The Melbourne Anime Society was formed in 1990 and to the best of our knowledge is the second oldest continuously existing anime group in Australia. The founders were Adrian Pett, Robert Thompson and Ken Stone. In April 1997 Adrian and Robert decided that seven years at the helm was quite long enough and by the end of July were able to hand over the task to a new committee.
The reason the society was started was to help others find out about anime. In line with this the society from its very beginning has had a policy of encouraging others to form anime clubs in Australia and to support them once they have started. From the beginning we have engaged in promotional exercises in Melbourne and occasionally elsewhere. Just recently I came across the program of one such early effort outlining the 25 hours of anime videos we put on at the Cancon'92 gaming and role playing convention in Canberra (quick geography lesson for overseas visitors - Canberra the national capital is located in the Australian Capital Territory while Melbourne is the state capital of Victoria).
The current meeting venue is quite comfortable, and close to public transport. The club has its own video projector for the screenings.
The MAS maintains a free loan library from which members can borrow up to 5 tapes at a time for a fortnight. The loan library has over 400 tapes and is currently mainly derived from a collection of over 1,000 tapes and many gigabytes of digital media - we have never managed to get all we wanted to copied into the loan library. Titles which are known to be available locally (i.e. video libraries) are withdrawn from the loan library as soon as we know about them.
Distribution of tapes is a bit limited due to our limited free time. Other Australian Anime Clubs get priority for our sending out tapes. We do not distribute commercially subbed or dubbed anime shows. We do make trades of course. Without swaps there would be a lot of shows missing out of our collection. See here for more details.
MAS and 3 other University clubs held a combined clubs' marathon at Melbourne University in 1999 which morphed into the anime convention Manifest - Melbourne Anime Festival, Australia's first anime convention, in 2000. Since then, the 4 clubs have continued to hold the convention each year with the informal addition of La Trobe University's anime club in 2002 (formally in 2003).
With the flood of anime from Madman, Siren and other companies beginning around early-mid 2002, MAS has shifted much of it's focus to newer and the much older releases from Japan. The advent of digital video of reasonably small size, the explosion of digital storage media capacity, and the increased availability of broadband internet connections has allowed MAS to move in this new direction.
2005 heralds the introduction of MAS's Screening Code of Conduct and Anti-Harassment Policy after long discussions to help make MAS a better place for all.
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