Bodies on the Line Sally Ingleton’s Wild Things and Australian Environmental Documentary

The opening scenes of Wild Things (Sally Ingleton, 2020) show the lush environment of the Tarkine in the Tasmanian summer. The area is, the documentary tells us, the second-largest tract of cool temperate rainforest in the world – and yet only 6 per cent of this area is fully protected from logging.

The threat to the forest, however, is not the primary focus of the film. Instead, Wild Things depicts a year in the heart of contemporary activist campaigns in Australia, revealing the work and motivations of new generations of environmental activists. Their stories constitute the three threads of the documentary. In Tasmania, the film follows Lisa Searle, a GP who has for the last thirteen years been immersed in the work of protecting the state’s forests through processes of monitoring and blockading endangered areas. Elsewhere, it observes two founders of the local School Strike 4 Climate movement, fourteen-year-olds Milou Albrecht and Harriet O’Shea Carre, who, after initially mobilising their classmates at their school in Castlemaine in Victoria, were instrumental in the massive street marches that were held around Australia in 2019. The third narrative of Wild Things takes us to central Queensland’s Camp Binbee, the base for the Frontline Action on Coal campaign and the temporary home for a group of volunteers committed to stopping the construction of multinational corporation Adani’s massive Carmichael coalmine. In the Tasmanian and central Queensland sections of the documentary, there is an emphasis on the connection between activism and