Scenes showing smoking in cabs, driving sans seatbelt and Perth without freeways all feature in a series of films made to promote life in Australia.

The makers surely didn't consider it at the time, but the films have become a valuable time capsule for present and future generations.

The short documentaries were made in the 1940s through to the 1970s in conjunction with the Commonwealth Film Unit, which later became Film Australia.

"Around that time there were a lot of films that were made for an overseas audience to try and attract people from the UK and Europe to come and live in Australia," Beth Taylor, online content producer with the National Film and Sound Archive, told ABC Radio Perth.

She said the films were "extremely successful at the time" and were now gaining a new audience on NSFA's YouTube channel.

"We often get comments from people saying they remember seeing these films and that may have been the reason why they came to Australia in the first place," Ms Taylor said.

"A lot of people really love seeing things that are still around, or maybe things that are no longer around."

Highlights in the online archive include 1961's Another Sunny Day In Western Australia, which depicts daily life in Perth and shows off the attractions of the sunlit city.

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A 1972 film directed by Greg Reading shows a day in the life of Perth taxi driver Jim McKenzie.

At the time it would have been fairly unremarkable, but it depicts a now-vanished world where passengers and the driver happily smoke in the cab, children ride without seatbelts, and a trip into the city cost just $1.50.

A 1947 film about the University of Western Australia makes much of the fact that it was founded as the only free university in the British Empire.

The narrator describes "an atmosphere of culture and learning that might well develop into the Oxford or Cambridge of the Southern Hemisphere".

"What I find so interesting about these films is that they capture things that they didn't realise they were capturing," Ms Taylor said.

"There are places that people still really care about — fashion, hair, cars.

"It's a really fun thing for people to look at."

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The NFSA has created playlists for each Australian capital city and encouraged the public to let them know if they recognised a house or someone they knew in the films.

"We get a lot of people identifying streets and bridges and maybe even family members," Ms Taylor said.

"We are putting more and more online.