Yurlu | Country is an important story of lingering disaster which is superbly told and should be seen by as many people as possible.
Yurlu | Country is a brilliant and emotional documentary looking at the final year of life of Banjima Elder, Maitland Parker, as he suffered with mesothelioma, the aggressive cancer caused by asbestos exposure, and as he struggled to have the blue asbestos tailing sites removed from Country which are left by 60 years of mining resulting in the worst contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere. The Banjima Traditional Owners call this area ‘poison Country’. Due to the contamination, Traditional Owners are barred from accessing thousands of hectares, cutting them off from a large part of their heritage.
Director, Yaara Bou Melhem, initially planned for the documentary to be about the abandoned mines of the 46,000 hectares in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, the Wittenoom Asbestos Management Area, but then she met Maitland Parker, and decided she would concentrate on the Wittenoom area rather than just making Parker’s story a smaller part of a wider story. He was a park ranger in the area not involved in mining.
Wittenoom was originally named by mining magnate, Lang Hancock after his partner in the nearby Mulga Down Station, Frank Wittenoon. It was established as the centre of mining of blue asbestos in the area and at its peak contained housing for the mine workers with modern amenities including running water and electricity. However, Aboriginal mine workers still lived outside of the town . Mining occurred at Wittenoom until the 1960s after that three million tonnes of deadly tailings containing asbestos were left behind. In the late 1970s, due to the extreme health risk of the airborne asbestos fibers, the Western Australian state government began to phase out the town. In 2007 the town was officially de-gazetted and removed from the maps. In 2023 remaining private properties were acquired and all the town’s buildings and infrastructure were demolished .
Yaara Bou Melhem highlights the beauty of this area with glorious aerial shots but also contrasts these pictures with the lingering disaster of the scarring tailing sites which will continue to spread their poison for hundreds of years yet.
In an interview for NITV, Melhem points out that, “There isn’t a Banjima family that has not been touched by Wittenoom and his story represents that whole, and I think that’s why [Mr Parker] really wanted to tell that story on behalf of his community.”
Yurlu | Country is an important story which is superbly told and should be seen by as many people as possible.
Yurlu | Country is screening now on Apple TV
Reviewed by Rob McKinnon
Rating 5 out of 5
Distributor: Bonsai Films
