THE YEAR THAT

Kiwi film-maker Kate McIntyre Clere, 55, on discovering an unexpected horror tale

Kate McIntyre Clere

For me 2017 was a year of discomfort and discovery. We had started — completely naively — making a film about kangaroos when we discovered all this stuff people didn’t know about Australia’s treatment of them. Once you find out stuff it becomes your job to be the teller of that tale.

My previous film had been about yoga women and celebrated women changing their lives. But this was a dark secret. It’s been happening in Australia for a couple of hundred years but society had stopped caring. We thought people would want to know these things — and they have — but we felt as if we were hitting a nerve of discomfort. It was like being the one in the family who has to say what’s wrong. Sometimes you have to man up — not a great word for a woman — but you have to be that person.

We started out filming kangaroos in the wilderness. Maybe six months into it we interviewed a government scientist who said, in the middle of a sentence: “This is the largest wildlife slaughter in the world.” We carried on, but when he finished, we said: “Did he just say that?” Things like that kept happening.

When you make a documentary, people start coming to you with stories they haven’t been able to tell. They want you to do something with that information, which on the one hand is good because it makes your research easier. On the other hand, you become responsible for their stories. With this film, some of those stories were horrific. It’s been a very awkward position to be in.

We put in an interview request for the Minister of the Environment, saying we wanted to ask about kangaroos. His people got back to us and said, “You want to talk to the Department of Agriculture.” We thought that was weird. He didn’t want to talk to us?

More people started coming out of the woodwork. A couple from the Blue Mountains contacted us. They had had a terrible time with a property they had bought that they wanted to make into a wildlife area. Most of it was surrounded by National Park, but on one side was a farm where they shot kangaroos every night. They rang the police who told them it was all fine.

We went out with shooters and saw what they were doing. Shooting kangaroos as a drunken rite of passage still goes on because it’s under the radar. The police don’t do anything because the cop goes to the same gym as the farmer and their kids are at school together.

Then we started editing. It was really hard-hitting stuff and we spent 32 weeks in a dark room with these images. You start to dream about it. We got stressed and short-tempered.

The twist of the story is that the kangaroo is loved as an icon. You see it on everything in Australia: sports teams, caps, company logos, airlines, beer holders. As we’ve travelled the world with the film, people have been shocked and surprised to learn it could be treated badly.

They just thought it was a special thing that they wanted to see. As told to Paul Little. KATE MCINTYRE CLERE’S FILM KANGAROO: A LOVE HATE STORY IS SCREENING NOW.