Vandals and angels
FINDING myself with 25 minutes between appointments in Hobart’s city centre this week, I wander aimlessly along Elizabeth St looking in shop windows.
I ogle guitars on display behind the glass storefront in McCann’s Music Centre, one of which whispers seductively to me as I walk past.
“Forget the home renovations,” the electric beauty murmurs with the breathy urgency of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy
Birthday. “I want you, you want me, take me home, we were meant to be.”
I peer into Shanghai King Bun and read the delicious menu, and find myself having to resist another steamy delight. I marvel at the restaurant’s logo, a dumpling cartoon character with eyes like saucers. It pokes out its tongue as I pass.
I admire rows of vinyl LPs in Tommy Gun Records and it reminds me of the thousands I lost in a house fire 20 years ago. I still miss them. There’s something about an LP that will always surpass music streaming, the artwork is so palpable and present.
Then I come across an odd little alcove under the new University of Tasmania accommodation building where an outdoor video screen is showing a film. Light drizzle falls. The cove is hardly welcoming, it’s cold and impersonal, a grey concrete waiting area with the ambience of an airport departure lounge.
The cove unnervingly reminds me of a scene out of a Jacques Tati movie. There’s no seats just plastic grass glued on concrete blocks that are OK for reclining as long as you don’t plan staying too long.
This cove is for waiting while between engagements, bound for elsewhere.
Sitting on a slab next to bizarre sculptures of large ants, a wombat, an emu and a goanna, I feel like Samuel Beckett’s character Vladimir with the fleeting thought that at any moment Godot will arrive to give me and this strange inner-city purgatory some meaning or context.
On the video screen there are images of the pink quartz beach of Tasmania’s original Lake Pedder. I can only just hear the movie and the words of those talking at the camera. It is a film about the lake before it was flooded in 1972 to become a hydroelectric dam.
It’s difficult to comprehend, but the Tasmanian government actually paid to make this film about the priceless scenic gem it was about to destroy in a perverse act that in hindsight is reminiscent of a serial killer keeping a secret trophy cabinet of heads and trinkets.
But I can’t look away. I am captivated by the beauty now buried under miles of water.
Pedder’s beach was usually submerged in winter to be gradually revealed as summer approached and the water receded. Fully revealed it was about 3.5km long and 600m wide and was surrounded by the Frankland Ranges, rimmed by rainforest and buttongrass plains. The film shows it was breathtaking.
Olegas Truchanas, a Lithuanian immigrant and father of Tasmanian wilderness photography, tells of the genuine lake’s unmatched glory as does late photographer Frank Bolt and artists Max Angus and Patricia Giles, who camped at the beach for 12 days to capture its spirit on canvas and paper before it was inundated. Their somewhat reserved appeals to save the lake are made with a sense of resignation. They seemed to know the loss of this magical place was inevitable.
“For any community to destroy something as beautiful as that, where it need not be destroyed, seems to be an act of vandalism not the act of a civilised community,” says London-born Tasmanian poet Clive Sansom so eloquently.
The movie rolls on and visiting Chinese university students wander back and forth past the screen to their UTAS accommodation.
I wonder what the students make of the movie. Do they know of Pedder? Have they stopped to watch the film on their way to get a steamed bun down the road? Do they care?
Probably not, but nor do the two young ruffians with skateboards under their arms chatting up girls while waiting for takeaway coffees at The Stagg across the road. Pedder is unlikely to have featured on the Facebook feeds of these likely lads. I doubt they have even heard of the lost lake.
Just before I collapse into inconsolable melancholy about the future of magical
places at the hands of this dysfunctional, fragmented and so often soulless era of human expansion, it dawns on me that Truchanas knew little of Tasmania before he arrived.
Perhaps one of the Chinese students rushing past is our next great Tasmanian wilderness artist. Perhaps one will stop to wonder what this grainy old film is about and the awareness and awakening will begin. Perhaps this island’s grace will seduce yet another spirit, a guardian angel for the wilds. Perhaps there is hope.
Few know Tasmania as well as author Pete Hay, he has written about it for decades, and in his latest book Forgotten Corners: Essays in
Search of an Island’s Soul he makes the sage observation: “You don’t inherit place. You commit to it. You take its meanings upon yourself; its history, its rhythms, its defining character.”
Yes, perhaps there is hope. My 25-minute wait is up and I stand to go to my next appointment, before catching out of the corner of my eye the late Michael Hodgman MP on the film looking very young, handsome and dapper.
“I hate to think what my great grandchildren are going to say of our generation for doing what we’ve done,” says Mr Hodgman, father of Premier Will Hodgman.
“It may be that we will benefit the state in the short range but we will undoubtably obliterate some of the most beautiful areas and some of the most unique areas of the world, and they are irreplaceable.”