NATURAL ATTRACTION

More than 20 years after his untimely death, Peter Dombrovskis remains a giant of Tasmanian nature photography. Many talented photographers have followed in his footsteps, creating images of breathtaking beauty, but Dombrovskis’ body of work still stands apart. Though no longer with us, he remains the master. Maybe, suggests local nature photographer Rob Blakers, it’s because none of his best images can be improved upon.

“Even now, three decades and more after many of his images were made, the finest of these have not been matched,” Blakers said at the recent Hobart launch of an eponymous new book, subtitled Journeys Into the Wild, dedicated to Dombrovskis’ work drawn from the National Library of Australia, which holds a 2000-strong trove of his images.

Some of these were instrumental in environmental campaigns. Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, was reproduced a million times over the last four years of the No Dams campaign protesting the damming of the Franklin River.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown, who wrote the book’s introduction, had asked Dombrovskis if he would consider rafting down the Franklin to capture it visually, an expedition he made three times between 1979 and 1981, as the campaign intensified.

It was laborious work. Dombrovskis used a large format view camera for his landscape photography, heavier and bulkier to carry than a standard 35mm SLR camera, but able to capture images in unsurpassed vividness and detail. Brown, accustomed to the tiny 35mm slides of the day, remembers being stunned by Dombrovskis’ postcard-sized transparencies yielded from the Franklin trips, and leaping to his feet galvanised when Rock Island Bend hit the light box.

Brown had photographed the same scene with rafters a few years before and used his black and white shot for the first Wilderness Society poster in the campaign to save the river. Now Dombrovskis had given the scene a dimension of such exquisite beauty and mystical reality that it became arguably the No Dams campaign’s most effective tool.

It remains the most famous photograph Dombrovskis took, but he didn’t think his image of the Franklin bending before its waters flowed down the Newland Cascades to the river’s tranquil lower reaches was his best. Readers will enjoy deciding for themselves their bests among equals in the stunning array of images reproduced in this book. Brown writes reverentially about Lake Oberon, a view of the glacial lake with its sphagnum-yellow meadow and trio of pandani, taken from the track on the Western Arthur Range.

But it was an image taken at one of Dombrovskis’ favourite places, Mount Geryon, that Brown chose to hang as a nearfloor to ceiling print in his parliamentary suite over his 16 years as a senator, where he could cope with the ridiculous by gazing at the sublime.

The Photography of Peter Dombrovskis, Journeys Into the Wild, published by NLA, $39.99, is available at Wild Island gallery at Salamanca and local bookshops