The Franklin and the future

In response to requests, TT publishes Richard Flanagan’s speech at the 25th anniversary celebration, Tuesday, July 1, of the saving of the Franklin River …

It was an idea of liberation and of hope that had the power to join people across class and politics. Ultimately it proved to people that they were more than workers and consumers, that they were also people with souls. For all the bravery of the Blockaders in the rainforest, it was the mortgage belt Australian in their lounge rooms who saved the Franklin, because they understood life is something more than interest rates. The lesson of the Franklin was that great things happen because of ordinary people too often and too easily dismissed as ordinary.

And because of those same people I know that the ongoing destruction of Tasmania’s old growth forests, as unique and as extraordinary as the Franklin, a destruction which survives only because of grotesque subsidies made by successive state and federal governments, will end. For profound change is upon us, and such destruction has lost the people’s favour.
THIS IS NOT the new Tasmania—this is the true Tasmania. And how good it is to be here at a time when the reign of the hate of old men appears to be finally ending.

I understand I am to be followed by a video message from Norm Sanders, who on being elected to the Tasmanian Parliament in 1980, described it as the worst job he had since cleaning out shit houses in Idaho. My job tonight isn’t quite so bad, but its far from easy—talking about the Franklin River and the future in five minutes. When Bob asked me I did point out I was here to drink with fellow Franklin river guides and it was very important the future came early.

I am forty six years of age and I’ve been going down the Franklin for thirty years. I lived it and I loved it, I worked for some years as a guide on it and on the first day of the Blockade I nearly drowned in a rapid leading a party down it.

But after over fifty trips down one of the truly great places on earth, I want first to say to all of you who fought so hard in your various ways to save this river, who marched, who sat fearfully in jail cells, who huddled in your wet clothes for 24 hours waiting to be carted away, who were reviled and beaten, who gave up your jobs and risked your careers, who campaigned on the streets and behind closed doors and in court rooms: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you to the old piner Reg Morrison who said damming the Franklin would be like cutting off the blood to his body, and thank you to dear Denny Hamil who skippered us all home, thank you to Di Masters who sewed a thousand and one Wilderness Society aprons in her Avoca home and thank you to Chris Bell who never gave up and Michael Aird who flew to Canberra and lobbied every Federal Labor member who would listen, thank you to Ros Jones who tragically lost her life to it, here’s to all the unsung heroes and here’s to all the unlikely and improbable allies, all the good people, the living and the dead, those in the police and the hydro and the media, in all the political parties, in all the towns and all the suburbs, who came together not just for a river, but for an idea of hope.

Because it was not just a river you saved. Tasmania changed, Australia altered, and so many lives were changed, my own among them. I became a writer because of the Franklin. I wrote my first book and then my first novel about that river. It liberated me, as it liberated so many. It was more than a river then, and it is far more than a river now, a vast and ever growing delta of destinies: personal, local and national. So when people say its just a moment in the past, they’re wrong. Because the river began to run through all of us, and it continues to flow ever stronger.

What was once my playground and then my workplace is now my temple. And when I kayak down the Franklin today I am ever more amazed: How was this saved? I came to travel the world; to see so much that was amazing and extraordinary, but it was always about power and money. The Franklin, to the contrary is about another idea: it was a moment when people said there were things that mattered more than power and money.

It was an idea of liberation and of hope that had the power to join people across class and politics. Ultimately it proved to people that they were more than workers and consumers, that they were also people with souls. For all the bravery of the Blockaders in the rainforest, it was the mortgage belt Australian in their lounge rooms who saved the Franklin, because they understood life is something more than interest rates. The lesson of the Franklin was that great things happen because of ordinary people too often and too easily dismissed as ordinary.

And because of those same people I know that the ongoing destruction of Tasmania’s old growth forests, as unique and as extraordinary as the Franklin, a destruction which survives only because of grotesque subsidies made by successive state and federal governments, will end. For profound change is upon us, and such destruction has lost the people’s favour.

And for this reason, even if Gunns pulp mill gets its money, it too has lost the people, and the people in this will endure, even if it takes civil disobedience on the scale of the Franklin Blockade. We learnt from the Franklin the power of the solidarity of the shaken. And if we must, no matter how frightened we are, we will stand strong in our love for our world, and we will go to jail in our tens, our hundreds and our thousands, and that mill will never ever be built.

I am an optimist and I do not buy into environmental doomsdayism. But the carnival that sustained the extraordinary human development of the last two centuries is over. Australia’s problems with global warming are as profound and as terrible as those facing Africa. But we are wealthy and cohesive. We could, if we choose, not just follow others but lead the world in the creation of a new society and a new economy in response to global warming, we could, if we choose, show that these challenges might even enable us to make our lives better.

I believe Australians want this change. That we are ready to become part of a larger idea than a petrol price war, to be actors in a new destiny that is not doomed but hopeful. We simply need our polity to have the courage to take the many large, concrete actions needed. If such leadership was shown, if we became a climate change leader instead of just another quarry waiting to be exhausted, there would no better way to explain to ourselves and to the world what we now stood for than by returning to where, half a century ago, the battle for the Franklin began.

For before global warming, before the High Court decision, before the Blockade, there was in the mountains of Tasmania a lake of such beauty that it aroused the wonder of all who saw it, a lake and a beach so extraordinary their fame spread through the country and then across the oceans. Yet the engineers saw this lake as the beginning of another hydro system that would ultimately dam all the waters of the Gordon River, including its then little known tributary, the Franklin. And though a great battle was fought to save it, Lake Pedder was drowned. Out of that defeat there arose the determination to save the Franklin.

If we choose to remake ourselves as a people and a nation, if we have the courage to make that future now, I can think of no finer symbol of such change, no better message we could send to the world, than pulling the plug on the impoundment that presently drowns Lake Pedder.

Tonight is rightfully a celebration of something very good. But it is also a promise, a hope, a dream that never dies.

And when Lake Pedder and its glittering beach are at last revealed and returned to the light of the world, when the dark waters of the Serpentine finally flow free to join with the Gordon and the Gordon with the Franklin, we will know that as a nation we have turned a great and historic corner, that we have a new and extraordinary destiny, and that the battle for the Franklin has finally finished where so many decades ago it first began.

Thank you.