Director Anthony ‘Ash’ Brennan
Narrated by Basia Bonkowski
Score 6/6

Punks for West Papua is an Australia wide movement, and the brainchild of Jody Bartolo. Jody and his band ‘Diggers with Attitude’ spearhead Punks for West Papua with the aim to raise money and awareness for the Free West Papua cause.
The genocide of the West Papuan people at the hands of the Indonesian military, is one of the saddest yet rarely told stories of modern times. West Papua, a land of untold riches, was hijacked with a violent and rigged vote by Indonesia in 1969. With the support of Australia, the USA and the United Nations, the Indonesian Military have slaughtered nearly half a million indigenous West Papuans in the years since, all in the name of a mountain of gold.

I’ve been meaning to watch another documentary directed by Anthony ‘Ash’ Brennan for about a year and even with my level of procrastination I knew that I was going to watch another one sooner or later. For those of you out there who want to watch Punks for West Papua you should be able to find it on Vimeo-on-Demand, also be sure to watch the interview with Benny Wenda.
The opening moments of Punks for West Papua were something that really grabbed my attention and led me down the garden path of thinking that was going to be music documentary about a concert. It was that kind of. But the music took a back seat to something important the genocide of the West Papuan people at the hands of the Indonesian military and this certainly is the type of documentary that asks a lot of questions, the kind of questions some politicians might find it to be awfully uncomfortable to answer and probably hope that they will not have to answer. I knew a tiny bit about the history discussed the documentary and I found what Australian journalist Hugh Lunn who reported on the Act of Free Choice in West Papua in ’69 to be very interesting. Punk music didn’t take a back seat for the entire documentary and towards the end there was an interesting point made by Stuart Coupe about Australia’s contribution to Punk music and the musicians featured in the documentary made a couple of poniente definitions of what punk music is, one of the definitions being that ‘Punk music is protest music but with balls’.