Sunday Examiner Brief: UQPRESS Sunday 2/10/2011 Page 1 of 6 Page: 1 Section: Sunday Magazine Region: Launceston TAS Circulation: 39,684 Type: News Item Size: 2,657.28 sq.cms. Published: ------S SuncilpyC COi C° , AS 1972 and a bathe to save the pristine .Lake Truchanas was an outstanding wilderness' Pedder in Tasmania's wild South.*fest was lost. photographer who spent countless hours capturing STORY: Tasmania's dense bushland, forests and water. PAGE C4-05 Before the environmental movement as we understand it today, Lithuanian refugee Olegas Cica retells his story through recollections of those Picture 0.gas Flatboat. Truchanas and a group of Hobart artists spent who were close to him, accompanied by The;kmOs. toah.d 0/..m1 years passionately campaigning to save the Truchanas's original photographs. Solitary and toadies Maria Creek and Ltd. Maria freshwater lake. Inside is an extract of the story that explores the beyond...a Pandatrans.mocy.Courtesy Their fight paved the way for Tasmania's raw beauty and vulnerability of Tasmania's Maio Traci-ulnas Iowa conservation success in the future, writes Natasha wilderness and the legacy of a man who had the Peltier Dreami,..gas Truchanas and a Loot Cica in a new Tasmanian book, Pedder Dreaming. vision to fight for it Tasmantan Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) licenced copy Ref: 117891879 Sunday Examiner Brief: UQPRESS Sunday 2/10/2011 Page 2 of 6 Page: 1 Section: Sunday Magazine Region: Launceston TAS Circulation: 39,684 Type: News Item Size: 2,657.28 sq.cms. A tributePublished: ------S to pristine Pedder 'There is no comparison. Today's lake is beautiful. Yesterday's was exquisite' Natasha Cica's book Pedder Dreaming tells the story of wilderness photographer Olegas Truchanas and his fight to preserve Lake Pedder. The following is an extract from the book T'S Easter Sunday and I am lost was there, winter, you know. You in Tasmania's South-West. couldn't go much out." Safely, warmly but definitely Did he see the old lake? lost, in a car that's taken a -No. Water was coming from dumb wrong turn too soon off Strathgordon, very dark, dirty water the main tourist road that black." wriggles its way past the Where I am now is clean, warm and Derwent1 Valley. through Maydena, past light, so blinding I have to close my eyes tree-affixed banners screaming STOP! in long, fuzzy blinks. ROAD TO CLIMATE CHANGE and The car grinds along a white gravel FLORENTINE: HOWARD'S BROKEN road studded with prickly dark green PROMISE, then on to Strathgordon and stubble, a track really, that ends the Gordon Dam. abruptly. I haven't set foot in this country for I get out and stand in a clearing in the nearly two decades. scrub. It's filled with squat wooden bee Fifteen years before that, at the start boxes, each pinned down with a heavy of the 1970s, my father Marko worked white rock, as though at risk of blowing out here for the Hydro, as a mechanical away. fitter in the workshop at Strathgordon. I retrace my steps and end up where So did his brother Nikola, as a guest I'm supposed to be. The boat ramp at worker from Yugoslavia for a year, McPartlan Pass. labouring on the Gordon Dam. -It was shocking," Marko says. "There was no civilizacija really, on the Gordon River nothing around." Road, McPartlan Pass is a Aside from the workers' barracks, LOCATEDstructural centrepiece of the there was a motel, a petrol station and a Gordon River power development. few houses. Named after a convict transported to -A lot of people worked on the tunnel, Tasmania for being illegally armed at it was a big job, a big construction. an unlawful assembly, who was later a There were all nationalities: Italians, member of the surveying party that Greeks, Yugoslays, Australian. mapped a route through the pass in -It mostly was cold weather when I 1881. it controls the transfer of water Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) licenced copy Ref: 117891879 Sunday Examiner Brief: UQPRESS Sunday 2/10/2011 Page 3 of 6 Page: 1 Section: Sunday Magazine Region: Launceston TAS Circulation: 39,684 Type: News Item Size: 2,657.28 sq.cms. Published: ------S between the current Lake Pedder and he was Commissioner Sir Allan Lake Gordon. Knight's right-hand man and reputedly The webs ite of Hydro Tasmania, the the brains behind the hydro-electric corporate successor to the Hydro- scheme that inundated Lake Pedder. Electric Commission, dryly describes The National Library of Australia this engineering feat in terms of holds almost 700 photographs, draglines and dozers, spillways and transparencies and negatives taken in supply levels. black-and-white and colour by Russ Russ Ashton was commissioner of theAshton between 1948 and 1989, which Hydro between 1977 and 1987, through mainly depict the activities of the the political and constitutional conflictHydro. that saw the construction of the Gordon-A small selection of titles gives a below-Franklin dam halted: before that, F14.47" Olegas Truchanas. Beams of light at sunset spotlight changing weather pattern-sat Lake Pedder, transparency C.1 g 70 Couitesy Melva Truchanas. Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) licenced copy Ref: 117891879 Sunday Examiner Brief: UQPRESS Sunday 2/10/2011 Page 4 of 6 Page: 1 Section: Sunday Magazine Region: Launceston TAS Circulation: 39,684 Type: News Item Size: 2,657.28 sq.cms. Published: ------S flavour of the times, and mindset of its camp and in this atmosphere and under creator: brilliant stars, having a sip of whisky, Gordon River investigation camp and listening to a battery radio. near Albert Rapids, below the -Who should we hear, in his usual Serpentine River Junction, Tasmania, jokey fashion, but Timothy Gibson Hydro-Electric Commission first Albert Bowden Bill and I knew him well. Rapids reconnaissance, ca 1948. Bloody Bowden comes in out of the >- Tents beside felled log and dirt celestial sphere!" road, with hut in background, bright red Zodiac boat glides Tasmania, ca 1955. to the ramp at the edge of Lake ). Beaver amphibious aircraft and THEPedder. party at Lake Pedder beach, Hydro- I crunch across more white gravel, Electric Commission flight to Lake clamber in, and we speed off. Pedder, Tasmania, ca 1958. It's a perfect autumn day, cut like )1,- Gauge on the Gordon River, crystal. The sky and air and water are downstream from Gordon Dam, all shades of ozone. Tasmania, ca 1960. My hosts navigate around looming Isobel Ashton with Lake Pedder in islands, an engineered archipelago of the background, during filling of the ancient forested hilltops that cast black lake, Tasmania, ca 1973. shadows on our pale blue pond. ). Lake Pedder at full level, looking We're zooming through a Max Angus down grassy ridge with four-wheel-drive watercolour that someone has pulled track, Tasmania, ca 1974. into astonishingly sharp focus. But the human truth is likely to be I'm soon lost, again, as we swerve and more complex. turn then cut across open water, the lake still sheltered by mountains. When Russ Ashton became Hydro There's a campsite on the beach. commissioner he reputedly kept a photograph of the original Lake Pedder We spend this Easter Sunday eating hanging on the wall in Sir Allan's old and sprawling in the white light, even office. brighter than before, bouncing off every tiny face of the sharp-edged quartz rocks around us. 4wE CAMPED on one of the There's no sand here. This beach is sand dunes," recalls former too young. So hot, we strip off and swim Tasmanian governor Sir Guy in peat-stained watermy feet beneath Green about his last visit to Lake me look like amber aliens. Pedder before the flooding. Then floating, staring at air bubbles He walked in with fellow lawyer Bill trapped on the lake's vast blue surface, Cox, who also went on to become like a trail of pearls stretching to the governor. Frankland Range. -I remember looking at the lake, this I imagine secret schools of galaxias black shimmer in the distance. It was pedderensis endangered since the really quite hypnotic. flooding, since fat brown trout gorged -And the great white beach, perhaps iton the native fish and swimming was moonlit. And then to go back to the Extract from Pedder Dreaming: Olegas Truchanas and a Lost Tasmanian Wilderness by Natasha Cica. (UQP $59.95) Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) licenced copy Ref: 117891879 Sunday Examiner Brief: UQPRESS Sunday 2/10/2011 Page 5 of 6 Page: 1 Section: Sunday Magazine Region: Launceston TAS Circulation: 39,684 Type: News Item Size: 2,657.28 sq.cms. Published: ------S after them to the horizon. I am as happy which we view one by one on a huge as a baby. mechanical lantern. It's so quiet too, the whole day we see By now I've already seen hundreds of just one fishing boat and a solitary photographs of the original lake. kayak, on the far horizon of our Here are more of them, stretching heavenly shelter. back half a century, yet timeless, drawn Night there falls fast, with a kind of from that palette of translucent pink thud, then there's no light from and blue and yellow and green, so anything, so it's a race to reach the boat familiar to me now I've started ramp in time. dreaming in these colours. We get lost, more seriously this time. There's my favourite, a plate from a We try not to panic; we don't have to, book on Lake Pedder that Elspeth we're soon back at McPartlan Pass.