What does it take to win an environmental campaign? We look back at Australia’s biggest-ever environmental victory.
As I travel on a boat towards the Franklin River, retracing a route thousands of young people have taken before, I'm struck by how otherworldly the landscape is.
The forest that hangs over the river is so dense that it obscures the shoreline. Branches dip into the water, and mist clings to the higher trees. This place feels mystical, ancient.
The south-west of Tasmania is famous for its dark, tannin-stained rivers.
As the water comes off the back of the boat, it looks like dark tea streaming from the motor.
It shines and reflects the light, contrasting with the dark waters below.
Out here on the boat on this misty morning, it feels like we could be the only people in the world.
But 40 years ago, the scene on this river couldn't have been more different.
Back in December 1982, this was the backdrop of the biggest environmental protest Australia had ever seen — the Franklin River Blockade.
At the peak of the protests, there was a constant stream of activity along the river: charter boats ferrying protesters upriver, police boats carrying them back after they'd been arrested, heavy machinery on barges. Blockaders piloted their bright inflatable rafts and kayaks into the path of dam workers, while the media jostled for the best spot to capture the action.
Over 1,250 people were arrested here as they blocked the construction work of a massive hydro-electric dam that would have flooded part of this river and the surrounding landscape.
I've spent most of the past year talking to people about these protests and hearing their stories about the wild river while making a podcast about this iconic moment in Australia's history.
As a reporter with triple j Hack, I've also spoken to a lot of young people about climate change and the environment.
Despite leading climate movements like the School Strikes, they have a sense of frustration and helplessness that change isn't happening fast enough to prevent us living in a world of cascading climate disasters and instability.
That's why I've come to Tasmania – to revisit our first national culture war over the environment, and find out what its lessons are for today.
The Franklin River under threat
For many environmentalists, Bob Brown is a legend. He was the first leader of the Australian Greens, a party that has changed the country's political landscape.
But in 1976, he was a young GP in Launceston taking a raft down the Franklin River for the first time.
As the days passed, the rest of the world slipped away.
For two weeks, Dr Brown and his rafting companion saw no sign of another person except a single light plane far in the distance.
"No fences, no farms, no factories, no towns, no streets, just nature," he says.
The further Dr Brown went, the more he was struck by the beauty surrounding him.
"The river's fern-decked, the rapids are always bouncing. And the water is honey-coloured.
"There's a white froth that gathers and you see it tracing down the river.
"There are fully grown Huon pines. Ancient.
"Some of them [are] more than a thousand years old."
But he says nothing prepared them for what they confronted as they turned the bend in the river.
They came face-to-face with the early testing work being conducted for the planned Franklin dam.
"Suddenly there were jackhammers, helicopters, barges, explosions going off, patches of vegetation torn away right up in the gorge wall where they were testing to see if they could anchor a dam there," he says.
That moment changed Bob Brown's life, and it's one reason why Australians know his name today.
"It was a cry to the heart. I came away with the most extraordinary challenge in my life, ringing in my head: 'What are we going to do about this?'"
The opposition gathers momentum
The modern Tasmanian economy was built on the back of hydro-electric power – abundant, cheap energy that came from damming the state's wild rivers.
By the late 70s, the Hydro Electric Scheme (known as "The Hydro") had projected that the state needed more power to continue its industrial and residential development and announced its plans to build a new dam.
At the time there were already 40 dams dotted across the state. The Hydro had built them on every major river in Tasmania except one: the Franklin River.
Overseeing so much infrastructure meant the Hydro was a big hitter politically, and it was often described as "more powerful than the government".
But the Hydro underestimated a new political force: conservationists, or "greenies", as they became known.
In the months after his rafting trip, Dr Brown had joined with other conservationists to found The Wilderness Society to campaign to protect Tasmania's nature from development.
The Hydro estimated the Franklin dam would produce 172 megawatts of power – about the size of a small wind farm today, or what Australians install in rooftop solar every three weeks. At the time, Victoria was building a coal-fired power station that produced 12 times that amount.
Karen Alexander, a campaigner who helped set up the Melbourne branch of the Wilderness Society, recalls thinking it was "a tiny amount for this cost and this destruction".
Young people began to join the campaign in large numbers, and Wilderness Society branches started popping up across the country.
They held rallies in support of saving the Franklin, and the symbol of the movement became a yellow "No Dams" sticker that started popping up around Australia.
"We would get together and meet," recalls Karen Alexander. "[We'd ask] 'What can we do? We need to raise awareness. We need to find funds. We need to understand what's happening politically. We need to be strategic.'"
The pro-dam side
While support for saving the Franklin was growing on the mainland, in Tasmania the majority wanted the dam to go ahead, seeing it as a crucial economic boost.
In 1981 a referendum was held asking Tasmanians to choose between two options for where the dam should be built. Just over half of the population voted to flood the Franklin.
For Bob Brown and the Wilderness Society, there was some cause for hope. In the 1981 referendum, a third of all Tasmanians had written "No Dams" on their ballots.
"Of course we were buoyed by the results. That was the biggest informal vote in global democratic history," Dr Brown recalls.
But in the 1982 state election not a single "No Dams" candidate was elected. In that year, the vehemently pro-dam Liberal leader Robin Gray swept to power with the promise to get on with building the Franklin dam.
He got the nickname "the Whispering Bulldozer".
The Wilderness Society decided that the time had come to take their campaign to the frontlines: a protest in the forest at the site of the Franklin dam.
"We decided that the ultimate demonstration couldn't be in the city," Dr Brown says. "We wanted nature to speak for itself because that speaks to the people of Australia. So the blockade had to be on site, and here we were arranging the most remote protest in national history."
Over that summer, The Wilderness Society invited people from all over the country to come to that remote pocket of Tasmania to protest the dam.
There were a few key objectives for the blockade: draw attention to the cause through media coverage; slow construction on the dam; and create political pressure on the Tasmanian Government.
Anyone who travelled to the blockade first had to go through non-violent direct action camps, where they learned how to remain calm and peaceful during the unrest and, according to Dr Brown: "how to deal with anger, to being confronted with violent workers if necessary, to police arrest, to whatever provocation".
One of the core campaigners, Geoff Law, had become a dedicated Wilderness Society volunteer after his own transformative rafting trip down the Franklin. He went to Strahan, on the state's West Coast, to help with the build-up to the blockade.
He remembers this previously quaint, sleepy harbour town suddenly buzzing with activity, and tension.
"There would be lines of people forming, and crates of oranges and potatoes and bags of rice and radio equipment, rubber rafts, paddles, tarps, tents and cooking equipment being loaded onto this boat.
"This was part of seeing that the blockade was going to happen. It was a build-up of emotion."
Tensions were especially high in the towns nearest the Franklin River, where residents like Brian Gardiner were hopeful about the potential work to come from the construction of the dam.
By the turn of the 80s, the Tasmanian economy was tanking – the state's unemployment rate was by far the highest in the nation. The Hydro was promising that its Franklin dam would be the economic boost the state desperately needed.
Brian had seen exactly what the boom-and-bust cycle of heavy industry could do to the West Coast, and knew the region needed new job opportunities.
"I was for it," he says. "I saw it as being a major economic boost to the coast and to have something else besides mining for people who lived here.
"People saw it as an opportunity to stay on the West Coast and to still be employed."
With the tensions rising between pro- and anti-dam camps, mainland media flew into the West Coast ahead of the blockade. What they were looking for, Geoff Law says, was drama.
"A friendly journalist came up to me and he said, 'Geez, mate, all these mainland media, they're not here for the rivers. They're here for blood,'" Mr Law says.
The blockade begins
The blockade kicked off on December 14, 1982.
A third of Tasmania's police force was sent to the West Coast for the protest. The Tasmanian Parliament had already changed the trespass laws in anticipation. Simply being at the blockade site was an offence – anyone caught at the river could be arrested and go to jail for up to six months.
On the first day, Geoff remembers feeling nervous, but knew it was a success once he heard people were being arrested.
"Later that evening we saw some of the coverage and it looked magnificent," he says.
"The deep greens contrasting with all of this colour and movement on the river, the yellow of the rubber rafts, the media boats, the hydro boats, the police boats. There was a sense of exhilaration."
Fifty-three people were arrested that day.
The footage was beamed into living rooms on colour televisions around the country.
For West Coast locals like Brian Gardner, however, the media attention held a different meaning.
"[The coverage] was very derogatory to West Coasters to start with," he says. "They showed all the bad shots of the town, all the old derelict homes.
"I think the tolerance went for a lot of West Coasters – we got to the stage where no-one was listening."
But that was just the beginning – the plan was for the blockade to run for the whole summer.
The complex operation was coordinated by two young women, Cathie Plowman and Lillith Waud.
Before the blockade, Ms Plowman was a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in Sydney who dreamt about Tasmanian landscapes when she wasn't bushwalking in them. She was in her early 20s when she got involved with the campaign. In the months leading up to the protest she had been put in charge of logistics, organising supplies and communicating with other organisers.
"I'd spend hours writing letters… to people to say: 'We are gonna want this, but we don't want it now. And by the way, don't tell anyone that we're planning it. We're trying to keep it a secret,'" she says.
With the cameras trained on hundreds of young, passionate activists who were sleeping in tents, the blockade organisers wanted to control how they would appear to most Australians.
When Ms Plowman was asked by Dr Brown to draw up a list of essentials that new protesters should bring with them to the blockade, there was one item he wanted at the top of the list: a hairbrush.
"And I was thinking, 'Oh, what's he on about?' Of course, he wanted people properly groomed in case they were in front of a TV camera. That was the point," she says.
Every day, protesters were ferried upriver to camp out at the blockade site, where they would wait their turn to get arrested.
A young Launceston police officer dispatched to the blockade, Danny Russell, recalls the interactions between the protesters and the police being like a coordinated dance.
"I remember running through the bush and jumping over trees and eventually arresting people and marching them back to the river," he says.
"There were no cells, no secure holding area. We just had a designated area on the ground, which was designated by a piece of rope that was just laid in a circle."
Anyone arrested was shipped back to Strahan on police boats and taken to court, where many refused bail in protest so they could go to jail. The state's one jail, Risdon Prison, was overcrowded with Franklin blockaders.
The campsite upriver was crewed by an experienced team of blockaders who had travelled from northern New South Wales to help out. One of them was Lisa Yeates.
"We were living on the edge of nothing, day after day living in very extreme weather. No hot water, no showers," Ms Yeates recalls.
"And there would be little gatherings of tents… and there were up to 200 people, nestled under ferny logs.
"It was pretty leechy. Not a lot of sunlight, but it was exquisite."
Eventually, the blockade gained a familiar routine whereby 50 or so people were arrested each day, while the Hydro workers tried to do their jobs with minimal disruption.
The stakes escalated when a bulldozer was loaded onto a barge in Strahan and towed upriver to begin clearing the forest for the dam construction.
The blockaders had been warned that the dozer was on its way, and had strung together inflatable rubber rafts to block the way.
There was a scramble as the barge turned the bend in the river.
"So there we were, singing our little hearts out," Lisa Yeates recalls. "We can see the fishing boat towing the barge coming. All the people in the duckies down below are scrambling to hold the line."
The barge broke through the line, and as the bulldozer was unloaded onto the shore the protesters began screaming for it to tip into the water.
"There's just mayhem," Ms Yeates says.
"I have these images that, to this day, are still traumatic for me.
"The fact that no-one got injured [and] no-one died is absolutely mind-boggling."
"The sight of a bulldozer was the sight of the enemy.
"The worst thing that can happen to a forest is to have a bulldozer in it."
The bulldozer's arrival was a stark reminder for the blockaders that in spite of all the media attention and sympathy they'd garnered for the Franklin River, the dam project was still going ahead.
Trying for federal politics
The strategists at The Wilderness Society never relied solely on the blockade to stop the Tasmanian Government from constructing the power scheme.
For years, they had been courting federal politicians and lobbying for one of the major parties in Canberra to adopt a "No Dams" policy.
"It was clear it would never be won in Tasmania," says Karen Alexander, who helped set up a Melbourne branch of the Wilderness Society. "In terms of political influence, we didn't have it [in Tasmania]. So we looked to the national government really quickly."
The change came when the Labor Party adopted the "No Dams" policy at its national conference in 1982, and Labor leader Bob Hawke ran with it as a core policy for his election campaign the following year.
Hawke appeared at an anti-dam rally in Melbourne with 15,000 people and his wife Hazel famously wore the yellow "No Dams" triangle earrings.
"It is at one and the same time an environmental obscenity and an economic absurdity," Hawke declared during the campaign.
The conservation movement swung in behind Bob Hawke's campaign. Two days out from the election, The Wilderness Society made a final plea to voters to back Labor, publishing a full-page colour advertisement in the major mainland newspapers asking: "Could you vote for a party that will destroy this?"
It featured a breathtaking picture from photographer Peter Dombrovskis of a place on the Franklin known as Rock Island Bend. The photo captured the morning mist and the otherworldliness of the river. It became one of the enduring images of the campaign.
Bob Hawke won in a landslide. On election night, he reiterated his promise that the dam would not go ahead.
There may have been plenty of optimism and back-slapping on the mainland, but in Tasmania, Labor didn't win a single seat.
Now, it was up to the newly-elected Prime Minister to work out how to force Tasmania to stop the dam.
The key was an ancient cave that would change our understanding of human history, and, ultimately, the fate of the Franklin River.
World Heritage discovery
The future of the Franklin partly rested on an earlier visit by a young activist named Kevin Kiernan who was obsessed with exploring Tasmania's hidden network of caves.
"They all tend to link together to form part of an underground drainage system which I always think of as like the arteries of the earth," he says.
On one trip in 1977, Kevin explored a cave on the banks of the Franklin with a large chamber and multiple entrances.
Among scattered stalactites and the mud on the cave floor, Kevin says he noticed an unusually large amount of old wallaby bones piled in one corner.
"We did think 'gee, that's a lot of bones' but none of us had any training in a matter of being able to identify sediments and what their origins might be," he says.
Kevin returned to this cave years later, after he'd become an activist with the Franklin campaign, and a trained geomorphologist. This time, he knew instantly he was looking at evidence of ancient occupation.
His eyes fell on a small piece of quartzite rock with a sharpened edge – a stone tool. Kevin says when he picked it up, it was almost like holding someone's hand across time.
"I remember slumping onto a rock and holding this stone tool and getting totally swept up in thinking about who last held it, who last sat on this rock, what were they thinking about, what were their loves, what were their fears," he says. "It was a very emotional moment for me."
The cave was later named Kutikina, a word meaning children's spirit in the language of Tasmania's Aboriginal people.
Just one square metre of dirt from the cave floor contained a quarter of a million bone fragments, and thousands of stone tools that had accumulated over millennia through the use of the cave by Aboriginal people. This was archaeological proof that humans had occupied the Franklin River area during the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, when Tasmania was more like an Arctic tundra than the dense temperate rainforest of today.
It upended two beliefs about human history. Firstly, that the south-west of Tasmania was the only part of Australia that had never been occupied by Aboriginal people, and secondly, that no humans anywhere on the planet lived this far south during the last Ice Age.
It put the protection of First Nations heritage at the centre of the Franklin campaign, but raised questions about who got to decide how this new knowledge was used.
"The archaeologists and the environmental movement were using our cultural heritage as a reason for them to achieve their aims," says First Nations palawa man Michael Mansell, who today is head of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.
"They were making the point that this is so valuable to mankind – which we agree with. But that's our heritage, not mankind's. That belongs to us."
When the cave became a central point in the fight for protecting the Franklin, Michael Mansell wanted to see the place for himself — the place of his ancestors, who had occupied the area around the cave continuously for at least 6,000 years.
Pulling up to the sheer cliffs around the cave, he says he was filled with strange emotions.
"You're going into the home of your people," he says. "[You] see all these children that would be running around here, and they'd be cooking something on the fires, and the old men would be talking about the spirits.
"This cave was full of life at one stage, and now it's silent. And here we are coming back, putting Aboriginal life back into a culture that had been practised there for thousands of years."
Even though Mr Mansell had issues with white archaeologists poring over the cultural heritage in Kutikina Cave, there was one thing they did agree on: the site needed to be protected.
The UNESCO World Heritage List recognises sites around the world that are unique and have an "outstanding value to humanity".
On December 14 1982, a UNESCO committee formally added the South West Wilderness Area of Tasmania to the World Heritage List – putting the region on the same standing as places like the pyramids in Egypt, the Taj Mahal and the Galapagos Islands.
That placed the onus for protecting the area onto the Federal Government – they just needed the grounds on which to do it.
A High Court showdown
After coming to power, the Hawke Government passed legislation that brought world heritage sites under the protection of the Federal Government.
It set up a showdown between the Federal Government and the Tasmanian Government in the High Court of Australia to test the new legislation. The Franklin dam would ultimately come down to a constitutional battle.
"We knew the decision could go against the river. It was just a feeling of sick anxiety and dread," campaigner Geoff Law remembers about the landmark case.
"It was very disempowering and it was very alienating. We were there at the opening and we had to set aside our natural irreverence and rebelliousness and to sit there obediently,"
As he waited for the decision to come down on July 1, 1983, Geoff Law went bushwalking in Tasmania's central highlands to deal with the nerves.
"I was hitchhiking back to Hobart, and I got a lift with one driver and he asked me what I did for a living. And I said, 'Well, I'm a volunteer for The Wilderness Society.' And he said, 'Oh, well you must be happy about…'
"I just felt this sense of overwhelming relief and my whole body went weak and I stopped hearing what he was saying because I knew that the court had gone the right way."
On Tasmania's West Coast, the news was a bitter pill for the majority of locals who wanted the dam to proceed. Kevin Bailey was a contractor who had invested in heavy machinery on the promise of ongoing work with the Hydro. He was in one of his earthmovers when heard the announcement on the radio.
"I shut the machine down, and composed myself and thought, 'What are we going to do now?'
"When you make a financial commitment, there's no room for not making payments. And I was wondering how ends would meet.
"I got home that night and we had a meeting with our drivers and we said, 'We dunno what's going to happen but you all know the decision and that could mean that we don't have any jobs for you.'"
The High Court decision put 2,000 workers out of a job.
In the days following the decision, a small group of angry workers set fire to a giant Huon pine – one that had been standing tall for more than 2,500 years. They hacked into it and scrawled a message: "F**k you Green c**ts."
Even today, decades after the decision to not dam the Franklin River, some people on the West Coast still hold that resentment against the environmental movement.
"They walked out," says Brian Gardiner. "No-one came back and said … 'We need to do something to help you out.' They walked away and left us.
"For 10 years it was still raw. Probably for 15 years you could still … start a fiery argument up. It split families. There's no doubt about that, it split families."
On the Franklin today
Forty years later, the Franklin River campaign is still considered Australia's biggest environmental win.
Many of the strategies adopted by the blockaders, such as non-violent direct action training, are still used today.
After the Franklin campaign, Geoff Law went on to dedicate his career to other environmental fights, like the campaigns to protect Tasmania's Tarkine area and against the Gunns logging company. On reflection, he says there are lessons to be learnt from the Franklin campaign.
"We made mistakes and there was a lot of naivety," he says. "The campaign was criticised afterwards for not being sufficiently engaged with workers, for various tactical errors during the election campaign, and so on.
"But I wouldn't change any of it because the outcome was the right outcome. It led to a period in which the Federal Government became involved in the protection of the environment in a way that had not happened before and has not happened since.
"It was a very powerful form of naivety because it meant we didn't feel constrained by what was the conventional wisdom."
One of the paradoxes at the heart of the Franklin story is that the dam was a renewables project. By flooding precious areas all over the state for dams, Tasmania today has 100 per cent renewable energy, and has a target for 200 per cent by 2040.
In the decades since the blockade, the science of climate change has become public knowledge. Environmentalists like Bob Brown are still trying to find the balance between advocating for renewables without compromising on conservation.
"We have alternatives for renewable energy. We don't have alternatives for extinct species," Dr Brown says.
Cathie Plowman, who moved her life to Tasmania to coordinate the blockade as a 24-year-old, says she still feels proud whenever she looks back at old photos of herself among other young and driven environmental activists.
"I'm still in awe of what that group of young people did… and that I was a part of that," she says.
"You don't see yourself as that at the time, you just see yourself as working hard for something you believed in."
For now, people can still visit the dark, tea-stained waters, the churning rapids, and experience one of the last temperate rainforests in the world, filled with rare and endangered plants and animals.
Bob Brown says the legacy of the Franklin should give young people hope for the future.
"The most common question I get from young people is: 'Why aren't you depressed?' I say back to them [that] I spent years being depressed as a young fellow looking at the way the world is, and I found that it's no place to be. It is so much better to be active.
"The Franklin campaign is a heartland lesson in the fact that even in the bleakest circumstances, you have a right to change things for the better.
"Had we allowed pessimism to overcome our optimism, and had we seen the death of the Franklin as inevitable, rather than something to be fought against, it would've gone."
Hear the full investigation by Jo Lauder in the latest series of Dig: Saving the Franklin, available on the ABC listen app.
Credits:
- Reporter: Jo Lauder
- Digital production and editing: Michael Dulaney and Rosanna Ryan
- Podcast executive producer: Clare Rawlinson
- Photography: Piia Wirsu
