CANE TOADS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 153

individual human-cane toad relationships that forms the core of the film. This
strategy effectively complicates the impulse to environmental education that
structures most documentaries and news stories on the impacts of invasive species,
which tend to focus on a singular narrative of invasion as catastrophe.
One of the most memorable characters is Monica, a young girl who is shown
lovingly tickling her pet cane toad, the gigantic 'Dairy Queen'. Incidentally, a
photograph of Monica and Dairy Queen was instrumental in obtaining funding for
the film. 7 Another character, David Sondergard, a resident of Gordonvale who
witnessed the introduction of cane toads, reveals how he likes to listen to the
croaking of the toads as they mate in his backyard at night. These more com-
panionable human-animal relationships are offset by depictions of far more
malicious and violent interactions. Brent Vincent, a resident of Cairns, reaches
ecstatic heights as he talks of the pleasurable 'pop' that can be achieved by running
cane toads over in his Kombi van. Tip Byrne, a cane farmer, speaks of his desire
to exterminate cane toads at every opportunity, exhibiting a tendency toward thinly
veiled racism in his animosity for 'this creature who had been brought in'. At one
point he even declares cane toads 'as big a menace as the German army'. Each has
a story to tell about human-animal relations, and they do so in their own inimitable
styles, direct to the camera and straight down the lens.
Lewis pioneered the use of a 'mirror box', a camera accessory he designed,
which gives the impression that his interviewees are speaking directly to the
audience. The sense of intimacy imparted through this technique was entirely new
to the documentary genre. Nearly a decade would elapse before Errol Morris used
a similar device in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), another film to focus on
human-animal relationships. 8 Morris's 'interrotron' is renowned in histories of
documentary film for its creation of a 'first person' narrative that renders the
interviewee's words as private and intimate, somehow more truthful, even as it
emphasises the constructed nature of his filmmaking process. 9 The fact that Lewis's
mirror box is left out of many histories of documentary can be attributed to his
position as an Australian documentary filmmaker with a predilection for making
films about animals. 10 In other words, a filmmaker working in a marginal industry
on the edges of a marginal genre. But it may also stem from the fact that he tended
to frame his interviewees in mid-shots that placed them in the wider contexts of
their homes and workplaces, adorned with the everyday clutter of their lives. By
contrast, Morris preferred to use stylised close-ups of his interviewees, filmed in
the stark confines of studio set-ups, which accentuated the direct gaze of his
interviewees and the claustrophobic effects of his interrotron. Whatever the reason,
Lewis's inventiveness as a filmmaker deserves greater recognition. His self-reflexive
and animal-centric style of filmmaking can be understood as prefiguring the work
of other documentary auteurs like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, who later
chose to focus on human-animal relationships. 11
Lewis's use of experimental cinematography also extended to the depiction of
cane toads. Throughout the production of the film, he worked with wildlife
cinematographer Jim Frazier to film cane toads in a variety of different habitats.