Good Neighbours is a short documentary that explores the hidden journey of Australia’s discarded clothing to the Solomon Islands. Every year, Australians buy an average of 55 garments and throw away 23 kilograms of clothing per capita, much of it ending up in secondhand markets overseas. Fashion researcher Tiziana Ferrero-Regis travels to Honiara to investigate how these cast-offs shape local lives, landscapes, and economies.

Produced by Associate Professor Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, directed by Associate Professor Phoebe Hart and co-written by Dr Zoe Mellick with Rev Dr Ben Wate, Good Neighbours was officially selected for the 2026 Green Film Festival of San Francisco. The festival showcases films that inspire audiences to engage with environmental and social justice issues and provides an international platform for impactful environmental storytelling.

We initially launched the documentary at the QUT Centre for Justice and Design Lab's Design for a Just World symposium in 2025, which attracted coverage through ABC Radio, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and QUT News. We also screened Good Neighbours at the 2026 CERN-APAC Conference in Australia and the 2026 Screenwriting Research Network Conference in the UK, and it is published in Issue 8 of Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy. The film has also informed a QUT Centre for Justice briefing paper on the impacts of Australia's second-hand clothing exports to Pacific communities.

Australia's second-hand clothing trade with the Solomon Islands has environmental and social consequences, and Good Neighbours highlights both the opportunities and challenges created by global clothing flows and encourages audiences to reconsider the afterlife of donated garments. As the first Australian documentary investigation of the secondhand clothing trade between Australia and the Solomon Islands, Good Neighbours generates new knowledge about the relationship between Australia's clothing donation culture and environmental burdens in the Solomon Islands.

Through interviews, observation and collaborative documentary production, the film shows that imported SHC supports women's livelihoods and small businesses while creating significant waste-management challenges. It documents low-quality synthetic garments rapidly entering local waste streams, straining limited infrastructure and polluting coastal ecosystems.

As director, hartflicker's Phoebe Hart said about Good Neighbours, "I wanted to create a work that does not just inform but moves people visually and aurally toward action. It is a call for empathy, cultural sensitivity, and sustainable practices because the choices we make in our wardrobes ripple far beyond our shores."

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