Return to the river - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Heather Kirkpatrick
DAY TWO. THE RIVER HAD ONLY DROPPED A COUPLE OF CENTIMETRES, which is great. We say "Hi" to a bunch of outdoor instructors from Victoria, camped on the other side. One woman's eyes are like saucers as she spots Bob. We all decide on camp sites downstream for a few days to avoid any double bookings. We'll head to Watermelon Beach tonight. That's one Bob didn't name.
We're paddling through easy grade-two and grade-three rapids under Pyramid Peak. An eagle watches us from a charred tree trunk above the forest. I decide to record from my minidisc as we are paddling. Hope I don't drown my microphone. I have three-track audio with narration from Bob, my paddle commands and the sound of white water. A log-jammed rapid is reached and Bob has a story to tell.
"I thought my number was up in that rapid once. A loose line at the back of my raft was caught around the log and the raft was being held in underneath with me ... no drainage holes like in this raft. Paul Smith inched his way back up the river with a knife ... so I could reach back and cut the line and voom, away we went."
Everyone seems comfortable and absorbed by the ever-changing scenery. We camp on Watermelon's wide sandy beach. Paul says he hasn't thought of home or work or anything back in the city. This place is like that. You become so focused on the present. It brings people back in touch with simple living, intimately connected with nature.
He shows me a garden with tiny bonsai-like plants of huon pine, sassafras, myrtle, lichens, liverworts and violets all growing together on a square foot of rotting log. He describes it as "magical" and lays his mat and sleeping bag beside it.
We sleep under the stars tonight as the dew falls gently. The cirrus clouds from the afternoon have disappeared and a clear sky is overhead.
After a bacon-and-egg breakfast, Brown and Thomas fasten original green triangular No Dam stickers they found in a recent house move to the front of each raft. The slogan came from a state referendum where "No Dams" was not an option. "You could either vote for the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam or for the Gordon-above-Olga Dam. And there was such an outrage about that, that one in three people wrote ‘No Dams' on their ballot papers. So it became a motto after '81 for the Franklin ...That was the biggest informal writing in Australian history."
During the day, we explore a sculptured side canyon at Askance Creek and swim in the pool under the huge cascade at Blushrock Falls. Downstream, the Side Slip rapid marks the entrance to the Great Ravine, the inner sanctum of the Franklin. The rafts speed down a steep fast chute, bouncing off the right-hand wall. We paddle the calm straight of Inception Reach. Walls 1,000 metres high tower in from either side. We move towards the Churn, the first of four major portages. The water is still too high to safely reach an easier portage route, so we decide to carry the gear along the trail on the left.
"Everybody ready? One. Two. Three," calls Brown as we heave the raft almost vertically up the steepest section of the trail. It is interesting and somewhat surprising to see him comfortably carrying barrels, bags and rafts with the ease with which he might deliver a fiery election speech. We complete the portage in three hours.
CAMP IS MADE FOR TWO NIGHTS AT THE TOP OF THE CORUSCADES, the second major rapid in the Great Ravine. The group is swimming again. Rail, hail or shine for these folk. Not me. The water is freezing. I help Anna organise dinner.
It is an incredible place to hang out for a rest day. We are surrounded by huge canyon walls, the imposing golden face of Oriel Rock with rich pockets of forest fringing the river banks. Michael spots a platypus surfacing in the deep pool of Serenity Sound. I love this place. I'm in heaven.
On the fifth day, we raft the steepest drop on the river, the Forcett, near the finale of Coruscades. It is a sneaky move to the far left side of the fall followed by a big "hold on". We line up well and the raft buries deeply and submerges for a split second. This always gets people excited. If they don't hold on it is easy to be flicked out. We pull in at the bottom and I set my video camera running on autopilot; river safety is the priority here. Here comes Anna's boat. "Oooh", and there goes Ben. I throw my safety line but he's instantly pulled back into his boat. Nice rescue.
Fully laden rafts are hauled over the left-hand side of the third major portage, Thunderush, and the bottom section runs smoothly. Sometimes rafts get held sideways on a rock here, with upstream water pouring in, requiring ropes and pulley systems to haul them off. Not this time. At the final ravine portage of the Cauldron, an easy dragging route is completed on the right.
Many parties have had to abort their Franklin expeditions. The river claimed two lives during the campaign years and a handful of others later. Brown describes an incident from the the first full river descent made by Johnson Dean and John Hawkins. It was their third attempt in 1959, and they finally made it all the way down the Franklin. During the first two attempts their parties walked out, leaving broken canoes behind. "Dean got stuck on the left-hand side on a rock with the rest of them on the central rock in the middle there throwing him canned food in the rain. It was a very dicey situation but they managed to haul him back," Brown, who knows Dean well, says.
In 1971, Fred Koolhof's party came down on rafts made of tractor tubes. The rafts smashed at the Cauldron. Brown says: "Koolhof is said to have been saying his prayers before he jumped in with his pack on his back because he had no option in rising water ... All four of them came out at the bottom end and pieced together the smashed remnants for enough flotation to get them through the river. The whole thing [the Great Ravine] is very beautiful, very spectacular, very inspiring and so different to what it would have become had the No Dams campaign not succeeded because we would be about a hundred metres underwater here, had that happened."
On the sixth day we encounter more challenging rapids through Propsting Gorge. The second of two portages so absorbs the attention of the group that they are surprised to suddenly see Rock Island Bend. Brown is immediately nostalgic: "This is where Peter Dombrovskis came in 1979, sat on the rocks just behind me here, waited for the moment and the misty morning to take that iconic picture of Rock Island Bend, which was reprinted more than a million times during the Franklin campaign. It headed up the campaign for the 1983 election to save the Franklin, which helped change governments and brought the Hawke government in, which stopped the dam through the High Court action."
I FEEL THE ADRENALIN RUNNING AGAIN AS WE SCOUT and set up safety ropes for the last major rapid on the Franklin, the 400-metre-long Newland's Cascades. The river is quite low now and Anna and I entertain our crews as our rafts bump and spin off rocks, forcing us to run a drop or two backwards when we don't have time to turn them around. We are both upright at the bottom of the rapid and that is what matters. We paddle a short stretch of calm water to camp.
Newlands, with a huge long overhang about twenty metres overhead, is my favourite camp site on the river. No tarpaulins are needed as secluded ledges provide shelter, complete with views of swirling lacework patterns in the river and the music of water droplets cascading off Shower Cliff on the other side.
The final two days are spent in the broad forests of the Lower Franklin. We have finished with the serious gorges; there are no large rapids to contend with. The mood is relaxed. The river gently flows thirty-five kilometres to the Gordon River. Limestone dominates the cliffs along the waterline, punctuated by caves, arches and waterworn pockets.
We are paddling on a mirror. The reflections are intense and when the breeze picks up, light patterns from the moving ripples play on the cliff like a light show. We refresh ourselves with regular swims; the temperature reaches 30 degrees. You really appreciate days like this on the west coast where it rains about 300 days a year. I lie on my back and float in the current, watching the clouds and trees move by.
Tonight at our Snake Island camp we toast Dick Smith with mugs of Tasmanian wine. He helicoptered in the box of goodies and a note: "To Bob Brown. Thanks for saving the Franklin. This gravel bank would be fifty metres underwater but for your work. I dips me lid to you. Thanks, Dick Smith." When we arrived on the beach at Flat Island this afternoon they were there waiting for us.
Everyone sleeps under the stars. In a couple of days I will miss the sound of gentle waters running over the shingle rapids as I fall asleep. I wake at three am to a huge full moon glowing through the mist before the imposing Elliot Range. I think about getting up to film but I drift off.
THE NEXT MORNING WE CLIMB UP FROM THE RIVER to the Kutikina Cave. It is the size of a large living room and the site of the southernmost known habitation of humans anywhere on earth during the last ice age. Brown recalls his memories of its historic rediscovery in 1981, on a trip he made with Kevin Kiernan and Bob Burton. From the river, he and Burton heard Kiernan's cry of delight from the cave above. "When we came up here, Kevin was bent over this hearth. There were coals still in the depression in the ground and bones of animals which had been cooked by the last Aboriginal people. We were astounded. In the silence of the morning you could see the little breeze lifting the ferns outside, you could see shadows outside and it was as if we were in somebody else's house. You could absolutely imagine an Aboriginal family coming back off the river and finding us in there, even though they left 14,000 years ago."
The cave was central to the No Dams campaign, particularly after December 1982 when south-west Tasmania became a World Heritage Area (WHA), as it was a site of recognised international cultural importance. The WHA Act protects sites of international cultural importance – providing a compelling argument when the battle to save the Franklin moved to the High Court in 1983.
Eight kilometres downstream, we reach the Gordon River as a sea eagle flies overhead. There is a good flow from the Gordon Dam today and even a tailwind to assist in the final seven kilometres to the jetty at Sir John Falls. The thick rainforest on these river banks is much denser than on the Franklin.
The crumbling remains of a drill site made in 1982 for the proposed dam is almost reclaimed by the forest. I look across at Bob, who smiles. He noticed it, too. He looks at home here.
This eighth river journey may be his last, his only trip down the Franklin since the future of the river became certain. "It is like reconnecting with an old friend and [finding] that he or she is just as beautiful and rewarding as ever. The great thing is the simple joy of knowing it is there and people ... are going to be floating down this river for centuries to come. Coming back closes the circle, the circle between going there in the first place, then the campaign, then almost losing it, and then entering a political system which would still dam the Franklin if it wasn't for enormous public sentiment, which is absolutely prohibitive of it now. Coming back has been a real journey. It was the journey of a great environmental epic in which I took part." ♦