Knitting Nannas and Frackman: A gender analysis of Australian anti-coal seam gas documentaries (CSG) and implications for environmental adult education

ABSTRACT

Frackman (FM) and Knitting Nannas (KN) are two documentaries about the anti-coal seam gas movement in Australia. Frackman features a former construction worker turned eco-activist, Dayne Pratzky (DP), fighting coal seam gas extraction. Knitting Nannas follows a group of women also protesting fracking. In this article, we set a challenge to environmental adult educationists to expose gender agendas embedded in environmental education documentaries. A scene-by-scene analysis of these two documentaries through a poststructuralist ecofeminist evaluation reveals there are lessons to be learned because of the repetition of gender blindness in FM, whereas KN offers potential solutions for greater inclusivity in environmental education. The article concludes with recommendations for community-based approaches in environmental adult education.

KEYWORDS:

• coal seam gas
• fracking
• environmental adult education
• ecofeminism
• Frackman
• Knitting Nannas
• Nannagogy
• poststructuralism

Notes

1. Statistics sourced from http://tara.localstats.com.au/demographics/qld/western/south-western/tara.

2. Conference of Parties (CoP) is an annual meeting of States that are Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change. (see http://unfccc.int/bodies/body/6383.php).

3. Sourced from Frackman, http://frackmanthemovie.com/about.

4. Both films gained positive community reactions. The Knitting Nannas premiered at the Sydney Flickerfest Green Flicks (2013, Finalist and Highly Commended); it won the Popular Choice award, Byron All Shorts Film Festival 2014. It is freely available online through Vimeo. There are also Internet references to it being shown in Lismore (2014); in the Blue Mountains as part of World Heritage Day celebrations in Katoomba and at Blackheath (2014); and more recently World Community Film Festival 2016 http://www.worldcommunity.ca/film-festival/ Courtenay, British Columbia, Canada 25 when it was launched to coincide with the 2015 NSW State elections. Mainstream media reports indicated the impact was enduring with children writing about CSG and dressing up as Frackman at school events and protests.

5. We are not focusing at all on racism, but we can see there is clear indication of gender-blindness in the representation of the female.