Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

een organised by FoE since 2000,
but the festival started back in 1993
as a public meeting on wood-chipping,
organised for the Wilderness Society by
independent filmmaker Gary Caganoff. It
was held at the Teacher’s Federation in
Sydney and consisted of speakers such
as Bob Brown (the then TAS Greens MP),
Clover Moor (Independent NSW MP),
Peter Thompson (Radio National) and
Peter Treseder (a well-known adventurer).
The night was used to launch “Tarkiner
Paner”, a film Gary Caganoff created for
the World Heritage proposal of the Tarkine
Wilderness in northwest Tasmania.
A similar meeting was organised again
the following year at the National Maritime
Museum in Sydney. These two public
meetings were named Wild Spaces. It
was only after the second meeting that the
film festival idea began to take shape, with
organisers realising the need for a vehicle
that would carry all the environmental and
social justice films that weren’t making
it into the mainstream media. Gary
contacted festivals in Sydney and around
the world, gathering information and
sourcing films. It eventually took a year
and a half to see the first `Wild Spaces
Environmental Film Festival’, screened
in a converted Warehouse in Newtown,
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Sydney in June 1996. It attracted almost
600 people.
Word of the festival travelled around the
country and within six months Wild Spaces
had screened in Melbourne, Byron Bay
and Newcastle. The1998 Festival was
held in Sydney at the Australian Museum
and attracted over a thousand people.
The festival continued to grow and in 2000,
Friends of the Earth Australia became
the national co-ordinating organisation
with the help of many environmental and
social justice groups, student networks
and individuals taking on the role of coordinating
Wild Spaces screening events
in their own regions. The national coordination
of the festival was based in
Melbourne from 2000 to 2002, and has
been in Brisbane since 2003.
The festival continues to expand, and
in 2003 there were over 30 screenings
of the Wild Spaces program in all states
and territories and covering a range of
cities and regional centres. In early 2004
the decision was made for Wild Spaces
to go bi-annual, allowing more time and
energy to be put into the preparation and
fundraising for the national festival.
FoE 30 Years 126