Adelaide Film Festival & Samstag. Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. 25 Nov 2024

 

The environmental and social impacts of mining have been politically charged issues in Australia and in other countries over many decades, frequently precipitating public protests, attempts to disrupt mining operations and court cases.

 

Three absorbing video works exploring the impact of the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia quietly but forcefully make clear the significance of this mine and, implicitly, mining operations generally in Australia.

 

Susan Norrie (NSW), Matthew Thorne (SA) and Emmaline Zanelli (SA) have created their thought-provoking works in response to the inaugural Expand Moving Image Commission, jointly programmed by the Adelaide Film Festival and the Samstag Museum of Art of the University of South Australia.

 

Approximately 550 km north of Adelaide, Olympic dam is one of the world’s largest mines, with the largest single deposit of uranium, the fourth largest deposit of copper and substantial deposits of gold and silver. For decades, activists have campaigned against it because of its contribution to the use — and potential misuse and mismanagement — of nuclear fuel and its large-scale extraction of artesian water which has severely affected the local ecology.

 

Susan Norrie, FALLOUT (Expand Moving Image Commission), 2024. Single channel video with sound, 30 min 51 sec. Commissioned by Samstag and the Adelaide Film Festival. Still from video, courtesy the artist and Samstag Museum of Art.

 

Zanelli, Norrie and Thorne had all independently sought permission from mine owner BHP to enter the mine and were refused, so they took alternative and quite individual approaches to characterising the impact of the mine on the communities of the region and on the environment.

 

In her long-standing art practice, 2007 Venice Biennale representative Susan Norrie has documented the impacts of mining and other ecological disasters. Her response to this AFF commission is Fallout (2024), a single channel video of around 31 minutes, in which two environmental activists, Kokatha custodian Andrew Starkey and Elder Aunty Sue Coleman-Heseldine, speak tellingly of the environmental impact of the nuclear testing at Maralinga, an area of approximately 3300 square km in South Australia’s northwest in the 1950s. As is well-known, the impact of the nuclear tests there has been horrific, devastating local communities and leaving the area contaminated with nuclear fallout, despite efforts to clean it. As Aunty Sue points out, all of Australia was directly or indirectly impacted.

 

Norrie’s speakers make clear the dangers of the use of uranium. They emphasise the government’s contempt for the affected communities in using the region for testing, failing to consult and protect those communities, failing to restore the area, much of which was rendered uninhabitable, and covering up the impact. Andrew Starkey notes that 10,000 tonnes of contaminated waste is still stored in the area, and he points out that the responsible minister is the minister for mining rather than the minister for the environment. Norrie’s account of Maralinga’s legacy prompts us to question the production and use of uranium.

 

Matthew Thorne, Extraction (Expand Moving Image Commission), 2024. Single channel video with sound, 61 min. Commissioned by Samstag and the Adelaide Film Festival. Still from video, courtesy the artist and Samstag Museum of Art.

 

Matthew Thorne’s video Extraction (2024) is an entrancing visual experience, as the camera slowly surveys the broad region adjacent to the mine, highlighting the beauty of the arid land. In a voiceover, we hear commentary by Kuyani woman Donna Waters whose barely concealed anger and distress at the impact of mining on her community seems to emerge from the land itself. Watching the 61-minute video is something of an endurance test, as we are simultaneously captivated by the imagery and disturbed by Waters’s story.

Thorne’s video highlights the Indigenous community’s connection to the land and the dissipation of its culture as a result of the mining. Waters speaks of the loss of the trees, which were part of her moiety, in the area where she grew up. She says, “Each tree gone is a piece of me gone” and she speaks of how the hot springs of the area have dried up and how the land can never be restored. Most of all, she notes that her community’s stories are slowly being lost.

Emmaline Zanelli, I take care of what’s mine (Expand Moving Image Commission), 2024. Commissioned by Samstag and the Adelaide Film Festival, installation view at Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Photography Sia Duff, courtesy Samstag Museum of Art.

The town of Roxby Downs was established to house Olympic Dam staff, and some mine workers are engaged on a fly-in-fly-out basis. Emmaline Zanelli worked with the Roxby Downs community and conducted a series of youth workshops with local people. Her video I take care of what’s mine (2024) starkly reveals the private lives of young people living in the region. The visual material was made by workshop participants using camcorders she provided, accompanied by their textual material, making it autobiographical in nature.

 

Zanelli’s artistically imaginative compilation video takes the form of a series of brief vignettes and is mostly in split-screen format. She juxtaposes dramatically contrasting imagery, for example a dancer performing in a dimly-lit squash court adjacent to an image of what appears to be liquid residues slowly swirling in a puddle. We see a young girl practicing gymnastics outside of a building bearing BHP’s name, and a young man aimlessly pushing an empty shopping trolley around on a basketball court while ruminating on a personal relationship. Another girl lies listlessly on her bed in a state of ennui.

 

Zanelli also shows young people with their pets, which include a macaw, a butterfly, goldfish, ducklings swimming in a toddler’s pool, and even a scorpion. A dog endlessly chases its tail. We’re told that a woman has a house just for her pet snakes. It seems there is even a cemetery just for pets.

 

Such creatures seem to be vitally important companions for these people who are isolated in a strange world and the pets become the subjects of their owners’ imaginative story-telling through which they reflect on their lives. Paradoxically, the pets’ lives seem to evoke a sense of freedom and escape.

 

Emmaline Zanelli, I take care of what’s mine (Expand Moving Image Commission), 2024. Two channel video with sound, 25 min 45 sec. Commissioned by Samstag and the Adelaide Film Festival. Still from video, courtesy the artist and Samstag Museum of Art.

 

When seen together, Norrie’s, Thorne’s and Zanelli’s videos offer complementary perspectives on the way of life in the region, the various impacts of mining operations and the obstacles faced by disrupted local communities in trying to ameliorate these negative impacts.

 

Implicitly, the three videos add up to a profound commentary on the nature of the world we have created. We know that copper from Olympic Dam and other copper mines is used to make the cable that brings electricity to our homes, carries the signals in our phones and other devices, and is used in electric car motors. The uranium mined at Olympic Dam is largely exported but Federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton is proposing the building of nuclear power stations in Australia as a source of ‘clean’ energy.

 

Mining may be seen as the ultimate form of exploitation of the earth by humans. As Samstag curator Anna Zagala points out in her companion essay, mining enables the creation of the complex cities and societies in which we live. But the creation of such cities and societies comes at an immense cost, and these videos prompt us to reconsider the ‘progress’ that the industrial revolution has brought. The impacts of fossil fuel production and use are well-known but perhaps not so well-known are the impacts of the mining of other minerals used in electric cars, such as lithium, nickel and cobalt.

 

We have painted ourselves into a corner by engineering a society and economy that relies on the ruinous exploitation of the environment and of its people.

 

Chris Reid

 

When: 11 Oct to 29 Nov

Where: Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia

Further info: unisa.edu.au

 

 

 

 

Susan Norrie, FALLOUT (Expand Moving Image Commission), 2024.

Commissioned by Samstag and the Adelaide Film Festival,

installation view at Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia.

Photography Sia Duff, courtesy Samstag Museum of Art.