Spectres - Short Animation - Australia

One million fish die to a frantic beat
Murray cod
golden and silver perch
bony bream with shining spirit skins
their ghostly swim bladders whisper

Director Gaele Sobott

Gaele Sobott is a writer living on Darug land in Western Sydney, Australia.

​Her published works include Colour Me Blue (Heinemann), My Longest Round (Magabala Books) and recent short stories in Verity La, Meanjin, Prometheus Dreaming, New Contrast and the anthologies, Botswana Women Write and Not Quite Right for Us. Her poetry is published in various magazines including Disability Arts Online, Cordite Poetry Review, Plumwood Mountain and New Flash Fiction Review. Her animated poems, I Was Born (Misfit), Dear Rosa, Evacuate and AstroTurf have won awards and been screened internationally. She is the founding director of Outlandish Arts, a disabled-led arts organisation that focuses on words as the catalyst for experimentation and improvisation across various art

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Director StatementEarly in 2019, close to one million fish searched for flow, for faster cooler deeper current, desperately fighting to breathe in the lower Darling River. But they failed, suffocated; their bloated, rotting corpses floating on blue-green algae pools, piling up on the banks and dry riverbeds. The deaths of 100-year-old Murray cod, golden and silver perch, bony bream with shining spirit skins haunt me. I grieve for them as I grieve the looming death of the Murray-Darling rivers system. I fear for the lives of farmers, townspeople, wildlife, reptiles, fish, insects, plant life, wetlands and soil that depend on this river system. Geologically speaking, the Murray–Darling Basin is over 200 million years old. The river system stretches 3,200 kilometres from Queensland, down through NSW, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory then into the Murray Mouth at Goolwa, in South Australia.