Bellarine students ready to regenerate Australia following film screening

STUDENT leaders from several Bellarine schools were lucky enough to get an advanced viewing of accomplished writer, director and environmental activist Damon Gameau’s latest short film Regenerating Australia.

Mr Gameau, who was in the first week of an eight-week national tour showcasing his 17-minute film at various cinemas and attending local schools to gauge interest among young advocates for climate change, visited Bellarine Secondary College in Drysdale on Thursday last week.

Student leaders from primary and secondary schools such as Drysdale Primary, St Leonards Primary, Our Lady Star of the Sea, Wallington Primary and hosts Bellarine Secondary viewed the new film and participated in a Q&A with Damon.

Bellarine Secondary School captain and leader of the school’s sustainability committee GangGreen, Odi Evans, was the event’s MC and invited youth leaders to ask questions of Damon.

Mr Gameau visited the school before holding a Geelong screening at Village Cinemas in the CBD the same day, which he said is a favoured touring method of his given the reaction he gets from students and young minds.

“They just get so lit up with this stuff,” Mr Gameau said.

“They sit there and realise how much plastic there is in the ocean and just how bad climate change is and they feel like it’s too big for them to change by themselves, but once they find out what solutions there are and how they can get involved, they are buzzing and start chatting.

“These are the careers of their future, and they need to know what careers there are to fight climate change, turn this thing around and regenerate the country, because the world is changing a lot in the next 10 to 15 years.”

The film viewing provided the young leaders the opportunity to imagine and be inspired by the vision of a ‘future Australia’ where, culture, people and environmental sustainability are prioritised to create a fairer, cleaner and more community-focused Australian economy.

A major focus point for Mr Gameau was to encourage to students to make change at their own schools, “even though disgruntled students might take to the streets, they can actually make real change”.

“This can be done by talking to their own principals, getting cleaner energy in the school, planting more trees, recycling plastics and dealing with food waste properly,” Mr Gameau said.

“There’s plenty of ways for students to make change and alleviate their own anxiety in feeling like they’re contributing.”

Bellarine Community Health’s Healthy Connected Communities team supported the Bellarine-based schools to attend the film screening, as part of its objective to work in education settings empowering young people, their teachers, and their families to understand the impacts of climate change.

BCH’s other collaborations include The Bellarine Youth Agents of Change environmental leadership initiative, Farm My School and the Youth Guerrilla Garden Project.

“What today did is remind us all what we can do to be better with respect to climate change,” Bellarine Secondary principal Wayne Johannesen said.

“For myself, I fully expect to be sitting down with our student leaders on these issues in the future to decide what we can do more of.”

In 2021, Bellarine Secondary installed 120 solar panels Solar Regeneration project, but will look to improve its recycling management and will investigate the benefits of food pods alongside their Agriculture-Horticulture Department.

Mr Gameau’s new film will be accessible to the public on April 1, where they are encouraged to organise their own screenings.