Documentaries have been a part of Australian film history from the beginning. A whole 10 years before The Story of the Kelly Gang claimed the title as the world’s first feature-length movie, Marius Sestier was making nonfiction short films that detailed the extravagance of the annual Melbourne Cup and the mundanity of passengers disembarking from a paddle steamer at Manly. Not too long later, photographer Frank Hurley was documenting his travels to Antarctica in South and Home of the Blizzard.

Sestier, an employee at the time of film pioneers the Lumière brothers in France, is just one of many documentarians whose importance to Australian cinema culture has long been ignored. It’s disappointing considering documentaries are frequently among the world-class cinema this country produces; even our first Academy award winner was a documentary: Ken G Hall’s 1942 newsreel Kokoda Front Line.

The number of documentaries being made and released is on the rise thanks to the affordability of digital filmmaking as well as advancements in distribution methods including streaming services. April alone has seen four locally-produced documentaries land in cinemas: Sherpa, Remembering the Man, Wide Open Sky and this week’s release of Margot Nash’s The Silences. Early next month is Chasing Asylum.

Here are some of the best non-fiction achievements the Australian film industry has given us: a mix of treasured classics, new discoveries and hidden works of historical significance.

South (1919)

In 1914, Australian photographer Frank Hurley joined Sir Ernest Shackleton for his doomed trip to Antarctica. The resulting film is South (aka In the Grip of Polar Ice), a silent documentary that incorporates extraordinary filmed content, photographs, as well as hand-drawn renderings of sequences unable to be filmed due to weather or being lost to the depths of the ocean, destroyed when the crew became shipwrecked. Nature would continue to be a major focus of local documentaries over following decades, such as Northern Safari, Desert People and the partly fictionalised Back of Beyond.

Morning of the Earth (1971)

Surf documentaries were among the most popular and important subgenres in the early days of our industry’s cinematic renaissance of the 1970s. David Elfick’s Crystal Voyager, with its 23-minute hallucinatory Pink Floyd soundtrack finale is rightly famous, but Albert Falzon’s Morning of the Earth is the one that has persevered across decades of culture. That is not just thanks to the incredible beach and surfing footage of the era, but also the accompanying soundtrack that became the first such album to achieve gold status on the music charts.

Ningla A-Na (1973)

The local film industry’s new wave coincided with a rise in awareness of Aboriginal land rights. Alessandro Cavadini’s Ningla A-Na captures this moment in time with particular focus paid to the beginnings of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. The objections and obstructions to their fight are documented with brave close-up, the intensity of these sequences perfectly counterbalanced by the efforts of community leaders to build a non-violent national dialogue. Cultural battlegrounds also became the climax of another excellent doc, Pat Fiske’s Rocking the Foundations (1985), which honed in on government efforts to raze affordable inner-city neighbourhoods like Redfern.

The Seven Years On Series (1976-2010)

Directly inspired by the popular British series 7 Up, My Brilliant Career filmmaker Gillian Armstrong began her own franchise of films charting the lives of Kerry, Josie, and Diana. Across five films – beginning in 1976 with Smokes & Lollies, and continuing on with 14’s Good, 18’s Better; Bingo, Bridesmaids, and Braces; Not 14 Again; and most recently Love, Lust & Lies – audiences have experienced the highs and lows of being a teenage girl growing into adulthood in Australia. If the timeline sticks, we should be getting another film in the series next year.

Journey to the End of Night (1983)

What begins as seemingly a rambling train of thought from the mind of an ageing man, soon becomes something much more. Peter Tammer’s film is a diary of sorts, spoken aloud some 40 years after the fact; a painful first-hand recollection of the horrors of war. The soldier at its heart, Bill Neave, doesn’t often speak directly to camera, instead the audience catches him deep in thought as he recalls his experiences escaping the Japanese army and debating his personal ethics over what differentiates a kill and a murder. It’s a powerful portrait of a damaged man who has found himself, after war, caught in an endless battle with himself.

Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988)

A movie as hilarious as it is informative, Mark Lewis’s look at the plague of cane toads across the northern regions of Australia is just as funny as features Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. An unlikely box office smash, it was the highest grossing Australian documentary of all time for 19 years before it was overtaken by Bra Boys. In 2010, Lewis followed this AFI-winning and Bafta-nominated film with a sequel called Cane Toads: The Conquest that was the first Australian film ever released in digital 3D. And yes, that includes scenes of cane toad cricket!

Australia Daze (1988)

Director Pat Fiske assembled 20 film crews to document the bicentennial on Australia Day, 1988. What she captured was a panoramic vision of Australia at a crossroad of controversy that continues to play out to this very day. There are the Indigenous protesters converging on Sydney from across the country, the rich white Sydney harbour residents who don’t want the protesters to block their view and disrupt their fun, the country-dwellers who don’t really care, the suburbanites who see it as little more than an excuse for a barbecue, and many others. It remains as relevant nearly 30 years later as it was then.

Rats in the Ranks (1996)

Australian documentary icons Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s look at historical encounters with Papua New Guinea locals, First Contact (1983), was a deserved Oscar nominee. But in 1996 they made magic out of the farcical in this funny, humiliating and rudely awakening examination of the race to elect mayor of Sydney’s Leichhardt Council. Watch in horror as the contenders and their allies form more alliances than Survivor and the desires of the people are all but forgotten in this endlessly fascinating documentary.

Not Quite Hollywood (2008)

Subtitled “The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!”, Mark Hartley’s doc is a hyperactively collated history lesson that covers the halcyon days of Australian genre film production in the 70s and 80s; the era that saw an escalating number of horror, sci-fi, action and erotica titles being produced thanks to generous tax concessions that are treasured by lovers of all things cheap and nasty. Movies like Fair Game, Dead End Drive-In and Turkey Shoot were dismissed by critics and frequently ignored by audiences upon their release, but now thanks to the likes of Quentin Tarantino (who appears here geeking out over the films) are finding new followings and reappraisal. Not Quite Hollywood is a fitting tribute to the ribald spirit of over-the-top film mayhem.

Sherpa (2015)

For director Jennifer Peedom, Sherpa as we know it almost never happened. Intent on filming something else entirely, her initial project was sidetracked when an avalanche on Mount Everest killed 16 Sherpa guides and significantly altered the narrative she’d gone to Nepal to film. One of the most cinematic documentaries in recent times, Sherpa has become a box office blockbuster (at least in terms of what is usually predicted for a documentary) and after three weeks is already one of the highest grossing Australian docs ever. Peedom’s next film? She’s sticking to Everest with a narrative drama about history’s most famous Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay.

• The Silences is in Australian cinemas. Chasing Asylum premieres in Australia on 5 May at the Human Rights Arts & Film festival