As the creator of what has been called the most influential photograph of Australia ever taken, the late Peter Dombrovskis was known as a perfectionist of the first order – willing to endure whatever physical exertion was necessary to get the wilderness shot he wanted.
In 1979, on the advice of Bob Brown (now the leader of the Greens), Dombrovskis set off on his raft down the then doomed Franklin River. That trip produced his haunting image of a misty morning at Rock Island Bend, which would have been destroyed by the proposed dams planned by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission.
Brown snared the photograph for his ”No Dam” campaign to save the Franklin, using it in posters, leaflets and newspaper publicity to show urban Australians what beauty would be lost if the scheme went ahead.
It became one of the famous photographs of 20th century Australia, and is often credited with helping to swing Bob Hawke’s election in 1983.
”No Dombrovskis, no Franklin River,” Brown has written. And yet that emblematic photograph was just one of thousands which the self-taught Dombrovskis took of the Australian wilderness until he died of a heart attack, aged 51, on a solo expedition on the western Arthur ranges of Tasmania in 1996.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/images-of-pure-beauty-ripped-the-cataracts-from-our-eyes/2009/10/20/1255891816181.html
Picture: The man and his passion … Peter Dombrovskis and some of his wilderness collection, including the celebrated shot of Rock Island Bend, above.
