An Evergreen Island

Synopsis

In 1989 the landowners of Central Bougainville closed one of the world's largest copper mines that was destroying their land. It remains closed to this day. In response, a blockade was imposed around the island. This is a film about a people who survived for 9 years without assistance from the outside world.

From scratch the Bougainvilleans built their own schools and tertiary colleges, without Western medicines or health professionals they turned to their traditional bush medicine, without weapons they made their own guns out of water-pipe; without communications they charged batteries using solar power to run satellite telephones and 2 way radios and without a power station they generated their own electricity by harnessing water energy.....But the most fascinating invention was the use of fermented coconut oil as a substitute for diesel and fuel.

AN EVERGREEN ISLAND is a story of courage, survival and persistence - of inventiveness, imagination and creativity on a little known, Pacific island.

Impact

BRIEF BACKGROUND TO THE MAKING OF THE FILM by the Directors

The film was self-funded for Production stage with its completion being made possible with financial assistance provided by Community Aid Abroad(CAA), the Search Foundation, CFMEU – an Australian trade union representing miners and the Mineral Policy Institute, (MPI) is an Australian-based non-government organisation specialising in advocacy, campaigning and research to prevent environmentally and socially destructive mining, minerals and energy projects in Australia, Asia and the Pacific.

* The film was shot over a 7 week period in 1997 exclusively in those areas (around 80 - 90%) of the main island of Bougainville controlled by the Bougainville Revolutionary Army or BRA, under a total sea and air blockade since 1989. There was no money economy operating except in small coastal areas controlled by the Papua New Guinea Army. People behind the blockade would grow rice and the women would take it down to the markets in the PNG Army controlled towns and sell it so they could buy necessities like salt and soap.

We travelled clandestinely, under the cover of darkness by boat with BRA guerillas from the Solomon Islands to Bougainville. The waters were being patrolled by the Papua New Guinea Army in Australian-government supplied patrol boats. Their orders were ‘shoot to kill’. We were lucky and travelled there and back safely.

* The film took 4 years to post-produce. The reluctance of the Australian media organisations to support films about our near region - the Pacific! It seemed that what was happening in our very own region was too sensitive, for Australian audiences - until just recently, of course, because the peoples of the Pacific have demanded attention. SBS finally bought and broadcast the film in July, 2001 in a documentary history program slot, ‘As It Happened’.

* During 1997 there was very little transport other than on foot - so we also got quite fit while we were there. The only times we travelled in a vehicle was after the exhaustive process of scraping and distilling the oil of 200 coconuts which produced 5 litres of fuel. Food was plentiful because of the rich and fertile tropical jungle environment, but people only ate 2 meals a day.

* the highlights or strong memories include openness and friendliness of the people who looked after and fed us for the 7 weeks. We came with very good recommendation and will be forever grateful to Moses Havini, Overseas representative of the then Bougainville Interim Government, who gave us the appropriate introductions

* a brief mention of one of the vital things left out of the film - the Bougainvilleans had set up, with some assistance from outside, their own community radio station, Radio Free Bougainville.

* the film was only made possible by the positive moral and physical support of the Bougainvillean people,

* also support of Bougainville activists in Australia

You never know your influence – Evergreen Island with a big reach – from Znet

December 10, 2001

Mekim Na Savvy: Bougainville - Small Nation, Big Message

By Aziz Choudry

These days we are swamped by information about the impact of corporate capitalism, structural adjustment, and the power and influence of transnational corporations. We are bludgeoned with propaganda about the inevitability of globalisation, of there being no alternative to the global free market economy, of promises of globalisation with a human face.

The US-led "war against terrorism" has rained yet more death and destruction on the people of Afghanistan. The globalisers are on a counterattack against their critics as they try to claw back ground that they had lost.

Opponents and supporters of the World Trade Organisation alike are still pondering the meaning of the outcome of the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Qatar. And as usual, we are invited to drown our sorrows in a sea of consumer choices. Pepsi or Coca-Cola? BP or Shell?

But what if for some reason our ocean of consumer choices dries up? How would we live and what would we do? Would we, could we survive?

Right now it seems that we could all do with some good news.

It is rare that I wax lyrical about a film. But the independently-produced documentary, An Evergreen Island, about Bougainville, a South Pacific island which survived nine years with little assistance from the outside world has left a big impression on me.

Made by Australian filmmakers Fabio Cavadini and Mandy King, it should resonate with all who struggle against the power of global capital. With all who are concerned about genuine alternatives to the global free market economy. With all who believe that it is impossible to exist without being beholden to products of the transnationals. And all of us who believe that we can.

An Evergreen Island has become a permanent fixture in my luggage as I have been on the road in North America and Asia since September. The people to whom I have shown it seem to have been as inspired by it as I was when I first saw it a few months ago.

Bougainville is part of the Solomon Islands archipelago, and lies about 700 kilometres east of Papua New Guinea. Like so many other lands and peoples, it is the victim of arbitrary boundary-setting by former colonial rulers during their scrambles to control and exploit the Pacific.

Bougainvilleans neither accepted Australian colonial rule nor incorporation into Papua New Guinea when it became independent in September 1975. In the early 1970s, demands for a referendum to give the people of Bougainville the right to genuinely determine their own future were denied. Meanwhile, the island was being ravaged by one of the world's most rapacious transnational corporations.

On their own, the people of Bougainville took on one of the world's biggest mining companies, and a Papua New Guinea government, backed by Australia, which was desperate to get the mineral-rich island back in its grasp- and won. Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia had located a huge copper-ore deposit in the Panguna valley in 1965. Prospecting had been strongly opposed by the local landowners whose customary title to the land was denied by the Australia and Papua New Guinea administrations in the name of "development".

Women, the true custodians of the land on Bougainville, were at the forefront of early protests against the mining, and the backbone of the subsequent struggles and grassroots initiatives to rebuild their communities.

In 1972 through its subsidiary, Bougainville Copper Party Limited, CRA began commercial production - a hugely successful and profitable operation from the standpoint of the company and for Papua New Guinea, but devastating for the peoples, lands and rivers of Bougainville. In 1987 Philip Hughes, Head of Environment Science at the University of Papua New Guinea described Panguna as "an economic godsend - and an environmental disaster."

Villagers were forced to relocate because of the mine tearing into the heart of their motherland. Over a billion tonnes of poisonous tailings were dumped in the Jaba and Kawerong rivers. River fish and animals, as well as marine life near the coast were poisoned, died, or disappeared, along with forests and food gardens.

The mine created a huge crater, half a kilometre deep and two kilometres wide. Green mountains turned to barren rock. The Jaba river valley became a moonscape. Local communities were showered in dust containing toxic heavy metals and drank from polluted water.

After 17 years of patient petitions and lobbying to seek better environmental controls, a fairer deal and compensation from CRA and the PNG government, the people of Bougainville closed the mine. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army blew up the power supply to the mine. From May 1989 until the present it has stayed shut.

An Evergreen Island is a bittersweet film. One cannot watch this documentary and forget the scale of the suffering in Bougainville, where between 15-20,000 people - out of a total population of around 200,000 - died during the years of war, many from preventable diseases like TB, whooping cough and malaria, or during childbirth.

When Papua New Guinea sent its soldiers in to shoot to kill, and to try to reopen the mine, the pro-independence Bougainville Revolutionary Army formed to defend the land and the people.

In April 1990 the Papua New Guinea government imposed a land, sea and military blockade around Bougainville. It aimed to make life even harder for Bougainvilleans so that they would turn against the pro-independence BRA and the Panguna mine could reopen.

All government and social services were suspended, schools closed and medical staff left Bougainville. For nine years, the blockade kept journalists out, along with food, medical supplies, fuel and humanitarian assistance. The film documents how the people of Bougainville survived, rebuilt and maintained their communities.

Without modern weapons, the BRA built guns from waterpipes which could fire more quickly than the automatic weapons of the PNG Defence Force. As the noose of the blockade closed in around the island, Australian-supplied Iroquois helicopter gunships strafed villages, and the Australian-supported and armed PNGDF troops attacked, tortured and killed people and torched villages on Bougainville.

But in the BRA-controlled areas (over 80% of the Bougainville mainland) communities showed incredible resourcefulness, determination and ingenuity in fashioning solutions to complex problems from local materials and nature itself. They built and maintained indigenous health and education services without outside assistance.

While the seriously ill could take the chance of being ferried at dusk across the blockade in small boats to hospital in the Solomon Islands, bush medicine - the traditional knowledge and practice of indigenous healing underwent a revival in the absence of medical supplies and health professionals.

A system of schools and training colleges were set up. Houses, schools and clinics were built from local timbers, vines and foliage. Nails were made from cutting up cyclone fencing. In Pidgin, local chiefs dubbed this indigenous inventiveness "mekim na savvy", or learning by doing.

Without diesel, Bougainvilleans discovered a new, truly revolutionary use for coconuts. Coconut oil was fermented in upturned fridges discarded at the beginning of the crisis, boiled and used as fuel to run generators and the specially-adapted four wheel drives needed to cross the rugged terrain.

Young people driven from their studies by the crisis combined basic technical knowhow, indigenous knowledge and sheer genius to cannibalise available bits of machinery like the gearbox of a truck to create electric power from small homemade hydro installations on the fast-flowing rivers of their lands.

The abandoned mine became a hardware supermarket for spare parts which were salvaged, carried across the island, and put to new uses. Solar power was harnessed to charge batteries for two-way radios and satellite phones - an important link with the outside world. As one Bougainvillean woman comments at the beginning of the film: "The war was like a university - it made us creative. We thought for ourselves and we discovered alternative ways to survive".

This film is more than just a tale of survival on a troubled tropical island paradise. It is a story about community – and self-determination. After many years, there is finally some light at the end of a long tunnel for the Bougainville people in their struggle. Communities across Bougainville are confronting the painful task of reconciling with communities and individuals whom they treated as enemies during the war.

In late August, after three years of an often fragile ceasefire between the BRA and the PNGDF, an agreement was signed which will deliver a greater amount of autonomy to Bougainville. This includes a disarmament agreement, the drawing up of a new Bougainville constitution, and an eventual referendum on full independence. In December legislation is due to go before Papua New Guinea's Parliament to make the constitutional amendments necessary to implement the peace and autonomy agreement.

Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel for the rest of us, too.

For many years now we have been lied to. The TINA myth. There Is No Alternative. Embrace the free market – or perish. Buy our products - or miss out. Let us destroy your lands and rivers for profit - or else. Watch this film. There are alternatives.

There are no blueprints. But if we can harness just some of the same courage, resourcefulness and vision as the people of Bougainville we would be well on the way to a brighter future. Perhaps we need a global dose of mekim na savvy.

(To order a copy of An Evergreen Island, contact Frontyard Films at cavadini@tpgi.com.au)

FESTIVALS & AWARDS

World Social Forum Film Festival
Mumbai
January 2004
Other Worlds are Breathing

Docomania
Oct 2003
New Plymouth, NEW ZEALAND

5th Kalamata International Documentary Film Festival
20 - 25th October, 2002
Athens, GREECE

Cape Town Earth Festival Film Programme
23rd ~ 28th August 2002,
2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development
Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA

Commonwealth Film Festival
June 28 - July 7, 2002
Manchester, England
UNITED KINGDOM

FINALIST, 2002 ATOM Awards
Best Short-Form Documentary
20th Annual ATOM Awards for Film, Television, Radio & Multimedia
25th May 2002
Melbourne VIC AUSTRALIA

THIRD ANNUAL LABOR FILM FESTIVAL
May l-4, 2002
290 Harvard St.,
Brookline, MA USA

Version>02
April 18, 19, 20, (21), 2002
Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago Avenue CHICAGO USA

20th GLOBALVISIONS FESTIVAL
November 8 -11, 2001
Edmonton Alberta CANADA

WILD SPACES ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL
3,4, 5 November 2000
5th Environmental Film Festival
Fitzroy Victoria AUSTRALIA
National Australian tour

WOW 2000
A WORLD OF WOMEN'S CINEMA
10th International Film Festival presented by Women in Film & Television NSW
November 2-5, 2000
Sydney NSW AUSTRALIA