This visually stunning film draws on Australian school administrator and children’s fiction writer Colin Thiele’s book about preteen Michael (Finn Little) growing up with his reclusive father, Hideaway Tom (Jai Courtney), on the remote Ninety Mile Beach in southern Australia.
Bonding with pelican chicks he’s rescued and reared, Michael befriends a similarly reclusive aboriginal man, Fingerbone Bill. Director Shawn Seet tells this story in flashback, through the eyes of an aging Michael (Geoffrey Rush). His son-in-law Malcolm now runs his business and is considering leasing farm lands in the Pilbara (an area known for Aboriginal people) for mining; activists protest the mining project for the potential loss of natural habitat.
As Malcolm contends with activists on the streets, the aging Michael contends with a budding activist closer to home: school-age granddaughter Maddy.
Michael’s dilemma, as he pleads with Maddy to trust in human goodness even while nurturing legitimate concern for nature, isn’t new. He and his father faced it when their beach town had to vote on whether it should keep a hunting ground for bird-hunting enthusiasts or be converted into a bird sanctuary.
Children, parents, grandparents, and schoolteachers, bombarded by activist-fueled, sensationalist media headlines portraying businesses as villains and activists as heroes, can learn from this film. Seet invites audiences weighing environmental concerns to revisit their attitudes and behavior.
Activist Granddaughter
Michael acknowledges Maddy’s concerns but questions her impatience that mirrors the myopia of misguided activists. She imagines that Michael’s pelican chicks met untimely deaths; he corrects her.
Rude and deaf to other views, Maddy mimics the preening of self-obsessed activists. Then, as Michael tells his story she turns remorseful, open to learning from his wisdom. She blurts, “I like being angry,” only to hear Michael counseling, “There’s no future in that.”
Onshore, the boy Michael commandeers his trained pelican to rescue Tom offshore, stuck in a boat mid-storm. Local headlines soon scream, “Pelican Saves Man From Storm,” but that’s not even half-true. It was a human, Michael, who’d trained the pelican. It was humans again, Michael and Bill, who’d prioritized the value of a human life above the commercially valuable goods also at stake: the haul of fish food, supplies and equipment, the boat itself. Michael didn’t mind endangering his beloved pelican to save his father.
Spying the defenseless pelican chicks, the boy Michael glances at Bill, “Other birds will look after them, right?” Bill corrects him, “It’s not their way.” It is humans who have that capacity. Human not only to look after themselves, but also to go beyond themselves, their family, and their strip of land, to embrace animals, trees, and rivers and to protect a wider circle, even the world.
The “vote,” whether of Michael’s boyhood or old age, signifies a vote of confidence in the uniquely human ability to learn from mistakes, to curtail excess. Humans mining the earth are no more nefarious than pelicans killing and eating fish to survive.
Tom doesn’t trust people to be sensible about protecting nature, but changes his mind. Michael tries to pass that perceptiveness onto Maddy who, at least initially, views industry as inimical to life and living. Never mind that nearly everything she touches, uses, or learns from, came from human hands: clothes, smartphones, laptops, houses, refrigerated food and drink.
Michael imbibed this lesson as a boy when he discovered that he couldn’t save one chick, let alone three, without man-made stuff: a sweater, a scarf, a glass pipette, an outboard motor, piped water, a bucket, a fishing hook, or a diving visor.
