Natural Law

But now, with the Franklin River flowing swiftly over polished rocks, the activist Geoff Law pulls his oar through an icy flow the colour of strong tea. His ears prick, too, for the thrum of an approaching rapid.

They call this one the Duck Chute and ordinarily it is not challenging. This cold Tuesday in February, however, it’s a hissing, spitting chicane of freezing turbulence. We’re quickly stuck in it, wedged between branch and boulder, the right side of our yellow raft rising as frigid water pours into the left.

Law is the first person tipped out.

He was one of the key campaigners behind the Franklin River blockade of 1982 and 1983 – the most successful environmental campaign in Australian history – and I’ve come here to ask him what lessons we might learn from that historic action. With climate change deniers and coal carriers in high office, I’ve also come to take heart from a battle won, to view the spoils of war through the eyes of an old warrior.

Right now though, Law can’t see anything. He can’t talk. Can’t breathe. He is stuck under the boat, wondering if he is about to drown. He fell headfirst into the brisk current and is now experiencing “panic, claustrophobia and confusion”. This river, which he fought so hard to save more than three decades ago, is trying to kill him.

Because the Franklin is wild, he says, its water levels are unpredictable, meaning the rapids are a doddle one day, a death trap the next. To me, the river seems capricious. Deceitful, even. Law laughs, reminded of his first trip down the Franklin in 1981. When that journey was almost over, the weather shifted swiftly, turning innocuous flows into “horrendous man-eating monsters”.

“I recall thinking, ‘The river doesn’t want to let us go. It’s not gonna let me go that easily,’ ” he says, sipping his cuppa. “That’s the thing about this river, and it was just as true of the campaign to save it. It grabs you by the throat.”

It could be worse. The first people to successfully run the full river – John Dean and John Hawkins – took years to do so, enduring a series of smashed canoes and near drownings before finishing the 85-kilometre stretch on an attempt in 1958. But the place remains untamed.

There never have been any roads or tracks to the Franklin. Get into a mess? Get yourself out by forging on downstream or hiking through nearly impenetrable forest for days. “That’s what made it different from other wilderness trips,” Law says. “There was this imperative: once you start, you must finish.” An inevitable mystique grew around the challenge.
Law, born in Venezuela, raised in Geelong and Melbourne and now living in Hobart, visited Tasmania in 1975 and heard whispers while hiking the Overland Track, South Coast Track and Arthur Range.

He saw frightening footage that convinced him he had neither the co-ordination nor the mental agility to negotiate that kind of natural force, yet kept meeting people who were going to try. “If you were young, outdoorsy and adventurous, it was the main conversation.”

In February 1976, a young doctor named Bob Brown made the trip in an inflatable raft and was enchanted. (Brown became head of the Wilderness Society, state MP, federal senator and, eventually, leader of the Australian Greens, but his profile began with the fight to stop the Franklin being dammed by Tasmania’s Hydro-Electric Commission.) Brown recalls the river as a “restorative experience” in a primordial place. “It seemed an absurdity to be damming this great potential for salving the human soul,” he says.

Standing on the river bank at a spot called Fincham’s Crossing, he explains the hopelessness every time his raft popped a seam. Finding a flat clearing in a near-vertical landscape. Setting up camp in the rain. Lighting a fire, then dragging the soaking boat to dry by the embers. Fiddling with scissors and glue, patching holes by firelight. Waking up hungry, inflating the boat by mouth, braving the rapids again.

“The paddles were just chunks of wooden dowelling with hand-sawn blades attached by hose clamps. They were so heavy I felt like I was paddling in slow motion. And for the rest of my trip there was this bubbling, farting noise in the water, reminding me of how crappy my raft was and how I would always be in this state of fear or flustered catch-up.”

The savagery and vulnerability of the place compelled Law to join the campaign. Until that time he had been little more than a “roving, roaming witness” to an environmental movement that seemed like something for “earnest losers”. Now he was swept up in the mission.

And he recalls the end, when the High Court saved the river in 1983, and a photo was sent to the Wilderness Society of HEC workers posing in front of a famous Huon pine. The tree was 2500 years old, but they had cut and burnt it anyway, and painted a message on it: “F…k you green c…s.”

Law co-ordinated ad campaigns, knocked on doors, wrote letters, met politicians, organised river trips, established blockade camps, planned marches, liaised with media, lobbied in Canberra. He learnt a series of lessons.

He learnt to be ready for intimidation. The campaign office had its phone lines cut. Brown was attacked. Law was on the streets with a woman one night when a posse of HEC workers rounded on them, screaming “f…in’ greenie slut” in her face. He recalls a threat by phone: “If that dam isn’t built, you won’t f…in’ walk again.”

Attacks on environmental activists are neither rare nor harmless. In March 2016, Honduran protest leader Berta Caceres was murdered following her campaign against a dam. Months later, Mexican farmer and anti-logging organiser Isidro Lopez was shot dead. Research by non-government organisation Global Witness found that in 2015, at least 185 green activists were killed in 16 nations.

Law familiarised himself with the cost of defeat, rafting the doomed Murchison River. Near the end he saw the gouged riverbank, and large rocks positioned at the base of what would become the dam. He could tell how the water would gather there, how the river would slowly drown itself. The birdsong was almost too sad to hear.

He also learnt from past failures. The Franklin campaign was built on an unsuccessful effort in the early 1970s to save Lake Pedder, which helped the Wilderness Society understand they could not win fighting only in Tasmania – the issue had to be national. “Otherwise it would be like trying to stop capital punishment from death row itself.”

He learnt activism is often monotonous, attending a crush of political strategy and office management meetings. He began to hate the personal “sharings” each member was expected to offer, and the blindfolded trust exercises. One organiser described the campaign as “meetings and lists, meetings and lists”.

Law learnt that a cause requires all sorts. The bushwalking lawyer who drafted legal documents. The psychiatric nurse who quit to become a blockade liaison. The businesswoman who kept the organisation afloat financially, and had the idea of enlisting “shareholders” to buy a campaign office. (Before the crowdsourcing era of GoFundMe, such ingenuity was the mother of survival.)

There was the singer writing protest songs. The artist painting banners. Law even admired the hippies at the blockade site, with their painted bodies and loincloths. The “itinerant ferals” sung melancholy dirges – “We are one with the infinite sun” – and reminded him of Lord of the Flies, but they were committed. There was even an old “piner” whose family had logged the area for generations, who loaned his boat to the protest and said: “If they dam her, it would be like cutting off the blood to my body.”

He learnt the power of courting allies, including Barry Jones, Manning Clark, Dick Smith. Law helped woo Bob Hawke before he became PM. Hawke called the proposed dam “an environmental obscenity and an economic absurdity”.

And he learnt the power of imagery, most notably a single photo, by Peter Dombrovskis, of Rock Island Bend. The campaign took out full-page ads in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age featuring the picture and a caption: “Could you vote for a party that will destroy this?”

Among our rafting party are a father and son from Sydney. The father broke his rib early in the trip, but struggled gamely on, always with the famous Dombrovskis photo on his mind. It is day five of our journey when he sees the landmark up close. We climb a cliff and stand in thin rain. Tired but energised, he whispers: “I just can’t believe it’s here.”

He became a career activist, working since then with the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society, co-ordinating with everyone from the Bob Brown Foundation to Greenpeace. He fought to stop new logging trails at the state’s Farmhouse Creek, and to create the Douglas-Apsley National Park.

In 1986, he organised a chopper flight with former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson, showing off a pristine environment, then one devastated by logging. “It turned him into a born-again greenie,” Law says. “For a few years he was our most powerful ally in government.”

In 2004, he became one of the “Gunns 20” – accused of conducting a conspiracy against the logging giant, namely by unlawful lobbying and defamation. The suit claimed they had harmed the company image in the eyes of the Banksia Foundation, investors in Japan and major financier ANZ Bank. “We had done these things,” Law says, “but it was claimed we had done them for the malicious purpose of damaging Gunns, when we weren’t out to damage them so much as save the forests”.

It took five years to win, but they did. The company – once so powerful it was colloquially known in Tasmania as “The Gunnerment” – went into receivership in 2012.

Law moved on, fighting deforestation in Sumatra and protecting old-growth forests in Slovakia and Romania. Lately he has campaigned to save Tasmania’s Tarkine Wilderness, and will soon move to Berlin to develop and consolidate World Heritage Watch – an NGO he set up to ensure World Heritage sites are protected.

Brown recalls the young Law as athletic, astute and “strategically quick” – and says not much has changed: “He was always in the thick of things when it counted. He has this indomitable, puckish intelligence – a green fire about him which was and is indispensable.”

Still, the election of Donald Trump was a blow. In the late noughties, environmentalists coined the terms “climate depression”, “eco-anxiety” and “apocalypse fatigue” to describe their fear and melancholy about the state of the planet. Those phrases have now taken on new life.

“I could hardly move the day after Trump was elected,” Law says, pausing. People rallying in the streets made him feel somewhat better, but he draws more on his experience here – having made a difference when all seemed lost. “It gives you some optimism, and also gives you a capacity for defiance. Defiance is a necessary element.”

“For us, sitting in this beautiful scenery, having experienced these wonderful gorges, saving the river is kind of a no-brainer; we feel that this river had to be protected for its intrinsic value. But for people who’ve never set foot in the wilderness, and can’t feel what we feel, you had to engage on a rational basis.”

With the Franklin campaign, that meant challenging the economic arguments: pointing out that the 180 megawatts generated by the proposed dam paled in comparison to, say, the planned 4000 megawatts of Victoria’s Loy Yang power station. It showed how small the scheme would be, yet how great the consequences.

The other campaign lesson is that blockades won’t stop governments from permitting or committing environmental atrocities, but people can change governments. Bob Brown says this is what people must do in response to the Adani coal mine in Queensland. “But are people going to get out of their comfort zone to save the planet?” he asks. “We only have one planet. There is no planet B.”

The judiciary is perhaps the other tool for resistance. Brown is back in the High Court, challenging controversial Tasmanian laws limiting the right to protest. And Law points out how, in 1983, all seven High Court justices were compelled to consider each World Heritage attribute of the river, including the Kuti Kina Cave on its lower reaches.

Some people, he says, are disappointed when they enter the cave. The Indigenous site doesn’t have stunning galleries of rock art like those in Kakadu. But it does have deposits of stone tools, camp fires, the bones of wallaby, platypus, wombat and possum, and egg shells of the extinct Tasmanian emu.

“It’s a significant reminder of the most southerly people on the Earth during the last Ice Age. And it was all threatened with inundation. The international community says to lose any part of it would impoverish mankind, for all time. It’s worth trying to keep all of these things in mind as we float down the river tomorrow.”

There is little to no wildlife. Currawong are cheeky, and have been known to steal scraps from camps, even opening tent zippers. Someone sees a spotted quoll. Another sees a platypus. In camp one night a leech bites my foot, and I am reminded of former Tasmanian premier Robin Gray, who once described the river as “nothing but a brown ditch, leech-ridden, unattractive to the majority of people”.

Australians disagreed, and still do. Thousands raft the Franklin every year on journeys like this one, named best rafting trip in the world by Outdoor magazine.

“People establish a camp somewhere, completely inhabit a site so that it’s festooned with all this clothing and life jackets and kitchen utensils, and the ground is carpeted with sleeping mats and containers, and the next morning it’s all gone,” says Law. “It’s ephemeral.”

With no mobile coverage, we don’t know what the weather will bring. Our sleeping quarters are whatever space we create under a tarp. The bathroom experience is worse than you imagine. We don’t sidle off and dig a hole. With such unforgiving terrain, there are few places to squat. So people walk away from the campsite alone, doing their business in small plastic bags. Those bags then go into a metal box that looks like an old army ammunition case, nicknamed “the groover”. Every night the groover is set up, and every morning before we get back on the water someone will check: “Everybody groovy?”

This is quite different from the kind of eco-tourism practised elsewhere, with maintained trails and man-made structures. Take the new plan for the South Coast Track, which has a provision for seven huts. It might sound harmless, says Law, but it could entirely change the character of the trip, be it the sound of helicopters transporting gas bottles, or such buildings insulating us from the wildness we’ve come to experience. Besides, Law says, the daunting nature of the trip is the point.

“Being slapped around by a river, rocks and mountain teaches us all a little humility. And it makes us look at the natural world in a different way. We experience these places as something living, something that has character. You can’t do that being ferried to and from a lookout.”

Planting a stick in the sand of the riverbank where it meets the water, then looking in the morning to see if it has risen or fallen. Knowing that if the water touches the third rock near the Coruscades rapid, the river will be unsafe to raft.

The guides know how to mimic the call of golden whistlers and olive whistlers so that the same birds, unseen in the forest, call back to the boat. They strategically work their way through each “portage” – a choreographed succession of roping and lifting that sends the raft down a rapid.

These challenging manoeuvres require us to climb ledges, often with the barest toehold, while rain sheets down and the wind howls, knowing a slip could be fatal. People have died here.

They have drowned in Pig Trough. They have drowned in Big Fall. In the 1980s, a river guide died at The Cauldron, an incident that was immortalised by the author Richard Flanagan. Flanagan was himself once a guide, and was almost killed here, trapped in an air pocket for hours, sitting in his kayak. To him the river was “a huge army on the march, overrunning the countryside, taking all before it, collecting ever greater strength from every dripping moss-lined rock face, from every overexcited stream”.

Have you heard people say that if you are lost in nature, find a river and follow it to the end? People assume this will be easy, but river valleys are often steep, thick with vegetation, hidden from light and warmth. They are unforgiving. Our guides help mitigate that risk. When a metal gear rack breaks, they use a pocket knife to cut a dogwood branch and tie it back together. Our lead guide sliced open his palm once, and stitched it closed that night. (When he opened his hand the next morning, the five stitches opened, too – “Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!” he says – so he superglued the wound shut.)

They are good company. They sing at the top of their lungs as we enter The Great Ravine. They ask which animals you see in the clouds. They play ukuleles. And when one of us sighs about our imminent return to the real world, they reply: “This is the real world, mate.”

He thinks things are generally going well for environmental causes, too – at least in Australia. In 2013, Woodside pulled out of a plan for a massive gas hub in the Kimberley. In 2016, BP withdrew from drilling in the Great Australia Bight. People are mobilising against fracking and coal seam gas.

Law recalls, too, that there were all sorts of disagreements decades ago, over whether to focus on the wilderness or unions, politicians or public. There was endless debate about when or if a blockade should begin. Often, the action felt more calamitous than calm. In truth it was both, like the Franklin: the rough patches with names like The Churn and Thunderush, quiet places like The Sanctum and Serenity Sound. We’re in a peaceful stretch called Deliverance Reach, floating. “I’m just soaking it all in,” he says, “just enjoying it for what it is.”

He looks to the back of the boat and spies a backlit stand of trees above a ridge. Then he turns to the front, eyeing a glassy arrowhead of water between two rocks. He surveys it all – as if for the first time – and asks us all to do the same. “Look downstream. Now look upriver,” he says, then he excitedly asks a question, and he repeats it, as if he still doesn’t know the answer. “Can you believe you are here? Can you believe it?”

Konrad Marshall rafted the Franklin River with Geoff Law as a guest of World Expeditions.