The father of all battles

The bid to save Tassie’s wilderness is being handed down the generations

Oliver Cassidy wasn’t born when the Franklin Dam controversy took place but he grew up with a deeply ingrained sense of its importance, and a deathbed apology from his late father changed his world view forever. “When Dad was dying, I remember him apologising,” Cassidy says. “He said sorry, on behalf of his whole generation, for not doing enough to protect the planet for my generation. But he was part of this amazing campaign and it had me thinking, well, what else CAN you do? What is enough?”

Cassidy’s father, Mike, was a conservationist and environmental science teacher whose deep love of the Tasmanian wilderness drove him to be active in the campaign against Tasmania’s proposed Franklin River Dam in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Ultimately the campaign waged by conservationists was successful and the dam never went ahead, their style of nonviolent protest and blockade forming the blueprint for countless environmentalist actions to follow in the 40 years since.

Mike fell so completely in love with the Franklin River region that in 1983, around the end of the campaign, he rafted the river with a group of friends just to experience it as purely as possible.

“Mum was pregnant with me at the time, so she stayed back home,” Cassidy laughs. “Dad got home a week before I was born. When they reached Strahan, the first thing he did was call Mum and the first thing he asked was if she was still pregnant, and had she had the baby yet! It took them 18 days to do the trip and they had no contact with the outside world all that time. It’s kind of amazing to imagine somewhere so remote these days.”

Cassidy, 36, grew up in Launceston surrounded by these stories of adventure and doing a lot of outdoor activities but it was only after losing his father to cancer in 2012 that Oliver was looking through his dad’s old bushwalking diaries and discovered the account of that rafting trip.

“Dad kept a lot of bushwalking diaries but the one he wrote

Burgess says. “We’re hoping it will be an inspiring masterclass in running an effective social change campaign — the years of training and strategising and running it like a military operation. For the people who lived through it, there’s the nostalgia of reliving that campaign, the ‘Greenies in beanies’, through to Bob Hawke’s election and the High Court decision that finally killed the dam project.”

The Franklin campaign was 40 years ago but for some people the bitterness towards the conservationists remains, making it still a touchy subject all these years later.

Cassidy says it was important to him to try and be sympathetic to those pro-dam voices in the film as well.

“Yeah it still divides people, which is fascinating. You need to remember there is a reason for it, because this campaign affected people’s livelihoods. “A lot of people on the West Coast wanted the dam to go ahead. The way they saw it, it was about employment, putting food on their tables, and that’s not a trifling matter to ignore. It’s almost a luxury that we can fight to preserve things that aren’t immediately about us or a part of us.

“People still use the term ‘Greenie’ in a negative sense all these years later,” Burgess says. “That term was coined for Bob Brown and his group. So a lot of people do still think of this image of dreadlocked, smelly, hippy greenies and ask ‘what did they ever achieve’, but the truth is they achieved a lot. And now that struggle is so closely linked to the campaign against the Adani coal mine, the fight to protect the Tarkine, and all those other current situations people are now fighting to save and fix.”

Even though there are still two very firmly entrenched camps on either side of those current battlegrounds, Burgess and Cassidy say the clearest difference now is that even the people who once clung to the status quo at all costs were becoming more open to admitting there was an issue to be addressed.

“The thing is, everything anyone is doing to turn climate change around, IS about preserving us and maintaining our livelihoods and way of life. It’s just on different scale to the immediate concern of putting food on the table tonight. Adaptation is important, and helping make changes that will benefit their own kids down the line. We’re not going to have all the answers straight away, it’s a complicated thing.”

Meanwhile, the toughest part of the film shoot is yet to come: that rafting adventure down the Franklin.

Cassidy has done a limited amount of rafting previously, but nothing quite on this scale. And Burgess, who will have to follow along to film everything, has even less experience.

So, well, it will certainly be an adventure.

“Yeah I’m nervous,” Cassidy laughs. “I’m trying to get myself fit for it and I’m sure it will have some hairy moments. We have done a kind of practice trip on the Arthur River, just for a couple of days, to shoot some footage for our sizzle reel. Essentially, you have to be prepared for everything to be submerged at some point. Dad went down the Franklin in a rubber duckie. In his diaries he said a branch or a rock would rip a hole in it almost daily. And there was this whole process, pulling over to the side of the river, starting a fire in a wet rainforest, drying the raft out so you could apply a patch to it, then setting off again. Modern rafts are a lot more durable so I’m hoping I don’t have that much trouble.”

Burgess is thinking of a little bit more than just the cost of puncture repair kits, though.

“One of my big challenges will be doing justice to the beauty and majesty of that river, because I’ll be shooting it as well as coming along for the journey, so I’ll have my hands pretty full. The logistics of that are pretty intense. I’ll have to bring along all my power supply, batteries, memory cards, cameras, drone, computers, all these delicate instruments, keep them dry and safe. I just hope they all survive the trip! Along with us, too, of course!”

The producers of Dark Water: Battle on the Franklin are running a crowd funding campaign from February 11 to March 5. For more information or to make a donation, visit documentaryaustralia.com.au/project/dark-water-battle-on-the-franklin/

Further information can be found at www.facebook.com/franklinrivermovie or http://franklinriver.movie/