It was smiles all around on Wednesday night when federal arts minister Tony Burke joined the National Film and Sound Archive retiring chair Caroline Elliott and CEO Patrick McIntyre to celebrate 40 years of collecting, preserving and sharing Australian audiovisual media and culture.

On October 3 1984, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke officially opened the archive’s new headquarters in Canberra, calling it “an institution devoted to the popular cultural expression of our age”.

Hosted by broadcaster Wenlei Ma, the celebratory event took place along with dancing and DJ sets in the audiovisual gallery at the heritage art deco building in Acton.

The opening was backed by footage of Hawke opening the archive – the former Institute of Anatomy – and the crowd heard that the transformation of the old institute into a home for Australia’s visual and audio collections had been the culmination of an extended lobbying campaign but the project nearly collapsed some years down the track when the idea was floated of subsuming it into Sydney’s Australian Film Commission on a permanent basis.

That was put paid to after demonstrations and marches by angry Canberrans refusing to lose their institution to Sydney. In 2007 the NFSA became fully independent, as it is now.

McIntyre took the stand to note that not only was it the 40th anniversary of the archive but the 93rd birthday of the building itself, a unique piece of architecture that he and his team were tending carefully.

Minister Burke said that the timing of the archive was serendipitous given the massive popular cultural explosion of VHS and BETA from the ’70s, and archivists found it hard to keep up with the amazing wealth of A/V material in Australia.

“It was an exciting moment for our country,” Burke said.