Josh Fox’s 2010 anti-fracking exposé GasLand has one jaw-dropping moment, the kind of gasp-inducing money shot that singlehandedly sold it as a must-see documentary.
Investigating the effects of coal seam gas exploration on land around his property in rural Pennsylvania, the first-time film-maker visits a neighbour who promises to show him something shocking.
Stuck to the wall above the kitchen sink is a piece of paper with a handwritten warning reading: “Do Not Drink This Water.” To demonstrate why, the neighbour puts a cigarette lighter directly underneath the tap and turns it on. What we see next beggars belief: the water has become so contaminated it erupts into a gigantic fireball.
The Australian documentary Frackman isn’t a sequel but it contains at least one scene that feels as though it picks up where GasLand left off.
The film’s subject, former pig shooter and self-professed “world’s worst environmentalist” Dayne Pratzky, is waist-high in Queensland’s Condamine river. He’s holding a candle lighter.
Forget about a tap in the kitchen: when he ignites the lighter a small part of the river itself catches fire.
This is one of many shocking sequences that the film-makers – led by the Newcastle-born director Richard Todd – contend are linked to the proliferation of CSG mines, which in recent years have spread across Australia, particularly in New South Wales and Queensland.
Todd casts his narrative as a David versus Goliath story about a knockabout Aussie bloke and “accidental activist” who takes up a fight with the big boys and refuses to back down.
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