Publisher's Synopsis
About two months ago I received a copy of the book Peter Dombrovskis I've written about Dombrovskis before, as his Journeys into the wild: the photography of .images of Tasmania were partly my inspiration for atrip to Tasmania's Western Arthur range, SouthwestNational Park, in January this year. Unfortunately wehad five straight days of rain and my dream of replicating his image from above Lake Oberon was thwartedby low-cloud and gale force winds. As my partner andI huddled in our tent eating our last packet of cheeseand crackers, it was a reminder, if ever we needed one, of Dombrovskis' sheer bloody mindedness to visit anddocument the remotest parts of Tasmania, in placessubject to some of the most challenging weather inAustralia.It's also why I'm so pleased for the first time in this issue we're able to share some of Peter Dombrovskis work, following the announcement of the first major exhibition of his images at the National Library of Australia.It's been a project years in the making and you can readmore about the painstaking work preserving and digitising more than 3,000 of his images on page 22.From the exhibition it is clear that Dombrovskis biggest motivation was not just visiting remote parts ofTasmania, but highlighting their increasing fragility, something he had become hardened to after witnessing the flooding of Tasmania's Lake Pedder by the construction of the Serpentine dam in 1972. For an audience who had little awareness of the existence of theseplaces, images in his calendars and books must haveseemed like a window to another world.In the 1970s and 80s, roaming Tasmania with hislarge format camera in tow, Dombrovskis may not havebeen aware of just how powerful his images would become. The Hydro Electric Commision, backed by theLiberal and Labor parties of the day, saw little value inpreserving these places but as activist Bob Brown says, their glee at the destruction of Lake Pedder and plansto dam the Franklin would soon be tempered by thepublic backlash to c