Aussie hero you’ve never heard of

GAS: Watch as a Chinchilla local sets fire to his bore water, which may have been contaminated by coal seam gas operations.

Dayne Pratzky. Not your average activist. Source: NewsComAu

THERE'S a movie currently taking Australian cinemas by storm, and you've probably never even heard of it.

That's because it's not playing at a giant megaplex near you, but at art house cinemas here and there and at halls and theatres in towns around the country — where locals are going absolutely nuts for it.

The reason they're going nuts? It's about them, that's why. It's about ordinary Aussies protecting what belongs to them against greedy companies trying to take it all away.

The film's star Dayne Pratzky is one of those very ordinary Aussies. A labourer on Sydney's Lane Cove Tunnel who left school in year nine, he decided to leave the city aged 30 to try his hand on the land. He bought a property dotted with scraggly gum trees near Tara, about three hours west of Brisbane on Queensland's Darling Downs.

Then the gas companies showed up and told him they were drilling. As Dayne narrates it in his movie Frackman:

"One day a guy drove down my driveway and said: ' ... we're going to sink a well down the back of your place. And if you don't like it, there's nothing you can do about it'."

It's obviously just a coincidence that the word fracking sounds a little like a slightly ruder word. Source: Supplied

So began the fight of his life, a fight which continues to his day and which is the subject of the movie Frackman. It's Australia's equivalent of Gasland, a film about coal seam gas mining which did exceptionally well in America.

CSG is the major environmental fight of our age. You'd use that old chestnut "divisive" issue, except the issue doesn't seem to be dividing too many people. Not at the community level, anyway.

The top end of town loves it for the profits it brings in (which then mostly go overseas). But most Aussies hate it. A whopping 437 million hectares of Australia is now covered by CSG licenses or applications. That's roughly twice the size of the state of Victoria. But the process of hydraulic fracturing of rock to release the gas — known as fracking — is said to be terrible for the land and for groundwater supplies.

Things have gotten so bad on many farms that dam water has become flammable with all the leaked gas. Dayne Pratzky says it's like the asbestos issue all over again. His unlikely new best mate, broadcaster Alan Jones, is his greatest ally. Yet the CSG license applications keep flooding in, and Dayne is the number one crusader against them. That's why they've been cheering him at showings of his film this week.

Gas is flammable. And when it ends up in farm dams, which it often does, farm dams become flammable. Source: News Limited

"Once most people see the film, they actually get what it's like, the hype goes out the window and realty sets in," Dayne tells news.com.au from a roadside somewhere in NSW, where he's pulled over to talk to us as he travels between towns to attend screenings.

"Even those who were not opposed to coal seam gas, I think they leave with a healthy respect and go 'wow, OK, now I'm going to do some more research into this'."

Dayne Pratzky wasn't born angry and didn't choose to be an environmental activist. To use the old cliche, the lifestyle sort of chose him. But despite Dayne jokingly calling himself "Australia's worst environmentalist" on Twitter, the lifestyle couldn't have chosen a better man.

Dayne is a natural at this stuff. Get him talking and you can't stop him. Does he parrot well-rehearsed spin? He does not. He talks from direct experience and most importantly, from the heart.

His anger is on behalf of a nation but it's also deeply personal. Dayne suffers migraines, which he'd never had before he lived on a property with gas wells. He says the neighbours were getting nosebleeds and mysterious rashes. Such stories are commonplace across the country. And those are just the physical symptoms.

Many wells are on prime farming land. Image: Lock the Gate Alliance. Source: Supplied

"Then there's the mental anguish of this bullying industry all over you," he says.

"People who haven't experienced the resource industry and especially the CSG industry coming over the top and bullying you into signing a contract that gives away rights to the future of your land for the next 50 years, they freak out. They ask: 'is this Nicaragua or Australia?'"

And so Dayne Pratzky continues his crusade. As he sees it, he has to. Who else will?

"My job is to turn up and be a real face behind this industry and help people make informed decision on CSG about whether they want to fight it or just say 'drill baby drill' which the Baird government does in New South Wales.

"I'm exhausted, there's no two ways about that. But I'm feeding off the energy around me. We are actually winning this battle. We are actually turning people around and breaking through the industry spin and lies.

"We don't need these onshore gas reserves. We've got a lot of gas offshore that we can tap into and supply the entire east coast. We have a money-grubbing industry trying to suck the life out of farms and every poor bastard on the land and leave complete disaster zone behind.

"Well, not on my watch. It makes me a proud Australian to think we can beat this industry."

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