Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip opens with local resident Mrs Moran describing to a crowd the effect on her life of the shipping container trucks driving through the streets of her inner-city Sydney suburb of Balmain. Footage of noisy trucks is followed by a voice-over describing how a truck crashed into the front fence of her home. Still images of the damage are shown. Back at the demonstration a man calls for a minute’s silence in memory of a young woman killed in an accident with one of these trucks.

Educational value points

• In 1969 the first container ships began arriving in Sydney and the old wharves in Darling Harbour were found to be inadequate for such large vessels. In the early 1970s the Australian National Line (ANL) ran a terminal at Mort Bay in Balmain, which was accessible only by roads too narrow to accommodate heavily laden trucks and, as seen in the clip, the residents objected to the 24-hour noise and emissions from the trucks.

• The clip shows how dramatic local events can galvanise a community into action. The death of a young nurse whose car ended up rammed against the side of a house after a truck’s brakes failed on a narrow Balmain street corner provoked a public protest meeting that provided the community with a forum to vent their anger and grief and demand a change of route for the container trucks. The protest group held a minute’s silence in respect for the young woman.

• The Balmain residents featured in this clip were objecting to the danger of, and the noise and pollution produced by, the shipping container trucks that drove through the narrow streets of Balmain 24 hours a day. In 1972 the residents had petitioned Leichhardt Council to take the issue to the state government but they had waited two years for a response.

• During the 1970s residents’ action groups such as this one often mobilised to stop activities that they saw as threatening their areas. The environment, a growing concern, attracted a wider support group including organisations such as the National Trust, and the Builders Labourers Federation, led by Jack Mundy, introduced ‘Green Bans’ under which unions refused to work on historical areas of Sydney earmarked for destruction and development.

• This clip shows how filmmaking can work as an advocacy tool in community campaigns by raising awareness of issues. This video was shot in three days and a roughly edited version was screened at the Balmain Town Hall. A few weeks later a delegation of residents took the video with them to a meeting with the Australian Minister for Shipping and Transport, Mr Charles Jones, to show him the effect of the container terminal on people’s lives.

• Making We Have to Live with It started Tom Zubrycki on a new career as a documentary filmmaker; he had been completing a PhD at the University of New South Wales in sociology when he made the film. Video Access Centres, established in the 1970s, provided the equipment, editing and training free of charge. He subsequently became involved in other community campaigns, making several more films.

• The invention in the early 1970s of the first portable, albeit bulky, reel-to-reel black-and-white videotape recorders opened up the filmmaking process to more people. The Canadian Film Board claimed the new technology ‘would assist the empowerment of disadvantaged communities’. Tom Zubrycki says ‘these dinosaurs were the equivalent of the modern digi-cam’ but after a few years he switched to 16-mm cameras (http://www.tomzubrycki.com).

• Tom Zubrycki developed a filmmaking style that he calls ‘verite narratives’, a term related to ‘cinema verite’ coined by French filmmaker Jean Rouch, which aims to depict ongoing events with minimal interference. Zubrycki’s stories evolve from his relationship with his subject and the wider social issues they represent, such as his Australian Film Institute (AFI) award-winning film The Diplomat (2000) about José Ramos-Horta and East Timor.

Woman addressing a rally.
Mrs Moran As you know, I have lived in M …(unclear) Street for many, many years and I have bought a home there for my old age. Now we have these monstrosities of things coming up and down the street, killing people. We are afraid to walk across the road, especially getting to my age.
A truck drives up the street as she speaks.
Mrs Moran I am sure that everybody in Balmain would like to see these animals of things get off the road. For me, my house hammers when they go by. I cannot hear my television or my phone ring or anything like that. Half the time I cannot hear anyone knocking at the door. Thank you all very much.

Applause. A long shot of trucks climbing a hill.
Woman It is one of those things that they are hoping that if we all close our eyes it won’t be there, but it is there and we have got to live with it.

Title: We Have To Live With It, then back to trucks and then the scene of an accident.
Woman It was only really our house and the concrete that my husband put in on the side of the fence here that stopped the container going right through the front bedroom. It sort of came down and it turned and as it turned, it hit the side of our house.

Man addresses the rally.
Man I have just been approached, ladies and gentlemen, by Mr Graham, the father of the girl who was killed. I think it would be appropriate to take time off at this juncture to observe a minute’s silence in memory of that girl who was a victim of this monstrosity down here.