This PhD research project includes the production of a series of short-form documentary episodes, sharing disparate views on land management in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage. Using Lake Malbena, the location of a helicopter tourism proposal that has attracted public protest, as an example, the researcher aims to create an environmental documentary series using storytelling methods more commonly seen in contemporary popular documentary.
This project poses the questions ‘how can storytelling methods used commonly in popular contemporary documentary facilitate broader sharing of environmental stories?’, ‘how do the current definitions of environmental documentary live up to the expectations of social and popular documentary practice?’ and ‘what does it mean for a documentary to be activist?’.