In the late-1990s, I gave a talk in Perth about the rise of the landcare movement and the work underway to end large-scale land clearing. Afterwards, film-maker Frank Rijavec approached me with his concept for this film.

That concept was to dig into both the drivers of the massive landscape change that happened in southern WA after WWII, and the deeply personal stories of the people involved. For the first few years of our work on the film, from refining the concept to getting the funding and conducting the interviews, our working title was ‘The Country Inside’.

This was a great working title because the film is not about the ‘goodies and baddies’ of a simple environmental story, but how real people with the broad range of human emotions, and the hands-on experience of land clearing and farm development, changed as they were changing the environment around them.

While this is a southern WA story – the Great Southern region and over towards Esperance – I think it is also a universal story. The people who arrived to clear and farm these landscapes felt a mix of exuberance, optimism, and unease. As the film reveals, for many the unease grew. It became a shared awareness of what we were all losing and a determination to do better through a landcare approach.

A Million Acres a Year (the film’s final title) depicts a major and often greatly unrecognised epoch in world history where environmental loss of Amazonian proportions happened over a very short period. In just 25 years (1948 – 1969), the West Australian government released over a million acres a year to agriculture. And the clearing of that and other land continued until 1997, when the state’s clearing controls were tightened. I was delighted to be part of that tightening process.

The film touches on the genuine hardships suffered by farming families, which continued for decades. Farming in those areas today is considered a quite profitable activity, but that’s only for the very few farmers who remain there. Most of the smaller-scale farmers have gone and those farming there run vast properties now. The landscapes have largely emptied of both people and wildlife. I’m very glad that through our work across the Gondwana Link we are already managing to bring back both, on multiple properties.

In my life I have had the great privilege of knowing most of the people featured in the film as friends. Many have since died, and I miss them. But it has also been a great privilege to help make sure their story is kept and shared. In the making of A Million Acres A Year, Frank and I also produced and kept, for future generations, some 96 hours of transcribed personal stories from the amazing people interviewed.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to Frank for making this pearler of a film. It has stood the test of time.

For those who are members of their local library, A Million Acres a Year can be watched through the Kanopy streaming service. It is also available online for a very small rental fee through film distributor Ronin Films: https://www.roninfilms.com.au/…/million-acres-year.html

Keith Bradby OAM

CEO of Gondwana Link Ltd