Damon Gameau On How Storytelling Can Inspire Collective Social Progress

Damon Gameau is an award-winning screen writer/director, author and activist.

In 2015, his debut feature documentary THAT SUGAR FILM broke Australian box office records, won the AACTA Award for best feature documentary and sold to 25 international territories. His accompanying campaign book, That Sugar Book, was a best seller in Australia, is published in 20 countries and translated into 8 languages.

Damon’s most recent feature documentary 2040 is also one of the highest grossing Australian documentaries of all time and has been released all over the globe. His companion book 2040: A Handbook for the Regeneration is published by Pan Macmillan.

His latest film Regenerating Australia will be released in early 2022. An in demand thought leader and keynote speaker, Damon has received numerous accolades for his work, including a nomination for NSW Australian of the Year in 2020.

Damon discusses how communities are more effectively informing climate change policy, and how film and television can be used as a medium to convey social impact and societal changes.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, can you please tell us about your background and what led to your interest and passion in storytelling and documentaries to create a better future?

[Damon Gameau] - Originally when I finished school, I thought I wanted to be journalist. I spent about a year and a half studying journalism and was doing a university play review. The reviewer of the local paper said, "have you thought about doing any acting or auditioning for NIDA?" On a whim, I went and auditioned for NIDA (the leading drama school in Sydney) and got accepted there. I spent the next few years thinking I was going to be an actor, and when I left NIDA, I did quite a few different films in Australia and overseas. I was fortunate enough (spoiled really) as the first film I ever did was with Rolf De Heer in The Tracker with David Gulpilil. This was when I was only 23, and that really spoiled me in the sense of seeing what film-making could be and how potent storytelling is. I really didn't get any more experiences like that until about seven years later when I did a film called Balibo, about these ten Australian journalists who were killed in East Timor. I think around that time, I just felt very frustrated with telling other people's stories and not communicating my own values and what I wanted to say. Apart from those two jobs, acting just wasn't satisfying me in a way that I'd hoped it would. I made a TropFest film with my wife, and it cost $80 to enter it, so I just submitted it. It happened to get in which was a complete shock! Then, I was doing a film at the time and was asked, "do you want to make a feature [film]? Is there anything specifically that you'd like to do?" I just thought it was good opportunity to have a stab at something. At the time, I'd seen so much about sugar in the press and thought that the idea of sugar just lends itself to a really great film aesthetic in terms of the madness, heightened colours and ‘Willy Wonka’ aesthetic. I just made that film [That Sugar Film] and then just really got a deep dive lesson into how influential stories can be to culture, the impact campaign of that and the difference it made not just to Australia and the curriculum, but also overseas to policy. We did screenings in the UK Parliament with Jamie Oliver and then the New Zealand parliament. That really lit the fire of how influential story could be.

I took a lot of those learnings into filming 2040 and developed an impact campaign at the same time as we were making the films so they were running concurrently, and we could really make sure we were doing it properly. We got some wonderful metrics and feedback from that. That's led to this, which is a localised, condensed version of 2040, focusing on Australia and what we can do. But again, this was based on a really deep listening and consultation process with lots of different Australians.

Throughout the last eight years, one of my theories of change (for lack of a better term) is through the power of story.

We walk around with a story in our heads of who we are, and that really influences how we interact with other people and whether we think we're an imposter, we're confident or terrified by public speaking.

These are all narratives that we concoct in our head, but more and more I realise there's a collective narrative we're playing out, and a lot of people don't even realise we're in that.

It's a narrative that wasn't around five or six hundred years ago, and it largely tells us that we're separate from nature, we have to grow at all costs and we're inherently selfish and greedy.

I just don't think this is true, so I do think there's a role of story and art in particular to wake people up from that, but also create visions of how things could be different. I think the storytellers have a really important role there and they've been really undervalued and underutilised in that space in the last few decades.

In your film, you discussed what Australia would look like by 2030 if we simply listened to the needs of its people? Can you tell us a little bit more about the film and what you've learnt in the process of making it?

It was May of 2020, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) had reached out to us. I just floated the idea of wanting to do a collaboration and they really wanted to explore the idea of narrative. It was good timing, because I'd thought about doing something that was more Australian focused after 2040, and so we embarked on a listening campaign, largely with bushfire affected communities at the time. It was only four or five months after the fires, and we just asked people how they would rebuild and what changes they would make in their communities? It was so insightful that we expanded that campaign and ended up continuing it. A really large number of Australians from diverse backgrounds including coal workers, to teenagers, farmers and everyone in between responded, and it was a wonderful process just to sit with these people and hear where they're at, what frustrates them about the country and what they'd like to do differently by encouraging them to dream and use their imagination. Many people just said, " I've never done anything like this or thought to do this."

We are so involved with living in the present and trying to survive that we outsource our imagination and future creation processes to large organisations and various corporates.

Obviously, they're thinking and strategising about the future, but it’s important for us to also wrestle some of that control back because not all of their decisions are something we're going to agree with. It was a really fascinating process, and we took all that feedback, collated it and then tried to incorporate it into this vision with an idea of using familiar voices. This was because a lot of this stuff, as we know, can be quite new to people. I thought if we use those voices that people have grown up with in their living rooms, then the familiarity and credentials of some of those people reading these news stories of the future would just add gravitas that I think people need at this moment. There's so much conflicting information and propaganda, but if we can use these trusted messengers to deliver new information, we've got a much better chance of people taking it seriously.

Where have you seen opportunities for people to change the world for the better?

What came through really clearly in the listening campaign was that people have ideas and they know what's appropriate for their communities. However, they often don't get a say about the governance of ideas in their community, and there's a huge gap between the ideas and the capital or even the expertise to bring them to life. Businesses now have to develop an idea and get it to the right investors. We saw that as a huge opportunity, and so WWF very generously set up a multi-million-dollar fund, entirely consisting of grants between 10,000 to 250,000 dollars for anyone that sees the film, resonates with something and then say, "I've got an idea!” They could want to do an urban food project or a first nations learning centre, whatever it might be. We're fifty-one screenings in, and just the quality of ideas that have been submitted through the Innovate To Regenerate program is extraordinary. It's people thinking so creatively, laterally and with really well-rounded values that benefit their community. It really is encouraging and very hopeful to see the way that people are thinking and getting on with things. I think that comes with a lack of legitimate action that we've had in some of these ecological areas over the last 10-20 years.

People have learned to be more resilient, roll up their sleeves and try and get work done themselves.

We're very excited by what we can develop in the years ahead with all these networks, by partnering with various impact investors, and whichever government is in power. We can say, "we've got all this incredibly rich material in communities that want to empower themselves with really great ideas, how about we turn some of this into policy and put some legitimate funding in place to help them develop to the next level and bring in a layer of impact investments to start scaling up."

It’s about cultivating this de-centralised, regenerative network across the country that no one's leading, that has no hierarchical structure.

It's very much a horizontal relationship of people learning from each other, sharing their expertise and skills. That's the only way we're going to get through and win this, you cannot expect some technology billionaire to save us, that era is gone. We're going to have to come together and connect if we're going to solve our largest existential threats.

What is the key thing that you think is holding communities back from coming together and addressing complex problems?

I would say it's largely policy. We're getting a sense of what a captured state we have in terms of fossil fuels. The mechanisms that are built to protect those energy monopolies that don't allow things like micro-grids or community batteries to easily come through. That is changing to a degree, but there is an incumbent system that’s adept at protecting itself, and that applies to the building industry as well as others.

To actually get these meaningful regenerative changes we require, it's going to take the right leadership and policy shift.

What's come through clearly is that despite local and state governments to a degree are doing wonderful things, there's such a disconnect between them and the federal government. It's a real mess currently, and the people don't have trust and we're even seeing that with overseas investors. They're so reluctant to come here and do things because we don't have meaningful targets.

They don't feel reassured to actually get on with their activities, and then we see what's happening with EVs, where our vehicle emission standards are meaning all these countries are sending dirty polluting cars to us because no one else will accept them. We're missing out on all this incredible diversity of cheap electric cars that are now prevalent throughout Europe and other parts of the world.

We've just lagged so far behind because we don't have the right structures, policy and communication to allow this to happen easily. I would argue that's one of our biggest barriers and a lot of these protective mechanisms are very old.

People have benefited from it in various ways, and so they're going to be reluctant to change. But I guess the reality is we just know what the outcome is if we don't change, and I don't think any of us want that. Increasingly, people are realising what that looks like, and so we're going to be forced into change because I think this will be one of the largest movements in human history, purely because of the changes in weather. We've seen what's happened with the floods, we're going to get more fires in the decade ahead and intense rainfall because warmer air holds more moisture. But with every disaster we get more people coming onside realising the urgent action that's required. It's going to be very hard to be a denier or lagger in the five to ten years ahead.

What advice would you give to founders, social entrepreneurs or leaders of not-for-profits that are keen to engage their audiences and create the change that they want to see?

I say this with a caveat, but I would really like it not to be used against us by promoting greenwashing campaigns! Certainly, I can only speak from our experience, and it came from trial, error and discussions over the last six or seven years around psychology, especially in this time where we're so bombarded with dystopian stories or images of the future. This includes things you've got to contend with, whether it's wars or AI threats. All sorts of things are happening that affect people's capacity to process information, because it shuts down parts of our brain. The limbic system gets activated when you're in fear and it shuts down parts of the brain that think creatively and problem solve [the pre-frontal cortex]. We're so bombarded with information and our algorithms are engineered to keep us in an outrage mode.

It's so important we remind people so much of this is not a story about sacrifice and depravity, which has been a controlling, polarising narrative around climate particularly for the last 20 years.

Campaigns say you have to give up all these things; you have to give up your life, and ‘they’ want to steal your life and take your jobs. Really, the narrative (especially in this country) should be addressing the opportunities we have (that are just remarkable). I found this even when I was filming 2040. When we were doing press for that film throughout Europe and America and the journalists would say to me, "what is happening in your country?" From their point of view, they would beg to have that much land available for solar and wind. This would give them the ability to diversify and use energy to create all new industries around EVs or turbines. This then includes the amount of ocean that we have to start restoring sea grasses and kelp forests. The vast landscapes you can sequester carbon into, revegetate and plant mangroves are going to be so important in future markets. We just have these resources sitting here, and yet we're clinging on to what is largely the most vulnerable asset in the world right now, and we've hedged all our bets in that. I think we've seen how vulnerable we are, so we've gotten rid of all these things that we used to have that gave us resilience, diversification and manufacturing.

We've put our eggs in the education, tourism and fossil fuel baskets, and two of those industries got smashed in the last few years and one of them is on the way out of existing.

We just have to think differently, and that's why people are pulling their hair out because we're wasting time. As I said before, people are going to go to other countries to do this while we waste time and send the wrong signals. We're losing incredible opportunities.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating positive social, environmental and cultural change?

It is very hard to narrow them down, because obviously I spend a lot of time in the solution space and on a daily basis you’re learning about different programs. What's exciting is that people are starting to think in a much less linear way that they did a few years ago. People are starting to do that legitimately, and you can look at certain companies that have been leading the way for a long time like Patagonia. Certainly, however this is also happening behind the scenes, and we have seen this at the screenings we've done to very large corporates not just in Australia but overseas. I would say even with the governments around the world that we've done talks with the great thing is that they're all having these conversations. These aren’t radical conversations like they were a few years ago, and they are aware of the inertia in the system, fiduciary obligations and contracts that have been done up and are unravelling from that old system. They are having those discussions about what does it look like?

I've even been privy to a couple of chats with MIT level professionals who are talking about redesigning systems; a new incentive so we're not destroying the living world or our society.

The fact that those conversations are being had by really unlikely people, and they are looking at the cascading benefits of this new system not just for the few people at the top, but for society is very exciting. Then there's obviously a litany of smaller start-up impact ideas, but just the amount of money going to that climate technology or start-up space is massive. Whether it's air capture, algae or plastics made of oceanic waste, there's just an unbelievable number of projects going on at various different levels and possibilities of scaling.

I think it's so healthy we're at this point at least. It's not where we'd love to be and probably should be, but I do think we're very close to a global tipping point. As I said before, it's going to take a few more shocks. They're going to keep coming to escalate the problem. It's a great reference if you think about what happened in World War Two when people saw the amount of bombing that was happening nearby, and the emergencies became existent in their own towns. The policies that came out of the back of the wall were extraordinary in terms of that galvanisation, regulation and things that needed to be done to move forward to a better future. In a lot of ways, that's a template where the more disasters we get, the more people will wake up to the large-scale changes that we need.

To finish off, what books or other resources would you recommend to our listeners?

There's so many, I feel like I've read some really wonderful books lately. I'm halfway through The First Knowledges series, I'm not sure if you're familiar with those. I’ve just read Country, which is by Bill Gavage and Bruce Pascoe. The Songlines is great; these books should just be essential curriculum.

I think they're just such a great opportunity to upskill people through utilising the incredible asset we have in this country, the 60,000 years of acute observational science and First Nations knowledge that we have at our disposal.

I just finished Overstory, some of you might've read that already and it’s by Richard Powers. It is just such a beautiful use of narrative to embed ecological values through storytelling. I thought that was an incredible read, and it won the Man Booker prize in 2018. Also, if people haven't read The Ministry For The Future, that one is by Kim Stanley Robinson and is a science fiction or 'sci-fi' book set in the future. It looked at how we turn things around and set up this The Ministry for the Future to make decisions. It talks about using a carbon coin which becomes the dominant currency. It's matched to the fee of how much carbon you can sequester, and you get rewarded for it. It has really interesting ideas to kickstart some thoughts about what we could create as businesses or what the future might look like, because it's certainly not going to look like it is right now.