Learn about the Black Cockatoos at ECU Joondalup
Tuesday, 04 April 2023
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See 'Black Cockatoo' Crisis at the Telethon Community Cinema in Joondalup.
Western Australia's iconic black cockatoos are in crisis. Their numbers have fallen dramatically over the past few decades and all three species in the south-west of WA could become extinct in just 20 years unless something is done to protect their habitats.
Head to the Telethon Community Cinema on the Joondalup campus on Tuesday 4 April for a special screening of the locally made documentary 'Black Cockatoo Crisis'
Head down to the cinema at 6.45pm and take a 30-minute tour of cockatoo conservation efforts at ECU Joondalup. Learn about artificial nesting hollows and how cockatoos use them to raise their chicks on campus, and find the recently installed water towers that give all birds on campus the opportunity to drink safely all year round.
The film gets underway at 7.45pm, and there a Q&A session with the director afterwards.
With the loss of the banksia woodlands on the Swan Coastal Plain to housing, Carnaby's Black Cockatoos have come to depend on the once vast exotic pine plantations on Perth's northern fringe.
These pine plantations supply up to half of all the food needed to keep the population of Carnaby's alive but these too are disappearing. Within the next two years the remaining 4000ha of pines are slated for clearing leaving the cockatoos facing possible starvation.
Meanwhile the Baudin's Black Cockatoos are literally being shot out of the sky in an unequal battle for food with apple and pear growers in Perth's hills. And the Forest Red-Tailed Black Cockatoos are under threat from the loss of nesting hollows and declining habitat.
'Black Cockatoo Crisis' looks at the plight of our special cockatoos and what we can do to stop these threatened species disappearing forever.
The film is was created by producer and director Jane Hammond. She is a filmmaker and freelance journalist. She specialises in stories of environmental justice, action on climate change and social affairs.
In 2012 she took redundancy from The West Australian newspaper and went back to university to learn the art of filmmaking. She completed a Masters of Professional Communications at ECU, doing her final units of study at the WA Screen Academy in 2016.
Jane Hammond has made three longer form documentary films prior to 'Black Cockatoo Crisis'. Her documentary 'Cry of the Forests - A Western Australian Story', released in November 2020, was instrumental is raising awareness and changing public opinion on logging in WA. After a strong social impact campaign around the film the WA Government announced in 2021 that all native forest logging in the state would end by 2024.
Hammond's other films include 'A Crude Injustice' (2017), which tells the story of the 2009 Montara oil spill off the coast of WA and its impact on the seaweed farmers of West Timor; and 'A Fractured State' (2016) which examined the threat of fracking in WA and the community movement fighting that threat.
'Black Cockatoo Crisis' was named winner of the 2021 Brian Beaton Award for social impact.