RESTORE PEDDER NOW
THE EARLY DAYS
by Bob Brown
Patron of the Bob Brown Foundation & Former Leader of the Australian Greens
POWERFUL MEN LIED, CHEATED AND BULLIED their way to flooding the Lake Pedder National Park in 1972, but citizens raised a heart-rending campaign to save it and, unlike the ardour for its destruction, that campaign is yet to run its course.
Aboriginal Tasmanians witnessed the reformation of the lake, high in the mountains of the Tasmanian wilderness, as the last Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago. Records of an Aboriginal village in the nearby Vale of Rasselas, upstream beside the Gordon River, point to people walking on the lake’s beach millennia before engineers from the Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC) came in the 1960s to flood it.
The beach of fine, pinkish-white quartzite sand was more than three kilometres long (the same distance as the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Railway Square) and, in summer, was 800m wide and backed by high, vegetated sand dunes; the latter provided fine camping sites protected from the Roaring Forties winds.
Within 170 years of the British colony at Hobart, Lake Pedder and its national park, declared in 1955, was obliterated by Tasmania’s rampaging Hydro-Electric Commission. The remarkable sequel is that, fifty years later, the campaign to restore the lake is gathering a winning momentum, a momentum which awaits the political will and common sense of federal and Tasmanian leaders keen on restoring rather than ravaging the wilds. As the people, including scientists, led the lake’s defence in the 1960s and 1970s, so now they lead in its restoration.
A doyen of the campaigners, Melva Truchanas, made many trips to the Lake Pedder National Park. She became chairwoman of the Lake Pedder Action Committee and,
