The arts in Australia need to break up with fossil fuels

In her book Arts Wash: Big Oil and the Arts, British writer and Liberate Tate organiser Mel Evans defines artwashing as the process by which large oil companies clean up their dirty image through a public-relations approach mediated by cultural philanthropy. Artwashing is an extension of the notion of greenwashing, where companies feign green credentials to build credibility for their brand and generate social capital. Evans asks:

How is it that there is a gap between all these harmful impacts that oil companies like BP have through their daily activities around the world and our acceptance of them as part of our lives? A big part of what happens in that gap is artwash – the way in which oil companies project a better image of themselves to the public through their associations with cultural institutions and sport and their social license to operate.

Artists and the arts sector need to take a hard look at the kind of social license we are granting the fossil fuel industry and weigh that up with our contract with the audiences and communities we serve.

There are significant parallels here to the ways in which tobacco advertising was once commonplace and is now seen as unacceptable. Activists, doctors and campaigners worked to ensure stricter controls of tobacco advertising as the public health impacts became clear. The health impacts of the climate emergency are vast and are set to impact everyone on the planet—far beyond the damage tobacco has caused—so of course the same advertising standards should apply to fossil fuel companies.

In their 2019 project Maps of Gratitude, Cones of Silence and Lumps of Coal, arts collective The Centre for Everything mapped the web of relationships between the fossil fuel sector and the arts in so-called Australia. The web is so busy that the diagram the artists created to map the links between organisations, boards, directors, festivals and funding has little blank space and is a mass of lines, nodes and connections.

As she walks us through the map in the video that accompanies the project, Gabrielle de Vietri—who is now the Mayor of the City of Yarra—asks:

What about the impact on the arts? It’s not just about money. These associations to people and brands inform the culture of our institutions. From the way the workplace operates to which artists are supported. They can influence who tells a story and influence our shared culture. Are we still willing to accept their money and their governance and in exchange grant them, the fossil fuels industry, their social license to operate?

Darwin Festival, one of the largest festivals in the Northern Territory (NT), takes place in the tropical dry season. It hosts some incredible work from First Nations artists from across the Territory and opens with a free concert featuring First Nations artists from across the continent, an event which is sponsored by oil and gas producer, Santos. 51 per cent of the land of the Territory is under active exploration licenses for gas fracking; Santos is a major permit holder and one of the most advanced in these explorations.

The relationship between Darwin Festival and Santos is emblematic of art-washing in the Australian arts context, and is particularly devastating in a First Nations cultural context. As well as accruing social capital, the Santos money silences communities by putting First Nations artists in a position where they have to choose between backing campaigns in their communities opposed to fracking and staying quiet to take up the opportunity to perform in the largest creative showcase in the Territory.

The forced relationship between First Nations artists and the fossil fuel sector brokered by the festival is particularly exploitative when so many historical and contemporary examples of fossil fuel extraction occur on First Nations lands and in proximity to communities, deeply impacting traditional culture and dividing communities over its impacts, risks and limited monetary reward.

There has been a consistent campaign by Territory artists, audiences and arts sector organisations since 2015—when the first open letter was published—calling on Darwin Festival to break ties with gas companies. The campaign has included securing commitments to replace fossil fuel producers with ethical sources of philanthropic funding to ensure that artists and audiences don’t miss out if fossil fuel ties are cut. So far, Festival organisers and their corporate and government backers have yet to respond to these offers, and have even increased fossil fuel sponsorship in recent years bringing Japanese oil and gas company Inpex into the mix.

Further south, in Western Australia, climate activists had a victory earlier this year, when they managed to get the Perth Fringe to terminate its sponsorship by Woodside Petroleum. The campaign lobbied for the event to break ties with the company, and in June they celebrated when it was announced that Woodside would no longer have naming rights. Barely a few weeks passed before Woodside and Artrage, the event’s producer, announced a new philanthropic partnership.

The Western Australia arts and cultural sector are inextricably linked with the extractive industries. The Guardian reports that there ’it is impossible for arts companies to completely wean themselves off sponsorship from the fossil fuels sector.’ Author Mark Naglazas continues:

Woodside is also a sponsor of Barking Gecko Theatre, Yirra Yaakin, the WA Symphony Orchestra and WA Ballet. Fortescue Metals Group supports Black Swan Theatre Company; BHP is the principal partner of Awesome Arts; Chevron has the naming rights for Perth festival’s music strand (also targeted by activists); Tianqi Lithium is the naming sponsors of a gallery of the new WA museum Boola Bardip; and Rio Tinto is the premium partner of CinefestOZ.

The underlying value of these sponsorships is that they ‘offset’ the low levels of tax paid by fossil fuel companies compared to their profit base. In truth, if they did pay adequate taxes, there would be significantly more money available to governments to support the arts—and health, and education. These companies are not being altruistic: they are paying a minimal amount of money in sponsorships (in terms of their wealth) whilst casting themselves as good, corporate citizens and building a culture of dependency and silence around a polluting and culturally destructive industry.

So, what can artists do when we are so squeezed financially and struggling to survive the conditions created by Covid-19, particularly ongoing cancellations of our work?

A practical way to reject fossil fuel funding has been developed by Groundwater Arts, a US citizen-artist collaborative. They propose a clause that artists can insert in their contracts to reject funding derived from the extractive industries. It reads in part:

Client/Employer [should define ‘Client’ and ‘Employer’ in the contract] hereby represents and warrants that: (i) it has not heretofore knowingly and willingly received funds or donation from fossil fuel industries.

Artists can advocate for the inclusion of similar clauses in Australia’s workplace agreements developed by our peak arts organisations such as NAVA, Theatre Network Australia, APAM and MEAA. Festivals, arts organisations and artists can actively engage in securing relationships with funders investing in climate action and climate justice whilst simultaneously and publicly withdrawing their support—and their hard-won social capital—from the art-washing initiatives of the extractive capitalist industry. We live in a time in which there is no alternative.

In concluding the Maps of Gratitude film, Gabrielle de Vietri sums it up best:

The social context of our arts must become more authentically connected to our ethics. To the tides of public sentiment. To the urgency of our times. We must interrupt the cultural soliloquy of big business and replace it with the urgent and overwhelming public outcry demanding climate justice.

Image: a detail from Maps of Gratitude

Shot at dusk on a street in Alice Springs, the opening scene of Maya Newell’s In My Blood it Runs is intimate and cheeky. We see an Indigenous mother looking straight into the slightly wobbly lens, answering her child’s questions about himself. The love between them – and also her concern for him – are palpable.

The 10-year-old Arrernte and Garrwa boy holding the camera is Dujuan Hoosan. Both he and his mother, Megan Hoosan, are credited as ‘collaborating directors’ of an observational documentary that was made with a clear social purpose. Turning these subjects into active credited participants in the filmmaking process is just one example of the film’s deep collaborative and consultative approach. Other members of Dujuan’s family and community are also named as collaborating directors and advisors in a project that sets a gold standard for non Indigenous creatives working with Indigenous stories, as well as for documentaries wishing to impact policy and create wider social change.

A different way of working with Indigenous communities

The philosophy and protocols behind the film are outlined as an Indigenous Project Approach [PDF] available on the film’s website for other filmmakers to use. Newell says the development and articulation of these principles owes much to the input of the producers: Rachel Naninaaq Edwardson, an acclaimed Iñupiaq/Norwegian/Sami filmmaker; Sophie Hyde, of Closer Productions, a company well known for its groundbreaking methodology (52 Tuesdays); and Larissa Behrendt, an Aboriginal Australian legal academic, writer and documentary filmmaker (After the Apology).

The key tenets of the radical approach include: partnership with those represented; having a senior Indigenous advisory team; shared profit and ownership; an ongoing duty of care; long production timelines; and strong impact strategy and messaging for distribution and exhibition.

‘We made this film in a really unique way,’ explains Newell on the phone to Screenhub from Alice Springs on the morning of the film’s outdoor premiere in the hills of the Hidden Valley Town Camp, where some key opening scenes were shot. ‘We were led by one of our producers, Rachel Naninaaq Edwardson, who brought incredible consultation models to the project. This meant that we were sitting with the family before we started filming, and throughout the whole shooting and rough cuts and fine cut process. They were able to watch footage and talk about what they did want and what they didn’t want in the film, and they knew they could pull out at any time.’

This sounds like a nightmare for control freaks and filmmakers on tight timelines, but Newell says, ‘It was very important that this was a story where the agency and creative control sat with the family and the filmmakers in collaboration.’ What this meant in practice was that, ‘we were showing footage directly after it happened and engaging in conversations about what it would mean locally and nationally, to have that story out there. This meant that there were no surprises by the time we came to the edit, and there was always a strength-based reason for including anything tricky.or sensitive.’

As for whether subjects could pull out at any time, Newell says that is something that should always be on the table. ‘It’s always a risk and I would hope that all documentary makers would take than on as part of the gig.’

Clearly this process took took a vast investment of time and energy. Not just the three years of actual filming, but the many years before that when Newell was engaged with Alice Springs communities making short films with and for them, a process that built trust and rapport. Newell says her commitment will probably include a lifelong responsibility and duty of care long after the film is archived and forgotten.

‘It’s the only way. It does take a lot of work,’ she says, ‘and a lot of the systems in the film industry and the funding bodies don’t often allow for it, but it was very important for us to represent the communities properly, and Sophie Hyde and Closer Productions were a key part of allowing us to do that and creating space from deadlines.’

Representing and Advocating for Children

Newell met Hyde at a Q&A screening of her previous documentary feature, Gaby Baby (2015). Hyde was moderating the session, and the two filmmakers hit it off immediately, both sharing the fact of being children of gay families. Representing children of those communities with sensitivity and accuracy was a key impetus for Gaby Baby, which became part of the national conversation leading to the legalisation of gay marriage.

Now, In My Blood it Runs looks set to become part of the push towards raising the minimum age of incarceration of Australian children from 10 to 14, and also the transformation of the education system for Indigenous kids. Dujuan, the boy at the heart of the film, at 12 years old was the youngest speaker to address the United Nations Human Rights Commission about the issue of child incarceration. Right now, aged 14, he’s on his way to accompany the film to Canberra, where it’s being screened to politicians on both sides of the fence. Being part of the documentary has no doubt changed his life and chances.

In a shocking statistic shown in the documentary, 100 per cent of the children incarcerated in the Northern Territory at the time of filming were Indigenous, with some as young as 10. Dujuan narrowly escapes this fate, thanks mainly to his proactive family sending him back to country, where we see him fishing, swimming, hunting and bonding with his father.

‘In every other western country the age of legal incarceration is 14,’ says Newell. ‘That’s the international human rights standard. And when we screen it in Parliament and around the country, we want people to see that resources should be put into Indigenous housing and upstream models of education instead of putting it into the justice system.’

In some excruciating and eye-opening scenes in the film we see Dujuan in the classroom, with various teachers failing to keep his attention. He plays pranks and runs away from school, an unsurprising fact given that the material he’s taught is either completely irrelevant to his day to day life, or outright disrespectful to a history of First Nations dispossession.

Newell says there is incredible work being done by teachers across the territory, and she never wanted to criticise individual teachers or schools, but wants to change the system at large. ‘I come from a family of teachers and I’d love to be making a film about how tricky it is to be a teacher working in this space without the support that they should be getting on a systems level to be teaching in a culturally safe way.’ What she hopes is that, ‘people watching the film can see beyond individual teachers or schools and see this as a systems issue, with how we talk about history in this country, and also how the education system could be adjusted for schools and teachers to be able to do their job better.’

Australia lags about 30 years behind other many countries in its First Nations led education, according to Newell, who cites New Zealand, Hawaii, some parts of Canada and the US as examples of places doing it better. Indigenous kids here, she says, ‘just want what other children in Australia have which is to have their first culture taught and prioritised in their education.’

Supporting the film with Impact Strategies

Asked whether she always intended to make documentaries with social effect, Newell says, ‘I think most documentary filmmakers are attracted to the form because there’s an opportunity for social change through story.’

The job of impact producer barely existed five years ago, and now it’s a key role on any documentary with purpose. It wasn’t until Newell was introduced to the Good Pitch model in 2016 with Shark Island and Documentary Australia Foundation, that she realised, ‘Not only could you make the film, but you could also support it with impact strategies.’ She credits ‘the amazing contribution of Alex Kelly, our impact producer, who has worked on campaigns like Ngapartji Ngapartji, where they achieved an Indigenous language policy in Canberra. Having that thought leadership on our own impact campaign was very important.’

Read more: Hire an impact producer, change the world

With impact partners that include Amnesty International, the Australian Human Rights Commission and World Vision, the ‘Change Goals’ for In My Blood It Runs are set out clearly on its website, with clear calls to action for interested viewers. This is the world of documentaries that set their sights further than festival screenings and awards. On a clearly pragmatic level, it’s a key way to build audiences and extend the life of a film project.

Asked for any final advice for young filmmakers, Newell says: ‘The most important thing is to trust your intuition and your moral code of ethics when you’re making documentaries. Don’t be afraid of doing things differently from the way the status quo tells us to do them.’

For her thoughts on the big issues facing Australia’s documentary filmmakers, here’s a great little interview with Screen Australia:

In My Blood It Runs is in national release from 20 February 2020.