“I was born in the Blue Mountains, so I grew up with bush as my backyard. I’ve always had a love of being in nature and being on country. It’s part of my soul. I didn’t have a great childhood. My parents were quite distressed, so the bush was a sanctuary for me as well.
I had an alcoholic dad, a legacy of WW2 and it was quite traumatic at home. I would escape to the bush.
I’ve been a bushwalker and a camper all my life and interestingly when I look back at some of the photographs I took back when I first got into photography, there are mushrooms there. So I’ve been drawn to the microcosm of the forest as well as the big picture in the many previous incarnations of this life.
The way I got into film making was a bit of an accident. I trained to be an art teacher and went to Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education when they offered the first degree in a CAE in art teaching. But by the time I came out the world had changed and there was a 3 year waiting list for a position.
I was also married and couldn’t go out west where there were positions available.
I had majored in Photography and Ceramics, so I got a job as a Photographer for 12 months.
Then what turned out to be a dream job opened up at NSW University in their Audio Visual Unit as a Photographer and a Videographer. I was completely inexperienced and it was back in the day, when universities would hire people with a degree over people with more experience. So I had the degree and very quickly I was shooting, editing, writing and producing films.
I made about 300 educational films in 8 years. It was a unique training ground. I was also one of only a handful of female cinematographers at that time.
When I finished up at the university I became an independent doco maker. I’ve made a lot of documentaries for international broadcasters; I’ve travelled the world and eventually it brought me around to Series Producing Compass for 18 months and then working at ABC North Coast.
I’ve been living up here since 1996 on and off. I had a house and every time I came home, I did a little bit more on it. Every doco project paid for something else. The house had no kitchen for about three years until I got another film funded and then that would pay for the kitchen. It was surrounded by mud for a long time until I could pay for the paving. So it was a bit of an artwork in itself. It was a beautiful mud brick house on a very small multiple occupancy.
In 2010, the ABC decided to start this initiative called ABC Open and were offering jobs in regional NSW including Lismore. I wondered if they’d be interested in someone my age because it was about this revolution in social media, Web 2.0 and how this enabled sharing stories, digitally.
I thought maybe they were after young things, and I was in my 50s, but they were just after people who knew how to tell story and also could teach, so I got that job as the local ABC Open Producer. What a privilege that was. Having now retired from the ABC, it’s the one thing I miss. I was so embedded in the community and it’s such a privilege to share people’s stories, and in particular an honour to assist the local First Nations community share their stories.
Getting back to Steve … one of the very first ABC Open projects that we did was an audio slideshow project where we worked with community members who were good Photographers, to create a slide show where they put their own interview on it. I saw Steve’s photographs of fungi and I thought, well, water is fungi, so maybe we could do a project together. And that was really the start of it. We sat down and the very first thing we did together was something creative and It’s been the foundation of our love for each other and our relationship. That was in 2011 so we’ve been together for 12 years.
I’ve now produced in some capacity nearly 100 hours of TV but some of the films I’m most proud of are….
Back in 1999 the steel works in Newcastle were closing. I’ll just take a step back…
I had been researching a project on adolescent suicide because I was really concerned about the numbers of young people taking their own lives. I started that research in Newcastle because at the time, they had a disproportionally high rate for the state.
One of the things that came up in the research was that the social environment for men had shifted with places like the steel works closing down, because in that environment, young men and older men work together so they have a community of a varied demographic of men in their lives. And in fact, they often went on to marry the daughters of men, older men they worked with. They had older, wiser male mentors, whereas, with a high rate of unemployment, which Newcastle had at the time, young men were only associating with young men who were from the same demographic, and the same social situations. There was also lack of opportunity, so their world had become very small.
Because I couldn’t get the other film up and the steel works was going to close in 6 months I decided to do a film on what the steel works meant to men. In some ways it became an ode to my dad who was of that generation and culture – a working-class man, a lino-type operator and a trade unionist.
The spin doctor of the Steel works is one of the story threads in the doco as he was trying to spin it as a positive story. I had to get the permission of the whole Board to be allowed in so I approached them all and was able to do the film. It’s called STEEL CITY and it was a Film Australia project.
The other ones I’m proud of are – HOSPITAL – AN UNHEALTHY BUSINESS where I followed the lives of three patients who were needing really significant medical care in a public hospital. It was during the years of Jeff Kennett’s economic rationalism and case-mix was just introduced into the Victorian hospital system. I managed to get permission to get access which I wouldn’t have been able to in a normal public hospital but because St. Vincent’s was owned by the church, Tony Wright (the Producer) and I approached the Nuns. They gave their permission. It meant that I could tell an upstairs, downstairs story. I was in the accounting room as they were trying to earn as much money under case-mix out of each patient’s file and I was with the patients who were in desperate need of care. I’m very proud of that film because it gives a very human face to the political economic agendas of the time.
It’s been a varied career. I’ve made films about Royalty in India, filming in palaces in Gujarat and Rajasthan with co-director Sarina Singh – a Lonely Planet author. It’s hard for Australians to understand but it was like, living and filming in the palace with Queen Elizabeth. They’re much older Royal families in India. That was an incredibly fascinating project to do. The Maharana of Udaipur who’s quite famous is one of the most successful businessmen.
There were portraits of his ancestors right back to 10AD. They had the privy purse taken away from them in the 1960s so all of a sudden, they had to provide the money to upkeep their palaces, and those estates are huge so a lot of them turned to tourism. His family were probably one of the first to do that. He brought back all these amazing skills from an MBA in the US to do the business side, but he also feels very much his responsibility as a spiritual King to the people so he plays this dual role of this spiritual figure plus this businessman and that’s what the film is about. The film is called BEYOND THE ROYAL VEIL. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/beyondtheroyalveil
I also directed THE LIFE SERIES. LIFE AT 1, 2 and 3 and established that series with Jennifer Cummins, the Producer.
The Life Series was a terrific project. I spent 6 months going around Eastern Australia selecting families and we shortlisted 11. I was at the birth of 2 of those children and I was at the death of one of their siblings which was terribly sad.
Normally when a scientific study happens, they don’t put out papers for a couple of years, but we needed the data analysed to be able to find how our people could represent the correlations that were happening in the data, so I worked with the scientists leading the study to identify what we could explore with the families. It was a fantastic project and gave me a love for science programming. It blended my skills as an observational film maker with my geekiness wanting to understand what makes humans who we are.
So getting back to Steve and I … We met over that water is fungi project and I’d have to say that fungi completely changed our lives. Steve will tell his story about how he got discovered by the BBC and This is Colossal. I’ll do the ABC Open bit.
So we’d been together for a few years, ABC open had this new time lapse project and I thought I should do an example. Steve and I were looking at the weather report for the day and there was a storm coming in on the Border Ranges so I said, Why don’t we just drive up to the Pinnacle’s and have a play? We had no time-lapse gear at this time except for our two cameras, two tripods, our button pressing fingers and we were making it up as we went. We stayed on the lookout platform for four hours. In that time, we watched Wollumbin gather clouds, those clouds form into a storm, the rain passed over the top of us, the sun came out, a rainbow formed … all of which we captured and are now in our new film – FOLLOW THE RAIN.
They were the very first time lapses we did and probably still some of our best. Anyway, we got home, and Steve said, “Why don’t I try that with my Mycena Chlorophos”, a local fungus that glows in the dark and that grows quite quickly. We did it in our in our spare shower and we blacked it out filled it with rotting wood with fungus buds on them. Steve did a few time-lapses which turned out great.
Then the BBC came knocking. They’d seen his photographs of Mycena Chlorophos on the internet and they wanted to pick his brains. At that time we were thinking about trying to do a longer film together about people like Steve, fungi enthusiasts, modern day naturalists who were documenting fungi because by this stage, we realised that fungi were really, really important.
Without fungi the planet as we know it wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t exist. Coffee wouldn’t exist, beer wouldn’t exist, chocolate wouldn’t exist, bread wouldn’t exist, the forest wouldn’t exist. The rain would be very much less without fungi. Fungi captures an enormous amount of carbon. It’s been a neglected area of science in fact, in Australia fungi is still classified by government as plants even though since 1969 it’s been its own kingdom of life which means it hasn’t been documented or conserved.
I guess we became passionate about how little we knew, and we really want to share the story of fungi and raise awareness on how important it is. So we have been making many small documentaries and a couple of longer ones and posting on our YouTube channel www.planetfungi.movie.
We started getting invited overseas to document fungi in very remote areas. It started with an invitation from Professor Peter Mortimer working at the Kunming Institute of Botany in China. His father had come across Steve’s photos and suggested to Peter that he contact Steve. He invited us to Yunnan to help them document Fungi on one of their field trips. We ended up in a forest down near the Laos / Myanmar border and some of the tributaries of the Mekong River. It’s culturally very diverse there, not like other parts of China. It’s the old hill tribe people. They wear traditional dress. Yunnan is quite a food bowl, a bit like here. We’ve been back there 4 times now.
We’ve documented fungi in NE India with the Balipara Foundation which led to another film. We’ve also documented fungi in Nepal and Myanmar and Chile. We are about to go to Sri Lanka and back to NE India. We love it there. We’ve been to Nagaland and Majuli Island which is the biggest river island in the world in the middle of the Brahmaputra River, which has ancient Hindu Monasteries. They date back to 12AD. The island is being eaten away by the river and some of the footage which is in ‘Planet Fungi – Northeast India’ film was shot on that trip.
I’m so spoilt as a doco film maker, to be let inside the culture of people just a little bit when filming, so I’m not very good at just being a tourist.
Fungi allows us to travel a bit in culture. When we do these fungi safaris, we have local Scientists, villagers and PhD students collaborating with us. We get to share their journey on this planet a little bit and that’s really life enriching and inspiring.
On the trip to Majuli Island we got to meet the forest man of Majuli. His story went viral 3 years earlier. This man had single handedly replanted a forest on the North end of the island. His name is Jadav Payang. He started in the 70’s and the forest he’s planted is enormous, there are trees that are 2 meters in diameter. There’s Tigers, all sorts of animals including an endangered species of Vultures that came back. There’s Rhinos and Elephants. He became an international celebrity because he’s just a farmer, a poor farmer and he became renowned. Conservation organisations flew him around the world. We were meeting him so he could chat with Steve about what Fungi he had found in this forest. I knew we had to film that. It was so beautiful, and after that Steve became the Presenter of that whole 50-minute film that we called PLANET FUNGI – NORTHEAST INDIA.
Recently we collaborated on an IMAX film which will be released this year called FUNGI-THE WEB OF LIFE TO BE RELEASED LATER THIS YEAR AND FEATURING Merlin Sheldrake as presenter. He wrote Entangled Life which is a best seller.
And we contributed about 20 time-lapses to Fantastic Fungi which people would know from Netflix.
We still after all these years hadn’t made the film that we wanted to make so when Covid happened and we couldn’t go overseas on Fungi Safaris, and of course just before that the fires happened here, so we documented fungi coming up after the fires and then we started documenting after the big rains of 2020. We thought, let’s pour everything we have learnt into this film and our time lapses – in a way that no-one has ever seen before. We have a catalogue of over 500 time-lapses. They are our Big Scrub fungi. We love that forest, and we wanted to combine the forests and the time-lapses in a very magical way in this film.
We self-fund all our projects but this time we want it to be an opus to the beauty of fungi and to the beauty of nature. We also very much model what we do on David Attenborough’s philosophy. If we can get people to fall in love with fungi, we will get them to fall in love with the environment that we need to conserve for the planets sake, and for our sake.
Part of making it as beautiful as it can be is to use composed music rather than pre-recorded production music from the internet. There is an amazing Composer locally, Romano Crivici and we saw the film he and his partner Carla Thackrah made called The Last Violin at the Bangalow Film Festival. As I was watching the film and listened to the violin compositions, I see fungi growing.
We invited them to come and see the time-lapses and they are very excited. The score that will cost $20k. Then there’s the colour grade for a 75-minute film is about $9k, the sound mix and the visual effects. We’re asking for $43k in whatever bits people can afford. We are hoping that our following will get behind us to make the film as beautiful and as powerful. If we can do that it is likely to get international distribution to get the message out, so everyone who contributes will be joining with us to make a difference.”
https://bit.ly/GoFundMeFollowTheRain
