Kemira – Diary of a Strike

Kemira – Diary of a Strike (1984) started spontaneously. 16 miners from a BHP colliery were suddenly presented with retrenchment notices. They barricaded themselves underground in a mine near Wollongong on the New South Wales south coast. It was an event that perfectly captured the spirit of the times. It was the early ’80s and the comfortable days of near-to-full employment were over. The reduced demand for coal, both domestically and internationally, led to oversupply and falling coal prices. The pit closures were seen as necessary for the company to remain financially viable in a struggling market.  

I decided to take the plunge, shoot as much as I could with a crew working on deferred wages and then apply to a funding body for post-production. Looking back, it seemed a crazy thing to do, but the gamble worked. To go through the funding agencies at the start would have necessitated the usual three months wait, and I wanted to capture all the drama in the heat of the moment.

Video was too primitive a technology at the time, so that left me having to source the 16mm film stock, and where was I going to get that? I only had a small budget made up of money I’d saved from earlier research jobs. However, I knew some filmmakers who had recently made films on reasonable budgets. They might have still kept ‘short ends’ in their fridge (parts of 400-foot rolls that hadn’t been exposed through the camera). These may have been slightly dated, but they were still useable – give or take a bit of colour shift that could always be corrected in the film grade. I knocked on a few doors, and very quickly assembled what amounted to 25 rolls of stock, which totalled about four hours of shooting. If I actually rationed the stock and shot about two to three rolls per day, that would probably be enough to keep me going for a couple of weeks. The most important cash expenditure was to get the negative processed, and I could always get it printed later if I was able to secure a grant – and this is indeed what happened. 

Working in 16mm had a discipline attached to it. Limited by the amount of film stock we had allocated in our budget, we had to very carefully think through what you were going shoot next. We were always trying to predict what might happen with our characters, and with the ongoing story. 

The strike was in its fifth day when we started filming. On the sixth day, we were told that the unions had hired a train to take steelworkers and miners along with their family members and supporters to Canberra to take their protest right up to Parliament House. We joined the train and filmed the journey, including doing select interviews along the way.  Everybody was ‘wound up’. When the group of 400 or so alighted from the train I could sense that something big was going to happen. A conventional rally with speakers wasn’t what they had in mind. I sensed their anger mounting, as the crowd strode purposefully up the hill to Old Parliament House. Suddenly, the crowd charged towards the building. Ten minutes later, they burst through the Parliament heavy plate glass doors. Our cameras were rolling. The story had quite outgrown a simple strike in a mine: it had reached the headlines and reflected the dire economic situation nation-wide, with unemployment skyrocketing to double figures.

We were back up the following day at Kemira pit-top filming some of the people we’d got to know. When I started shooting, I knew I wanted to tell the story through a particular protagonist, even before I’d shot a foot of film. I wanted to mainly but not exclusively personalise it through one individual, or one family. I’d already identified my main character, Ngaire. Why did I pick Ngaire? I chose Ngaire because she appeared to me one of the more vulnerable of the group of women keeping vigil at the pit-top. She really wanted to tell her story. It was as if she had this weight on her shoulder which she wanted to let go. Ngaire told us about company cars driving past her house harassing her, and her children not understanding why their Dad couldn’t come home. 

Over several days we became Ngaire’s confidantes. Whenever we turned up at the pit-top she sought us out, rather than us seeking her out. Edgar Morin, who worked with Jean Rouch on Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), talks about the camera acting as “a confessional” – people would say things in the presence of the camera that they would never say otherwise.  It’s the filmmaker with the camera who has that transformative effect, and this was very much the case with Ngaire. My presence might have had a similar catalytic effect. As the months wore on, Ngaire began to question her relationship with her partner. Whilst coping on her own while he was underground, she discovered a sense of independence. The strike for her proved a life-changing event. For me, one of the things that Kemira illustrated is what happens when people are confronted with something quite exceptional which throws their whole life into relief. They discover things about themselves that they never knew before, and often make life altering decisions.

During the 16 days of the strike I was very conscious of recording as much radio as possible, and during the edit they came in very handy as I used bits of radio bulletins in place of narration. The other element I wove into the film were the transcripts from the Coal Tribunal, where the company was arguing with the Mining Union about the impending retrenchments. I chose not to approach BHP for an interview, because their position was quite well expressed via the transcripts. It wasn’t a cut and dry thing either. There were reasons why the company closed the pits: the sudden downturn in the manufacturing sector, and the more efficient longwall system of coal extraction. All those ideas were expressed in the Tribunal, so I decided to paraphrase those transcripts and have actors read them out, with typewriter text unfurling on the screen roughly in sync with the voice. This animation had to be done optically in the lab – easy to do now, but very expensive at the time.  

During the 20-week edit, it became obvious to me that I had to situate what was happening in Kemira within a larger historical context. The militancy of the miners grew out of the dangerous conditions they had to work under. A colleague, Brett Levy, brought to my attention the films of the Waterside Workers’ Film Unit made in the 1950’s. I looked at all those films, and particularly Hewers of Coal (1957). I decided to extract shots from the film to make an opening sequence. This long wordless montage became underpinned by a music track from Elizabeth Drake. Elizabeth wanted to actually feel that experience of being underground to get the inspiration for the score, and through the union we found a way to make that happen.

In the later stages of the edit I decided to film a reconstruction of the start of the sit-in with a group of the actual strikers. We organised to enter the mine at the dead of night – the ‘actors’ grabbed their torch lamps and kit bags stuff and jumped into in the mining cars taking them underground. BHP never even knew this had happened. The reconstruction lasted barely more than two minutes of edited film, but it was enough to convey a sense of what it was like. During the actual two-week period of the strike, my cinematographer Fabio Cavadini smuggled a small camera – a Bolex – underground. He gave the camera with instructions to one of the strikers, who turned out to have a bit of experience shooting Super 8 home movies. It produced a grainy, spooky and very emotional scene.

The strike ended in very dramatic fashion: the men came up, there were cheers. Candles lit the entrance to the mine, there were speeches made, but I and others knew that this was just a pyrrhic victory, that in fact the workers’ jobs were going to disappear, and they’d only won a small reprieve of two weeks. The strike was over, but I had to keep shooting to get the aftermath. I still had some of that $4,000 I’d saved, so I bought fresh film stock and continued to film intermittently for weeks and months later.  

Looking back now at the film, it’s a piece of important social history. It evokes a slice of working-class life and unionism that has now almost disappeared. The film is very much of its time. People don’t speak about the class struggle anymore, and unions would seldom take such militant action to achieve their goal.

When the film premiered in the State Theatre at the Sydney Film Festival in 1984, it happened there was another strike going on at another colliery just down the road from Kemira. The miners from that pit came up on stage after the screening and were received very generously by the festival audience. 

Looking back, one of the reasons for making Kemira was to amplify the voices of people who were the victims of these larger economic and political forces that were beyond their control. In those days coverage of industrial relations was poor and restricted to brief news reports. I felt a strong sense of responsibility towards the people I was filming with, that I could elevate their voices to a wider public. The role of a documentary filmmaker is to give deep and layered accounts of what’s going on – that’s what makes documentaries so different from current affairs style journalism.

The film went on to win the AFI for Best Documentary (1984), and had film festival screenings around the nation and also overseas. It won a Silver Dove at Leipzig (Film Festival), screened at Berlinale, and won the main prize at Tyneside in the UK. Tyneside happened to be very near where the British Miners’ Strike was taking place. People from the small villages affected were bused to the festival screenings. 

I remember sitting in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op cinema in the early ’80s and watching Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976). It was one of the films that inspired me to make Kemira. Harlan County and Kemira take you to a level beyond the local, and beyond the specific. Rebecca Cole and Lisa Milner, in their extensive analysis of Kemira, write: 

In her examination of history and its operation in popular culture, Meaghan Morris discusses our need for history as (re)presentation and argues against an epistemological model of ‘history as progress’. Applied to Kemira, the progress of the strike and its compromised resolution is not the primary concern as much as the documentary’s critical themes and their meaning today.¹

Kemira – Diary of a Strike (1984 Australia 63 mins)

Prod Co: Kemira Productions Prod, Dir: Tom Zubrycki Ed: Ray Thomas, Gil Scrine Phot: Fabio Cavadini Mus: Elizabeth Drake

Endnotes