Obituary - Pip Starr
Pip Starr was a Melbourne activist filmmaker. He made powerful, intense documentaries about injustice. His documentary, Through the Wire is a heartbreaking account of the Woomera protests and a powerful indictment of Australia’s policy of compulsory detention of asylum seekers.
I’d known Pip since 2000. I met him while covering the S11 protests against the WEF in Melbourne - I’d been working for 4ZzZFM and had heard about this new thing called Indymedia, and he was at the first planning meeting. He struck me as the kind of person I aspired to be - passionate but calm, someone who stood up for his beliefs but was still openminded and caring.
Since then I’d seen Pip around a fair bit. I hung around Indymedia, 3CR and Ska TV while in Melbourne, and continued to run into him at activist conferences and at Woomera. We traded footage at CHOGM, and chatted whenever we caught up.
The last time I saw Pip was late last year. I was talking to him about acquiring footage for an SBS documentary about protest in Australia (currently on hold). We talked about the usual sort of stuff - the industry, dealing with commissioning editors, the war in Iraq. We talked about the recent protests in Melbourne against APEC and how a lot of the older generation of activists had dissipated.
Pip mentioned that he had pitched a doco about his friends in Melbourne - a look at life as a gay activist in Melbourne. I can’t do the project justice, but it sounded like something I would really like to watch - an antidote to the saccharine middle-class representations on TV. The commissioning editor came back to him and said it was good, but he needed to ‘drop all the ferals and make it into something my mother would like to watch.’ That is, ignore your life experience and make me a happy friendly documentary that doesn’t challenge anyone. God forbid anyone portay gay men as anything other than pets for middle class women.
That anecdote, and Pip’s reaction to it, really said a lot about Pip and the challenges of being a committed political filmmaker in Australia. I respected Pip for sticking to his principles, to the detriment of his success. As with many of the friendships I’ve made with activists, I’ve never had enough time to really get to know them and appreciate them. We see each other intermittently, and never for long enough. I wish I’d spent more time with you, Pip. I’ll miss you.
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