Case Studies
Case Studies
Climate Change Television in the 1970s: Visualisation and the Problem of the Future
Find out more about the film that kicked off the campaign to save the Franklin River and created a new idea about the environment in sound and image…
The Pastoral Station as an Important Site of Australian Film History
Find out more about how Attenborough’s programmes have shaped the changing relationship between global audiences and the Australian environment since the 1960s…
The Great Barrier Reef and the Tropical North:Tourist Film from Edenic Scene to Precarity
Find out more about how filmmakers used documentary to promote hydroelectricity and petroleum use in the 1940s and 1950s…
Energy, the Environment and Mid-Century Sponsored Documentary
Find out more about how filmmakers used documentary to promote hydroelectricity and petroleum use in the 1940s and 1950s…
Saving the Franklin River and Film History
Find out more about the film that kicked off the campaign to save the Franklin River and created a new idea about the environment in sound and image…
Petrofilm and the Shell Film Unit
Find out more about how Shell Oil came to produce some of the most innovative and expressionistic documentaries in mid-century Australia…
Sir David Attenborough in Australia
Find out more about how Attenborough’s programmes have shaped the changing relationship between global audiences and the Australian environment since the 1960s…
Extraction and the moving image in Broken Hill
Find out more about how Broken Hill’s mining industry is crucially tied into its role as one of Australia’s most important locations in film history…
Women and the Rise of Environmental Documentary
Find out more about the intersection of the rise of environmental documentary and the institutions that shape opportunities for women filmmakers…
Publications
Publications
Ashe, Melanie, Tessa Dwyer and Eloise Ross. “Make it epic’: Furiosa, mythic placemaking and 45 years of Mad Max”. Studies in Australasian Cinema, 2025, p 1–21. [Online first].
Ashe, Melanie, Simon R. Troon and Belinda Smaill. “Encountering Flying Foxes: Audience Response and Reckoning with Ecosystem Disruption in Australia”. Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis. Mary Hegedus and Jessica Mulvogue, (eds). Vernon Press, 2025.
Ashe, Melanie. “The pastoral station: an overlooked ‘outback’ location space in Australia’s regional screen history”. Continuum, vol. 39 no. 1, 2025, p 134–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2024.2405929
Smaill, Belinda. “Fire Aesthetics: Film and Television in the Pyrocene.” Creative Matters, Ed. 6, 2024. https://creativematters.edu.au/fire-aesthetics-film-and-television-in-the-pyrocene/
Smaill, Belinda. “Hydro, Petroleum and Mid-Century Sponsored Documentary: Ecologies, Aesthetics and the ‘Australian Image.’” Energy Imaginaries: Public Relations and the Moving Image. Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau, (eds.). Berkley: University of California Press, 2024. [Forthcoming]
Smaill, Belinda. “From Extraction to Wilderness: Australian Film History, Environmental History, and The Last Wild River.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), Vol. 63 no5, 2023, p 377-399. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.a941836.
Smaill, Belinda. “Understanding Environmentalism as a Feminist Media Concern: Documentary Filmmaking, Argumentation, Advocacy and Industry.” Feminist Media Studies (2021) (10.1080/14680777.2021.1979072)
Smaill, Belinda. “Historicising David Attenborough’s Nature: Nation, Continent, Country and Environment.” Celebrity Studies 13:3 (2022): 344-365. (10.1080/19392397.2020.1855995)
Smaill, Belinda. “Petromodernity, the Environment and Historical Film Culture.” Screen. 62.1 (2021): 59-77.
Whitelaw, Mitchell and Belinda Smaill. “Biodiversity Data as Public Environmental Media: Citizen Science Projects, National Databases, and Data Visualizations” Journal of Environmental Media 2.1 (2021): 79-99.
Davis, Therese and Belinda Smaill. “Rethinking Documentary and the Environment: A Multi-Scalar Approach to Time.” Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture & Technology. 32 (2018). Online http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/11/Trans32_2_davis_smaill.pdf
Smaill, Belinda. “Ecological Relations: FalconCam in Conversation with The Back of Beyond.” A Companion to Australian Cinema. Felicity Collins, Jane Landman and Susan Bye (eds.). London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. 508-524.