TRUE CRIME:
who killed Brenda Hean? Campaigner’s disappearance still a puzzle
The last known letter from Brenda Hean was sent to her niece late in the winter of 1972, shortly before her mysterious disappearance. In it, Auntie Bren – as all the nieces called her – thanked Diane Rex for hosting her on a recent trip to Melbourne, delighted in Di’s young son, Philip (“never known a more intelligent or loveable child”), extolled her freshly permed hair (“Great improvement. Helps a lot.”) and wrote excitedly about an upcoming “wonderful adventure”.
On September 8, she planned to fly from Hobart to Canberra in a World War II Tiger Moth to lobby federal MPs to save Lake Pedder, a pristine glacial lake in Tasmania’s south-west wilderness. Refined, perfectly coiffed and in her early 60s, Brenda made an unlikely eco-warrior. Yet something about Lake Pedder had touched her
– the way it touched many – and in its salvation, Brenda found her calling.
And so, she wrote to Di: “Off we go to persuade the Powers that Be that we are so devoted to our cause and the enormous future value of keeping Lake Pedder in its original state that we are prepared to risk getting stuck in a large tree top on one of the Strait’s convenient islands.”
Unbeknown to Brenda, she and pilot Max Price risked far worse.
Within hours of take-off from Hobart’s Cambridge Airport, the vintage Tiger Moth would vanish. No wreckage or human remains have ever, officially, been found.
Yet, almost half a century on, rumours and questions still obscure the pair’s fate. Many Tasmanians believe the plane’s fuel tank was sabotaged in a politically motivated attack to silence Brenda, but the mystery has never been solved.
Perhaps it will remain hidden in the bosom of Tasmania forever, along with the isle’s other dark secrets.
“My own personal view,” Diane tells The Australian Women’s Weekly, “is that she was the victim of foul play.”
Birth of a movement
Next year will mark 50 years since Lake Pedder was flooded as part of the Tasmanian government’s $100 million hydro-electric scheme. Former premier Eric Reece – dubbed “Electric Eric” for his enthusiasm for the scheme – had been hell-bent on luring industry to the state through the cheap, renewable energy that dams could provide.
Yet when the state’s powerful Hydro-Electric Commission first trained its sights on Lake Pedder in 1967, there was an immediate public outcry, spearheaded largely by Brenda. Petitions were signed, protests
launched, referendums demanded, action groups formed and families split down the middle.
“These people [the protest organisers] can be compared to some degree to Frankenstein,” Premier
Reece said at the time.
In early 1972, Dick Friend, 19 at the time and between jobs, wanted to see what all the fuss was about. He hiked for a full day through rough terrain until he came upon the pristine lake and its pink-hued beach which was, by his estimate,
700 metres wide and about three kilometres long.
“What I saw quite literally changed my life,” he tells The Australian Women’s Weekly. “This was a place that defies description.” Dick went on to become an activist and a friend of Brenda’s. Now retired, he has travelled widely to many of the world’s other wonders – Iguazu Falls, Machu Picchu, Patagonia, Italy’s northern lakes. Yet, he says, “none of them compares to the impact of Lake Pedder”.
Before the Lake Pedder campaign, Brenda had never been drawn to the barricades. She was a social conservative, a wealthy society widow, a devout Christian. But the decision to drown this natural wonder galvanised her to the cause. Together with the state’s eco-activists, she helped create the world’s first green party, the
United Tasmania Group (UTG). Brenda stood unsuccessfully as one of the party’s candidates in the 1971 state election. She also initiated a
High Court action claiming that the Hydro-Electric Commission was illegally flooding the lake.
Former Greens leader Bob Brown says Lake Pedder is the real birthplace of the green political movement internationally. “Lake Pedder is hugely important – on a state, national and international level – to the history of environmental politics.” And Brenda’s work was central to the cause.
Brenda’s plan to fly to Canberra and emblazon “Save Lake Pedder” across the sky marked the first time that activists had tried to get a local Tasmanian message out to the mainland. This strategy later became the blueprint for the Franklin River protests of the early 1980s, during which activists travelled the country making the Franklin Dam an issue of national concern.
“We had learned from the experiences of the Lake Pedder campaigners – both their successes and their mistakes,” says Bob Brown, who spearheaded the Franklin anti-dam campaign. “Those experiences were key to saving the Franklin.”
Before she took off on her ill-fated flight, a journalist asked Brenda when she would give up the fight to save Lake Pedder: “Just at what stage will you call it a day?”
In the archival footage, Brenda is seen shaking her head even before his question is complete. “I will never call it a day. We will never give up the fight. We have a lot of British spirit left yet! Let’s really not think about it… until it’s gone.”
“I will never call it a day. We will never give up the fight.”
Death threats and sabotage
According to an article published on February 8,
1968 in The Hobart Mercury, four and a half years before her death, Brenda Hean was “a woman of many varied interests”. She was president of the Hobart Ladies’ College Old Scholars’ Association; a life member of the Arts Club; a member of the St Ann’s Rest Home for the Aged Auxiliary; vice-president of the Eventide Appeal; a member of the Hobart Philharmonic Society; an associate member of the Tasmanian Music Teachers’ Association; an official music examiner; and a member of the Hobart Walking Club. She was also involved with the Girl Guide Association; played piano with the Tasmanian Orchestra; sang with the Memorial Church Choir and was interested in floral arranging, gardening and antiques. In old footage, Brenda appears elegant, thoughtful and refined. So when this Establishment woman decided to take on the Establishment, she was hated by her own class.
Brenda was aware that she was up against powerful political and commercial interests. Days before her final flight, she told Diane and other friends about threats she had received. An anonymous caller had phoned to ask if she was willing to concede defeat over Lake Pedder, now that the flooding was underway. When she replied that, no, she intended to still fly to Canberra to save the lake, he replied: “Mrs Hean, how would you like to go for a swim?”
The threats must have frightened Brenda, although she claimed to Diane that they did not.
“She was absolutely and completely committed to saving her lake,” Diane recalls, before quickly correcting herself: “Well, not her lake. But she was going to do anything… She didn’t have children, her husband had died. She could do anything she liked within financial reason and she was going to do that.”
In early 1972, months before her death, Brenda began a brave vigil by
Lake Pedder as the dammed waters slowly rose. Dick Friend, who transported her to the vigil, says they set out in a tiny dinghy, packed to the gunwales with provisions, and only a small motor to propel them across a vast expanse of the partly flooded lake. They spent a night camped in the branches of flooded trees, and almost 50 years on, Dick remains struck by Brenda’s courage and commitment to the lake, which she once called “a masterpiece of perfect creation”.
Scientist and fellow conservationist, the late Dick Jones, who helped found the UTG, believed Brenda was prepared to give everything for the cause. “I think that she had come to the conclusion that if she gave her life for Lake Pedder, that extreme sacrifice would move people. They’d suddenly say: ‘This is not good enough, when such a nice person’s life is lost for this’. In her mind, I think, she had made that decision.”
“She didn’t try to martyr herself,” Dick Friend elaborates. “She loved life and wanted to keep contributing, but she was prepared to die for the cause. She was prepared to take the risks.”
The ill-fated flight
We can’t know whether Brenda was thinking about the death threats when, at 10.16am on September 8, 1972, she and her pilot, Max Price, set off from Hobart’s Cambridge airport, but if she was, it doesn’t seem that would have stopped her. There, waving them off, was Brenda’s youngest sister, Barbara Ditcham, and her niece, Celia, then just 14.
Auntie Bren had taken her godmother duties to Celia very seriously, teaching her the piano, taking her on bush walks and having her to stay in her “lovely big old home” on York Street, in the leafy Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay.
“I vividly remember farewelling her,” Celia Watchorn, now 61, tells
The Australian Women’s Weekly. “It was all so exciting, watching her set off on this unknown adventure. I was completely unaware of the gravity of the situation, the risks of the journey or the political implications. We just watched this gallant little plane take off, flying northwards.”
Then, nothing. Until Diane, Brenda’s other niece, received a call to say the Tiger Moth had failed to stop for refuelling.
The family at first assumed the obvious – that the plane had simply gone down into the sea somewhere between St Helens and Flinders Island. But within days, disturbing reports began to emerge and, as Dick Friend puts it, “people started to get spooked by it all”.
Like Brenda, Max the pilot had received death threats before the flight. One caller told him: “Don’t get involved in this – you may not make it.” More sinister, the night before the flight, the plane’s hangar had been broken into and its emergency beacon hidden behind fuel drums.
“She was prepared to die for the cause, to take the risks.”
From that day forward the police and government might have considered the possibility that Brenda and Max’s demise was no accident. But the police investigation went nowhere and the state government resisted calls for a public inquiry. Not one member of the government made any public statement of sympathy or concern for the pair. Brenda’s younger sister, Barbara, told journalists years later that the family had felt “very much abandoned” by the authorities.
From the start, conservationists pointed the finger at those with an interest in having Brenda silenced: the government, big business, the hydro-electric scheme.
Bob Brown still believes something was fishy. “The fact that there wasn’t an adequate, independent inquiry into how come the safety beacon had
been removed, how come the hangar had been broken into and that the flight had been preceded by what was effectively a death threat: Well, I put all of that together and say they died as a result of foul play,” he says. “It was pretty disgraceful that the Premier of the day didn’t have a full inquiry.”
Others suggest that there were several people who might have wanted Max out of the picture – for the old-fashioned motives of love and money. These theories focus on Max’s reputation as a womaniser who had been having an affair with his sisterin-law, causing bad blood in the family. He was also in conflict with a business partner after making allegations of embezzlement.
In 2008, filmmaker and writer Scott Millwood tried to piece this puzzle together. Curiously, he had received a large package of police files on Brenda and Max’s disappearance and been told “use this for good”. Scott personally offered a $100,000 reward for any information, and collected new tips and evidence.
Ten people told him they’d reported seeing the Tiger Moth flying overhead that day, but the police had never interviewed them. According to his documentary Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? a search aircraft spotted wreckage in the water, but was ordered to return to base, and a police boat did not follow up the
report until three days later.
Scallop fishermen in the Banks Strait, where the Tiger Moth vanished, claimed to have dredged up a plane’s wings, tail and fuselage parts during the 1980s, but threw them back because, “they didn’t want to get involved with the cops”. One fisherman said he pulled up a dress and a bottle of champagne. Wreckage was also said to have washed up on a beach, where it was supposedly buried on the orders of “a person of very high standing in Hobart”.
Scott’s documentary also suggests that then Premier Eric Reece ordered his aides to “stop that damn plane”. Certainly, just months before Brenda’s flight, in April 1972, the UTG had come within 200 votes of winning a seat at the state election. For the first time anywhere in the world, environmentalists were posing a tangible political threat. And the loss of the hydro-electric scheme would take a hefty financial toll on Tasmania. But despite Scott’s best efforts, he was unable to find sufficient evidence to finally crack this four-decade old mystery.
Lady of the Lake’s legacy
Fifty years on, Bob Brown believes it is “a national disgrace” that we still don’t know what happened to Brenda Hean. And perhaps now we’ll never know whether this great unsolved mystery was in fact a great unsolved crime. But Brenda’s friends and family are certain that her life wasn’t lived and lost in vain.
“Brenda was this hugely intelligent, courageous and spiritually strong character,” says Bob, “who reconnected with the planet in an age of materialism. She became an environmental warrior in her own way. To fly to Canberra in a Tiger Moth took enormous guts.
She showed that everyone shares a role in saving life on earth. She’s up there in the pantheon of environmental campaigners on a planet that needs many more.
She’s a beacon of inspiration.”
Bob and fellow former Greens leader Christine Milne have been inspired by Brenda to lead a campaign to drain and restore Lake Pedder to its original state by 2022, to coincide with both the 50th anniversary of its flooding and the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030.
It’s early days yet, but last September the United Nations Environment Programme offered a preliminary endorsement of the plan.
Today Lake Pedder remains an emblem of the green movement, and Brenda Hean, who died fighting to save it, continues to inspire generations to her cause.