Thousands of press photographs showing scenes of early Canberra have been saved from obscurity, after years in limbo in an American warehouse.

Canberra Museum and Gallery has purchased the more than 3500 images, taken from the 1920s to the 1990s, that relate to Canberra and the region.

Typical Canberra Day celebrations in the City’s Civic Square, July 19, 1972. Part of the Fairfax photographic archive recently acquired by Canberra Museum and Gallery

The photographs were part of a huge trove of images sent by what was then Fairfax Media to the United States to be digitised in 2013.

The company undertaking the work was liquidated soon after, and the photographs languished in a warehouse in Arkansas, until the California-based Duncan Miller Gallery acquired them.