With only three weeks until Christmas, many Tasmanians are busily preparing for the festive season – buying gifts, decorating trees, planning family get-togethers and counting down until Santa arrives.But for acclaimed Tasmanian filmmaker Craig Leeson, Christmas still feels like an eon away, as his festive countdown is crammed with a string with of important business meetings which involve jetting across the world – multiple times – before landing in Australia later this month.

The Hong Kong-based environmentalist recently spent some time in Paris, before heading to Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP26 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference where he presented talks to delegates (the event attracts 25,000 people from 200 countries) and previewed his new film The Last Glaciers to scientists and world leaders ahead of its official release in March.

The 54-year-old, who grew up in Burnie in Tasmania’s North West and worked as a journalist for the Advocate before becoming a foreign correspondent and later delving into filmmaking, then flew to Bahrain to attend talks with government ministers before flying to Abu Dhabi to give a speech at a university. He’s currently back in Europe but will soon fly again to the Middle East for the Global Citizen Forum before jetting back to Paris until he finally boards a plane bound for Australia (note: all Leeson’s travel is carefully carbon offset as part of a forestation program run by Ecomatcher, with two experts performing an independent audit on the film’s footprint – including filming, post-production and promotion – so Leeson could calculate how to best offset it).

Add the strict border control measures of a global pandemic to that already-hectic travel schedule and it’s certainly an eventful few weeks for Leeson, who was named Tasmania’s Australian of the Year last month and is now a contender for Australian of the Year, which will be announced in January.

But it’s also an exciting time, as he prepares to launch a film about the Earth’s rapidly vanishing glaciers, which has been four years in the making and involved some intense physical and mental challenges while filming across 12 countries.

It follows on from Leeson’s earlier documentary, A Plastic Ocean – now screening on Netflix – about the devastation caused by plastic pollution which has helped launch worldwide impetus for change since its release in January 2017.

Leeson has since become somewhat of an environmental hero, in hot demand across the globe – with everyone from schools and local government organisations to global corporations keen to hear more about his experiences while seeking help to implement positive changes when it comes to waste and single-use plastics.

He speaks passionately and articulately about the work he does with climate experts, scientists and other change makers – a passion which he says harks back to his childhood, where he’d spend hours scouring rockpools on the beaches of Burnie.

“Growing up on the beach and in a small community really shaped who I am and influenced me in a lot of ways,’’ he explains.

“From being in the ocean and spending a lot of time on the beach and studying animals in rockpools to patrolling the beach as a volunteer surf lifesaver and representing Tasmania in the national titles.

“My poor parents had to put up with me turning the house into an animal sanctuary at the age of eight or nine because I wanted to heal all these sick and injured animals that I wanted to save from the beach.

“From that age I wanted to be a vet or a park ranger or David Attenborough … that may not have happened in a big city.’’

In many ways Leeson says he has achieved this childhood dream – during filming he has worked with numerous animal experts who study the impact of pollution and climate change on turtles, whales, seals, seabirds and other wildlife, and he also met and interviewed his naturalist hero Sir David Attenborough while filming A Plastic Ocean.

As a young Burnie lifesaver, Leeson began to ask questions about why he emerged from the surf with sore eyes. A fourth-generation journalist at the Advocate, Leeson investigated and found his stinging eyes were caused by toxic pollution being dumped into the water by heavy industries, including the local pulp mill.

He wrote of his discovery and so began his first big environmental stoush.

Burnie has since transformed from a heavily polluted industrial city with high rates of cancer to one of Australia’s tidiest regions with a sparkling blue coastline.

Leeson never imagined that covering that story would eventually lead him to global acclaim as a filmmaker.

It was while working as a foreign correspondent for news outlets including the Seven Network and Al Jazeera, that Leeson became increasingly interested in longer-form journalism.

“I enjoy the immediacy of daily news,” Leeson admits.

“But it can be frustrating when you spend one, two or three days packaging a story that is a minute and a half long, and it gets screened three or four times in a 24-hour news cycle and then it’s gone, never to be seen again.”

He delved into current affairs reporting, producing some longer segments, and this “seemed like a natural progression into filmmaking”.

He was approached by National Geographic to help set up a channel in Asia and direct and produce documentaries for that channel.

“I jumped at the chance,” he recalls.

Since then his focus has been on making films, but his finely-honed news sense has not disappeared.

A Plastic Ocean initially started life as a documentary about the blue whale, an animal Leeson had been fascinated with since childhood.

But while filming whales in the ocean, far offshore, the camera crew noticed how foul the water was. It was oily on the surface and cloudy beneath with a haze of tiny particles.

The haze was caused by clouds of microplastics, the sand-size particles of plastic that remain as bigger pieces of plastic degrade. And the oil was a combination of the other substances absorbed and carried by the plastic as it broke down.

And all of this was happening in the middle of the ocean, ­nowhere near land or human populations.

Leeson was so appalled by the discovery of the toxic pollution in what should have been a pristine environment that the direction of his documentary changed entirely. It became a search for the origins of this plastic, the story of why it was made, how it was disposed of and what caused it to end up in the ocean as a poisonous cloud.

What he discovered was simultaneously shocking and self-evident, a confirmation of what most of us probably already know about our consumerism, but also the revelation that the damage we are causing is far more insidious than we realise. Because those loosely dispersed expanses of deteriorated plastic create clouds of microplastics beneath the surface and bigger pieces eventually sink to the sea floor.

The microplastics are ingested by tiny animals in the water, or even swallowed with mouthfuls of krill by baleen whales. Bigger pieces are mistaken for food by bigger fish or birds. And one way or another, all this plastic finds its way into food chains.

Including ours.

“Plastic is the most durable substance ever made – every single piece of plastic that has ever been made if it hasn’t been incinerated, is still here somewhere in some form. The Earth is turning into a rubbish bin that is overfilling and spilling over the sides,” Leeson says. “What started out as an oceans documentary actually turned into a human health documentary.”

Leeson says he took great care to do no finger-pointing in his film. He prefers to let the footage speak for itself. He expected the film would take less than two years to complete but it ended up being an eight-year project that took him to 21 countries.

Hollywood heavyweight Leonardo DiCaprio, a keen supporter of environmental causes, came on board as an executive producer of the film to help raise its profile.

Leeson’s new film, The Last Glaciers, was a four-year project that took him to 12 countries, but with the added challenge of the pandemic.

It began as a documentary about extreme sports but again morphed into something with an important environmental message.

Leeson had planned to explore the world of para-alpinism – an increasingly popular sport that combines the pursuit of mountaineering and paragliding, braving his fear of heights to undergo intensive training and undertake an expedition on Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Western Europe.

But when he and fellow travellers Malcolm Wood and Dave Turner arrived to begin their expedition their journey took an unexpected twist.

“When we turned up to film it was the middle of winter but the alps were brown, there was very little snow around,” Leeson reveals.

“Guides explained that this is something that had been happening for the last 30 years and was getting worse, the glaciers were retreating.”

And Leeson, ever the journalist, was curious to know why.

So he spoke to a local meteorologist, which then led him on a quest around the world to find out more about climate change and global warming and the impact it is having, not just on mountains and glaciers but on the planet as a whole.

Leeson says scientists have been studying glaciers for centuries, but it’s only in the past three decades or so that things have dramatically begun to change.

“It morphed from being an extreme sports documentary into a climate change film,” Leeson says of his work.

“The story kept growing as we kept filming, so we had to go to more locations and gather more data. And it became more important.

“We’re going up against a pretty strong industry, saying that burning oil and gas is responsible for what’s happening to the planet.

“We’re putting the audience right in there on the glaciers – having a look at what dying glaciers look like … it’s very emotive, it’s very emotional to see what has taken hundreds of thousands of years to create to disappear in decades.”

He still managed to incorporate plenty of extreme sports, including the moment he flew, in a tandem paraglider, off one of the big peaks of the Andes, in Peru. There are two separate cuts of the film – one is a 100-minute cinematic cut, which will hit cinemas and streaming platforms (details of which streaming service it will appear on are yet to be finalised but Disney and Paramount are among those who have expressed interest), while the other is a 40-minute version created especially for IMAX.

“I cannot tell you how hard it is to condense four years of filming from 12 countries into 100 minutes and then once that’s been done to cut it again … it’s like cutting limbs off your baby,” Leeson says.

It’s fascinating to think that, while Leeson’s journalistic nous has led him on some amazing adventures across the globe, he didn’t always want to be a journalist.

But, looking back, he says he’s pleased he accepted a junior position at the Advocate.

“I never wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to be a vet, then I wanted to be a park ranger and then, because of the success I had as a champion surf boat rower, was offered the job to row competitively for a Queensland surf club,” he explains. “I went to my dad and said ‘I’ve been offered this dream job to train and compete professionally’, but Dad in all his wisdom said ‘that’s great but what happens when you turn 30 and your knees blow out and you don’t have a profession behind you’?

“It all made sense and, nepotism being what it is, he said there’s a position vacant at the Advocate as a copy messenger.

“I started doing that, later discovered I was quite competent at writing and enjoyed it, and it all started from there.”

He says the profession has been a vehicle for many amazing adventures since.

“I can produce these documentaries that can be a historical reference forever and I get a big kick out of that … that’s very, very satisfying,” he says. “I get to work and film with vets. I get to work with park rangers and scientists and all these wonderful people … they take me under their wing and off we go.

“I get to play the role that David Attenborough and others have played in creating awareness. And all those things came about because I’m a journalist. I’m very thankful that my father provided me with what was, obviously, clearly sound advice but at the time it probably seemed like a father lecturing a son. But I guess with me being the fourth generation media entrepreneur in the family, the genetic coding is strong and there’s no escaping.”

Leeson is looking forward to returning to the state in the new year – he’s due to fly into Australia before Christmas and plans to spend time with his sister in Melbourne before hopefully visiting Tasmania (pending covid restrictions) in January.

He was last in the state to give a speech at a Burnie City Council event on Australia Day in 2020, only weeks before the pandemic hit.

So he’s pleased to finally be able to return to visit his parents on the North-West Coast and also attend the revamped Taste of Summer event in Hobart. He still owns a property in South Hobart.

Leeson will also be spending time in Canberra, attending the Australian of the Year ceremony on Australia Day eve.

He feels honoured to have been nominated alongside so many other great representatives and finding out he was chosen as Tasmania’s Australian of the Year had been “absolutely fantastic” for a number of reasons.

“First of all, like most Tasmanians, I am a proud Tasmanian,” he says. “It’s a privilege to be able to work overseas and talk about Tasmania. I think my friends are probably sick to death of me because I’m always talking about Tasmania.

“When my international friends ask me where to go when they’re going to Australia, the first place I say is Tasmania, for obvious reasons.

“And every single person comes back to me after visiting Australia for the first time and says ‘you’re right, Tasmania was the highlight of our trip’. It makes me very proud but it also makes me more determined to protect what we have.”

Leeson, who is the chief executive of Leeson Media International and Ocean Vista Films as well as co-founder of Plastic Oceans International – a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to ending humanity’s single-use plastic addiction within a generation – says hailing from a small island at the bottom of the world prompts people to sit up and take notice.

“Coming from Tasmania makes you a little bit different in the eyes of the international community,” he says. “Many people haven’t met someone from Tasmania before, and people do come up and question me. It gives me an opportunity to talk about the state – up until this point I’ve been somewhat of an unofficial ambassador but now I’ll be able to talk from a more official status.” Leeson says it was a total shock to be nominated – and win – the award and he has no idea who put his name forward.

“I didn’t actually expect it, I don’t know who nominated me, but I thank them for believing in my work,” he says, adding that his work isn’t a solo effort and there are a lot of great people he collaborates with to help realise his vision.

Leeson is calling for Australia’s federal government to help create awareness and screen The

Last Glaciers at Parliament House in Canberra for all political leaders to view.

“I’ll provide the film if they provide the place and time,” he explains.

“I will ask the Prime Minister to do this when I meet him at the Australian of the Year Awards event in Canberra.”

Meanwhile, when Leeson heard Tasmanian Young Australian of the Year for 2022 Kaytlyn Johnson and 2021 winner Toby Thorpe were both going to be in Glasgow for COP26, he invited them to attend a preview screening of his film.

Leeson needs to be back in the US in March for the release of his film with IMAX but has plans to move back to Australia to build his business and spend more time with family and friends.

He’s already got a few projects in the pipeline – he’s been asked to collaborate with a new TV project and his team is already working on another TV series.

He’d also love to finish the whale documentary he originally started, with official announcements expected to be made about some of these projects in the New Year.

“I don’t think I’ll ever run out of stories to tell,” he says.•