In the midst of a nation on fire, Australian photographer Matt Abbott immerses himself in an unprecedented environmental catastrophe to deliver imagery which reverberates around the world. Matt Abbott is among the closest witnesses to one of the worst environmental disasters of the last decade. His photography propelled the Australian bushfires to the top of the global news cycle and saw him nominated for highest international photography awards. The daily dose of toxic smoke left him with an entrenched lung infection; his personal health symbolic of the accumulating pain this fire season inflicted. This is an immersive first-hand account of Australia's black summer through Matt's extraordinary lived experience and a glimpse into the role of photojournalism to affect the international climate debate.
Film now available to view online at: aje.io/Change
Dirty Power: Burnt Country is an investigation into the spread of misinformation during the Australian Black summer 2019-2020.
“While this past black summer was not a season we’ll soon forget, our politicians are acting like it never happened. Amid the chaos and uncertainty of the COVID-19 global health crisis, Australia’s leaders have been paralysed on climate policy, which needs to be in place to ensure that this summer of catastrophic bushfires is not the first of many.” -Dr. Nikola Casule. Head of Research and Investigations
“This is Reality” is an abstract exploration into the lasting impact of conflict, set in the independent nation of East Timor. East Timor endured a brutal 24-year Indonesian occupation from 1975-1999 in which around 200,000 people were killed or disappeared.
Few carry these scars more distinctively than Osme Gonsalves, a celebrated artist, singer, poet, actor, and prominent ex-resistance fighter, who struggles to find peace despite the goal of sovereignty being reached. Frustrated by his nation’s perceived apathy, Osme creates a fake reality television show to travel the districts and interview the population about the contemporary reality of their lives.
Although tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into swift lethal exchanges which threatened to permanently reshape highlands culture.
Bootlegged copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use
of such weaponry. The influence of the film was so pronounced that the term Rambo is now used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes. The services of Rambos were suddenly in high demand as a variety of M16s and Indonesian military weaponry found its way down the Sepik River through swap-laden smuggling routes.