Come and Celebrate 25 Years of Why Documentaries in the Illawarra!!
12.30 Doors Open
1pm "Ode to My Brother: A Sherbrooke Down Story" - When the Mt. Kembla coal mine in New South Wales explodes one horrific day in 1902, Evangeline relives the hurt she felt years before when she lost her own brother in similar circumstances. Q and A with Director James Stewart Keane
1.30pm Beneath Black Skies - a history of coal mining in the Illawarra documentary telling the stories of the Mt Kembla Disaster and Bulli Disaster and how coal mining shaped the lives of women in the area.
3pm Celebration of Why Documentaries plus drinks
4pm "The Dalfram Dispute 1938: Pig Iron Bob" This film covers an episode in Australian history overlooked for far too long: the efforts by striking waterfront workers in Wollongong to stop the shipping of pig iron to imperialist Japan in the late 1930s. Framing the story with the figures of Trade Union leader Ted Roach and then Attorney General Robert Menzies, the film brings to life not only the clash of ideas between their two worldviews, but provides a window onto the fraught politics of late 1930s Australia. Drawing on a wide range of views from historians and commentators, as well as the daughters of Roach and Menzies, the film is a well-balanced and finely crafted account of this dramatic episode in Australian political culture.
Perhaps the film’s greatest success is the connection made between the local and the international. Against the backdrop of the rise of Japanese militarism and Tokyo’s invasion of Manchuria, the film shows the energising effect of these events on the consciences of the Waterfront workers at Port Kembla. It shows, too, their desire to not only have their voice heard but to shape the foreign policy of the nation on the cusp of the Second World War.
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