Driving out to Lake Pedder to see for myself and to show our visitor from Sydney the enlarged Hydro ‘jewel’. We come to a town?, village?, hamlet?, collection of shacks? called Maydena.
Surrounded by metallic dark green pine forests creeping up the hillsides and crowding the road, a pall of smoke blankets the town. The local school is almost obscured by a haze that spreads like an opaque curling stinking hand that touches everything in the town, it’s fingers penetrating our sealed car.
Onwards we go, pass the teenage girl walking to the shop in her green and purple flannelet jarmies, uggies, drawing deeply on a fag who is strangely attractive with long black hair and a worried expression on her so far unlined face. What does she do here? In Maydena?
Onwards to a sign that says “Welcome To The SouthWest – Heart of the wilderness”, we get out and see our first buttongrass plains, strangely beautiful and noisy with constant bird twitter.
The sign is sponsored by Hydro, Forestry and Parks and Wildlife, it’s like a cardboard cutout with Hydro’s name first, Forestry’s second, (and almost completely scratched out) and then, like an after-thought, a concession, Parks and Wildlife.
Onwards we go, pass the Sentinel Ranges who look human in their purply fleshy folds as they stare down at us; we drive through what is called “The Gordon Forests”; nothing is natural, there is no wilderness, the biggest tree trunks are those that are long dead and lying, discarded on the edges of this ‘forest’.
We come to the lookout that says Lake Pedder. Again, the lake appears or ‘feels’ strangely ‘unnatural’. It is enormous and reflective like glass and the sign summarizes surprisingly frankly its tortured history.
Onwards, pass the dead cardboard cutout Strathgordon village. Suddenly, there is a collective sucking in of breath when we sight the destruction on the banks of Lake Gordon.
Trees, thousands of them, grey, dead, thrown together, lie on the steep grey banks of this appalling testament to Hydros’ ingenuity. It is disgusting.
This Sunday drive has become a funeral march. We can’t even talk. We push on to the Gordon Dam. My husband says are you sure you want to see this? We’ve come this far, I say, we have to see it.
Its steep, dark and dead, it’s sickening.
This is the dam that time forgot. A video is playing Wagnerian music on the
soundtrack as a distant figure waterskies on what the commentary describes as Tasmania’s leisure and holiday future.
On the way home, we retrace history’s mistakes, dead country with dead, dark green forests. A fire is in its final stages on a coupe next to the road in, you guessed it, Maydena.
A family watches it with obvious enjoyment on their faces. We drive through this dark place not quite believing the destruction we have witnessed and sanctioned by the government of this land.
My friend said ….This is a Godless, lawless land.
Mary Tippett is …
