Southern Blast – Surfrider Foundation’s film about the campaign to stop seismic blasting – was released online last week. We had a phone yarn with director Matty Hannon as he was pushing his eldest on the tree-swing at home in northern New South Wales, just a few days after the birth of his second son.
"The whole experience of filming Southern Blast, really, was a testament to why these sorts of campaigns need to happen. At the moment, we’re still able to do things like surf all day, go for a quick dive just an hour before the sun goes down, pull up a few abs and have a barbecue.
"But we can take these things for granted. I was just looking at a photo of this massive sequoia tree over in the Pacific Northwest in the US. It was something like 1500 years old and they chopped it down. At the time they took that tree for granted, whereas now those kinds of trees almost don't exist.
"We have this issue of a shifting baseline where the next generation doesn't realise what the previous generation had. We're just losing it, bit by bit. Diving for abs after a surf is a perfect example, where really, if we don't jump into action and stop these messed-up industrial complexes, then we’re going to lose those human experiences of being able to pull an ab off the rocks and have a good feed with your friends on the beach.
