Interview with Jana Enriquez

Image: Jana Enriquez

Moving from the Philippines to Fawkner in Melbourne would be a big change in anyone’s life. Anything that can help newcomers discover the local landscape and community is vitally important. For Jana Enriquez, the Merri Creek has done just that.

Jana Enriquez is a young animator and filmmaker who came to Australia in 2020. During the COVID-lockdown, Jana found herself needing “…a little nature back in her life” and she was drawn to the apparent wildness of Merri Creek, a place where “….I'm gonna go on a little adventure ...”

Jana was so delighted by Merri Creek and its history, she decided to make a film about it. She searched for information on the internet. Wiki Northia and Friends of Merri Creek websites provided useful links to important oral history:“I was like,….. Oh, I just hit the jackpot. This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted that social history. Like real personal history that people had with Merri Creek during that time.” In conjunction with her ACMI residency, Jana’s film (a work in progress) is described in the blurb below. 

“Merri Creek Freeway presents the tenacious efforts of Melbourne’s northern suburbs to protect, at the time, a polluted creek from a widely touted visionary transportation plan: a plan which remains influential to the city’s urban development nearly 60 years later. The multimedia format reanimates the local history remembered mostly from disconnected archived news clippings, audio recordings, and even inflammatory posters, uniquely providing special attention to the emotional experience of those who lived through it.”

Inspired by the work of Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Jana Enriquez’s work uses an intriguing mix of photograph montage, oral history excerpts and loose animation to tell a story about the Merri Creek. As Jana puts it, it’s a “collage style, that was mostly born out of restriction…” as footage of the creek in the 60s and 70s is rare.  Jana’s approach neatly draws her collected static information together in a lively visual format to evoke, in the first section of the film, the fun local kids had playing down in the creek in the 1960s and 70s.

Her next step is to visually tackle the decline of the creek’s health during that period and highlight the community effort to stop the freeway and restore the creek: the important events that gave birth to the Friends of the Merri Creek in 1976.

After a lot more animation and interviews with local people, Jana hopes to share her film with the community and ultimately donate her work to Merri Bek library, where the story can be kept in perpetuity. We wish her luck with her project and look forward to seeing the final cut of “The Merri Creek Freeway” film.

Image from Merri Creek Freeway by Jana Enriquez