Island in the rain
James Hughes-Onslow
Hobart, Tasmania
BarryBarry Humphries, a leading light in the Wilderness Society, recent- ly told the people of Hobart what he thought of their state government's plans to build a hydro-electric dam on the Franklin River and to flood some of the world's finest rain-forest. As Sir Les Patterson, he has been known to call Tasmania a bushy triangle in the nether regions of Australia but on the Franklin issue he has been sur- prisingly serious. 'The Federal Government must stop these mean-minded bureaucrats,' he said. 'This is not interference, it is just old-fashioned patriotism.'
The Franklin dam is becoming an in- creasingly emotive subject throughout Australia. `No ,Dams' car stickers pro- liferate in every state. Demonstrations have been held in Melbourne and federal politi- cians are desperately trying to decide which way they should hop before the general election early next year. Just before Christmas in Paris. the World Heritage Commissions decided that south-west Tasmania should be added to its list of areas which must be preserved at all costs. It should be a matter of some pride for Tasmania to rank alongside the valleys of the Pyramids and Katmandu and the Great Barrier Reef. Instead the Tasmanian premier made his position clear by sending a delegation to Paris with the dismal message that the Franklin River is little more than a mass of brown slime.
The Tasmanian record on conservation could hardly be worse. Within 150 ..years of the first penal settlements in Tasmania the convict settlers had managed to destroy the aboriginal population completely. The ma- jor cause of the natives' demise was the in- troduction of European diseases to which they had developed no resistance. Many thousands more were systematically wiped out by hunters who were given rewards for killing them. The irony is that the aborigines had, over 20,000 years, developed a sophisticated life style, well sheltered and well fed, in an area which the present government says is not worth preserving because it is inhospitable to man. Various animal species were also destroyed quite deliberately by the white settlers, notably the Tasmanian tiger, a unique car- nivorous marsupial about the size of a wolf. Between 1888 and 1909, 2,184 £1 bounties were paid by the government for killing these animals.
• Ten years ago, after an astonishing saga of government deceit, the Tasmanian government began its first hydro-electric scheme in the south-west by flooding Lake Pedder. This has been described by UNESCO as the biggest ecological tragedy
since European settlement in Tasmania. At least 20 species of plants and fish which ex- isted nowhere else on earth were destroyed when this dam was built and the original Lake Pedder was enlarged. It is quite possi- ble, since the area is so remote that it had never been properly examined, that Lake Pedder also contained other secrets which can now be only the subject of scientific speculation. Bushwalkers who were lucky enough, or energetic enough, to see Lake Pedder before the flood say it was a gem in a rugged setting with a straight 800-yard- long beach of gleaming white quartz.
The conservationists' arguments against building a new dam on the Franklin are even more compelling now than they were ten years ago because there is less of the wilderness left. Indeed they are so over- whelming that they are scarcely worth argu- ing about: any more tampering and the south-west will cease to function as an ecological unit. Tasmania will lose its only claim to international scientific interest and its best long-term hope for the lucrative tourist market.
The trouble is that the arguement has ceased to be about conservation and started to be about politics and the frightful in- feriority complex which Tasmanian politi- cians display in their dealings with the rest of Australia. At the Brisbane Com- monwealth Games a couple of months ago Tasmania was omitted from the ceremonial map of Australia — a gaffe which will not be repaired for quite a while. Tasmanians `I still feel hungry.'
are well aware that they possess in abun- dance the one commodity which the rest of Australia lacks — water. While mainland Australia swelters under the worst drought in its history, some parts of south-west Tasmania are still being drenched with three metres of rain a year. The perennial ques- tion for Tasmanian politicians is how to use all this water to solve the unemployment problem.
So far the only idea that has sprung to mind is constructing dams. This enables them to boast that the enlarged Lake Ped- der is the biggest expanse of fresh water in Australia and that Tasmania is self- sufficient in energy. But converting water into energy in Australia is a little like turn- ing gold into lead. The mainland has vast untapped supplies of coal, gas, oil and uranium which can provide energy just as cheaply. Tasmania is never going to attract employment by means of cheap energy, therefore. In fact the reason why hydro- electric power is economical is that it re- quires very little labour to get it going about 600 men to construct a dam and 26 men to maintain it. According to some calculations Tasmania does not even have enough industry to make use of existing supplies of hydro-electric power, let alone the additional electricity to be provided by the new dam.
The gradual realisation that he has got his sums wrong must now be dawning on Mr Robin Gray, the Liberal leader who took over as premier a few months ago on a clear mandate to build the Franklin dam and reduce unemployment. He has been listen- ing for too long to the over-optimistic ad- vice of the powerful Hydro-Electric Com- mission which has been in the forefront of the campaign against the conservationists.
For his fellow Liberal, the Federal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, the Franklin scheme also threatens to be a headache. Fraser has been strongly in favour of con- servation issues in the past and he knows that interference from Canberra to stop the Hobart government's hairbrained schemes would be a potential vote-winner on the mainland of Australia in next year's elec- tion. On the other hand there are one or two marginal Liberal seats in Tasmania where such a move could prove disastrous for the Federal government. Another com- plication is that the Liberal governments of Western Australia and Queensland have come out in support of Mr Gray's hydro- electric proposals for constitutional rather than environmental reasons. If the Federal government intervenes on this one, where will it all end, they ask.
It seems a little hard on the primeval flora and fauna of south-west Tasmania that they should be sacrificed because of some petty bickering by local politicians. Perhaps the question the World Heritage Commis- sion should consider is whether the Tasma- nians, as exemplified by the political leaders, having originated from pretty dubious stock, are becoming increasingly inbred and probably quite mad. Are the Tasmanians really worth preserving?
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