Historic photo of the Warragamba Dam construction. Picture: Sydney Catchment Authority Source: Supplied
Historic photo of the Warragamba Dam construction. Picture: Sydney Catchment Authority Source: Supplied
IN the late 1940s, a small army of men equipped with bulldozers, giant drills and explosives set to work re-engineering a vast stretch of Australian wilderness to build the southern hemisphere's highest dam. The waters flowing into the Warragamba River were to be held back for almost 50km, the scenic Burragorang Valley would be flooded and a natural gorge surrounded by old growth forest would be turned into an artificial lake containing four times more water than Sydney Harbour.
"The deep, silent canyon resounds to the chatter of pneumatic drills, the roar of machinery, and the clatter of concrete mixers as man turns the mute forces of nature to his own use," reported The Sydney Morning Herald.
In an era before green politics, when wilderness was tamed not worshipped, the construction of Warragamba Dam to provide water for Sydney was an act of national heroism.
It a federal Coalition government was to build a dam of any reasonable size, it will overturn an effective moratorium that began 40 years ago next month, when Bob Hawke's incoming Labor government blocked the construction of the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam. Only one major dam has been built since, the Burdekin in far north Queensland, a monument to the defiance of Joh Bjelke Petersen, completed four years after Franklin. Australia's stored water capacity has remained static, at about 77 megalitres, while the population since 1983 has grown by 65 per cent.
A dam-building program would face ferocious opposition, for few totemic issues resonate more strongly than artificial lakes for the Australian green movement. Anti-dam campaigns in Tasmania were the catalyst for the rise of green politics. As in America, anti-dam campaigns became a proxy war over the limits of frontier, a symbol of mankind's hubris, a line in the wilderness where the advance of industrial development is halted and turned back.
In 2005, environmental historian Robert W. Righter predicted that in the future "engineers will likely dismantle more dams than they build."
The narrative of the Australian post-war years was nation building; no forest was too precious, no valley too pure and no mountain too remote to stand in the way of progress. Dam building was the symbol of the second pioneering age, the means of turning an arid continent into a productive food bowl and powering industrial development.
The Snowy Mountains scheme was the apotheosis of Australian modernism; a bi-partisan exercise started by a Labor government and completed under the Menzies' Coalition government with barely a whisper of opposition.
At a ceremony to mark the start of construction, minutes before detonating an explosion that blew a chunk out of a hill at Eucumbene, prime minister Ben Chifley said Australians were "directing nature, not defying her"; playing Australia's part in freedom from want; helping to relieve the suffering of two-thirds of the world's population who had insufficient food.
In a nation of less than eight million people living chiefly on the coast, Australia's imagined frontier stretched far into the horizon. Nature conservation movements had been operating since the late 19th century, and national parks had been proclaimed on the fringes of Australian cities, but they were conceived not as natural museums but as places of recreation, where city-bound people could escape for rejuvenation.
The notion of a self-contained biosphere from which mankind should be banished had not yet arrived. In the US, dam building became the focus of environmental campaigning in the early 20s. The battleground was a glacial valley in the Yosemite National Park, where the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir would supply water to San Francisco, about 300km to the west. The campaign against Hetch Hetchy, led by John Muir, founder of environmental lobby group the Sierra Club, was defeated but the project's completion in 1923, nine years after Muir's death, only served to galvanise the movement.
The reputation of dam builders was not helped by the bursting of the St Francis Dam in 1928, killing 420 people in one of the greatest disasters in Californian history.
The tide finally turned in 1964, when the Johnson administration drove the Wilderness Act through congress, imposing a statutory obligation to ensure that a growing population, expanding settlement and mechanisation "does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions".
President Lyndon B. Johnson called for "a new conservation" that embraced the relationship between man and the world around him: "Its object is not just man's welfare, but the dignity of man's spirit."
The US environmental movement, lead by the Sierra Club, was becoming increasingly sophisticated in its campaigning. It set out to systematically redefine the concept of "wilderness" from hostile wasteland to a pristine natural wonder that must be saved at any cost.
The club's landmark victory came in the 60s in a campaign to stop two dams being built that would flood portions of the Grand Canyon. The dam builders argued that the development would give the public access to an inaccessible natural landscape. The Sierra Club responded with full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post, asking: "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?"
Australia's Hetch Hetchy moment came in the early 70s, as work neared completion on the Huon-Serpentine Impoundment in Tasmania. The Serpentine, Scotts Peak and Edgar dams would create Lake Pedder, containing six times more water than Sydney Harbour.
Tasmania's premier, Eric Reece, had received bipartisan support in Hobart and Canberra when he announced the project in 1967; no one seemed troubled by his warning that there would be "some modification to the Lake Pedder National Park". Indeed, the Holt and Gorton governments chipped in $48 million with the Labor opposition's blessing.
Initial opposition was led mainly by bushwalkers and conservationists with no clear leadership or organisation. Gradually, however, opposition grew and spread beyond Tasmania, turning the campaign for Lake Pedder into a proxy battle for wider environmental concerns.
Like Hetch Hetchy, the failure of the campaign to save Lake Pedder was the turning point for environmentalists.
The world's first ecological political party, the United Tasmania Group, the forerunner of the Greens, sprang directly from the battle for Lake Pedder. The recipient of Coalition government funding had run soft on Lake Pedder and now faced a coup from its members. A radicalised Australian Conservation Foundation turned to the Sierra Club in the US for lessons in running campaigns.
Bob Brown, then running The Wilderness Society, persuaded his fellow campaigners to take haircuts and put on a jacket and tie for interviews; he kept a selection, bought from St Vincent de Paul, in his "camouflage cupboard" in the corner of the office.
Green groups joined forces in 1978 when the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission announced a new construction project: the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam, a structure two-and-a-half times taller than the Serpentine. A second dam, twice as tall again, was proposed further upriver.
The HEC fought back at the "self-appointed guardians" of the public conscience. "The inescapable fact is that no matter how much we deplore some of its facets, we cannot halt development," the HEC's associate commissioner, Ray Ferrar, wrote in The Examiner.
Outside Tasmania, however, opposition was growing. Anti-dam protesters had persuaded Malcolm Fraser's federal Coalition government to nominate South West Tasmania as a World Heritage site, and in July the ACF and The Wilderness Society lobbied delegates at the federal Labor Party's biennial conference, where a motion opposing construction was passed, against the wishes of the Tasmanian ALP.
Tasmanian premier Robyn Gray warned they would have "a massive fight on their hands if they tried to obstruct the will of the people in Tasmania".
In November 1982, the campaigners ran out of democratic options when Fraser's cabinet confirmed there would be no federal intervention. "They can only resort to blockades and clutching at the straws of a High Court challenge or a change of Federal government," The Hobart Mercury editorialised. "Next Tuesday's blockade by conservationists in the southwest is now wholly indefensible."
The blockade began on December 14. By Christmas, 202 of the 417 people who had registered for stage one of the blockade had been arrested and 167 imprisoned for refusing bail conditions. The protests recommenced in January, although work on the dam continued unimpeded.
Fraser was obliged to go to the polls against the background of bulldozers, drilling, blasting and images of mass arrests. Hawke, newly elected as Labor leader, was willing to overlook the contradiction between campaigning on jobs and employment while promising to block the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam.
At the March 5 election, the 4 per cent swing to Labor across the country was reversed in Tasmania, with a 4 per cent swing to the Coalition.
To all intents and purposes, the Franklin campaign ended dam building in Australia for 40 years and turned the environmental movement into a force to be reckoned with.
By reinventing wilderness as a living organism in danger of brutalisation, they had cast themselves as a resistance movement, the last line of defence before the destructive forces of corporatism and bureaucracy.
Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland government supervised the last defiant water storage project, in 1987, with the completion of the Burdekin dam in the far north of the state, providing drinking water for Townsville and feeding the state's largest area of irrigated agriculture.
Over the next quarter century, Queensland's population grew by more than 70 per cent, and the population of the country as a whole by almost 40 per cent, but the growth in stored water capacity was, to all intents and purposes, zero. The Queensland government tried valiantly to revive the lost art of dam building.
Traveston Crossing, 180km north of Brisbane, could hardly be considered pristine wilderness; it had been farmed with cattle since the mid 19th century.
Nevertheless, Peter Garrett exercised his right of veto as environment minister in 2009, proclaiming: "The science shows that this project would have serious and irreversible effects on nationally listed species such as the Australian lungfish, the Mary River turtle and the Mary River cod."
The Labor Party, hurt by its association with the Greens in a minority parliament, will be less enthusiastic about joining the anti-dam crusade than it was in 1983. Experience has taught the party that the issues that fascinate the patrons of coffee shops in inner-city Sydney or Melbourne can be electoral poison elsewhere.
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