Narrabundah's controversial peafowl strutting their stuff in new documentary

Narrabundah’s peafowl are officially movie stars.

Local filmmaker Nathan Collett has taken home the Canberra Short Film Festival’s ‘Best Cinematography’ title and the silver award from the Australian Society of Cinematographers for Lucky Fowl.

The 10-minute documentary shines a light on the colourful birds that have scratched out a living – among cars and foxes – in Canberra’s inner south for more than 30 years.

“A lot of people knew about them, but they may not know the history and community behind them,” Nathan says.

“I wanted to tell the story of how they survive, and how the community feels about them, and show how they struggle to survive against the cars, foxes, and other predators that have a go at them.”

Lucky Fowl premiered at the Byron Short Film Festival in October, followed by two screenings at Dendy Cinemas in the Canberra Centre in November for the Canberra Short Film Festival.

Now Nathan is working to organise community screenings in the new year.

Peafowl, thought to have escaped from the old Mugga Lane zoo, have made Narrabundah their home for more than three decades. They’re normally found in and around La Perouse Street and Carnegie Crescent.

In July 2020, the ACT became the first jurisdiction in Australia to install peafowl crossing signs at four locations along those roads, following 18 months of lobbying by the Save the Narrabundah Peafowl group.

Although born in the United States, Nathan spent a lot of time in the Narrabundah area when his parents moved there when he was young. He also attended Telopea Park School up the road in Barton.

“When I was a kid, there were a few around,” he says.

But he never really thought much of them until 2015 when he was in Africa working as a freelance filmmaker on a project for a tech company, and spotted the peafowl in his newsfeed.

Over the years, the peafowl have graced TV screens in the UK, USA, Russia and in Australia on Channel 10’s The Project.

“I saw it and thought, ‘Wait, what? There’s what in Narrabundah?’.

Nathan returned to Canberra in 2018 and bought a home near his parents. They live “literally on the same street” as the peafowl.

“I see them [peafowl] all the time, when dropping my daughter off to daycare or school, so I basically just started picking up my camera and filming them.”

While in Africa, he’d created a short documentary about the last remaining northern white rhino in Kenya. So he was no stranger to “human-wildlife relationships”.

“This idea we have that extinction is happening out there has always interested me. But it’s kind of us who decide how we’re going to protect this animal,” he says.

Along the way, Nathan met Tim Dewan from Save the Narrabundah Peafowl who contributed interviews to the film. But he was also keen to include “the haters”. And it didn’t take him long to find them.

“There was one guy who, every time he would see me, would say, ‘If you like them so much, take them away to your house’,” Nathan says.

“At first, it really annoyed me. But then I asked him if he wanted to have this conversation on camera, but he refused.”

His original plan was to forego interviews altogether, in favour of incidental shots of the peafowl doing their thing. But Nathan decided he needed a few “talking heads” to give the story more context.

The whole process has taken him a couple of years, between his full-time job in Defence and shooting and editing. But he’s been well and truly buoyed by the reaction to Lucky Fowl.

So what does he think of the peafowl?

“I can’t be pro or anti in the film. But personally, I like them and think they bring a lot of joy, and many of the kids love them,” he says.

“But I still stand to be corrected. So please, if you think that maybe these guys are terrible, let me know and we can make another film.”

Lucky Fowl is expected to be shown in public screenings in 2025.