An Australian answer to Gaslands, the North American documentary that first opened the eyes of the world to the terrifying realities of the methane gas industry, Frackman the doco-drama follows the trials of ‘accidental activist’ Dayne Pratzky, the self-styled Frackman.
Denouncing fracking (coal seam gas or CSG mining) as “the biggest environmental issue Australia has ever faced”, Pratzky’s land at Tara in southeast Queensland was engulfed by the industry after a gas company demanded access to his land, and told him he couldn’t refuse.  From a knockabout pig shooter building a home on his block of land, Frackman follows Pratzky’s journey from reluctant to radical activist, travelling the world to take on powerful pro-fracking corporations. Pratzky sets out to expose the long-term dangers of fracking to a mainstream audience and on a series of intrepid commando missions he does so with convincing flair.

Wayne Dennis has 13 CSG wells on his property. His story is told in Dayne Pratzky’s (The Frackman) compelling environmental film, Frackman, which has its premiere at the Byron Bay Film Festival on Saturday March 7.   Photograph: Andrew Quilty/Oculi

Part Crocodile Dundee, part The Hobbit, the film adopts the tone of a classical heroic saga as The Frackman’s investigations reveal much about this secretive business and the corrupt political machineries in place to preserve it. Pratzky is up against heavy odds, fighting an established industry that has thus far been successfully promoted as an economic and even environmental panacea by such icons as Queensland football legend Darren Lockyer. But he has hyperbole – “it’s the biggest con that has been perpetrated on the Australian people since the asbestos disaster” – a surging, emotive soundtrack and some powerful allies on his side.

On a cross-country odyssey The Frackman moves from mining badlands in Queensland to the Pilliga forest in northwest NSW and to Bentley in the Northern Rivers, where the stirring sight of peaceful Aboriginal warriors uniting with farmers demonstrates the powerful momentum of the growing movement against CSG. They’ve been protesting under the banner of Lock the Gate, the apolitical lobby group whose name itself has become a powerful slogan, uttered with convincing fervour in the film’s bona fide protest scenes, where The Frackman comes into his own as an activist, disrupting CSG mining conferences and being arrested in dramatic scuffles.
Along the way he’s encouraged by Lock the Gate founder Drew Hutton, who counsels farmers on a Ghandian approach, urging ordinary people “to step up and become heroes”.

People power raised Lock the Gate from a grass roots organization to an international slogan.  Photograph: Andrew Quilty/Oculi

There’s even a visit to the mansion of the bewilderingly powerful radio commentator Alan Jones in his southern NSW estate. Jones, in his best Churchillian soprano, tells Pratzky “You’re a gutsy bloke” and thunders about the CSG pestilence that has destroyed his Queensland hometown. He tells his enormous radio audience with righteous fervour: “The battle is on for our rights and for our country. The enemy is within”.
Jones’ presence in this film will give it some heavy credence in conservative, mainstream Australia, but it’s Pratzky’s personal narrative arc that gives it a gritty, if patchy authenticity. He finds romance, for instance, with a beautiful fellow activist from the USA, where methane mining has already wrought devastation worse than that seen in Gaslands. This relationship is the gold in filmmaker Richard Todd’s story, giving Pratzky’s sometimes somewhat overplayed histrionics a humility that fits beautifully into the elaborate plot.
Frackman is a fast-paced and fluid doco that has plenty of incendiary ingredients readymade.  The effortless indignation of Pratzky’s fellow Tara landowners, victims of corporate mining conspiracies, provide plentiful high pathos and there are solid hints of governmental skulduggery when The Frackman’s plans come unstuck in a cliff-hanger ending. It’s a worthy thriller that may well broaden the already universal appeal of Lock the Gate, whose mantra is creating a credible voice of opposition to a doomsday industrial cult that threatens our very air and water.

https://www.sonicbids.com/theremains> https://www.re-mains.com> https://www.reverbnation.com/australianremains <https://www.mickdaley.com>

From the BBFF

Another film in the running for the festival’s Best Environmental Film Award is Maarten van Rouveroy’s Black Ice.  This feature-length documentary captures the first-hand accounts of the infamous Arctic 30 – a group of Greenpeace protesters who attempted to sabotage the world’s first Arctic oil-drilling platform and found themselves the centre of geopolitical controversy.

 Black Ice charts the group’s adventure aboard the Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise, their protest at the Prirazlomnaya oil platform, arrest, imprisonment and eventual freedom. It provides a behind-the-scenes look at the life and dramatic times aboard the Arctic Sunrise: tense, provocative, inspiring.

A scene from Black Ice – a day in the life of a Greenpeace warrior on board Arctic sunrise.

 There’s uplift, hope and, yes, positivity also in Net Positiva, a short documentary about a trio of young surfers who do something practical about the discarded fishnets that make up 10% of the plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.  The three friends travel to fishing villages in Chile and come up with a fishnet collection and recycling program, converting the fishnets into skateboards, illustrating the impact that the actions of a few can have on the future of many.

Uranium mining is creating havoc for the environment in Australia, where every operating mine has a history of leaks, spills and accidents, and it’s no different in the US. The film Crying Earth Rise Up tells the story of two Lakota women who work to expose the human cost of such mining and its impact on the people and water of the Great Plains. Debra White Plume is a grandmother and tireless leader in the fight to protect her people’s water and land from corporate polluters and is the lead plaintiff in a case challenging uranium mining on Lakota treaty territory.

Debra White Plume, grandmother and leader in the fight to protect the local water in Crying Earth Rise Up

Elisha Yellow Thunder knows too well the dangers of contaminated water. She unknowingly drank water with high levels of radiation while pregnant with her first daughter, whose severe medical anomalies are life-threatening. A nearby mining operation is extracting uranium ore from deep in the ground by tapping the aquifer that supplies drinking water to rural communities from South Dakota to Texas. Crying Earth Rise Up follows Debra White Plume as she rallies her community against the operation. But the promise of a much-needed infusion of economic opportunity to the region is seductive, despite the risks, and public opinion could go either way.

The 9^th Byron Bay Film Festival runs from March 6-15, with films screening at venues in Byron, Ballina, Lismore and Murwillumbah.  Says festival director J’aimee Skippon-Volke of this year’s offerings.  “We have 220 films of an exceptionally high standard, with something for everybody’s taste.”

See Verandah Magazine next week for program details.

The post Frackman: from reluctant to radical activist appeared first on .

Australian native Blue Banded Bee

 Life in the city, in the fast lane, living on sugar, white flour and caffeine, rushing, oblivious of others, from one meeting to another, playing nonstop with the iPhone, cuts us off from real life, and from our original nature, writes our Political Potter Richard Jones…

British philosopher and writer Alan Watts commenting on the human experience put it like this:
 “As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, ‘It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.’ How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”

“This is a Flame tree I planted years ago, covered in these brilliant red flowers. Above, half way up, is a mistletoe bush and another baby one has established further down. The Mistletoe bird a regular visitor. On the right of the flower is a self sown epiphytic hanging moss. The pumpkins have doubled after two nights of rain and another shower is on the way. I just went for a walk through the young forest. It’s damp and lush. The sandpaper figs are heavy with fruit and the endangered Small-leaved tamarinds are covered in flowers as are the Silky oaks- with masses of orange blossoms. It all changes so fast after good rains…”

Here in Possum Creek we constantly experience the subtle, gentle movements of nature, whisper of leaves, ever changing shadows through the trees, distant calls of the whip bird and kookaburra, cheeps of finches and buzzing of bees as they busy themselves on numerous fragrant blossoms. 
If you put your ear to my studio wall you can hear the hum of many thousands of bees going quietly about their business. We could never separate ourselves again from this existence to live amongst the raucous sounds of traffic, smell of car fumes and hoards of rushing strangers and where birds are a rare sight, let alone other wildlife.

Alan Watts is right, every second is a precious jewel to be considered and relished and not just “gulped down”.

The post The sound of 40,000 bees humming appeared first on .

Potter Richard Jones: “The word ‘retirement’ is not in my lexicon…”

Never averse to standing up for the causes he believes in, Richard Jones was the first convenor of Friends of the Earth Australia, and assisted in the founding of Greenpeace. A ‘ratbag’ (as he’s often been called) environmentalist, as a Democrat and later Independent politician he was an early advocate for green politics and animals rights issues. He lives  near Byron Bay in a house he shares with his partner, environmentalist Jo Immig, and an assortment of wildlife including paper wasps, pythons, koalas and tree frogs. Verandah caught up with him on his verandah – naturally!

Q:  You were a politician for many years, and an eco-warrier for many more – when did you decide to become a potter?

I was handling a couple of my mother’s pieces she had made a few weeks before she died – very suddenly. She had just startedrecovering from the equally sudden death of my father and had made only a few pieces of pottery.  I realised that these were the most precious things I had of her, something she had made with her own hands.  I thought it would be good to leave a few objects like that for my son and three grandchildren. I started learning with Lucy Vanstone in 2007 and became entranced with it. As I made more pieces, it soon became evident that we would not have enough space for them so I had better find homes for them. I tried a small market stall and was amazed to sell sixty pieces and then I tried another market.

Q:  Your pottery has a beautiful almost Japanese feel to it – how do you feel it’s progressed over the past four years?

I love the Japanese aesthetic, particularly their notion of wabi sabi. I’m not keen on perfect pottery that could almost be machine made. I found my wonkiest pieces sold first. I don’t make them deliberately wonky but do allow nature to take its course both during throwing and firing. You simply never know what to expect when the kiln door swings open after a reduction firing. Every piece I make is an experiment and I never quite know how I will carve it or even glaze it. Not worrying about being perfect allows me the freedom to make individual and idiosyncratic pieces.

Q:  What’s it like being a regular market-stall holder?

I now have so much respect for market stall-holders. They are up before dawn and back at dusk. They work so hard and sometimes for not too much return. There are quite a number of young women who are making, baking, growing, designing products and carving out their own living. There’s a lot of camaraderie amongst stall-holders.
It is tremendous fun meeting such a variety of people from all walks of life and from different countries. My pottery is now in a number of countries and scattered in homes around Australia.

Q:  Where did you live before you came to the Northern Rivers and what attracted you to the area?

I first came to legendary Byron Bay in the sixties and my first question was: “Where are all the trees?” It’s changed a lot since then – there are many more trees and a host of fascinating creative people. We’ve made so many more like-minded friends here than we could ever have in Sydney where I spent much of the previous 38 years.
Originally friends from Sydney’s Northern Beaches started moving up and I followed them.

Q:  I know the money you make goes to buying rainforest – so do you do this for love rather than an income?

About ten per cent of the gross revenue goes to buying rainforest. Every firing saves around 750 square metres of rainforest in Sumatra, land that would otherwise be cleared for palm oil plantations thereby destroying the homes of endangered tigers, clouded leopards, gibbons  and other creatures. I use gas and feel I have an obligation to more than offset that by saving forests and planting trees. My customers also like the idea that they are contributing. Each piece I sell saves five square metres of forest, even five dollar pieces, so I make five dollar pieces specifically and young girls in particular buy them.

 Q:  What about retirement? You’re 74 but you’re not showing any signs of slowing down…

I’ll be retired when I’m interred.  Plenty of time to lie around when I’m dead. The word “retirement” is not in my lexicon.

Q:  What do you love best about living in this area?

The people, the beaches, the abundant organic food, the spirit and the fact we now have koalas in the trees I planted years ago. They have returned after an absence of about eighty years – as have other wild creatures. It’s heaven on earth.

The post The Political Potter appeared first on .