Qualla: Franklin Dam Controversy

Franklin Dam Controversy: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The advertisement asked a question that a whole country found it could not answer the wrong way. On the morning of 2 March 1983, full-page colour photographs appeared in newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne: a curl of river sliding between rainforest and bare rock, soft mist rising off the water. The image was Peter Dombrovskis's Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, and beneath it ran a line that turned a landscape into a ballot question. "Could you vote for a party that would destroy this?" Three days later, Australians went to the polls. The river in the photograph was the Franklin, in Tasmania's southwest wilderness, and a state-owned utility wanted to drown it behind a hydroelectric dam. It never happened, and the fight to stop it became one of the defining campaigns in Australian history.

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Franklin Dam Controversy: A River Worth a Fight

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit JarrahTree, CC BY 2.5 au. The proposal arrived in 1978: a dam on the Gordon River, below its junction with the Franklin, to generate 180 megawatts of electricity in a corner of the state that badly needed work. Early polls showed about 70 percent of Tasmanians in favour. But the wild rivers ran through co...

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Image: JarrahTree | CC BY 2.5 au

Franklin Dam Controversy: Deadlock and Defiance

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Robyn Jay from Sydney, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Politics tied itself in knots. The Labor premier Doug Lowe offered a compromise dam further upstream, but the conservationists refused any dam at all, and the upper house refused his compromise, and the whole thing seized up between two houses of parliament that could not agree. ...

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Image: Robyn Jay from Sydney, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Franklin Dam Controversy: The Blockade

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Allan warren, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 14 December 1982, as UNESCO in Paris prepared to list the rivers as World Heritage, the blockade began at Warners Landing on the Gordon. Around 2,500 people came, from across Tasmania and from overseas, to stand in the path of the machinery. Bulldozers were barged in under pol...

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Image: Allan warren | CC BY-SA 3.0

Franklin Dam Controversy: The River That Won

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Robyn Jay from Sydney, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 5 March 1983, Bob Hawke's Labor Party won the federal election, having promised to stop the dam, and the question moved from the riverbank to the High Court. Tasmania argued that the environment was a matter for the states, and that Canberra had no constitutional power to inte...

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Image: Robyn Jay from Sydney, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0