CONSERVATION THROUGH THE LENS
Wilderness photography and conservation have had a long association in Tasmania.
DURING THE 1860S, PAUL Ricochet and Morton Allport became the first Tasmanian photographers to point their lenses into the wild, when they lugged fragile glass plates into the state’s centre to produce images of
Lake St Clair.
In the decades that followed, the Spurling family and John Watt Beattie brought landscape images into people’s lives through magic lantern shows (where exposed glass plates were placed in lantern boxes that projected images onto screens). In 1904 Beattie used his lantern slides to try to dissuade the government from selling part of the Freycinet Peninsula, on the state’s east coast. Four years later, he used images of the Gordon River, on the west coast, in a campaign to have a reserve on its banks enlarged.
During the 1920s, Fred Smithies travelled Australia with handcoloured slides to showcase the natural beauty of Tasmania’s wild places and campaign for their protection.
From 1954, Olegas Truchanas extensively explored and photographed Tasmania’s wild rivers and Lake Pedder, using his images to champion efforts to save the lake from its eventual flooding. Truchanas paved the way for photographers such as Peter Dombrovskis, whose 1979 photograph Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend was pivotal in preventing the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam.
Since the 1980s, photographers such as Rob Blakers and Grant Dixon have continued the wilderness photography tradition. Today, they are members of Nature Photographers Tasmania, an organisation that encourages contemporary photographers to use their images to promote conservation efforts.
Since the group formed in 2007, its members have photographed places such as the Vale of Belvoir (see Tasmania’s veiled beauty, AG 98), Skullbone Plains, the Blue Tiers and Gordonvale. Through the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, they’ve made their images freely available to environmental groups working to protect these wild, beautiful places.
The combination of steep terrain and uneven ground meant we often only travelled 1km/hr. There are no handrails, ladders or any safety aids and the only signs of human interference are intermittent boardwalks, stepping-stones, campsites (boarded to prevent erosion and plant degradation) and the track’s infamous toilets, which are dropped in by helicopters.
DESPITE THE CHALLENGES OF the track, being in such a wild, raw and beautiful place was overwhelming. As we explored the range, I was continually dumbstruck by how striking the landscape is, and couldn’t help but wonder what Dombrovskis would have felt when he traversed the Western Arthurs. “When you go out there, you don’t get away from it all; you get back to it all,” he wrote in 1979. “You come home to what’s important, you come back to yourself.”
His famous image of the three pandani framing a mist-shrouded Lake Oberon was captured in 1988, some 29 years before our visit. His widow, Liz Dombrovskis, tells me that after setting up for and composing the image, a process that generally required at least 45 minutes, he noticed his tent was visible in the frame.
Such was his dedication to the craft that he remarkably decided to take the 250m vertical descent to his campsite on the shores of Lake Oberon to dismantle his tent and hide it in the bushes. He then made the precarious clamber back up the cirque wall and captured the now-famous photograph.
Dombrovskis visited the Western Arthurs frequently, and he often did so solo. Carrying what must have been close to 30kg of camping and photography equipment and provisions would have been no mean feat.
Such is the unpredictability of the weather in southwestern Tasmania that on one expedition, Dombrovskis didn’t capture a single image during a 10-day walk along the Port Davey Track, which cuts through the Arthur Plains at the base of the towering mountains.
While camped on the shores of Lake Oberon, we woke in our tents to winds roaring across the range with gusts of up to 100km/h. A southerly, blowing unobstructed for thousands of kilometres across the Southern Ocean, was crashing into the mountains with absolute ferocity. Our tent pegs were ripped out of the ground and our tent walls bent and f lexed and f lapped in the pelting rain. Just metres away, the surface of Lake Oberon was whipped into a series of white-capped waves.
The weather may have been particularly unwelcoming, but the scenery was spectacular. You can’t help but be spellbound by the grandeur and majesty of the Western Arthur Range, and we became entranced by its wild beauty.
The pure wilderness of this rugged landscape lured Dombrovskis back time after time. As a photographer, I can understand why. It is the most incredible scenery I have ever witnessed. The images Dombrovskis captured are so powerful that he has inspired a new generation of photographers to experience and capture images of Tasmania’s remote places for themselves. For me, there is no place more wild or beautiful than the Western Arthurs, and I owe my experiences to Dombrovskis, whose images led me to such an extraordinary place.