John Dean

“On the wall of my bedroom [as a child] there was a very early map of Tasmania, and it showed two areas—one in the northeast and one in the southwest—marked “Unexplored: covered with impenetrable horizontal scrub and bauera.” And maybe not consciously, but I think I thought, maybe the only way to explore these areas is to do it by river.”

One clear spring morning in 1950, a vintage twin engine Monospar spluttered into life at the Western Junction airport at Evandale, not far from the northern Tasmanian city of Launceston. Charting a course over the Western Tiers, the plane continued over Lake St Clair and then deep into Tasmania’s mountainous southwest. Soon it was flying below the tops of the peaks, and the aircraft’s twin engines echoed off the hillsides as it pursued a snaking a course down a tremendous valley full of gorges, sheer cliffs, and tumultuous white water. On board was 24-year-old John Dean, and he was scouting a river that had never been paddled: the Franklin.

Dean grew up in Evandale, not far from the South Esk River, and was the youngest child with considerably older brothers. “He always felt he had to prove himself,” says Annette Dean, his daughter. Exploration and adventure was one way of doing so, and the nearby South Esk River exerted a magnetic pull on John