This was completed in 2016 and the NLA and the Club now hold these historic recordings in digital format.

In 2019 the Club again was faced with decisions on what to do with the rest of the Library. Various options are now under consideration.