Pedder Dreaming

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Tags: summer-2011, UQP

Pedder Dreaming by Natasha Cica

An edited excerpt from Pedder Dreaming, published by UQP

Together and apart, we Tasmanians have woven a dense web of myth around our heart-shaped home of islands. Pull on any thread, and quite a lot more than you’ve bargained for can unravel.

So how could I even think of writing about Olegas Truchanas – undoubtedly, the stuff of Tasmanian legend? How could I not?

Olegas Truchanas stands quietly among the 20th century’s most influential wilderness photographers, explorers, conservationists and democrats. He arrived in Tasmania from Lithuania in 1949, and across the next quarter of a century subtly but surely crafted the modern frame through which we now interpet the beauty and value of Tasmania’s wild places.

He climbed mountains, journeyed down rivers, and campaigned to save forests and lakes from destruction at a time when it was neither fashionable nor widely intelligible. His efforts to save Lake Pedder were at the heart of Australia’s first globally noticed environmental battle, a battle that was also fiercely personal: Olegas risked his livelihood by speaking out publicly against his employer, Tasmania’s powerful Hydro-Electric Commission, which planned to flood the lake, in a community where most people were more comfortable toeing the line.

Through his photography, Olegas brought an Old World sensibility, and sense of civil society, to a corner of the New World struggling to develop and express its own authentic self. In 1972 Olegas drowned on an expedition down the Gordon River in south-west Tasmania. True to form, he had travelled there to bear witness to its remarkable beauty, to document, and to protect. He died young, at the age of 48, but his work had already laid the foundations for the Green political organisations in Tasmania and far beyond.

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