By Tom Zubrycki
With the upcoming screening of restored prints of Homelands and Kemira: Diary of a Strike, acclaimed Australian documentary filmmaker Tom Zubrycki looks back on the creation of these two essential works.
The invitation from Melbourne Cinematheque for a mini retrospective was the perfect excuse to restore a couple of my early films, Kemira: Diary of a Strike and Homelands. I worked with Sydney based expert restorer Ray Argall. We went back to the original negatives and made really good digital files. These are two quite different films in terms of content, but are similar in approach and style. For me, the starting point was amplifying voices that were missing or unheard.
KEMIRA: DIARY OF A STRIKE
Kemira: Diary of a Strike started spontaneously. Sixteen miners from a BHP colliery were suddenly presented with retrenchment notices. They barricaded themselves underground in a mine near Wollongong on the NSW south coast. It was an event that perfectly captured the spirit of the times. It was the early 1980s and the comfortable days of near-to-full employment were over! The reduced demand for coal, both domestically and internationally, led to oversupply and falling coal prices. The pit closures were seen as necessary for the company to remain financially viable in a struggling market.
I wanted to capture all the drama that was there in the heat of the moment. Looking back, it seemed a crazy thing to do. I had around $4,000 saved, which was enough to buy and process just a few rolls of 16mm film. I decided to take the plunge, shoot as much as I could with a crew working on deferred wages and then present it to a funding body for post-production. The gamble worked. To go through the funding agencies would have necessitated the usual three months’ wait.
Everyone was shooting on film (16 mm). Video was too primitive a technology at the time, so that left me having to source the film stock, and where was I going to get that? I only had a small budget made up of money I’d saved from earlier research jobs. However, I knew some filmmakers who had recently made films on reasonable budgets. They might have still kept “short ends” in their fridge. [Short ends are parts of 400-foot rolls that hadn’t been exposed through the camera] These may have been slightly dated, but they were still useable – give or take a bit of colour shift that could always be corrected in the film grade. I knocked on a few doors, and very quickly assembled what amounted to 25 rolls of stock, which totalled about four hours of shooting. If I actually rationed the stock and shot about two to three rolls per day, that would probably be enough to keep me going for a couple of weeks! The most important cash expenditure was to get the negative processed. I could always get it printed later if I was able to secure a grant. This is indeed what happened.
Working in 16mm had a discipline attached to it. You were limited by the amount of film stock you had allocated in your budget, so you had to constantly think through what you were going to be shooting next. You were always trying to predict what might happen with your subjects, and with the ongoing story. After a shoot, I used to always jot down the scene descriptions into a notebook, transfer them onto cards, stick the cards up on a pinboard, and see what patterns emerge. You could say I was writing the script simultaneously as I was shooting the film. This discipline stayed with me in subsequent films shot on tape.
The strike was in its fifth day when we started filming. On the 6th day, we were told that the unions had rented a train to take steelworkers and miners plus family members and supporters to Canberra to take their protest right up to Parliament House. We joined the train and filmed the journey including doing select interviews along the way. Everybody was wound up. When the group of 400 or so alighted from the train I could sense that something big was going to happen. A conventional rally with speakers wasn’t what they had in mind. I sensed their anger mounting, as the crowd strode purposefully up the hill to Old Parliament House. Suddenly, the crowd charged towards the building. Ten minutes, later they burst through the Parliament heavy plate glass doors.
Our cameras were rolling, though we actually missed the moment the doors shattered because the film magazine had just run out. Still, the Nagra sound recorder kept rolling, and we were able to insert the noise later into the track-lay. I realised that the story had quite outgrown a simple strike in a mine; it had reached the headlines and reflected the dire economic situation nation-wide, with unemployment skyrocketing to double figures.
We were back up the following day at Kemira pit-top filming some of the people we’d got to know. I’d already identified my main character Ngaire. Why did I pick Ngaire? Maybe because she was a bit removed from the other group of women. She looked particularly vulnerable with two young kids and a partner on strike down the pit. We only had the film stock to do one main interview with her, but that was enough to find out how she was coping. She told me about how she was being intimidated by the company for speaking out. There was unusual traffic in her street – cars cruising up and down. It was not beyond belief that BHP would apply pressure to whoever was most vulnerable.
The strike ended in very dramatic fashion. The men came up, and there were cheers. Candles lit the entrance to the mine, and there were speeches made, but I knew and others knew, that in fact this was just a pyrrhic victory. The workers’ jobs were going to disappear, and they’d only won a small reprieve of two weeks. The strike was over, but I had to keep shooting to get the aftermath. I still had some of that $4,000 I’d saved, so I bought fresh film stock and continued to film intermittently for weeks and months later.
Looking back now at the film, it’s a piece of important social history. It evokes a slice of working-class life and unionism that has now almost disappeared. The film is very much of its time. People don’t speak about the class struggle anymore, and unions would seldom take such militant action to achieve their goal. What happened to the film? We went on to win the AFI for Best Documentary (1984), and had film festival screenings around the nation and also overseas. The film won a Silver Dove at Leipzig (Film Festival), screened at Berlinale, and won the main prize at Tyneside in the UK. Tyneside happened to be very near where the British Miners’ Strike was taking place. People from the small villages affected were bused to the festival screenings. When the film premiered at The State Theatre at The Sydney Film Festival in 1984, it happened that there was a strike going on at another colliery just down the road from Kemira. The miners from that pit came up on stage after the screening and were received very generously by the festival audience. They said, “Well, it’s our jobs now, and this situation hasn’t changed.”
HOMELANDS
Homelands (1993) was a departure for me not only in terms of style, but also in terms of content. It was 1992, and I felt it was high time to explore issues around migration and ethnicity. There was also a strong personal reason: our family emigrated from Europe in 1956, and my father Jerzy Zubrzycki happened to be one of the chief architects of multiculturalism – at the academic and policy levels. I also observed that there was a noticeable absence of films made in this country that explored stories of migration. Sophia Turkiewicz’s Silver City was produced in 1984, but there were no feature documentaries. I found that inexplicable, and I wanted to correct this imbalance.
Australia had a proud history of re-settling refugees from post-war Europe and Vietnam. In the mid-1980s, the most recent arrivals were from The Middle East, East Timor and South America – especially the military dictatorships in Chile and El Salvador. My first idea was to make a film about survivors of trauma and torture, and it so happened that I had a connection with the El Salvadorian community in Melbourne through a friend who was a social worker in Broadmeadows.
A civil war had raged in El Salvador for eleven years, claiming 80,000 lives and forcing 20% of the population to flee the country. Peace talks were in progress, and the civil war was finally coming to an end. Many families were torn by a practical desire to stay in Australia, versus an emotional desire to uproot themselves once again and return to El Salvador. The idea of “homeland” meant different things to different families, and to different individuals within those families.
Quite early in my research, I met a family who epitomised these tensions. Maria and Carlos Robles settled in Moonee Ponds in 1985 with their four daughters. Both had been members of the clandestine opposition, and both had been kidnapped and tortured. When I first met the couple in 1991, they were going through a stormy and difficult period in their marriage. Carlos, a former teacher and guerrilla instructor had a job as a hospital cleaner, while Maria was flourishing as a community worker. She was satisfied with her career and felt comfortable with her safe new life in Australia. Meanwhile Carlos was unhappy and yearning for his homeland. He had never really wanted to leave El Salvador and the political struggle, and now the way was potentially open for him to return and make a contribution to the country’s post-war reconstruction. The scene was set for a challenging time in their relationship, and the idea of a documentary portrait of a marriage appealed to me as a filmmaker.
I submitted the idea to SBS who agreed to support it. The network had only just begun to commission independent production. Given the cost of stock and processing, I had to schedule the shooting very carefully. It was a long-distance film: the family were in Melbourne, and I was in Sydney. This was an advantage of sorts because it forced me to make very considered decisions about what scenes to shoot, plus I didn’t want to impose my crew on the family every day, or even every week. I also had a hunch that the story would unfold over a significant period of time. I was correct: Carlos suddenly decided to leave the country, and I had the feeling Maria would later follow, and so it turned out.
Maria, Carlos and I became involved in a complex three-way relationship. The roles of filmmaker, friend, and counsellor overlapped and merged. It all came to a head when Maria decided to track down Carlos. When the two of us landed in El Salvador after a gruelling set of flights from Melbourne, Carlos turned a cold shoulder to me – in retrospect, not surprising. What made it more complicated was that Maria brought along her own video camera. She wanted to bring some images back of El Salvador to show the community in Melbourne. It’s as if she was making her own film inside mine!
Originally, I had never intended to write narration because this was always going to be a “fly on the wall documentary”, but it was clear that my presence as the filmmaker was affecting the dynamics of the situation. My solution was not to deny my presence but to acknowledge it, and one way to do it was through first-person narration.
The tensions in the marriage were all brought to a head in an extraordinary moment late in the filming. We were staying overnight in a small village sleeping in hammocks. I don’t think I got much sleep. The cock crew at four o’clock in the morning, and suddenly there was activity. As the day dawned, Maria said to me, “Look, I’ve got to tell you something and I also want to tell it to my kids, and I want you to film it on my camera.” What happens next is an extraordinary moment in the film.
A few months later, Homelands premiered at The Sydney Film Festival in 1993 and screened later the same year at The Melbourne International Film Festival. Carlos had by that time returned from El Salvador. He and Maria came up to Sydney for the screening. They appeared on stage before an audience of over 1,200 at The State Theatre for the Q&A. They were very brave: Maria responded to the occasion with an incredible sense of assurance, while Carlos was understandably nervous.
Within the El Salvadorean community, the film had its supporters and also its detractors, which was not surprising given its conservative Catholic culture. Many people didn’t like Maria being so upfront about her relationship, and so candid about her own life experiences. However, Maria saw herself as an outsider. She states publicly in the film that the reason for her participation was to inform Australians of how difficult it can be settling into a new society and culture, and “what being a refugee does to your personal life” – which was the whole reason of why I wanted to make the film in the first place.
Restored prints of Kemira: Diary of a Strike and Homelands will screen at The Ritz, Randwick in Sydney on December 8 from 5:00pm. Tom Zubrycki will introduce the films and take part in a conversation with filmmaker and scholar Maree Delofski, and expert film restorer Ray Argall. The evening will conclude at 8pm followed by drinks & snacks upstairs in the bar. Click here for all ticketing and venue information. Homelands and Kemira: Diary of a Strike will also screen on Wednesday December 4 at ACMI from 7pm as part of the Melbourne Cinémathèque.
For much more on Tom Zubrycki, click here.
