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Friday, 13th Aug, 2021
Online
04.00PM – Daniel Muggleton – Stand-up Comic
04.10PM – Hugh Brown – GARIMPEIROS: The prospector’s Quest for a Better Life
04.50PM – Happy Hour – Q&A + Networking
Hugh Brown
Hugh Brown is a multiple best-selling author and Australian documentary photographer. His current major project documents the world’s artisanal miners, working in some of the world’s most extreme and difficult working conditions.
Despite the fact that there are estimated to be 40 million of these miners directly employed, and an additional 240 million indirectly employed,– about three percent of the world’s population – virtually nothing is known about them by the developed world.
More recently artisanal mining has been caught by the Responsible Sourcing movement sweeping the globe. Major decisions are being taken affecting these miners’ lives and without care there’s a significant risk of unintended consequences impacting not just these miners but the global whole.
Hugh is driven to raising awareness about artisanal mining while also steering people to appreciate the many nuances characterising it. That in turn this will lead to better decision-making so as not to disenfranchise this large section of some of the world’s most disadvantaged people.
The output will be a major coffee table book, a series of exhibitions passing through the world’s major cities and a feature documentary film shot in 360 12k VR.
It is also Hugh’s dream to establish a charitable trust to provide education scholarships to children of artisanal mining communities around the world.
40 million men, women and children around the world mine with their bare hands like the old prospectors did in the mid 19th Century.
These people are called Artisanal and Small-Scale Miners (“ASM”) and if one was to ask people in the developed world what they knew of these miners the answer would be zero.
Amazing really when you consider that ASM incorporates some of the most difficult aspects of humanity. Extreme poverty. Dangerous working conditions. Human trafficking, slavery and child labour. Conflict minerals. Environmental degradation. Extremism.
ASM is not all good, and it’s not all bad. The challenge for all of us is to be able to pull out the best bits of ASM, while sanitising the bad. Working with the miners rather than abandoning them because things get too hard.
In this talk Hugh takes us all on a journey to some of the poorest places in the world and brings back images of a huge section of the third world that most people have never heard of.
In this 11 year project Hugh has been to some of the more difficult places on the planet, and, through his photographs, hopes to drive awareness of this huge section of the world’s population so better decisions can be made about their futures.
