The
Australian outback is the last true cathedral on earth. You are just in this enormous expanse
and there's something quite spiritual about that, I think. Where we’re going to, in
Pipalyatjara, that’s maybe 800 ks south-west of Alice; so it’s a long way inland. The
first time I went out there I found it really overwhelming I felt that I didn't belong there
and I still get a sense of that when I go to the APY lands that you do feel honoured
to be allowed to be there because it is, a very strictly, tightly controlled Aboriginal
space. When Damon was very young he did “The Tracker”
with David Gulpilil and they had a really close connection.
I respect Aboriginal law as much as you respect whitefella’s law – maybe more
It was the first time I'd ever met an Aboriginal man and was just completely captivated with
him and his stories. Them blackfellas – they probably cooked
him and ate him. You know, we’re all cannibals... LAUGHS
To go and spend time with him and live with his family and live off the land and hunt.
It was just a complete ... I was only 23 and it blew my mind, because I'd never experienced
something like that. But I felt the magic of that, and the simplicity of it, and that
it just made me feel different. But there was an element ... when I’d seen how much
Coke people were consuming and that kind of really shocked me
And that image stayed with him, and little did he know at the time how pertinent it would
be to his unfolding story around sugar, down the track.
Damon: It’s not just saying fizzy drinks are bad – drink water but understanding
why, especially regards kidneys and Type 2 diabetes and what not...
People in the APY Lands, I think, live ... their average life expectancy is about 55 years,
so it’s 20 years less than we do. This is a dry community, there’s no alcohol here,
hasn’t been there for 40 years. So all these diseases we are seeing there are predominantly
diet-related. How’s it all going well?
Yeah, yeah, Kellie’s been busy. I’ve been sort of going around spreading the news – prepping
everything. John Tregenza's one of those people that I,
you know, I feel very, very fortunate to meet. In the last 35 years, he's seen the health
deteriorate, and that would be very hard to watch, so that's what drives him, I think,
to keep going and trying to, try and make a difference.
Damon discussed with me what we might be able to do in tackling these chronic illness problems.
Myself and Kelly and Fiona, the two nutritionists, really want to help out.
I think one of the important things that has really helped is the fact that they're volunteers,
cos Anangu relate to the fact that people come out here out of their own goodwill to
try and do something to help them. For me, it's like, can't we at least give
these people healthy, nutritious food, you know and I guess that's the driving motivation
for doing what we're doing at the moment. When I met Zoe, self-care wasn't high on the
list, I was still enjoying a packet of cigs a day and a couple of Cokes.
I was aware of eating healthful foods. When Damon came into the picture, I think he was,
he was curious. We met in Timor, in a place called One More Bar. I was over there shooting
a documentary, and Damon came over for ‘Balibo’. Damon as Shackleton: The buildings here are
deserted. We spoke to one soldier today who believes that a potion given to him by his
family, BOOM!!! Bomb goes off And I remember thinking, wow, he’s handsome,
he’s intelligent, he’s charming, and doesn’t he know it.
And I just, yeah, every cliché in the book, I just, I was like, oh wow, that's the girl
I'm going to be with for the rest of my life, I just had one of those things.
Damon was very much in that acting world. When you're part of that scene you're inclined
to go out, get a bit drunk, or have a good time.
But I knew as soon as I met her, I'm going to have to change some things in my life.
She's the one, but I've got some work to do. I hadn't been drinking for quite some time,
and he'd been dabbling with the idea of not drinking, and that sort of bonded us in a
small way, we kind of both liked the lucidity of our relationship.
It was tough, early on, because I was so used to sweet things that I was sitting at dinner
going, no, give me some salt or sweetness, for god’s sake, smother this in barbecue
sauce. But I got to a point where I started going, wow, I feel different, I'm sleeping
like I've never slept before and people keep commenting on my, on my eyes and my skin and
I've lost some weight and, what's going on here. I started seeing some articles about
sugar, and I thought, well, I know my experience from that is quite real, so I wonder and then
it kind of all snowballed from there. My name is Damon Gameau. Sugar has become
so prevalent in today's society, that if you removed all the items containing it from a
standard supermarket's shelves, just 20 per cent of items would remain.
Having been an actor it was an inevitable transition for him to be making films eventually.
There was a few stats that were quite motivating to me, and one was that Type 2 diabetes now
kills someone every six seconds, around the world, and this is a disease that's preventable
by diet, um, the fact that one in four Aussie kids are now overweight or obese, and so we're
seeing, for the first time in history, children get type two diabetes. From my perspective,
I didn’t want that to happen to my child. And there’s so much debate and conjecture
on the topic that it's hard to know what to believe. The only real way to get some answers
is for me to start eating sugar again and see what it does to my body. So here are the
rules for my next 60 days. I must consume 40 teaspoons of sugar a day.
When he was gearing up to shoot and make the sugar film, he was almost in perfect physical
condition to do such an experiment on himself, because he had very little refined food already
in his diet. I was thinking about how to tell the narrative
– how do you tell the story – and I picked up a can of tomato soup and I saw that it
had seven teaspoons of sugar in it, and this was just like a one-serve tomato soup, and
I thought, I don't reckon many people would know that there's almost as much sugar in
that as a can of Coke, you know, and yet this is really perceived as a healthy, savoury
meal. So, that's really how, how it started, and I thought, I wonder if I could eat what
most Australians are eating every day, but actually do it through the foods they're not
aware of. Because we did the experiment where I didn't have any chocolates or ice cream
or lollies or, you know, I was only eating perceived healthy foods, I genuinely didn't
think, or know, that we'd get any effect. But the fact that things started happening
to me so quickly, and my body started deteriorating very quickly, we probably could have stopped
the experiment after 30 days. After 60 days and 2360 teaspoons of sugar,
I gained 8.5 kilograms over all. The speed at which my high sugar diet was affecting
me, took us all by surprise. I was going to have to expand the scope of the experiment
and this would take me out of town for a few days.
By the end I'd developed pre-Type 2 diabetes, I had heart disease, I had 11 centimetres
of visceral fat, which is the fat on the inside of your body – that is the more toxic, dangerous
fat. The big one was the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease was almost in a full-blown state
where, if it goes much further, you know, it starts to harden and you get the cirrhosis
of the liver. One of the things that was always important to me was, I thought I don't want
to just make a film. Part of me was, what are the next steps, like how do you actually
impact change? Just 100 kilometres from Uluru is the small
town of Amata. In 2007, its population of just under 400 people consumed 40,000 litres
of soft drink. I just found this story about this town Amata
in the APY Lands where the elders had got together and decided to remove full-strength
Coca Cola, I just went, wow, that's ... that, that needs to be told.
When Damon approached me he said he was making a film and he asked if it was possible to
come onto the lands to sort of argue the case of reducing people's sugar consumption, um,
I was fairly wary. I undertook to help Damon on the basis that he would give something
back, he just can't come onto these lands and make a film and go away, er, without what
we call ‘Ngapartji Ngapartji’ – what are you going to give back in return for this
favour – and he said that if the film was a success, he would set up a foundation to
assist the people to understand the sugar message.
So one Aboriginal man decided to do something about it. His name is John Tregenza. This
is his case, this is his puturu, and this is his nickname. Why?
John: Cos I cut through the bullshit. Yeah, I arrived on these lands in the early
’70s, and at that time most of the diet was coming from the bush, and only supplemented
from the store. John Tregenza was a social worker at Amata,
he saw the effect the reserve was having on the Pitjantjatjara. When they asked him to
come here as community advisor, he agreed. John Tregenza understands the Pitjantjatjara
because he is a man in their terms – that is, an initiated man.
Life was, good, long time, there was no store, no houses, long time, they were like a warriors,
you know, and feed their families in the bush. John: These little communities have sprung
out of these people's desire to get away from settlements and missions, with all of the
social problems that those places create. Back in the ’70s people were probably sourcing
90 per cent of their food from, from the bush, and about 10 per cent from the store. Now
that's changed over the last 30, 40 years to pretty much round the other way; in fact
it's probably more like 95 per cent out of the store and about 5 per cent out of the
bush. They lost access to bush tucker. People used to live a lot off rabbits – calecivirus
wiped out the rabbits, the Port Arthur massacre and the response from the Australian government
to that essentially disarmed the men. So “once were hunters” can now only point
their finger at the game. They don’t have the weaponry to go out and hunt. Apart from
the fact, of course, that the game is scarce because of the buffel and the camels.
What we’ve got now is a changed environment. That’s native grass, that, but that there’s
buffel and the rest of the plain, as you go out there, is choked with buffel. The problem
is that not only don’t ’roos and big game not eat it, it’s also very hard for predators
– the birds and others to find their feed so it doesn’t only impact on the big game,
it impacts on the whole food-chain. In the early ’90s, the defunding of the
homelands forced people to come into the larger settlements and with that event, the reliance
on the store became stronger. All the stores were operating with non-Aboriginal managers,
and the prices were outrageous and the products were terrible.
In those days it was basically the store manager became responsible for the nutrition of the
community. People were having tons of sugar added to their normal diet.
Sugar came, so people they had a taste, hey, this is beautiful taste, sweet, I might get
one for my children. We didn't know, we thought it was a good,
like sugar, instead of eating um, fruit and vegies.
Insulin resistance syndrome increased, obesity increased, and diabetes, Type 2 diabetes.
All of the health problems including diabetes and the kidney failure is all related to the
diet. I've known almost everyone buried here, I've got family members buried here. Most
of these, um, these deaths here are premature, and could have been avoided, um, with correct
diet and access to affordable healthy food. It's a complete tragedy.
We formed an Aboriginal Anangu steering committee to have a look at the whole problem.
John and his team with the local committees there, formed a group called Mai Wiru, which
meant “good food”. They would operate the stores with good food, good education,
and try and restore the health of the local people.
I was the first general manager of the Mai Wiru stores policy. We were funded at that
stage through the Department of Health and Ageing and we had in-house, a nutritionist.
The original intention of Mai Wiru was that stores should be seen as an essential service.
They're the only source of food and nutrition in the community and they should be allowed
to be not for profit. The Mai Wiru itself, the, the stores group,
makes up of five stores now. Mai Wiru it has help this community and other
communities too so everybody like it, oh yeah, we might try and put up something, I think
that's a good idea, Mai Wiru, it's good. Mai Wiru was working, and in a very short
time Amata had the lowest rate of sugar consumption in the region.
So things were going along in that way until the Federal Labor government decided that
the Mai Wiru group no longer was to be funded under the health budget and we became the
responsibility of, essentially, the Aboriginal Affairs Department of the Commonwealth Government.
The stores were told that they had to be economically viable in their own right.
They have a great word in Pitjantjatjara, ‘tungungpunganyi’ – we're stubborn,
we're just going to keep going, you know. We got there, over two years, and developed
the Mai Wiru stores policy and we certainly improved on lots of the retail structures
within the stores. So they're very well run stores, they're very efficient, they've got
good managers. There's no government funding comes into Mai
Wiru at all, so that's weaned ourselves off that, which is good. We've now run a weekly
service. So from the Adelaide markets, we're getting fresher fruit and veg into the lands,
quicker than what people in Alice Springs is getting it.
But in this whole process, whilst everything's fine commercially, there are still huge amounts
of sugar being consumed and the emphasis on health has sort of been lost on the way.
When they lost the funding from Department of Health that also meant they lost the funding
for a nutritionist and that's been difficult to sustain a nutrition focus, because you
also need somebody who's dedicated to looking and monitoring the nutrition of the store.
What people are consuming here is not a lot different to what people are consuming everywhere
else. The difference with here is there's one store. They try to provide as much choice
as possible in that store but there's a lot of other factors producing chronic health
effects a lot quicker. There's a lot of sugar consumed by children. It’s not as clear
cut as it would be maybe in a city. One statistic that we found out about today – only today
– was that there's 100 kilos of raw sugar sold a week in Pip for about 150 people. So,
we have some work to do. And the AACTA award goes to ‘That Sugar
Film’ – Nick Batzias and Damon Gameau. Thank you very, very much. So many people
to thank … It is the highest-grossing Australian documentary
of all time now. Because of the success of the film and the attention it gave Mai Wiru,
we were able to establish the foundation, which has raised about $100,000 so far and
made it possible for nutritionists to return to the APY Lands with an education program
around added sugar. Today, part of the deal of getting a meal
is that you also get a free movie screening thrown in. So we’re going to serve the dinner
after showing – we’ve got an Aboriginal version of ‘That Sugar Film’. Just to
get everyone on board with what we’re trying to do
Given the level of funding that the foundation had, I considered it was best to start in
one community. Pipalyatjara was seen as a good place to start.
The store is in quite a good state. It's a smaller community, um, and John Tregenza has
good relationships with people in that community, so it was just chosen as a pilot really.
JOHN TREGENZA: I have family and friends out here and that's where I've lived for many
years. It's a lot more comfortable out here, to introduce something new and to talk to
people about it. So that's really what the foundation was about
and teaming up with John again was to try and help reinvigorate that aspect and provide
the nutritionist and employ that nutritionist that they couldn't afford anymore so that's
really what we're trying to do. Things are quite embryonic at the moment. We’re just
beginning but one of the first things we’re focusing on is just the store itself. We’re
going around, sort of, educating the local people as well to understand what we’re
trying to do about putting clearer labelling on the foods to make sure we’re aware of
the foods that have got added sugar in. In
an ideal world it would be lovely just to take everything off the shelf and just put
(laughs) everything that you want in there, as a nutritionist, but it takes time to change.
It was just fantastic having Damon and Kellie and Fiona. We had no idea how much sugar was
in some of this stuff. They just came and said, look, how about coming in and putting
some labels up in the store about the thumbs up, thumbs down and helping people make those
choices. So the key is to try and get familiar foods
that are comfort foods but they’re sort of, we can use slightly different ingredients
– lots of colours so we get lots of vitamins and nutrients in there.
We had a few of those children come in and help us. They've all done cooking before;
cooking's a big thing out here. Keenan, who was my little helper all day, he wants to
be a chef, which is music to my ears. A healthy chef, hopefully.
The thing that I say in community meetings all the time is that the reason we're doing
this is so that the young children now, our grandchildren now, do not end up going down
the same track of diabetes, kidney failure, dialysis machines and early death, which is
the track that many, many people out here are on now.
The future, we have to look forward for our children, to go forward, and stay healthy
and live longer. There is one thing that we can have a pretty
quick impact on, which is providing healthy cooked meals. Everything that we’ve prepared
has been eaten quickly, and consumed, and people have asked for more. That is a success,
that’s successful, the feedback that we’re getting as well, is 100 per cent positive.
It felt like yesterday went pretty well Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the women, and the men
too, commented on how good the food was. Yes!
Not withstanding it had no sugar and salt. (laughs ...)
Damon: (laughs) Way back, I think even on Captain Cook's boat,
that there was an exchange of sugar for dancing, that's how it first began. When they landed
on the shores, the Aboriginals did a performance, a dance, and they gave then bags of sugar
and you know, it even started way back then. This trip’s really shown us that what the
people are asking for is the opportunity to have a variety of foods that’s cooked for
them and presented to them every day. I reckon, given the success of the cook-up
yesterday, it feels like we should just go all out for the cafe idea.
John: So if you’ve got an alternative they will go for it – as they said last night.
We would actually bring in the chefs, cook the food there for the people and hopefully
see the lines snaking out the door. John’s been out there for so many years, he’s heard
all the stories, he’s, you know, he’s seen lots of initiatives like ours come through
and not, sort of, see any success. But I think he does believe in what we’re doing. We’re
trying to do things a little bit differently, especially this cafe idea. I think that is
something that is exciting everybody.
I wrote that song about sugar in Pitjantjatjara language:
Sugar kura sugar kura diabetes ungkupai (Sugar is bad, sugar is bad, it gives you
diabetes) Uwankara kunpu nyinama (Everybody stay strong)
Wati tjuta (All men) Minyma tjuta (All women)
Tjitji tjuta (All children) Kulila (listen)