Pedder by Max Angus

Pedder: The Story. The Paintings,

by Max Angus;

Lake Pedder Restoration Committee, 2008, $70.

Max Angus’s moving narrative sets before us a gentle and dignified man’s understanding of what was once an intensely inflammatory issue: the flooding of Lake Pedder in the cause of a hydro-electric power scheme. Lake Pedder was the jewel in the crown of Tasmania’s formerly untarnished south-western wilderness area.

If subsequent conservationists were even half as reasonable as the author and illustrator of this slender but beautiful book their causes would be served much better.

Angus chronicles what he sees as the tragic flooding of an area of outstanding natural beauty in the early 1970s in the light of his impassioned association with Lake Pedder which began in 1953. Unlike many who support so-called green issues today, Angus does not automatically characterise his opponents as either villains or vandals. What the book concludes, in fact, is that the flooding of the lake was ultimately unnecessary and that the famous, shallow, sand-fringed site could and should be restored one day to its former glory.

Angus narrates the story of the unsuccessful protests against the flooding of the lake with the slightly resigned air of an artist who has become accustomed to living in a predominantly philistine society. His gentle and somewhat dreamlike watercolours, which support his well-argued text, show us what we have all lost through the flooding.

When Angus first travelled there, Lake Pedder was largely inaccessible except by air, and he is right to condemn the politicians who decided on the fate of this remarkable site without ever actually seeing it for themselves.

Areas which are deliberately flooded often take on an eerie ambience, especially when human habitations disappear. When I was living in West Cornwall, two exceptionally hot British summers—1975 and 1976—caused a flooded village to reappear suddenly, owing to the evaporation of Drift Dam, which supplied local drinking water. Crowds gathered to see granite walls and whole cottages loom out of the lake, which became a temporary tourist attraction.

Max Angus hails from an era of environmentalist innocence before it began to be argued that human beings have less right to be on this planet than rare species of frog or zillions of ubiquitous gum trees. If the Royal Commission investigating the recent Victorian bushfires does not blame green activists for much of the destruction of property and loss of life which has occurred it will fail in its duty.

Angus belonged to an older and much worthier environmentalist tradition. We should salute him for demonstrating the kind of reasonableness which has become increasingly rare.

Giles Auty reviewed The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell in the May issue.