Anna Broinowski - Aim High in Creation! - A One-of-a-Kind Journey Inside North Korea's Propaganda Machine

I developed a bad case of green Tourette’s, stomping around my hood like Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, muttering about “greed and fucking concrete” as I passed my neighbours’ renovated bungalows. I railed at the lawn-bowls club for replacing its eucalypts with view-enhancing hedges. I hectored the childcare centre for uprooting its frangipani trees to attain that curiously Aussie ideal, the shade-free lawn. I sent righteous polemics to city bureaucrats about “lifestyle” vs development, and they swatted back polite form letters in reply. My partner, exhausted by my solo campaign-against-everything, suggested I get a desk job. I agreed, and hung up my boots.

Then one day, as I was reading about a British producer lured south by the high Aussie dollar to snap up some cushy screen job I’d applied for, I saw something strange. A community group had discovered that the NSW premier had quietly given a permit to a company called Dart Energy, to drill for coal seam gas (CSG) near Sydney Park. The park was a five-minute walk from my house, and two kilometres from my daughter’s school. She spent her weekends in its playgrounds, chasing dogs around its ponds. Two rare black swans had just built a nest in the prettiest pond and hatched five fluffy cygnets. I was damned if Dart Energy was going to stick its methane-belching needles in our park.

So I put on my Blundstones again and leafleted the streets, yelling at rallies with hundreds of other shocked residents. We were up against an insidious enemy: the CSG industry had saturated the airwaves with ads of happy farmers herding plump cows around pretty gas wells. They’d convinced Australia that gas was clean, green, and cheap. The spin was based on a powerful illusion: gas wells are small and can be concealed by artfully planted trees. The damage they do is invisible—the methane leaking up through the soil, and into the water, cannot be seen by the naked eye.

The fake farmer in the Santos ad shut his gate with a smile: “Santos has been working on my place for a while now. They look after the people, and the land. That’s why they’re always welcome here.” But YouTube posts from Queensland told a different story: in Tara, the CSG cowboys were riding roughshod over farmers and the aquifers they’d relied on for generations, using a law that made everything five centimetres below the topsoil the property of the state. Blue-chip graziers who’d never protested in their lives uploaded shaky videos of police-protected trucks rolling over their Akubra hats and sinking wells deep into their paddocks.

As the protests grew, an unlikely alliance formed: between the farmers and their sworn enemies, the Greens. Sydney lefties trekked north to chain themselves to fences alongside the farmers of the “Lock the Gate” campaign. The CSG industry roped in more security, and a thoroughly un-Australian video surfaced—of a cop in black riot gear throwing Abu Ghraib–style burlap sacks over two middle-aged mums who’d chained their necks to a bulldozer. He sawed their necks free with an angle grinder and threw them, fainting from shock, into a police van. The image was proof that vulture capitalism, whose bullyboy tactics had previously been confined to the Third World, had invaded the genteel West.

The security cameras strung up in the gum trees of the supposedly public Pilliga State Forest affected all of us when we slipped under the wire to inspect a new gas field with activist Tony Pickard, who had been trekking in to collect water samples ever since he’d noticed the forest’s normally clear creek running brown. The mining company, Eastern Star, issued a press release blaming the phenomenon on eucalyptus leaves staining the water, but Pickard’s samples, lined up in neatly dated Coca-Cola bottles, showed a damning devolution: from sepia, to brown, to an oily black sludge.

We studied Pickard’s Coke bottles with the farmers of Lock the Gate, listening to their stories of Santos suits who had driven around snapping up land for exploration wells, pitting neighbour against neighbour with lucrative deals. A dreadlocked lesbian lawyer from Kings Cross, not the sort with whom NSW farmers normally took their tea, held up a Pentagon instruction manual used by soldiers to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan, saying she had proof the CSG companies were using the same tactics in Australia. Instead of heckling her as a Yankee-baiting commie, the leather-skinned graziers listened in polite silence.

Then a seventy-year-old man, who had worked his whole life to ensure his farm would be a rock-solid inheritance for his grandkids, told of the trucks that had driven onto his neighbour’s property in Kahlua to set up a pilot production site. The fact he’d locked his own gate made no difference: his neighbour had fled overseas with the payout, and the farmer’s paddocks were now bordered by thundering bulldozers as Santos installed its rigs. He spoke of sitting in his kitchen at night, feeling the house shaking as the drills rumbled beneath it: “If I can’t stop the bastards, well, I’ve only got one other option… haven’t I?” He looked around the room, wild-eyed and desperate. We looked at the floor, struck that his pain could be this great. Then he gently took the lawyer’s hand and held her gaze: “It’s like a bullet hole, love. One tiny mark, but all the damage is done underneath.”

Incensed, I went back to Sydney to march. Luckily, one thing the industry had failed to spin into something more pleasant was “fracking,” the method by which coal seams are exploded, then pumped full of chemicals to release the gas. This we gleefully parsed on our t-shirts in every possible form: from Get Fracked and Frack Off to Stop the Fracking Frackwits . Fracking was causing mini-earthquakes in Britain—and in the US, children living near gas fields were suffering migraines, nosebleeds, rashes, joint pain, and epilepsy. Louisiana farmers, whose bores had been either polluted with methane or sucked dry by the industry’s voracious use of water, now relied on bottled water, delivered by the same companies drilling beneath them.

We shared these stories as we rallied outside parliament. We handed out “frack fluid” in Evian bottles to passers-by and paraded puppets of fat-cat miners and Edvard Munch’s The Scream . We put our kids in gas masks and lined them up in front of shifty-eyed politicians scurrying out for lunch. Thousands of farmers drove down from Queensland in their trucks and blocked off Macquarie Street for a day. The venerable Country Women’s Association, Australia’s number-one authority on baking, broke its hundred-year ban on civic protest and dispatched its chairwoman to the microphone, and she declared, with quivering dignity: “This is about a lot more than tea and scones, believe me.”

And still, the politicians did not listen. CSG mining was full steam ahead in New South Wales. In the dial-a-dump site next to Sydney Park, Dart Energy was already setting up shop.

I had to do something drastic. But with a seven-year-old child, I couldn’t hightail it north, chain myself to a fence, and get arrested. My best option would be to make a film—one that would convert the politicians, and not just preach to the already angry choir. Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland had inspired us to fight, but it had not stopped the wells rolling out across Queensland, and thousands more threatening New South Wales. I needed to infiltrate the mainstream, which had been colonised by the industry’s big-budget spin. Middle Australia was convinced that CSG was safe. I had no idea how to reach it.

Then I remembered my fortieth birthday present, and Kim Jong Il.

At the time, the Dear Leader was no more to me than a YouTube cartoon: the punch-permed star of the epic rap battle Kim Jong Il vs Hulk Hogan , where he blasted wrestling superstar Hogan out of the ring with an Uzi, ordering him to “eat my Korean barbeque, you blond arsehole. Your wife says my dick is bigger than yours.” Everything else I knew came from the Western newsfeeds: he was a brutal dictator who wore tinted aviators; he ruled over starving citizens who ate the bark off trees; he made incendiary pronouncements against the US; and, once in a while, he’d lob a rocket at Japan—which always missed, and normally fizzled out in the Pacific.