We Have To Live With It

Clip 1: We have to live with it

Taken from the documentary We Have To Live With It (1974)

Original title classification not rated – this clip chosen to be G

Curator’s clip description

Balmain resident of 48 years Mrs Moran addresses a local crowd gathered in the streets of Balmain about the dangers of shipping containers being trucked through the main streets of their suburb. As she is talking, the noise of the trucks can be heard and the camera shows them passing through the streets. As another resident speaks in voice-over, a still image fills the screen with the title card ‘We have to live with it’. Another freeze-frame captures a crash with the same title card. Another resident points out where a truck has run into the front of her house and crashed through her fence. A man on a loud speaker calls for a minute’s silence in the crowd for the girl who was recently killed by one of the trucks.

Curator’s notes

This clip is from the opening minutes of the video. While taking its cue from events as they unfold, it also uses sound and still images to quickly establish a situational context. The sequence of three title cards with accompanying stills re-enforces the impact of what the video is saying – that it is the residents who ‘have to live with’ the consequences of increased heavy traffic through their suburbs and that some of those consequences have been dire.

Lauren Williams, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This black-and-white clip opens with local resident Mrs Moran describing to a crowd the effect on her life of the shipping container trucks driving through the streets of her inner-city Sydney suburb of Balmain. Footage of noisy trucks is followed by a voice-over describing how a truck crashed into the front fence of her home. Still images of the damage are shown. Back at the demonstration a man calls for a minute’s silence in memory of a young woman killed in an accident with one of these trucks.

Educational value points

In 1969 the first container ships began arriving in Sydney and the old wharves in Darling Harbour were found to be inadequate for such large vessels. In the early 1970s the Australian National Line (ANL) ran a terminal at Mort Bay in Balmain, which was accessible only by roads too narrow to accommodate heavily laden trucks and, as seen in the clip, the residents objected to the 24-hour noise and emissions from the trucks.

The clip shows how dramatic local events can galvanise a community into action. The death of a young nurse whose car ended up rammed against the side of a house after a truck’s brakes failed on a narrow Balmain street corner provoked a public protest meeting that provided the community with a forum to vent their anger and grief and demand a change of route for the container trucks. The protest group held a minute’s silence in respect for the young woman.

The Balmain residents featured in this clip were objecting to the danger of, and the noise and pollution produced by, the shipping container trucks that drove through the narrow streets of Balmain 24 hours a day. In 1972 the residents had petitioned Leichhardt Council to take the issue to the state government but they had waited two years for a response.

During the 1970s residents’ action groups such as this one often mobilised to stop activities that they saw as threatening their areas. The environment, a growing concern, attracted a wider support group including organisations such as the National Trust, and the Builders Labourers Federation, led by Jack Mundy, introduced ‘Green Bans’ under which unions refused to work on historical areas of Sydney earmarked for destruction and development.

This clip shows how filmmaking can work as an advocacy tool in community campaigns by raising awareness of issues. This video was shot in three days and a roughly edited version was screened at the Balmain Town Hall. A few weeks later a delegation of residents took the video with them to a meeting with the Australian Minister for Shipping and Transport, Mr Charles Jones, to show him the effect of the container terminal on people’s lives.

Making We Have to Live with It started Tom Zubrycki on a new career as a documentary filmmaker; he had been completing a PhD at the University of New South Wales in sociology when he made the film. Video Access Centres, established in the 1970s, provided the equipment, editing and training free of charge. He subsequently became involved in other community campaigns, making several more films.

The invention in the early 1970s of the first portable, albeit bulky, reel-to-reel black-and-white videotape recorders opened up the filmmaking process to more people. The Canadian Film Board claimed the new technology ‘would assist the empowerment of disadvantaged communities’. Tom Zubrycki says ‘these dinosaurs were the equivalent of the modern digi-cam’ but after a few years he switched to 16-mm cameras (http://www.tomzubrycki.com).

Tom Zubrycki developed a filmmaking style that he calls ‘verite narratives’, a term related to ‘cinema verite’ coined by French filmmaker Jean Rouch, which aims to depict ongoing events with minimal interference. Zubrycki’s stories evolve from his relationship with his subject and the wider social issues they represent, such as his Australian Film Institute (AFI) award-winning film The Diplomat (2000) about José Ramos-Horta and East Timor.