Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  Long before she graduated with honours Marg had found her true vocation: environmentalist–troublemaker. The war for the forests, rivers and lakes had begun and the first of the battlelines were drawn along the scalloped white beach of Lake Pedder. It was here that she enthusiastically began her career as a tree hugger; river rescuer; guardian of lakes; opposer of dams, bulldozers and chainsaws; and mortal enemy of the all-powerful Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission.

  I had gone down to Tasmania in 1971 to see Marg after she’d badgered me to attend a protest meeting to be held in Hobart. I agreed only because it was a good excuse to see her. Anna had never again brought up the subject of my sleeping with Marg. Strangely, it was never the prospect of sharing a partner that created the antipathy between the two women, but rather how they saw each other’s lives and values: the fierce and fanatical environmentalist and the rapacious plunderer of the planet – Green Bitch versus Princess Plunder.

  I never returned to my scattered surrogates and while I can’t say it was perfect or that I didn’t retain a strong desire for Marg, life, even with its sexual compromises, was tolerable. In the moral sense I was the guilty party. I never gave up hoping Marg would change her mind. But if I had any carnal thoughts during my first visit to Tasmania, Marg definitely had other things in mind. She was entirely preoccupied with the protest over the damming of Lake Pedder and was anxious to have me meet her new friends.

  While there were too many of them to recall all their names, some I met on that first visit became stalwarts of the conservation movement. There was feisty Helen Gee, who had the distinction of having been called a communist ratbag in parliament; Olegas Truchanas, one of the finest nature photographers in the world, who was later tragically drowned canoeing on the Gordon; Peter Sims, a fifth-generation Taswegian who had, along with the redoubtable Jessie Luckman, been involved in the conservation movement for at least a decade. I also met Brenda Hean and Max Price, who died soon afterwards when the Tiger Moth in which they were flying to Canberra to skywrite ‘Save Lake Pedder’ above the Federal Parliament crashed. While I am not one for conspiracy theories, they had, as a matter of record, received several threatening phone calls and Price’s Tiger Moth had, on a previous occasion, been tampered with while in the hangar.

  There were of course many others as brave and true who fought and suffered greatly for their beliefs. Tasmania is a small island with a close-knit population. The fight against the Hydro-Electric Commission’s projects and the battle to save the Tasmanian wilderness and old-growth forests has left deep divisions. To this day families are divided and communities split. Many of those conservationists who took the side of nature have paid a heavy price in their social, working and family lives, but also, it must be said, those who sided with the Hydro and logging interests have not come through unscathed.

  Making a stand for the environment wasn’t and isn’t for wimps; these were and still are the bravest and truest of our green warriors. When the saints finally come marching in, it won’t surprise me to see that Brenda Hean and Max Price are the official flag-bearers, with Olegas Truchanas the photographer for the Resurrection Bugle, and Bob Brown will be giving the celestial newspaper his scathing opinion on the clipped box hedges of the Anglican suburbs of Heaven, while the other true greens will all be marching with chestfuls of campaign medals in the front line.

  But, of course, all of this is with the benefit of hindsight. At the time I was at best ambivalent. I supported Marg more for her resolution to change her life than for her chosen cause, which meant that I wasn’t entirely apathetic or uninterested but rather what I considered at the time ‘sensible and fair-minded’, pretty much the same thing, if you consider it in any depth.

  This doomed wilderness, euphoniously named the Middle Gordon Scheme, was first proposed by the Labor Premier Eric Reece, known as ‘Electric Eric’, who came to power in 1958 and described the area to be dammed as ‘worthless land that only contains a few badgers, kangaroos and wallabies and some wildflowers that can be seen elsewhere’. This just about sums up the prevailing attitude and appalling ignorance of the premier and his government about the state’s flora and fauna. Moreover, the Liberals who came to power in 1969 were no better informed, although it should be mentioned that one lone MP, Louis Shoobridge, a scion of one of the old landowning families, was the only member to protest against the damming of Lake Pedder.

  I arrived in Tasmania three days before the November Lake Pedder protest meeting, after first stopping off in Melbourne to see Anna and the site – now cleared – for Nauru House, the building of which was due to begin the following year. The Melbourne Herald had discovered who the genius was who’d put the real-estate deal of the decade together and Anna was suddenly being taken very seriously by the big end of town.

  Marg had urged me to bring my hiking boots, gear, rucksack and sleeping bag, and from her friends she’d borrowed two single tents (not a promising sign) and a rather beaten-up Toyota four-wheel drive. We spent the first part of the evening at a pub meeting Marg’s friends but she’d warned of an early start and a long day’s walk so we left around eight. Marg made a light supper – ham omelette, toast and tea – and I was in bed in her spare room by about half-past nine, only to be wakened just after four in the morning by the dead admiral’s resurrected wife dressed in hiking gear and assuring me that I had plenty of time to get ready but we would need to leave in fifteen minutes on the dot. ‘You don’t need to shave, Nick.’

  ‘What about going to the dunny?’

  ‘Well, yes, okay, but hurry,’ she laughed.

  We drove north along the Midland Highway, turning off to Bridgewater then heading along the Strathgordon Road through Maydena along a well-graded gravel road built to service the Hydro-Electric Commission projects. We left the Toyota at a muddy clearing off the road and, humping our backpacks, set off into what looked like an impregnable tangle of dark vegetation filling every inch of the space in the temperate rainforest where the trees rose no higher than forty feet. The path was narrow, muddy, dark and slippery and the vegetation kept snatching at my rucksack as if determined to close up the puny path humans had scratched and hacked through it. I’d never witnessed bush as dense and the fact that even this narrow path existed at all seemed remarkable.

  I was accustomed to hiking in tropical jungle where the canopy prevents sunlight penetrating to the floor so that, with the exception of vines and creepers, the surface is almost free of undergrowth and progress is relatively easy. The track Marg and I were following was going to make it a very long hard day, and despite the early-morning chill I was soon sweating profusely. ‘Christ, how long does this go on?’ I called to Marg.

  ‘If you were younger and fitter it would be about four hours but we should be there before nightfall,’ she replied.

  ‘Thanks for the ego boost,’ I called back.

  ‘Count yourself lucky, darling. One of the ironies of this situation is that by putting the track through to Maydena the Hydro people have reduced the hike to Pedder and back to two days. It’s much easier to make protest visits now. The old way was a three-day slog through rainforest and over the high peaks and you needed to really know your onions to complete it.’

  In the pub the previous evening Helen Gee had assured me that I would enjoy the hike, which she described as following a well-defined path. She mentioned several pleasant watercourses and a few easy rocky ridges with most of the trail winding through rainforest. ‘You’ll love the button-grass plateaus,’ she’d commented.

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ I’d replied with enthusiasm. ‘I’m pretty fit. Not long ago I spent a week or so wandering in the beech forests in the foothills in Japan,’ I’d told her confidently.

  ‘Well then, you’ll have no trouble at all, Nick,’ she’d assured me, smiling, I now realised, in a rather knowing way.

  While Helen’s description of the terrain was, technically speaking, correct – there were certainly trees, streams and rocky ridges – these w
ere not sylvan beech glades with winding mossy paths well-trod for a thousand years, gently gurgling brooks, hot springs and leaf-carpeted foothills. The forest was choked with a vicious, tearing, angry tangle involved in an all-out wrestling match with us; the thundering streams threatened to carry you away with the first misstep; and the towering ridges resembled the jawbones of dinosaurs.

  By late afternoon I’d been flayed alive by undergrowth with a clearly malevolent intent, slipped on my arse countless times, slid uncontrollably down muddy slopes grabbing onto tree roots and stumps until my hands bled, been scratched and cut wherever my skin was exposed (later I would discover that half the blood in my body had been sucked from it by leeches the size of bananas), puffed, panted, gasped and groaned. Finally we emerged onto a high button-grass plateau and faced one last steep razorback ridge.

  By this time I was well and truly bent, buggered and totally be-wildernessed. Marg had left me for dead and seemed still to be in remarkably good shape. Moreover, her resolute cheeriness was giving me the veritable screaming shits.

  ‘One last little climb, darling!’ she called, as if this were some Sunday-school picnic paper-chase we had a good chance of winning if only I’d move my fat backside a bit faster.

  The final climb up the last ridge damn near did me in for good. I reached the top and stood gasping, bent over with my hands on my knees, panting like an ageing bull-mastiff. Finally I looked down into the valley below.

  Oh shit, oh glory!

  Okay! Perhaps there are glacial lakes somewhere in the world, probably New Zealand or Switzerland, Italy or Norway, that are more beautiful in the accepted azure-blue, surrounded-by-snow-capped-mountains, picture-postcard sort of way. But Lake Pedder hadn’t taken any cues from these archetypical vistas. It was startlingly different in the way a woman, whether blonde, brunette, redhead, dark, fair, sloe-eyed or wide-eyed, can be beautiful and yet not conform to any cultural paradigm of beauty, but is simply a new definition, an original, who, having imitated nothing, somehow epitomises everything.

  Lake Pedder was a one-off. From where I stood, even in the late afternoon with the light still good, the water appeared as black as polished anthracite, a mirrored surface that stretched five kilometres or so, surrounded by ragged, plain-faced saw-toothed mountains. Above it was a sky of roiling, towering cumulus, all of it duplicated on the mirror-still surface. I have never seen nature reflected in quite so precise a way, the reflection more perfect than the wider reality, for it was completely contained, one end sharply defined by scalloped white sand. It was the absence of detail that struck me. It was as if the original artist had rejected every distracting element, eliminating the minutiae of trees and grass and sudden outcrops of rock, the myriad devices of landscape that serve to distract the eye. Every component existed for a single purpose, to maximise the dark surface of the lake and to call one’s attention to its primordial beauty. It seemed impossible that this purity of vision was due to be swamped with the dishwater contained in a man-made cement basin, a fat-bottomed frau to replace an astonishingly beautiful nymphette.

  I saw at once the ugly face of humankind hell-bent on profit, using the self-righteous catchcries of cheap electricity and jobs for workers as an opportunity for tawdry profit. These rapacious and vainglorious men, oblivious to the wonderful gift of purity and joy we had been granted forever with this ancient lake, were spitting into the face of God.

  That Lake Pedder would disappear was akin to a terrorist taping the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with sticks of dynamite strung with cordtex and then announcing that it was being blown up in the interests of jobs for plaster workers and artists on the dole. The late James McQueen said it more eloquently than ever I could: ‘. . . the river was not just a river, for me it is the epitome of all the lost forests, all the submerged lakes, all the tamed rivers, all the extinguished species. It is threatened by the same mindless beast that has eaten our past, is eating our present and threatens to eat our future: that civil beast of mean ambitions and broken promises and hedged bets and tawdry profits.’

  People simply don’t and won’t ever switch on the light with the thought, ‘Oh God, there goes another natural wonder!’ Hydroelectricity was the perfect answer for Tasmania’s politicians, and Marg’s mob bleating about a coffee-coloured lake in the high scrub was never going to win the hearts and minds of voters.

  There is very little doubt that if the Franklin–Gordon schemes had been proposed in the earlier post-war period of national euphoria and adulation of bulldozers and cement, it would have happened with a loud fanfare from both federal and state governments.

  Moreover, if we think those were the bad old days, the fight to ban the exploitation of Tasmania’s old-growth forests continues, and politicians and profiteers are still using the same specious arguments about jobs and unemployment. Tasmania has a history of old-growth timber extraction for pulp and paper mills that began back in the late 1930s. That ‘civil beast of mean ambitions and broken promises and hedged bets and tawdry profits’ is alive and well and making huge profits exporting woodchips to Japan. And yet, for every Tasmanian timber worker who loses his job, there are two jobs waiting in the tourist industry. It is simply a matter of willingness and a little training on the job.

  Marg and I erected our tents at the back of the quartzite beach that had seemed white from the top of the ridge but turned out to be a lovely pink colour and as fine as talcum powder. The sun was setting across the lake as Marg prepared supper and I removed my boots and socks and started to locate the banana-sized leeches – well, perhaps not quite that big, but still big buggers – freeloading on my blood. Marg laughed, ‘Good thing you’re a large fellow, Nick, or you’d be bones rattling around in a bag of skin by now.’

  ‘Are you quite sure it’s a good idea to save this lake? The amount of human blood lost could be considerable,’ I kidded, knowing, of course, that what I’d just seen was worth every bloated bloodsucker that had come along for a free feed and a ride. Marg, of course, had foreseen this additional blight and handed me a small saltshaker. I knew from the jungle that a little salt will make a leech drop off, taking what seems like half a cup of blood with it, but at least it won’t itch for a week. Of course, I hadn’t thought to bring my own supply of salt.

  Marg had also brought a vegetarian stew, which she was heating on the spirit stove she’d lugged all the way in – we were well above the tree line and there wasn’t a stick of wood available to make a fire. We talked as we ate, arguing in a lethargic way about some of the issues I’ve just mentioned, but it was fairly pointless. Marg was committed to a single cause and I wasn’t prepared to support the opposition with any real enthusiasm, let alone vehemence. The vegie stew was bloody awful but I was hungry and almost licked my plate.

  We were both dog-tired, never a good time to squabble or get tetchy, so I changed the subject and asked, ‘How are the landed gentry, your cousins and the ancient titled aunt?’

  Marg pulled a face. ‘I’ve been ostracised.’

  ‘Oh?’ I pointed to the lake. ‘Because of this?’

  Marg nodded. ‘Banished is a better word. Three months ago I was summoned to Sunday lunch with nine cardigan-clad senior members of the family. It was eaten in almost complete silence except for an occasional “Pass the salt, please.” Nick, you should have seen their faces, munching away. The only noise was the clack of dentures and the loud mastication of the overcooked roast beef, or an occasional clearing of the throat.

  ‘After lunch I was commanded by the dowager Lady Babbage to wait in a small anteroom until I was summoned. Another fifteen members duly arrived after lunch in a rattle of cars and trucks and all assembled in a large room they refer to rather grandly as the ballroom, where I believe folk-dancing took place in the old days.

  ‘A maid then came to fetch me and I was led into this huge room where all twenty-three members of the Babbage family, male and female cousins, second cousins, wives and maiden aunts, were assembled behind a chaise longue as i
f posing for a family photograph, all wearing their Sunday best in preparation for my banishment back to the mainland. The old dragon, attired entirely in black as if, like Queen Victoria, in perpetual mourning for Prince Albert, was seated alone on the chaise longue, visibly smouldering. The room fell silent as I entered.’

  Marg then described the whole comic opera, how the ninety-year-old Lady Babbage, the erstwhile Aunt Nettie, widow of Sir Bob ‘Bulldozer’ Babbage, the first deputy chairman of the Hydro-Electric Commission and a long-term member of the Legislative Council, sat ramrod straight, gripping the walking stick in both hands, the tip resting between her black lisle-stockinged legs.

  ‘Glaring at me she commanded me to sit in a lone straight-backed chair facing her and the remainder of the family. Then rapping her cane several times on the magnificent polished hardwood floor she barked, “We shall have silence!” even though no one had uttered a word since I’d entered the room.

  ‘By this stage I’d worked up a head of steam. At rallies I had grown accustomed to being yelled at by rednecks, drunks, angry workers and their wives but this was my own family. I sat down, trying to appear composed, even unconcerned. Then, remembering the admiral’s technique when dressing down a group of young naval officers, I looked over the silent assembly carefully, taking in each member, and announced, “Right then, let the inquisition begin!” The old witch didn’t bother with any polite preliminaries.