Tallaganda has intimate footage of Greater Gliders’ life in the den trees. Photos: David Gallan.
Bega Valley Shire filmmaker David Gallan’s latest film has been selected for the Far South Film Festival.
It took the photographer, nature lover and former teacher two years to film the main sequences of endangered Greater Gliders taking off and landing.
“I spent 24 nights at one particular tree to get what I wanted,” he said.
“It takes three hours setting up and one and a half hours packing down for something that lasts two minutes.”
In addition to the stunning footage, the film is remarkable for documenting the work of academics like Professor David Lindenmayer of the Australian National University and activists and citizen scientists who collect data so they can understand and protect wildlife.
Tallaganda is one of the 23 films that have been selected to premiere at the Far South Film Festival at Merimbula in August.
Mr Gallan’s love of nature and recording it on film started early.
He grew up in Sydney’s Georges River area. His interest in the natural form saw him spending hours exploring the bush.
Mr Gallan’s uncle was a press photographer and photographic editor of the Newcastle Herald.
“I would spend holidays with him and go out to work with him and journalists and photographers on news stories,” he said. “When I was 17, I bought my first 35 mm Single-Lens Reflex (SLR) camera.”
A glider doing what gliders do.
He moved to the Far South Coast in about 1985 in the middle of the “forest wars”.
“They wanted to do logging, particularly in the Tantawangalo portion of the South East Forest,” Mr Gallan said.
“It was a concern because a lot of farmers and small towns relied on the water coming through that catchment and they were worried it would be compromised.”
In 2015 his first major film Understorey documented the 40-year history of the conservation movement that led to the formation of the South East Forest National Park. It was screened in Parliament House and at the National Film and Sound Archive.
His second film The Ambassador won the environmental category at the first Far South Film Festival in 2020.
The halving of Greater Glider numbers over the past 20 years and well-publicised controversies about Forestry’s conservation team surveying for nocturnal species in Tallaganda during the daytime prompted Mr Gallan to make the film.
“Forestry only found one glider den tree in several compartments covering 1800 hectares,” he said.
“These are forests alive with gliders, so conservationists were very concerned about what has been lost with the logging and the Environment Protection Authority has lodged 29 charges against Forestry.”
For the past 10 years he has been filming gliders and quolls with Dr Ana Gracanin. Tallaganda includes footage showing the young woman climbing trees and being a leader in the dynamic data gathering to protect wildlife.
Dr Gracanin works with filmmaker David Gallan.
The film records how activists and citizen scientists are in the forest every night to identify the critical den trees.
“The citizen scientists are finding 20 times more den trees than Forestry did,” he said. “It shows how research takes time and effort to accumulate.”
All the trees have been mapped so people can go back to verify the findings.
Mr Gallan said the data has had an impact because it resulted in stop work orders and halted logging in some key wildlife strongholds.
When Tallaganda screened in Tathra recently, someone donated $20,000 to protect those stronghold areas. “People are seeing it and responding,” Mr Gallan said.
He believes many people have never seen Greater Gliders because they are usually remote from urban areas in huge forest areas with deep hollows and their preferred leaves for feeding.
“This unique wildlife needs protecting and when people see the footage, they think this is special and we need to conserve it,” Mr Gallan said.
“When we went decimal all our coins featured Australian wildlife. It features in our psyche and is so different from the rest of the world.
“The same warnings that were there for the Tasmanian Tiger are there now for the Greater Gliders with their numbers halving in such a short time.”
The Far South Film Festival will be held at The Twyford in Merimbula on 14 and 15 August.
