On the future of Lake Pedder.
Calm day over the Pedder impoundment. Oct 2021, Pentax MX, Portra 400.
There is something very strange about a place that is too quiet. It implies stillness, the absence of movement. And when things remain still for too long, they stagnate. Movement brings life, in particular, the movement of water is the crucial requirement for life. Water wants to flow, toward the sea, then evaporate, fall as rain, and begin its journey again, down from the mountains, toward the endless sea.
We may find a place beautiful, but that doesn’t mean that it contains a healthy and functioning eco-system that supports a diversity of life. There is a stark beauty to a frozen glacier, or desert, where life hangs on by the skin of its teeth. Similarly, we may find an artificially created lake beautiful, and appreciate the recreational opportunities it provides, but if we listen carefully, we will discover that there is something fundamentally wrong when we alter a landscape so dramatically.
The South-West mountains tend to be made of quartzite, which is sharp and pointy. It is the slow process of erosion of these quartzite rocks that has created the incredible beach of the natural Lake Pedder. Oct 2021, Pentax MX, Portra 400.
I recently made a trip out to what we call Lake Pedder, which is an impoundment 25 times the size of the Lake Pedder that was flooded in 1972. (Yet we still call it by the same name. This seems strange to me.) I had borrowed my friend Lou’s kayak and gear, and was making the most of a three day weather window in the fickle South-West. This year, our spring here in Tasmania has been one of the wettest and most turbulent. I had a moderate headwind on the paddle in from McPartlan’s Pass to Terminal Peak, 28km all up. I had incredibly calm, clear and warm weather for the remaining two days of the trip. My plan was to ascend the Frankland Range and find a certain vantage point from where a photograph of Lake Pedder was taken in 1972 by Lindsay Hope.
View from kayak while paddling on the Pedder impoundment. 2021, Pentax MX, portra 400.
What I noticed during my three days out on and around Lake Pedder was that this landscape was very quiet. It was too quiet. Moving life, capable of emitting sounds, was scarce. I would hear the occasional bird call, but it was far and few in between. The silence, to me, demonstrated absence. I was in a serene setting, but something was amiss.
When we flood a large river’s valley, and turn flowing water to still water, we are drowning an essential part of a functioning eco-system; its waterways. We have turned an incredible complex and vast network of arteries into a pond, water that sits still.
I’m not discounting the benefits of large bodies of water sitting still; from a human perspective it makes a lot of sense. Especially with our gradual awakening that fossil fuels must give way to renewables, dismissing hydroelectric power generation would be foolish. But even hydroelectric power requires the destruction of what was once a healthy and functioning living system, in the case of Lake Pedder, the destruction of the headwaters of the Serpentine and Huon Rivers in Tasmania’s South West.
Morning light and mist over the Pedder impoundment. Oct 2021, Pentax MX, Portra 400.
Lake Pedder National Park was established in 1955, deep in Tasmania’s South-West, accessible only on foot and by light aircraft. This national park was created to recognise the stunning beauty of the original lake, which featured an amazing pink-white beach, 800m wide 3.5km long. That’s nearly three hundred footy ovals worth of fine quartzite sand.
In the late 60s, the National Park status of the land surrounding the lake was revoked, to make way for a hydroelectric development. Three dams were built that saw the valley in which Lake Pedder sat flooded beneath about 15m of dark, tannin stained waters. The beach has not been seen since, except for the bits that some people took out in jars before the lake was inundated.
Lake Pedder was the beating heart of the South-West, a place that had a profound effect on anyone who visited it. Even the people who flooded it called it ‘a pity that it had to be done, for it was a pretty lake indeed’. Thousands visited the lake in the final years and months before it gradually became submerged in 1972.
It’s been 50 years since Lake Pedder was flooded. The dams were built with a 50 year lifespan. Hydro Tasmania is planning to spend a lot of money to reinforce the Scott’s Peak and Edgar Dams in the next decade. We are talking upward of fifty million dollars. Surely, now would be the right time to ask: is this money worth spending on the dams to keep them going?
Lake Pedder is a symbol of hope. Hope does not have a dollar value on it, but it’s vital to us nevertheless. As a global society, we have some serious challenges ahead of us, within our own lifetimes. If we can show that it’s possible to restore vast areas of previously degraded landscapes into more healthy and functioning eco-systems, giving home to diverse forms of life, then we have some hope of remaining on this planet for many more generations. Diversity means resilience. The more diversity of life that can coexist with us on this planet, the more resilient we ourselves will become to change, be it catastrophic or otherwise.
If we continue on the path of the conqueror and the coloniser driving the mass extinction process happening right now, we are going to make greater and greater parts of the Earth uninhabitable. Humanity will need to retreat to the remaining oasis areas. If we don’t change our ways, times are gonna get tough.
If humanity is to survive for thousands more generations, our culture needs to contain symbols of hope that everyone can recognise. We need to collectively believe that we can take care of the land, our water, our air and the sphere of living things, which includes us, people.
We have taken so much, surely we can learn to give this one lake back? Not for our sake, but for everyone’s sake.
Let the heart of the South-West beat again. Let’s restore Lake Pedder!
‘What was once, will be again.’
This is a composite image, made from two pictures taken from the same vantage point in the Frankland Range, 50 years apart. The original photo was taken in 1972 by Lindsay Hope, and is overlaid by an image taken by Andy Szollosi in 2021. The shoreline of the original lake is therefore revealed beneath the current impoundment. The mountains have largely remained unchanged, therefore they perfectly overlap in both photos and merge seamlessly.
(Thank you to Lindsay Hope for contributing and to Matt Jones for helping with the edit.)