A renowned wildlife advocate who helped spearhead the campaign to end Japanese whaling in the Antarctic has been awarded the prestigious Peter Singer Lifetime Achievement Award.
The award by the Animal Justice Foundation (AJF) recognises decades of tireless work in championing animal rights.
His career spans more than 40 years, and throughout those years, he has highlighted the need for the protection of wildlife by making documentaries.
McIntyre said he was humbled by the award.
‘One of my earliest memories is joining the Save the Whale movement as a teenager, and getting detentions in high school for selling badges and bumper stickers in the school grounds. It just seemed crazy to me that Australia was still killing whales’.
Whaling stops in ’78
‘I vividly remember in 1978, when the Malcolm Fraser government announced Australia would be putting a stop to whaling, and the recovery of this wildlife species has been a true environmental success story,’ McIntyre said.
In the 1980s, the young filmmaker started his career, working on Hollywood films including Mad Max with Mel Gibson, and Evil Angels (the Lindy Chamberlain story) with Meryl Streep, while continuing to hone his skills as a documentary maker.
In 1992, McIntyre co-founded Whales Alive, developing an education and training program for whale watch operators and was invited by the United Nations to convene the first whale watching workshop in the Pacific Islands in Tonga, which was contemplating a request by Japan to start commercial whaling of their humpback whale populations.
‘Since then, Tonga has gone on to become one of the world’s premier whale watching destinations,’ said McIntyre.
This led to McIntyre investigating a new film.
‘We spent five years traveling around Australia, gathering stories about kangaroos, speaking to landholders and whistleblowers from the commercial kill industry and witnessing for ourselves the brutal slaughter of our native wildlife.’
McIntyre co-directed Kangaroo, a Love Hate Story, which was released in 2018 to critical acclaim. This led to large corporates stopping the use of kangaroo skins and meat in their products.
‘Back home in Australia, the release of the film was not so positive. We were labelled traitors and un-Australian,’ McIntyre said.
McIntyre added it was this backlash that compelled them to establish not-for-profit org, Kangaroos Alive.
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