First release of Olegas Truchanas images
Truchanas’ work has been widely praised by photographers, artists and environmentalists, but until now the images have rarely been seen and never before published in significant quantity. Melva Truchanas has released two of them to promote awareness of the possibility of restoring the lake to its original state.
OLEGAS Truchanas photographs feature on two new greetings cards to be launched this week by Senator Bob Brown and Olegas’ wife, Melva Truchanas.
Truchanas’ work has been widely praised by photographers, artists and environmentalists, but until now the images have rarely been seen and never before published in significant quantity. Melva Truchanas has released two of them to promote awareness of the possibility of restoring the lake to its original state.
An informative text on the back of the cards encapsulates the story of Lake Pedder and provides a brief background on Truchanas.
For Tasmanians, the name of Olegas Truchanas is synonymous with the lost Lake Pedder. Slide shows of his haunting photographs of the lake before its inundation by the Hydro Electric Commission played to standing-room-only audiences in the late 1960s.
Truchanas, for some time a clerk at the Hydro, was prevented from speaking out about the destruction of what he saw as one of the jewels of Tasmanian landscape. Instead, he let the pictures speak for him. So powerful were the images that a campaign to save the lake sprang up; it did not succeed, but it formed the foundation of a robust environmental movement.
He had spent many years exploring and photographing the wilds of Tasmania and was often the first non-indigenous person to traverse many parts of the rugged interior of the island. In 1967, the Hobart bushfires destroyed his home and with it virtually his entire collection of images.
He set out to retrace his exploration and recording of the wilderness, but in 1972, while photographing the Gordon River on a mission to replace his lost slides, he was tragically drowned. The cards are published as a tribute to his memory and to his pioneering work in raising consciousness of Tasmania’s threatened natural beauty.
Public launch by Bob Brown and Melva Truchanas
The Green Shop
83 Harrington Street
Hobart
Friday 25 August at 5:30pm
guy Parsons
August 23, 2006 at 21:22
A teenager in the 60s, I was lucky enough to get a free ride on a six-seater from Pardoe to land on the shores of the then-threatened and subsequently doomed lake.
I was gobsmacked at flying over the rural plains into the Western Tiers and over the southern mountains but the beach … well, better sand and surf on the Coast I thought. Callow youth.
But I think now, as we are reminded that the photographs of Truchanas and others are immortal, how many people with a real appreciation of this lost landscape have not written about it. How many with a power of observation better than callow youth are still alive to write about what they saw, about what they experienced?
For the teeming thousands who trekked in through the mud to see and walk upon these few unique hectares in the world, there must be dozens more nice accounts to hear above the few already published.
I’d like to see a competititon with a set of iconic Blundstones or somesuch as a prize to winkle out a little more about what I was too stupid to really appreciate at the time.
Nudger
August 24, 2006 at 04:42
Great pictures.
But anyone who thinks Lake Pedder will be drained anytime in the next two hundreds years is smoking some pretty good stuff!
Forgetting for a moment the massive, stinking mud flats, as soon as the Hydro says it will pull the plug, folk will come out of the woodwork saying no, no, it’s part of our heritage, just as they’ve done with the wooden pipes on the West Coast.
Albert M. Dollar
August 25, 2006 at 07:19
. . . PEDDER LIVES!