Josh Fox’s 2010 anti-fracking exposé GasLand has one jaw-dropping moment, the kind of gasp-inducing money shot that singlehandedly sold it as a must-see documentary. Investigating the effects of coal seam gas exploration on land around his property in rural Pennsylvania, the first-time film-maker visits a neighbour who promises to show him something shocking.

Stuck to the wall above the kitchen sink is a piece of paper with a handwritten warning reading: “Do Not Drink This Water.” To demonstrate why, the neighbour puts a cigarette lighter directly underneath the tap and turns it on. What we see next beggars belief: the water has become so contaminated it erupts into a gigantic fireball.

The Australian documentary Frackman isn’t a sequel but it contains at least one scene that feels as though it picks up where GasLand left off. The film’s subject, former pig shooter and self-professed “world’s worst environmentalist” Dayne Pratzky, is waist-high in Queensland’s Condamine river. He’s holding a candle lighter. Forget about a tap in the kitchen: when he ignites the lighter a small part of the river itself catches fire.

This is one of many shocking sequences that the film-makers – led by the Newcastle-born director Richard Todd – contend are linked to the proliferation of CSG mines, which in recent years have spread across Australia, particularly in New South Wales and Queensland. Todd casts his narrative as a David versus Goliath story about a knockabout Aussie bloke and “accidental activist” who takes up a fight with the big boys and refuses to back down.

After GasLand, and given the subsequent increased awareness about the effect fracking has on the environment, Todd felt the film didn’t need to go deep into science and opted instead to concentrate it around his dyed-in-the-wool subject.

“I didn’t have to spend too much time in the film explaining what CSG and fracking is,” he says. “We really wanted it to be all about how the industry affects this one guy who’s trying to protect his castle. That was it and everything else wrapped around that. It was about Dayne’s fight to protect his land.”

Anti-fracking protests in the film

Four years of filming offered no shortage of dramatic incidents. Pratzky’s fire-with-fire approach saw him blocks roads with trucks, lead protests here and abroad, sneak on to gas company property to take water samples, interrupt politicians’ press conferences, storm the stage at a CSG industry event and hide in a wardrobe to secretly record conversations with gas industry representatives. There’s plenty more where that came from, including getting arrested for trying to lock the doors at Brisbane’s Sofitel hotel, where an industry summit was held.

A bunch of discoveries along the way, incorporated into the film as case studies, strengthened the hard yakka hero’s resolve. These include a spate of illnesses suffered by local children, dead animals found in water supplies, a site leaking gas 24/7 (the air itself is flammable) and a mysterious black substance found in the Pilliga forest of NSW. The Condamine river, by the way, is not only flammable – it bubbles like a spa.



For Pratzky, the fight has been long, hard and unrelenting. “If I actually thought about it I probably wouldn’t have done it,” he says. “When you realise deep into it that you’re fighting a $70bn juggernaut, the chances of winning, most people would say, are slim. But I just didn’t take that as the answer. I was that deep and there was no turning back.”

The ‘world’s worst environmentalist’: Dayne Pratzky

On the subject of powerful enemies and the extent to which he has experienced blowback, Pratzky’s claims are alarming. “My house was broken into seven times,” he tells Guardian Australia. “My dogs were poisoned.

“They smashed the windscreen of my car four times. They smashed the headlights out of my car. My email account gets hacked into at least once a month.

“It’s constant. I know I am being monitored, but you know what? That feeds the fire even more because I know, not think, I know that I’m getting to them. For me I’m like a shark and there’s blood in the water and I’m circling and they’re in the middle.”

The film presents Pratzky’s exploits in a snazzy package at a roaring pace, as if it’s afraid the audience might stop watching at any point. Frackman’s dramatic opening scene, in which Pratzky sneaks on to gas company property at night, feels like something out of a spy movie.

I know I am being monitored, but you know what? That feeds the fire even more Dayne Pratzky

“There was a lot of hairy moments for us both,” Todd says. The team received pro-bono legal advice from organisations such as the Environmental Defender’s Office. They developed a greater understanding of how to keep on the right side of the law from the magistrate after Pratzky’s arrest at the Sofitel in 2011.

“There’s a line that if you cross gets you into a hell of a lot of trouble,” Todd says. “We knew if that sort of line was crossed all of a sudden we’d lose the respect of the magistrate and we’d also then have the potential of going into a different kind of legal fight that wasn’t about the moral of trying to protect your castle.”

Strategically timed to screen in marginal seats in the lead up to the NSW election, where fracking is an issue for voters, the tactic appears to be working in terms of both activism and distribution. Frackman screenings with accompanying Q&A sessions are selling out and generating a steady trickle of local and national news stories. The Courier-Mail published a story that started: “There’s a movie currently taking Australian cinemas by storm, and you’ve probably never even heard of it.”

Frackman: the fight continues

Unsurprisingly, the gas companies aren’t happy. The Energy Resource Information Centre (which is funded by the natural gas industry) has responded to Frackman’s claims with a “fact check” document published online. It asserts, among other things, that the flammable Condamine river and the bubbles in it “pose no risk to the environment or to human and animal health” and that “methane naturally occurs in groundwater”.

Pratzky, of course, isn’t buying it. “Oil is actually a natural product too, and so is gas,” he says. “It’s all natural, so don’t be fooled by a play on words. We know arsenic is natural, but it doesn’t mean you want to drink the shit.”

• For up-to-date screening information about Frackman, including its theatrical and video-on-demand release, visit the film’s website