"Last night I saw the Sydney premiere of the acclaimed new indy doco Black Hole about the Maules Creek mine in rural NSW. Whitehaven Coal is destroying a unique and biodiverse public forest to excavate a big dark hole, fracturing local communities, bulldozing indigenous sacred sites and culture, sucking down the water table and threatening the productivity of the highly arable land around it.

 

Over the next thirty years, the yearly output of coal from the mine will disrupt the climate more than the total emissions of most countries, while poisoning and choking many thousands of people. Question marks remain over its allegedly corrupt approval, its shockingly inadequate biodiversity offsets, its court-confirmed lies, its illicit spying, its many breaches of approval conditions and the disproportionate policing and legal response between pro and anti mine parties.

 

This mine is an almost comprehensive illustration of the brokenness of our politics, our economic model, and our dominant cultural narratives. If an abomination like this can stand, what hope is there of addressing a host of less obvious injustices?On the other hand, the campaign to save the Leard forest illustrates the potential for creative, courageous action to bridge social divides and re-imagine a common future. Bringing together life-long Coalition members with those who think the Greens have sold out, local indigenous elders with Pacific Islanders fighting to save their homes from rising seas, farmers with ferals and faith leaders, more than a dozen groups with combined membership in the millions have worked to highlight and address the fundamental injustices of the situation, using tactics from traditional lobbying, the courts and parliamentary inquiries, through to (as a last resort) more than 320 people (over 350 arrests) defending the forest with their bodies and (largely) clean legal records.

 

How does one capture all that on film in a couple of hours, while allowing the story to be told entirely in the voices of participants without heavy-handed narration? The temptation for most directors would have been to simplify, to streamline the narrative down to a handful of angles, to adopt a univocal perspective to make a readily digestible message for audiences. But Joāo Dujon Pereira hasn't taken that path. 

 

This is uncomfortable viewing, without easy answers offered or false hope promised. The complexities and contradictions of the situation lie exposed in their raw brutality and head-shaking irrationality. The narrative unfolds in the words of people largely untrained in delivering palatable soundbites, yet their grief, frustration and urgency are palpable.

 

I have not been an idle onlooker to these events. It was a peculiar experience to become an audience, an observer of familiar faces and places: a farm in which I've been welcomed, a shed where I've debated the ethics and practice of non-violence, an iconic forest filled with security guards and bulldozers, and throughout it all a great big dirty dusty and dark hole.What have we dug ourselves into?"

 

- Byron Smith -