It was the jewel of the south-west. It became the duel of the south-west. We lost both.
Lake Pedder was the heart of Tasmania’s wild, rugged south-west. It was a bushwalkers’ mecca, a picturesque, glacial lake surrounded by mountains. It was no tiny tarn, but nine square kilometres of water, fed by Maria Creek, with a solid quartzite sand beach that was 800 metres wide in summer and several kilometres long.
The Tilleys were an avid bushwalking family and we walked into Lake Pedder many times. I remember slogging across the buttongrass plains, at times falling knee deep or higher into bogs, leaving my legs coated with thick, black mud. The track took us up the back of the Frankland Range, and then we could look down at the magnificent pearl that was Lake Pedder, nestled in the heart of the region called loewontumemeter by palawa peoples long before we visited.
The tepid, tannin-brown water of the shallow lake spread in a magnificent vista below us. The bright crystal sand of the beach contrasted with darker ripples at the edge that looked like fingers reaching out into the water.
My father, Stan, was a light aircraft pilot, so could fly a plane in to land on the natural airstrip created by the Pedder sand. That meant not only could he ferry in tents, camp stoves, sleeping bags and other paraphernalia for a family camping holiday, but my grandmother could come, too. Granma Elvy wouldn’t have managed the walk but was happy to be at the lake with her grandkids and share our camping adventures.
As she did at home, every evening at our campsite Granma would unwind what she called her “grass”, her long hair that spent all day wound up in a bun on top of her head. She’d comb it, then rewind it, ready for the new day.
We camped beside Maria Creek that flowed into the lake. My siblings and I rolled down the sand dunes into the chilly waters of Maria Creek then ran out to bask in the relative warmth of Lake Pedder’s shallower water to warm up again.
We searched for “Pedder pennies” – unique quartzite rocks, usually flattish, but not necessarily round, which had ferro-manganese rims formed around them -- and collected many. For years, I had a jar of Pedder pennies that moved with me, long after our gem of a lake was lost, to share house after share house, first in Hobart and Launceston, and then Queensland, when my journalism career took me there in the early 1980s.
Of course, the bushwalkers’ creed now is to take only photographs, leave only footprints, but we knew no better as kids at the time. However, we can be grateful that the thinking has changed, that we can learn to be more respectful of the land. Just as we can learn to restore what we have damaged, to make amends for errors of the past.
Sadly, at some stage, the Pedder pennies jar was lost, but the memories remain. No doubt some well-meaning friend, helping me pack to move house yet again, saw no value in this little jam jar filled with circular stones with dark rims around them. None was the same, and none was perfect, but they were an important memory to me of an incredibly happy time of my childhood.
. . .
I was 14 when they flooded what I thought of as “my lake”. There remains a strong, vivid memory of a lost love.
When Tasmania’s Hydro Electric Commission, with solid backing from the Tasmanian government, announced plans to flood Lake Pedder, my mother, Bonnie, and I marched in protests in Hobart.
Building a huge concrete dam on the Serpentine River, which drained from Lake Pedder down to the Gordon River, would create a man-made impoundment, with the real lake hidden under 15 metres of water. I went to Save Lake Pedder functions, including a slide show of photographer Olegas Truchanas’s magnificent images of the many moods of the lake. South-west Tasmania’s unpredictable weather meant some days at the lake were wet and wild, others so still the mountain ranges and cheeky white clouds were perfectly reflected in the lake’s dark water.
I wasn’t old enough then to be fully cognisant of what was happening, of exactly what we were losing, but I knew that greed was the motivation for flooding one of my favourite childhood playgrounds.
At the time, we lived only streets away from the Truchanas family in the Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay and walked to school with Olegas and Melva’s children because going through their property was a short cut as we wandered down to Waimea Heights Primary School.
I remember a molten object that hung outside their family home’s front door. I was told it was all that remained of the frypan after their former family home had burned down in the 1967 bushfires that ravaged so much of Tasmania. Not only was their home destroyed, but Olegas Truchanas lost his massive collection of photos depicting so much of Tasmania’s rugged beauty. He spent the years before his death in 1972 trying to recreate the collection, including many images of Lake Pedder.
My favourite painting, which adorns my living room wall, is one of the late Tasmanian artist Max Angus’s watercolours of Lake Pedder. Its mauves and pinks recreate the Pedder I loved. Clouds scud across the Frankland Range, a portent of a storm to come, but unlikely one of the magnitude of the storms of protest that greeted the greedy plan to flood the lake.
Ignominiously, and perhaps as a spite to the protesters who tried in vain to protect this place of unique beauty, they gave the fake lake that flooded 15 metres of water on top of the real Lake Pedder the same name.
On my desk as I write is a small glass jar with a silver, screw-top lid. Inside is about an inch of the famous quartz crystals that were part of the long beach of Lake Pedder. Sticking out of the sand is a larger lump of quartz that rattles against the glass as you peer into the jar to reflect on an important piece of history.
My Granma Elvy’s neat handwriting in red pen adorns a label that’s been partly worn away. “Souvenir sand from Peddar 24.3” it reads. The rest of the date is no longer visible as moths or perhaps silverfish have chewed at sections of the label to devour the gum. Despite the spelling Pedder incorrectly – surprising actually for a former schoolteacher who revelled in and encouraged all her many grandchildren’s academic and other achievements – it’s obvious this lake meant a great deal to my grandmother. The jar was among many precious things passed to my mother and her sisters after Granma’s death, and then on to various grandchildren.
I feel proud now to have that precious bottle of grains of sand in varied hues, predominantly pink, that Granma Elvy had so lovingly collected at the jewel of the south-west. I fervently hope that one day I can return that sand to where it rightly belongs, back on the real Lake Pedder’s beach.
This is no pipe dream. Research by Lake Pedder Restoration Inc shows the beach is still there. Once the water is drained, the lake will eventually return to its former glory. The project is achievable and essential.
It will be one of the most important global ecological restorations and put the island state on the world stage as a place with people committed enough to right the wrongs of the past. It is time to return the jewel of the south west.
Kate Tilley was born in Hobart into an avid bushwalking family that spent weekends and holidays exploring Tasmania. She completed a journalism cadetship at the Mercury before moving to Queensland to work on newspapers in Rockhampton and then Brisbane. She now runs a Brisbane-based communications consultancy. Kate has long been passionate about the importance of restoring the real Lake Pedder and is a life member of the Lake Pedder Restoration Committee.
