Australia’s landscapes are home to massive infrastructures of extraction. The country’s economy is so defined by mining and fossil fuel projects that ending our reliance on them would mean reimagining how we live and who we are.

After the End creates a new story for Australia. Beginning 50,000 years ago, it explores the journey of the earliest First Nations communities, through colonisation and its history of resource extraction, to a hopeful tomorrow where fossil fuels are banned and stolen lands returned.
But what happens to the enormous industrial structures left to sit like scars on the earth? Do we melt them down and reshape them into new cities, preserve them as symbols of our past, or let them decay and return to the earth?

In this future, island communities form above oil rigs turned into artificial reefs, while an Indigenous space industry launches from old gas plants. After the End follows the First Peoples who return to the land, reclaim their sovereignty, and weave these machines into their new lives on Country.

Planetary Punk
“The giant machines have been reborn. Now they stand as launchpads for the future, not beasts of destruction but beings of light and memory.” – Natasha Wanganeen

After the End was filmed and takes place on Ngarrindjeri, Narungga, Kaurna and Noongar woman Natasha Wanganeen’s Country in South Australia. This includes the Yorke Peninsula, and surrounding areas, encompassing the Olympic Dam mine, the Cooper Basin, and the Maralinga / Woomera nuclear test sites. The Olympic Dam mine is the largest single deposit of uranium in the world, and the fourth largest copper deposit; the Cooper Basin has Australia’s most important oil and gas deposits; and the UK conducted seven nuclear tests at Maralinga / Woomera from 1956 to 1963. This colonial and environmental destruction is referenced in After the End, with Wanganeen’s poetic narrative and Young’s visuals envisioning First Peoples reclaiming Country and the infrastructure of extraction.

While cyberpunk explores virtual subcultures and solarpunk imagines positive environmental communities, After the End represents a new style – ‘Planetary Punk’, which adapts global infrastructure to create post-colonial climate solutions.

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