Qualla: Lake Pedder

Lake Pedder: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit eGuide Travel, CC BY 2.0. The beach was pink. A wide curve of quartzite sand, nearly a kilometre across and three kilometres long, glowed rose-coloured at the heart of the Tasmanian wilderness, ringed by jagged mountains and reachable only on foot or by small plane. That was the old Lake Pedder, a glacial lake unlike anywhere else on the island. In 1972 it vanished. The Hydro-Electric Commission dammed two rivers, and the rising water swallowed the lake, the beach, and a stretch of wild country whole. What floods the valley today is far larger, and it is not the same place at all.

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Image: eGuide Travel | CC BY 2.0

Lake Pedder: The Lake That Was

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit eGuide Travel, CC BY 2.0. Nothing about the original Lake Pedder was ordinary. It was a glacial outwash lake of about ten square kilometres in the remote southwest, named in the early twentieth century for John Pedder, the first chief justice of Tasmania. Its defining feature was that astonishing beach, a...

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Image: eGuide Travel | CC BY 2.0

Lake Pedder: Electric Eric and the Blank Cheque

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The decision to drown it was a political brawl. In 1967 the Tasmanian government stripped away the national park status that had protected the lake since 1955, clearing the way for the dams. Premier Eric Reece backed the Hydro-Electric Commission so fiercely that he earned the ni...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Pedder: A Cause Worth Dying For

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SamCoCh, CC BY-SA 4.0. The fight to save Pedder cost lives and gave a movement its shape. The nature photographer Olegas Truchanas had captured the lake in colour slides, and when they were shown in Hobart set to the music of Sibelius, people are said to have wept and left the hall in tears. In 1972 th...

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Image: SamCoCh | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lake Pedder: What the Water Took

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit eGuide Travel, CC BY 2.0. Some losses cannot be undone. When the lake filled, it carried species into extinction. The Lake Pedder earthworm, known from a single specimen gathered on that pink beach in 1971, was never found again and now sits on the IUCN's list of extinct species. The Pedder galaxias, a sm...

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Image: eGuide Travel | CC BY 2.0