‘Beyond Reason’, published in water[shed]
Wilderness. Love. Photographer Peter Dombrovskis said you could live your whole life without either one, just so long as you never knew they existed.
But … if you did?
Close your eyes and conjure a Dombrovskis-style image. Perhaps composed of a pair of twined branches that whorl and twist around the emptiness left behind by love and wilderness in a heart that knew both.
Maybe the hollow would take the shape of Lake Pedder.
I never saw the lake. By the time I was born, in August of 1972, it was already drowning. With the Huon and the Serpentine rivers paralysed, the mountain ranges could do nothing but channel water down into a steadily filling basin. Every rainfall of that winter, every snowfall, became a layer of destruction.
Of those of us who never had the chance to see the lake, but love it regardless, it might be said that our love is second-hand, sparked by the mediated experience of paintings and photographs, the words of poets, activists and essayists, the expressions on the faces of our elders.
To say that we have fallen in love with a lake made of paint and pixels, of stories and sorrow, would not be unfair. In fact, it would be a tribute to the Pedder People and their long campaign to keep the lake alive in the collective imagination. Although the work they did in the 1960s and 1970s did not save the lake from inundation, it may yet transpire that their original outpourings of images, words and passion will play a critical role in the lake’s future.
