“Burnie is a great town. It’s a beautiful town. The coastline is stunning. We’ve got some of the most abundant productive soil on the planet. It looks like chocolate. You can grow anything.”

Craig Leeson is the Alby Mangels of Tasmania – an intrepid explorer, activist and environmental filmmaker. In 2016 he released the documentary A Plastic Ocean (which is exactly what it sounds like.) It led to single use plastic bags being banned in Australia. Craig was the 2022 Tasmanian of the Year. He originally hails from Ocean Vista in Burnie.

Craig filming for The Last Glaciers near Davos, Switzerland

At nineteen, Burnie Surf Club (which had one of the best boat crews in Australia), asked Craig to join. This coincided with him starting a cadetship at the local newspaper The Advocate, following in his Father’s footsteps (Allan Leeson OAM, a well-known sports reporter). Craig had to fit his work roster around the thirty hours a week required for boat crew training.

At the time he was contemplating life as a professional surf life saver. The irony being that the life most in need of saving was that of the ocean itself. Craig describes the pollution as an ‘entity’ that would change its behaviour depending on the wind.

“If it was easterly we got the red ferric oxide from the paint pigment plant, if it was a heavy easterly then we’d get all the black liquor and the crap from the pulp mill as well. If it was north-westerly the ocean would generally be a lot clearer at Ocean Vista.”

In 1988, the story of Burnie’s pollution broke from a perfect storm of Craig’s journalism training and his habit of making the beach his office. He recounts a pivotal incident at West Beach after a heavy storm.

“The foam at Burnie Beach was eight feet tall. We were running into it and surfing it. I remember swallowing some water and it made me vomit. My eyes were stinging for days. I thought ‘this has been going on for a long time. This isn’t natural. Why is this happening? You’re a journalist, go and investigate it!’”

Craig took samples of the water at various points along the coast and had them analysed by a laboratory. What he found shocked him …