Abstract: This article examines the earliest coordinated use of film in an environmental campaign in Australia. The battle to save the Franklin River from hydro development occurred at a pivotal moment for both the environmental movement and the nation’s feature film renaissance. With a focus on the first film of the Franklin campaign, The Last Wild River (1977), I reveal how a novel idea of wilderness emerged in sound and image, one that questioned the established ideals of resource extraction that preceded it. I trace the sophisticated use of activist film at this moment of consequential cinematic and environmental change.

This article begins by gesturing to two seemingly unrelated spheres of activism that were underway at the outset of the 1970s in Australia: environmental activism was finding new momentum after declining in the postwar period and, at the same time, lobbying for government support for a national film industry was soon to spur the Australian film renaissance. Much is now known about how, in the 1970s, a new culture of narrative feature film, exemplified by Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), looked to the Australian bush and the outback as Australian filmmakers formulated a distinctive national cinema. While this cinema tied national identity to the landscape, filmmakers and activists interested in documentary turned to the natural world in a different way, politicizing images and contesting uses of the environment that had come before. As one of the most consequential environmental campaigns in the nation’s history, the successful battle to save the Franklin River has been well documented.[1] There has, however, been no acknowledgment that a single film, The Last Wild River (1977), initiated the campaign, with subsequent films following in its path to help sustain the campaign. These films occupy a special place in histories of Australian film because they played a pivotal role at a crucial time both in Australia’s film history and environmental history.

Cinema, including its production and circulation, forms part of cultural histories that, when examined, can show how societies relate to, and change in tandem with, the environment over time. Despite this, there is still too little examination of how film has been an actor in environmental change, especially in Australia.[2] Addressing the problem that there has been little disciplinary attention to the dialogue between histories of film and environmental history, I develop an approach that synthesizes methods in film history with those in environmental history. In his work on archives of nonfiction film, Thomas Elsaesser advocates a pragmatic approach that accounts for the three contingencies of (1) the commissioning body, (2) the concrete occasion for which the film was produced, and (3) the target uses or audience.[3] Elsaesser suggests that attention to these three concerns enables an understanding of “film as event,” recognizing that “the actual film is only one piece of the evidence and residue to be examined and analyzed.”[4] Accounting for the event can “determine the relation of one film to another, and [help] to understand its place in wider histories.”[5] Bringing the concerns of environmental history to the processes and examples Elsaesser refers to enables an approach that is attuned to how nonhuman nature is not simply a backdrop or an arena to be acted on but rather a partner in the production of filmed historical events and representations. A research process that, as Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor describe, explores “the perpetually changing set of social, symbolic, ontological, and material relations” through which the past is co-constituted by social and material histories can rethink the opposition between the two in valuable ways.[6] This also requires establishing, through archival research, knowledge of the past that is informed by sources that substantiate tangible and particular human/nonhuman relationships through attention to specific place-based events and activities.[7] I bring this approach to a focus on Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost state, and the fight to save the Franklin River.

The aim of this article is to bring critical attention to the Franklin films and, through building a picture of their production, circulation, and aesthetic approach, show how they offer a new understanding of documentary, and film more broadly, in Australia at this time. In so doing, I also aim to enhance ecocritical understandings of filmic historical concerns that grapple with the use of documentary produced with the purpose of supporting or transforming how societies relate to the environment. To this extent, I am interested in the function of utilitarian film. Outlining the category of what they term “useful” cinema, Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson broadly describe film that is “deployed variously—beyond questions of art and entertainment—in order to satisfy organizational demands and objectives, that is, to do something in particular.”[8] Acland and Wasson contribute to a growing body of literature that attends to utilitarian film modes, including industrial, educational, sponsored, and other nontheatrical films, many of which are forms of documentary.[9] They refer to a “body of films and technologies that perform tasks and serve as instruments in an ongoing struggle for aesthetic, social, and political capital.”[10] My interpretation of their category includes examples that might otherwise be considered activist or campaign documentary but nevertheless exemplify the struggle Wasson and Acland refer to in compelling ways. This allows me to offer a wider investigation, one exploring how different groups and institutions used documentary film to instrumentalize images of the environment in a manner that played out in competing ways over time.

I emphasize a context for the events of the 1970s that begins much earlier, in the postwar years. The twinned ambitions of industry and modernity clearly motivated Australian investment in government—and a smaller number of corporate—film units in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Documentary had a role to play in postwar reconstruction around the world, but my focus on Australia shows how nation-building projects relied on casting nature as a resource, and the biotic, climatic, and geologic character of the continent shaped film production and representation in specific ways.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, environmental movements, especially those concerned with what were increasingly viewed as so-called wilderness areas, had gained significant momentum. The Franklin campaign is remarkable for the way that activists were successful in presenting the river region anew as a wilderness area of high value through a coordinated rhetorical and visual campaign with great impact. This not only fed into their ultimate victory; it also cast a particular and timely construction of nature onto the national stage.

As I discuss, wilderness has existed as a crucially important symbolic field that has variously asserted some perspectives and obscured others. It has been pivotal in environmental movements and a potent tool in the expansion of colonial settler occupation in Australia. Through a particular film lexicon, wilderness was produced with great specificity and in a way that, I argue, marks out the importance of this moment. I place two types of filmmaking in dialogue, government-sponsored film and early campaign film, to establish how a new idea about the environment emerged in sound and image, one that questioned the aesthetic power of the extraction imagery that had been so comprehensively deployed in the mid-twentieth century.

Midcentury Documentary, Extraction, and a Vision of Postwar Australia

The large-scale postwar nation-building projects that were undertaken in Australia relied heavily on the continent’s rivers, forests, and geology. This period saw the substantial expansion of hydroelectric projects and the intensification of land clearing for agriculture and forestry. This was followed in the 1960s by the resources boom and the growth of mining for iron ore, uranium, and bauxite. I gesture to Imre Szeman’s broadest use of the term “extraction” to describe practices that “extract value” from the environment for the “operations of modern societies” while usually altering the environment, often in highly destructive ways.[11]

Postwar reconstruction was facilitated, in part, by a newly relevant documentary culture that was deployed by government—and, to a lesser extent, industry—to reflect images of the contemporary nation, its specificity and challenges, back to the citizenry. As the most prevalent genre of postwar film production in Australia until the 1970s, documentary assisted in the ongoing normalization of the natural world as a resource available for extraction. Films frequently expressed the materiality of the continent in ways that not only supported but also celebrated the seemingly limitless capacity of the continent to be reshaped to enhance economic growth. Nevertheless, they did so in ways that were diverse in theme and style.

I briefly outline documentary production over these decades in order to highlight how, within this diverse film terrain, the specificity of the Australian continent persists as a strong feature. I narrow my focus to examine the aims and output of the Tasmanian Department of Film Production, with a particular focus on a short travelogue, Tasmania’s Road West (Rodney Musch, 1970).[12] This example is generative because it focuses on the practices and ideology of extraction and combines this with a travelogue structure, a rich narrative trope that extends across the film groupings I discuss. By attending to well-known commonwealth-produced films as well as the lesser discussed Tasmanian context, I identify how the Australian environment was normalized as a site of extraction through documentary institutions and representations.

The Australian National Film Board (ANFB, 1939–1955) and its successor, the Commonwealth Film Unit (CFU, 1956–1972), have dominated discussions of the postwar history of Australian film. The ANFB was established for overseeing the production and distribution of documentary. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan write that at this time:

John Grierson, who visited Australia in 1940, strongly recommended the use of 16mm documentary for general as well as theatrical purposes.[14] The source of the cliché described by Moran and O’Regan is an essay by Harry Watt, a member of the British documentary movement led by Grierson.[15] While not explicitly stated, if documentary was to engage with the whole of the nation in innovative ways, it needed to account for the substantial ecological and geophysical variation that characterizes the continent. A preference for location shooting was to help capture this variation. The films that resulted were imbued with decisions based on more than singularly human concerns and conditions, reflecting both what was possible (not all parts of the land mass could be easily accessed by film crews) and what was novel (avoiding more kangaroos).

While the close ties between postwar reconstruction and the exploitation of natural resources necessarily resulted in narratives and imagery that promoted extraction, Australian nature was, overall, depicted in multidimensional ways that shifted and changed over the course of decades. Moran describes the film culture of the 1940s and early 1950s as fostering “a variety of film traditions and practices” and as the product of “Australia’s first film intellectuals.”[16] Most of these highly skilled film intellectuals worked for the ANFB, but some were employed elsewhere, such as by Shell’s film unit in Australia and the film and photography section of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme.[17]

The most celebrated documentaries of this time incorporated drama and innovative narrative structure and were influenced by fiction film. Notable titles depicting challenges and solutions to environmental problems include School in the Mailbox (Stanley Hawes, 1947), The Valley Is Ours (John Heyer, 1948), and the Shell Film Unit’s The Back of Beyond (John Heyer, 1954). The environment as a site of extraction was intertwined with other themes pertaining to the Australian continent, such as the challenge of natural disasters (flood, drought, and bushfire) and soil problems relating to colonial settler land use. The most celebrated films of this time were crafted around humanist concerns, explored problems of community life, and privileged narratives that would resonate with audiences rather than formulaic national tropes.

From the mid-1950s, this culture of experimentation gave way to a more predictable orthodoxy, with a staid expository style dominating the CFU’s increasingly voluminous output. Moran describes how a “classical” documentary template became a thematic and aesthetic norm at a time when the unit was increasingly tasked with making departmental films for the nation’s expanding public service.[18] Thematically, films were optimistic and celebratory, and as Moran writes, “this sense of things improving and changing for the better is directly linked in many of the films dealing with the physical environment, to an ideology of development. Here natural resources are there for the taking.”[19]

Titles over this time included those focused on fossil fuels and mining, such as Oil: Our Hidden Wealth (Richard Mason, 1962) and The Earth Reveals (Ian Dunlop, 1960), and the ongoing importance of the Snowy scheme with Power from the Snow (Gunnar Isaacson, 1955) and The Changing Hills (John Martin-Jones, 1961), along with omnibus films that celebrated the potential of several natural resources, such as North West Horizon (William Shepherd, 1958). Despite the shift to what Moran describes as a more “boring” period of filmmaking, themes and images of extraction remain central in commonwealth filmmaking well into the 1960s.[20]

Although film historians have focused their attention on federal film institutions, some Australian states also maintained dedicated film units. The Tasmanian Government Film Unit, established as a part of the Lands and Surveys Department in 1946, was the most prolific. In 1960, it became the Department of Film Production (TDFP) and was governed by its own board until its closure in 1977. In a meeting in 1961, the board reaffirmed the purpose of the department, with minutes recording that while there was some capacity for outsourcing staff to the commercial sector, the main aim should be to produce films that “have a positive use in or by the state.”[21] They note that “in film production there is a great temptation to think in terms of artistic achievement rather than utilitarian purposes,” but a “true work of art in this field is a film, which by its technical excellence does what it sets out to do.”[22] They warned filmmakers about being distracted by scenic elements and posed such distractions as threats to functionality: “Tasmania has so much scenic beauty that it can choke a film unit.”[23] The emphasis on utility, particularly for the state of Tasmania, was in part realized by fulfilling requests for productions from other government departments, including the Education Department, the Tourism Department, the Forestry Commission, the Agriculture Department, and the Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC; popularly referred to as the Hydro).

Films were produced for specific promotional or educational purposes, including a schedule designed to attract investment in Tasmanian industries. I wish to single out the Hydro because its long-standing influence in the state is both economic and cultural. Hydroelectricity development in Tasmania extends back to the 1920s and is crucially tied to both energy generation and historical identity—the Hydro is credited with transforming Tasmania into a modern industrial state. Significantly, the perception that the aims of the government-owned Hydro and the film department dovetailed so neatly led to filmmaker Bob Connolly writing in 1980 that the Department of Film Production had been “happily making propaganda films for the HEC for 30 years.”[24] Yet this should not be surprising given that, as I have described, the aim of the TDFP was to provide films of use, including for state-owned industry.

Flowing through Tasmania (Department of Film Production, 1972) offers a clear example of an industrial film designed to educate the viewer about how water is transformed into electricity while promoting the work of the Hydro. Yet it also represents the uses of its large lake system for leisure, including water skiing. Although the production of a film such as this for the Hydro is, to some degree, predictable, the deployment of industrial imagery for tourism promotion indicates an important dual purpose. Correspondence between the Australian Tourism Commission and the TDFP in 1970 indicates that films made to promote capital investment were occasionally also deemed suitable for tourism publicity.[25] On the flip side, there are numerous examples of films made specifically for the Department of Tourism that aestheticize the presence of industry in the landscape. Made in 1970 by Rodney Musch, Tasmania’s Road West is a rich example of this. It shows how extraction was valorized as not only wealth creation but also by 1970 as part of the character and experience of Tasmania as a tourist attraction.

Tasmania’s Road West is a twelve-minute 16mm film featuring two young women driving through Western Tasmania in a Renault. One is a tourism information officer from Melbourne and the other has been asked to show her the sights on the west coast. The Melbourne visitor, with her Ricoh camera in hand, stands in as the viewer’s surrogate. The casting of two women as the protagonists serves to highlight the ease of this tourist experience and its broad public appeal. They meet a wallaby along the way and take a journey on the placid waters of the Gordon River. A greater portion of the trip, however, is focused on mining and hydro sites, past and present. As they drive through colonial mining towns, they enthuse about the opening of a new tin mine and visit a mining museum. On the road they discuss the massive hydro station as they pass a dam and later stop to photograph an open cut mine. They refer to the minerals and metals that still lie in the rocks and hills as they pass though barren, dry hills around Queenstown that once, before clear-felling, would have been forested. The places the women visit, with a few exceptions, are industrial sites that are already tourist destinations. In this respect, the film makes use of the ongoing currency of the visual wonder of mining and hydro projects at the end of the 1960s and the specificity of this engagement between human and nonhuman over time. The film, as a scripted narrative, is a mix of fiction and nonfiction, a style typical of promotional travelogues of the twentieth century.

The travelogue is a broad category of film that includes examples that convey an emphasis on location as well as movement.[26] Those featuring tourists or tourism as key components are often infused with the promise of modernity, whether as a means of transport (cars, trains, or airplanes) or as an attraction (cities, architecture, or industry). Sites of nature deemed of interest, whether as spectacle or leisure, are also important destinations for the travelogue.

Tasmania’s Road West knits together sites of pristine nature and areas altered by industry into a single sequence of attractions. In keeping with an established travelogue convention, industrialized modernity is deemed a tourist attraction. It is deployed in the service of celebrating the twinned attractions of pioneering colonial heritage and the vision of large-scale present-day environmental transformation. Although archives hold no detail about where this particular film was distributed, at this time the TDFP made its films available for sale to schools, television broadcasters, and libraries in Australia. Titles made for the Department of Tourism could also be used around the world by travel agencies, in hotels, and on tour boats if they were distributed by the Tourist Commission. Tasmania’s Road West is suited to the promotion of domestic and international tourism and rhymes with the consensus that supports the cultural and economic importance of the resource industries.

Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau’s description of the nuances of the historical relation between cinema and petroculture is instructive in this instance. They describe how cinema “contributed to the century’s dominant energy regime not so much in a direct, political, or propagandistic sense” but through “informing, educating, and entertaining. . . . Cinema, in other words, became a realm of activities meant to have public effect, and to shape the tenor of collective life.”[27] Although the films Dahlquist and Vonderau refer to are largely produced by corporations, there are resonances across the promotional culture of private and government-owned industry. A film specifically made for the purposes of promoting tourism, Tasmania’s Road West is compelling as an example that shows how practices and values of extraction permeated the cultural and filmic lexicon. Yet its moment of production also casts it as a film that is only just in step with historical change. When Tasmania’s Road West was produced, the wider Australian nation-affirming project for sponsored documentary had diminished. As Trish FitzSimons, Pat Laughren, and Dugald Williamson note, this project was not, for the most part, able to adjust to the countercultural movements of the 1960s, which, in combination, threw the idea of a unified and homogeneous nation into question.[28] The 1970s were also to become the decade in which environmentalism gathered momentum and the ways of valuing nature started to shift. By 1982, this had resulted in the declaration of the UNESCO Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in a region adjacent to the sites depicted in the film. I explore how this shift occurred, tracing its development at the beginning of the battle to save the Franklin.

The Campaign, the River, and the Work of Wilderness Photography

After waning in 1940s Australia, the environmental movement was reinvigorated in the 1960s with the upturn in environmental action internationally. Drew Hutton and Libby Connors chart the long history of the movement in the twentieth century. They describe the renewal that occurred when a younger generation mobilized by the Vietnam War “looked at the aggressive intent of the Australian resource industries in the late 1960s and 1970s and decided that those forces were just as destructive as those that had caused such damage to the people and countryside of Vietnam.”[29]

This movement was mobilized specifically by threats to certain sites, which in the late 1960s included organized opposition to the threat of pollution to the Great Barrier Reef by oil exploration, the clearing of Victoria’s Little Desert National Park for farmland, and limestone mining in the Blue Mountains’ Colong Caves. These objectives differed from the issues that fueled contemporaneous environmental action in the United States and Europe, which revolved around the problem of pollution, including pesticide scares, oil spills, and nuclear accidents.[30] Hutton and Connors argue that in Australia what might be referred to as “wilderness” campaigns achieved a level of success and mobilization that other types of campaigning did not.[31] The campaign to save the Franklin River formalized a particular place for the rhetoric of wilderness in the ideological toolbox of environmental activism. In the interests of properly contextualizing the Franklin River films as an under-examined element of the campaign, this section explores how wilderness photography came to dominate in Franklin mythology and its visual culture.

Although the 1982–1983 river blockade made headlines and captured the attention of the nation, the campaign began years earlier. When the Hydro announced plans to build dams on the Franklin River and the Lower Gordon River in 1978, some in the environmental movement had anticipated the announcement, and initiatives to rally support against the plan were already underway. They were able to build on the recent bid to save Lake Pedder, a glacier lake in Tasmania located in a popular bushwalking destination. That campaign failed when the lake flooded in 1973. In the wake of this disappointment, conservation groups intensified their strategy and organization. There were already forty dams in the west of the state. Tasmanians were divided over the proposed dam. Many supported the project for the economic benefits it would bring, while others opposed it as superfluous and because of the damage it would cause to the unique ecology and beauty of the area. Although Brett Hutchins and Libby Lester describe the print reportage of the campaign as a critical case study in media and environmental protest, the role of wilderness photography in saving the Franklin is even more well known.[32]

The Franklin is a major perennial river stretching through the central highlands and western regions of Tasmania. It is 129 kilometers in length and largely flows through remote and rugged wooded mountainous terrain, making it difficult to access by road. It is located in the mid-northern part of what is now the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, one of the largest conservation areas in Australia and an extensive, wet, and temperate-forested region. The river flows from Mount Hugel to the Gordon River. Boat cruises along the calm waters of the lower Gordon are popular, and this is a long-established tourist destination. The cruises do not extend to the mouth of the Franklin. These attributes are extremely important in understanding how the character of the river was an anchoring force in the campaign and the films that came with it. Its physical qualities shaped its value in the public and activist imagination, cementing the campaign as a more-than-human historical event. The geography of this part of southwest Tasmania meant that, first, only very physically fit individuals would experience it firsthand, and so conveying the spectacle, if not the experience, of the river would be important to the campaign; second, as a river with a variable flow and physical structure located in a forested and remote area, the Franklin was well suited to ideas of wilderness that were already circulating.

The high point of the campaign is known for its investment in wilderness as a visual storytelling device, largely through the notoriety of a single photograph. Peter Dombrovskis’s 1979 photograph, “Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend,” was featured in a full-page advertisement in major Australian newspapers in the lead-up to the critical 1983 federal election.[33] It was accompanied by the slogan, “Vote for the Franklin because only you can save it.”[34] It cut through the political debate by presenting the magic of the river vista and a fantasy of nature. Depicting a section of the river that would have been flooded with the construction of the dams, the photograph shows an almost surreal, misty vista with water swirling around a rocky, forested island at a narrow bend in the river. Crucially, it encapsulated the dual concerns that the campaign sought to elaborate: the sublime beauty of the river and its status as uniquely untouched by human incursion.

This convention of excluding signs of human presence, as Tim Bonyhady writes, was established in Australian wilderness photography from the 1970s onward.[35] This presents, as Rosalynn Haynes notes, a phase in the longer development of wilderness photography of remote areas in Tasmania that has effectively constructed these areas as “in opposition to cultivated land, industrialisation and centres of habitation.”[36] I briefly outline what is known about the relationship between an orthodoxy of staging the Tasmanian environment in wilderness photography and the rhetorical work of the Franklin campaign in order to show that in overlooking the role of film, historical accounts have neglected an alternative and novel filmic vocabulary that energized the campaign by maintaining the human in the frame and, thus, creating a distinct and strategic idea of wilderness.

Film, Rafting, and Authentic Experience of the Wild River

The idea of the wild river was elaborated in a handful of films in a way that supported the Franklin campaign from the late 1970s to early 1980s. The Last Wild River, made in 1976, has not endured as the most well-known film featuring a journey on the Franklin River. This honor probably goes to Franklin River Journey, released in 1980 and directed by Bob Connolly. It was accompanied by a large format book, The Fight for the Franklin: The Story of Australia’s Last Wild River (1981), that details the context of the Franklin campaign and the production of the film and includes accounts of the difficulties faced by the crew as they traversed the river. Nevertheless, The Last Wild River has a special place—it documents the earliest expedition equipped with a film camera and marks the first concerted step in the campaign. This thirty-minute 16mm film was, moreover, the first to realize the filmic storytelling potential of river rafting journeys. In this section, I identify the confluence of factors that enabled its production and circulation, demonstrating the utility of the film and its place as a pivotal instrument in the campaign. I assert that a combination of aesthetic, narrative, and environmental qualities underscored the use value of The Last Wild River, and these in turn cemented the river journey as a particular kind of rhetorical agent in the public elaboration of wilderness.

The story of this time often begins with Bob Brown and his first rafting trip down the river. A former leader of the Australian Greens Party, Brown remains the most visible and respected environmental figure in recent Australian history. In 1976, he was living and working as a doctor, a general practitioner, in northern Tasmania. However, Paul Smith, a forestry worker at the time, was the instigator of the film, and it was Smith who invited Brown on the first rafting trip with the hope of eventually taking a film camera along. Brown agreed, despite the difficulty of traversing the river and their lack of experience.[37] In an interview with Martin Clark, Brown reflects, “I was stunned by the wild beauty of the place.”[38] Brown was inspired by the experience and on his return held a meeting at his house with fifteen others. Many had already been involved in the attempts to save Lake Pedder. The group formed the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS), which, from this moment, was the organizing force behind the campaign against the dams.[39] Much had been learned from the failed Lake Pedder campaign—conveying the experience of being on the river to a wide audience would be important.

Brown summarizes the beginning of the campaign: “Paul had all the contour levels of where the dams were going to flood—four dams—and the series would flood the river end to end. It was the last great river in southern Australia which was untouched. So, the campaign began. We went back the next year with a Bolex wind-up movie camera and got that footage onto Tasmanian television.”[40] The footage Brown refers to is actually the film, The Last Wild River. When Smith and Brown returned to the Franklin in 1977, Rick Rolls, Peter Thompson, and Amanda (Sam) Stark, all members of the Launceston Walking Club, went with them.

The film is crafted in a way that tells the story of their rafting trip, from beginning to end. Smith is credited as camera operator and Stark as scriptwriter, although both also edited the film. Stark, also a founding member of the TWS, describes the film as “very useful as it was the catalyst for the whole Franklin River campaign.”[41] They paid $800 to have the film broadcast on Tasmania’s two commercial television channels.[42] In the early days of the campaign, The Last Wild River toured not only around Tasmania but also to different parts of Australia with community screenings in town halls and churches organized by the TWS in a bid to highlight the threat to the river and what was to be lost.[43] Audiences would have viewed the film in these contexts via 16mm projection. Rick Rolls published his diary of the trip, including filming locations, in the Australian Conservation Foundation’s magazine, Habitat, in October 1977, describing the potential for hydro dams in the area.[44] From the time the film was produced, it was a key part of an intensive strategy to garner state and national attention.

The Last Wild River was the first film to reimagine this part of Tasmania for an audience beyond the walkers or climbers already familiar with the area. Indeed, the film built on the established filmmaking culture of bushwalking clubs, which created and circulated films in community settings.[45] The production was motivated by the threat posed to the river region by the Hydro but was enabled by a confluence of two further historical coincidences: the introduction of color television and the recent availability of consumer-grade rubber rafts. The television broadcast of the film was crucial, and its impact was heightened by the fact that it could be broadcast in color. Brown observes that in the late 1970s, “colour television had come in, and we knew that getting colour pictures of this wilderness to people’s lounge rooms in Tasmania and around Australia was going to be pivotal, because nothing could speak stronger for the river than itself.”[46] Indeed, color transmission arrived in March 1975, and the uptake of color television sets across Australia was extremely rapid.[47] The exact date of the broadcast is unclear, but if it was 1977 or 1978, more than half of viewers could have viewed the film in color.

Developed in the United States in the mid-1960s, consumer-grade rubber rafts were becoming increasingly available in the mid-1970s and provided a way of accessing river rapids. They were relatively safe and could be used to transport more gear than a kayak. Notably, between 1951 and 1976, only four parties had traversed the Franklin by canoe or raft, including Smith and Brown’s first trip. Describing Smith’s preparation for the 1976 expedition, Connolly writes, “Smith had seen photos of the big rubber pontoon rafts used in the US to run the Colorado River. He decided to experiment with a smaller version to run the Franklin and fixed upon a cheap Taiwanese model then on sale in Launceston’s sports shops. It was 2.5 meters long and at first sight seemed hardly adequate for the purpose. But the ‘rubber ducky’ was soon to revolutionize wild river travelling in Tasmania.”[48]

Rafting opened the Franklin up to more people, and the film served to show both the beauty of the Franklin and the new recreational pursuit of river rafting. From this time onward rafting became a key signifier in the construction of the wild river, with the journey promoted to conservationists, politicians, and reporters as a way for them to fully comprehend the river’s value. The new rafts also made it possible to carry a small 16mm camera and film stock down the river with greater assurance that it would stay protected and dry, a challenge without weather-proof cameras. In 1977, the newly available rafts and the dawn of color television were pivotal in the circulation of the wild river aesthetic for conservation purposes.

Bookended by the beginning and ending of the river journey, The Last Wild River takes the form of a travel film, told from the perspective of the rafters. After a graphic of a map of Tasmania and a voice-over by one of the rafters, radio broadcaster Peter Thompson, explaining the river system and referring to the Franklin as the last major wild river in southern Australia, Stark’s voice informs the viewer: “We will now take you on a summer journey down the Franklin with a party of four, using rubber rafts. The only member of the group with any rafting experience is Bob Brown, who successfully negotiated the Franklin last summer.” Brown appears in a mid-shot, paddling down the river with the other three behind him. Launching their rafts on the Franklin, Stark states, “We wonder if we will survive the rapids.” Stark’s narration introduces herself and the rest of the party, including Rolls and Thompson. Smith, not included in the introductions, is present behind the camera. From here the group goes on to travel through the different gorges, chasms, and rapids of the river.

It is unsurprising that with little prior experience, these filmmakers chose to make a travel film. It is a mode that instinctively allows for an elaboration of place in narrative form. Since early cinema, as Jeffrey Ruoff observes, travelogues have exploited the play between “education and pleasure.”[49] The pleasure The Last Wild River offers is certainly linked to the presentation of scenic nature. This visual presentation, however, is brought alive by the interplay between the movement and color brought by the rafters and the variation of the river landscape. The most vibrant colors in the film are provided by the orange rafts and the even brighter orange life vests worn by the group. The eye cannot help but be drawn immediately to the people in the frame, whether mid-shot or dwarfed by the cliffs of a steep gorge. The film proceeds through a rhythm of alternating stillness and movement as the group variously paddles through serene, secluded parts of the river and turbulent rapids in the bright summer sun.

The adventurer tourist is central to the aesthetic and to the educational tone of the film. When the river path is blocked, we are shown and informed about portaging, which necessitates carrying all the camping gear and rafts through and over rocks on the riverside (sometimes requiring multiple trips to transport everything). This can take several hours. At one point the rafts need to be entirely deflated. Early in the film the group finds a place to camp, set up, and cook dinner. As they resume, a shot shows Brown packing his sleeping bag into a small plastic barrel. Stark describes how the group uses these barrels to keep clothes and sleeping bags dry. The images then show the rafts haphazardly negotiating rocks and rapids in the river, sometimes traveling backward, as Stark’s voice-over narrates: “We shoot the rapids whichever way we can. While not as fast as canoes, rubber rafts are relatively stable, so it doesn’t really matter if you can’t see where you are going.” The next images show a flat, quieter river: “Easy stretches like this give us time to appreciate the surrounding forest. We see myrtle, leatherwood, and the graceful Huon Pine that attracted the loggers here last century.” The Last Wild River draws the viewer in to the experience of being on the river, both in sensory and logistical terms, by cataloging the activity and perception of the rafters, positioning them as the point of identification for the viewer.

Early travelogues of the American West offer an interesting example that echoes how the role of the tourist can offer meaning to wild destinations in travel narratives. Jennifer Peterson identifies how these films emphasized not only spectacular landscapes but also the figure of the tourist, and in so doing they “upset the myth of the West as an uncivilized wilderness.” Landscapes were populated in a way that helped domesticate and modernize these filmic spaces, partly by showing the ease of traveling to wilderness destinations. They became “a tamed region of natural wonders, a land ripe for tourism and recreation.”[50] The films differ from the Franklin examples in the way they emphasized not only wilderness but also trains and cities. The presence of adventure tourists has a similar function across both examples—they offer identification for the viewer that promotes and naturalizes novel modes of tourism pleasure. In the case of The Last Wild River this is, specifically, the ideal wilderness experience.

In his account of tourism and the history of river journeys on the Franklin, Andrew Brookes proposes that there is a symbiotic relationship between the construction of authentic wilderness and the construction of an authentic rafting trip on the Franklin: “The ideals of wilderness shape the moral, aesthetic, and cognitive frameworks on which individuals construct the meaningfulness of rafting trips.”[51] Together they have mythologized the Franklin as an “ideal wilderness experience.”[52] This ideal partly rests on the question of authenticity—an ideal wilderness experience is authentic if it entails physical difficulty as part of the immersion in remote nature. This in turn connotes moral worth. Indeed, despite the light-hearted tone of The Last Wild River, these trips were dangerous, and some rafters lost their lives. Haynes notes how, in the decades after the first rafting trips, the river accumulated and conferred certain cultural (and wilderness) capital: “To have visited such a place confers a level of moral superiority. . . . If tourists do not actually visit the wild rivers, they buy posters of them to hang on their walls at home in the city, and thereby receive, in attenuated form, something of the cachet of the actual experience—of canoeing or rafting down the Franklin, the Gordon or the King.”[53]

Although neither Brookes nor Haynes refers to the films shot on the river, it is significant that The Last Wild River functioned as audiovisual testament to the earliest rafting trips, fueling the idea of the river as an ideal wilderness experience.[54] It was able to achieve this in a logistical sense due to the introduction of rubber rafts. The film inaugurated a representational mode that was circulated via grassroots organizing in the campaign and the Tasmanian television audience. The Last Wild River utilized a filmic lexicon, including color and movement, to convey both the challenges and the beauty of an embodied experience. Given the long-standing consensus of sponsored documentary, this was also effectively a move that refashioned southwest Tasmania in sound and image for a wide audience, shifting away from practices of extraction and toward the use value of wilderness.

Wilderness in Context and a New Film Industry

The Last Wild River was a strategic and well-crafted depiction of wilderness made quickly by nonprofessional filmmakers with the intention to persuade and instruct in the particular context I have outlined. Indeed, although noting those who contributed to and supported the film, the credits do not acknowledge a director or producer, an indication of the film’s status as a utilitarian project. Its dual function was to activate the campaign and promote Franklin River rafting. Yet it served another purpose—motivating filmmakers to come. Whereas this inaugural example is entirely dedicated to the river journey as a structuring device, the films that followed used the motif of the rafting journey either as a substantive representational device or as a shorthand indicator of the wilderness experience. These films include Tasmania’s South West: A Wilderness in Question (Damon Smith, 1979), The Franklin Wild River (Michael Cordell, 1980), Franklin River Journey (Bob Connolly, 1980), Gordon Splits (Michael Cordell, 1982), The Franklin Adventure (Joe Connor, 1983), and Huon Cry (Philip Lohrey, 1983). This diverse group of films shares an interest in protecting the Franklin from pending hydro development. Crucially, each also takes up the notion of wilderness as a marker of the value of southwest Tasmania. The context for the production of this wider grouping of films shows how it functioned as an axis connecting environmental awareness and a quickly evolving culture of film institutions and filmmakers in the 1970s. Before exploring this, however, I analyze the particular politic of wilderness amplified by The Last Wild River, situating its meaning in relation to historical wilderness debates.

The title of The Last Wild River announces its interest in ideas of wilderness, yet there are actually only three points in the film at which the need for conservation or the notion of wilderness are explicitly stated. In one instance, as the group camps on the banks of a calm stretch of river, Thompson’s voice-over states, “We often spend time around the campfire talking about wilderness and whether it has a future. Rick thinks that man has a great need to experience wilderness and the nature of things before man set foot upon the earth. He can view his own society from a society-less part of the world. There are not many such places left.” This commentary evokes wilderness as a site for renewal and a place outside of historical time, human cultivation, or sociality in a way that is in sync with the wilderness photography described by Haynes. The narration, moreover, emphasizes the value of nature for human enrichment while also gesturing to the specter of vanishing wilderness. Through the visuals and the voice-over, moreover, it is clear that the area the rafters pass through is remote from visible human infrastructure. This characterization has been highly effective in activist strategy and, later, in land management initiatives. In a report for the Bob Brown Foundation and the Tasmanian National Parks Foundation, Martin Hawes and colleagues outline the continued relevance of this approach.[55] The utility of wilderness for those who seeded the Franklin River campaign is clear, and The Last Wild River was carefully designed in ways that anticipated this. Nevertheless, it exists as a situated perspective that, crucially, is entangled with Australia’s colonial history.

The ways in which the wilderness paradigm, as it has been elaborated in Australia, perpetuates colonial assumptions have been well established. Val Plumwood describes how the designation of wilderness facilitated the imperial expansion into new territories as it enabled a perception of “a place waiting to receive, to be filled, a place with no desire or fully human history other than what Western culture imposes upon it.”[56] Timothy Neale clarifies the role of wilderness in Australian colonialism, writing that “when British sovereignty over the Australian continent was declared in 1788, it was claimed as a ‘newly discovered and unpeopled’ wilderness.”[57] From this point the continent was deemed terra nullius, “a land without a recognizable sovereign and lacking any prior tenure,” a declaration that rationalized British invasion.[58]

The statement in The Last Wild River about a “need to experience wilderness and the nature of things before man [sic] set foot upon the earth,” is a generalized reference to the meaning of wilderness, tied to a particular purpose in the campaign. As a singular characterization of wilderness, it does not refer to the multiple specific implications of this term, including the long history of colonization in Tasmania and the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples from ancestral lands. Aboriginal peoples of the South West of Tasmania have connections to the land over at least thirty-five millennia, and their cultural practices, including land management, have modified the vegetation and geomorphology of the region. Evidence of land use across the World Heritage Area disrupts the easy imposition of the binarism of culture/nature or cultivated/wild, a point acknowledged more recently by Hawes and colleagues.[59] The colonial settler concept of wilderness must be further denaturalized when seen in conjunction with an Indigenous meaning of “the wild,” which, as Deborah Bird Rose writes, is used to describe the ecological destruction wrought by settler society: “Wild people (colonisers) make wild country (degrading, failing).”[60] Rather than a preexisting nature, the wild, in this sense, is an interruption. Indeed, Rose, gestures to a way of perceiving nature that does not align with either the ideologies of extraction or conservation for the purposes of appreciating immersion in nature. The environment can also be valued through an emphasis on caring for country, living as species in coexistence with nature, and fostering resilience, even if that may mean change and human intervention.

In her nuanced reading of the deployment of wilderness in the Franklin campaign, Plumwood writes, “Australian movements to protect such places from disturbance replaced the imperial concepts that denigrated wilderness with an American-centred concept that honoured it, but did not rethink its construction’s absence, emptiness, or virginity.”[61] Although I do not dispute this as a broad assessment, I would like to note that as it grew, the campaign became multifaceted. Several later Franklin films refine their claims to wilderness, acknowledging the area’s colonial past, particularly The Franklin Wild River, which steps through Tasmanian history to offer a broader context for the plans of the Hydro. There are sites of spiritual and archaeological importance along the river, a point highlighted later in the campaign. Aboriginal activists participated in the blockade and were arrested along with other protesters. As it gained momentum, the campaign against the vested interests of government and industry produced a broad coalition, one that included Aboriginal voices and history.

Wilderness as a rhetorical strategy, moreover, was not deployed in a unified way. Dombrovskis’s photography conveys the value of wilderness as a pristine, unpeopled spectacle for human consumption. The Last Wild River offers a similar expression of wilderness (deeming it society-less), but it differs in the way that its celebration of nature is bound up with a more pronounced mode of human use. Here wilderness revolves around experiential value. Not simply visual consumption, in the film use is also manifest as inhabiting nature through camping and rafting. The films featuring river journeys celebrate the absence of human impact, yet they revalue it by peopling the scene with the rafter as tourist, or as in Connolly’s film, the naturalist, both products of modernity. This gestures to the paradox of nature tourism (and perhaps more recent paradigms of ecotourism): the human quest for immersion in untouched wilderness while erasing the presence of the effects of that same quest. In this respect the film finds resonances in the Australian adventurer-explorer programs that were on the upswing at the time with the introduction of color television.[62] As an educational travel film, The Last Wild River offers a guide that promotes the rafting experience in order that it might protect it. Following its release, Fred Duncan and Brown produced a written pamphlet, titled Notes for Franklin River Rafters and Bushwalkers, that showed how to navigate the river and where to camp.[63] This further enabled the experience for others and helped domesticate the wild river for rafting tourism.

As the Franklin River and the impending threat of hydro dams gained visibility in the national public sphere, filmmakers were drawn to southwest Tasmania. A number of these, such as Bob Connolly, Michael Cordell, Joe Connor, and Rolf de Heer, became prominent figures in the Australian film industry in the decades to follow. The production particulars of these films gesture to the shifting terrain of public and institutional interest between 1976 and 1980. In 1976, The Last Wild River was supported by local conservation and bushwalking groups and is a low-budget amateur film.[64] In comparison, Cordell’s The Franklin Wild River, while supported by the TWS, also received funds from the Australian Film Commission (which had been established five years earlier). The Franklin Wild River was Cordell’s first film, and he traveled to Tasmania after deferring his communications degree in Sydney. He was inspired by his father’s stories of bushwalking in Tasmania and decided to raise money with his friends to make the film, which was shot on 16mm with a hand-wound Bolex.[65]

In 1977, the TDFP, which had produced Tasmania’s Road West, was replaced by the Tasmanian Film Corporation, a semi-autonomous, partly commercial film-funding entity, mirroring the establishment of other similar state bodies around the nation.[66] Connolly’s Franklin River Journey was funded and produced by this new Tasmanian funder and, shot on 35mm, was a commercial endeavor and the product of professional filmmakers. Franklin River Journey follows the rafting journey of amateur botanist Antonius Moscal. Featuring Moscal’s voice-over description of the journey, this twenty-five-minute film emphasizes the unique plant species that have adapted to this environment. It conveys that the value of the river rests in both the experience it enables and the ecosystem and biodiversity that thrives there. Franklin River Journey, perhaps more than other films of the time, captures the visual impact of the river. With choral music and the roar of the water intermittently featured on the soundtrack, the film juxtaposes Moscal’s solitude with the grandeur of the river. Connolly describes how, before the release of Franklin River Journey, the Hydro had pressured the new film-funding body, requesting to vet the script for the film.[67] Although the new corporation still produced films paid for by the Hydro, it denied the request.[68] Cordell describes the period of the Franklin campaign, noting that “Australia looked at environmentalists as outsiders” and their messages as too confronting.[69] Yet the environmentalists had quickly gained the support of the film sector, with peak state or national film-funding organizations supporting these two examples by 1980.

The corpus of Franklin films indicates new interest in, and support for, independent filmmaking with environmental or conservation goals. This idea should be understood against the backdrop of the reinvigoration of film culture in the 1970s. Not only did the feature film industry take flight, but documentary production moved from being largely the concern of government or industry film units (and, from the late 1950s, television), as FitzSimons and colleagues note, to being taken up by a younger generation of writer directors “who were busy making observational and short ‘trigger’ films designed as discussion starters” for political issues.[70]

There was also investment in experimental film funding, film schools, and university courses fostering a new generation of film and media practitioners. Tasmania’s South West was produced at the Australian Film and Television School (AFTERS) which had been established in 1973. Gordon Splits was supported by the Sydney Filmmakers Coop. As I have noted, Cordell and Connolly were part of a cohort of new film professionals to establish careers on the heels of the changes of the 1970s. The move from the support of extraction industries in Tasmania’s Road West to the Franklin River films of the early 1980s, I argue, owes much to not only a greater interest in wilderness and environmental awareness but a more varied film culture and the rise of an independent sector. This multivalent production context mingled with activism focused on the Franklin River to offer a filmic expression of wilderness designed for a mainstream audience. The importance of the Franklin campaign and what it achieved has been underscored by the 2022 release of a feature-length documentary, Franklin (Kasimir Burgess, 2022), that draws on footage from many of the films made at the time to highlight the national impact of these events. It is, in part, a first-person film in which Oliver Cassidy, whose father, Michael, was deeply involved in the campaign, retraces his expedition down the river. The film brings the river journey to a new generation of film audiences.

Conclusion

While the nation’s feature film revival was preoccupied with the art cinema potential of combining colonial period drama and the aesthetic of the Australian bush, another film practice was formulating a different kind of audiovisual heritage in collaboration with the natural world. Within the realm of documentary, the 1970s should be understood less as a moment of revival and more one of cultural adjustment. Government and industrial documentary thrived in the postwar decades in comparison to the low volume of local feature production. Documentaries produced by powerful institutions had, for decades, celebrated the spectacle of technological intervention, the capacity to extract value from nature, often devastating it in the process. In a peculiar twist, it is quite possible that the documentary vision of midcentury Australia that worked to show one part of the country to another had, by the 1960s, added fuel to the growth of environmental movements as the reshaping of the continent became visible to, and alarmed, a new generation. In other words, it may be that while films sought to engage the nation in the progress and wealth sustained by bountiful nature, some read against the grain and saw what was to be lost with the encroachment of agriculture, mining, and forestry into areas that were valued as wilderness. Since the Franklin’s success, wilderness narratives have been deployed to oppose extractive industrial development in locations as varied as the red cliffs of the Kimberley to the oceans of the Great Australian Bight while continuing to function in complex ways in the context of colonial power.[71]

The Franklin films worked in combination with wilderness photography to circulate a new idea about southwest Tasmania in the popular imagination. The films, however, differed in the way they employed audiovisual stylistic devices that were familiar to audiences, such as the travelogue and the education film, but utilized these in the service of asking the public to look again at the material world depicted, recognizing the potential for a different kind of human engagement. As I have shown, the broader grouping of films emerged in tandem with a resurgent environmental movement and a changing national infrastructure for filmmaking. The precise narrative appeal of the films owes much to the unique attributes of the river region, with its isolated location, temperate forests, deep gorges, and variable water flow. Indeed, they did not simply encourage conservation, but through a mode of storytelling that melded a sense of the deep past with the adventure tourist trope of modernity, they sought to engender a desire for an ideal experience of wilderness. It is significant that while The Last Wild River was the catalyst for the campaign, it prioritizes optimism and wonder over the predictable persuasion of a political campaign.

Travel, as a stylistic device, is a compelling reference point in the film history outlined here. This is unsurprising given that travelogues have long been one of the most prevalent documentary tools across cinema and television. In fact, it was the most popular form of locally made documentary sold to Australian television in the 1970s, including adventure travel series exploring the Australian outback.[72] The Last Wild River makes good use of the travelogue structure to win audience attention and anticipates the fact that travel was to become an established norm in environmental filmmaking, a tool in highlighting the planetary scale of ecological crises, from Sir David Attenborough’s programs to Leonardo DiCaprio’s activist documentaries.[73] But the Franklin films are designed with an entirely local focus, their ideological meaning contingent on the topography of the river area and their politics addressing an Australian citizenry. Conspicuously, these films did not kick-start a culture of environmental documentary in Australia. Although there exist notable examples in the 1990s and 2000s, it was not until approximately 2015 that Australia saw a concerted wave of independent environmental documentary, and this came with the rise of philanthropic funding and the professionalization of impact producers.[74]

Nevertheless, these films, when considered in the context of wider histories of film and environmentalism, reveal a new perspective on the importance of this moment for Australian filmmaking. As oppositional filmmaking, the films offered a filmic aesthetic of wilderness and thus challenged the dominant extraction ideology fueled by decades of government documentary. This is a history of filmmaking that shows how utilitarian film instrumentalized images of the environment in specific ways. A closer look, however, also indicates that, across the decades, some histories of useful film were contingent on more than singularly human concerns—they were made possible and delimited by the nonhuman places they sought to present.

With Australia as my case study, I have outlined a multicausal film historical story about the emergence of environmental documentary, a development that is not only temporally specific but highly place-based. Tom Griffiths describes an urgent requirement for meaningful histories of the past and the unfolding present “that enable us to see our own fossil-fuel society in proper perspective, and to see ourselves not just as a civilization but as a species.”[75] I suggest this presents an ethical challenge for film and media studies, one that should prompt deeper understanding of the trans-ideological role of cinema in the trajectory of environmental change, past and present.

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP190101178). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

1. Australia’s National Museum includes the campaign, and its role in the creation of the Australian Greens Party, as one of the nation’s defining moments: “Franklin Dam and the Greens,” National Museum of Australia, accessed May 31, 2024, https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/franklin-dam-greens. ↑

2. Works that address film and television and what might broadly be termed Australian environmental history (as distinct from discussion of landscape in Australian cinema) include Janette-Susan Bailey, “‘Dust Bowls,’ TVAs and Snowy River Waters: John Heyer, The Valley Is Ours and an Early Post-war ‘Image of Australia,’” Environment and History 22, no. 4 (2016): 589–627, https://doi.org/10.3197/096734016X14727286515853; Ben Dibley and Gay Hawkins, “Making Animals Public: Early Wildlife Television and the Emergence of Environmental Nationalism on the ABC,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 33, no. 6 (2019): 744–758, https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2019.1669533; Ann Elias, Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Catherine Simpson, “Australian Eco-Horror and Gaia’s Revenge: Animals, Eco-nationalism and the ‘New Nature,’” Studies in Australasian Cinema 4, no. 1 (2010): 43–54, https://doi.org/10.1386/sac.4.1.43_1; Belinda Smaill, “Petromodernity, the Environment and Historical Film Culture,” Screen 62, no. 1 (2021): 59–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjab002; and Belinda Smaill, “Historicising David Attenborough’s Nature: Nation, Continent, Country and Environment,” Celebrity Studies 13, no. 3 (2022): 344–365, https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2020.1855995. ↑

3. Thomas Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies: The Place of Non-Fiction Film in Contemporary Media,” in Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 32. ↑

4. Elsaesser, 32. ↑

5. Elsaesser, 32. ↑

6. Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor, “More-Than-Human Histories,” Environmental History 25, no. 4 (2020): 717, https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emaa027. ↑

7. I thank staff who have assisted me at the National Film and Sound Archive, the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, the Wilderness Society Archive, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. I would also like to make a note about the process of accessing archival materials that informed different parts of this research. I was able to access the correspondence and board minutes of the Tasmanian Department of Film Production, and although only a portion of these papers exists in the archive, these were very instructive. The repository of films produced by the archive is very rich. Archives were less fruitful for research into The Last Wild River. The film was made at the very beginning of the formalization of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, and because it is a utilitarian, grassroots film, newspapers and government documents do not shed light on the production or use of the film. I have relied on accounts and interviews published well after the events discussed. I have also spoken to or corresponded with several people directly involved with the production and distribution of the film. Sam Stark, in particular, has offered extremely helpful information about the making of the film. ↑

8. Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland, “Utility and Cinema,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. ↑

9. Edited collections have been particularly influential in this field. See Patrick Vonderau and Vinzenz Hediger, eds., Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema; Devin Orgeron et al., eds., Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Bo Florin, Nico De Klerk, and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm, eds., The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). ↑

10. Acland and Wasson, “Utility,” 3. ↑

11. Imre Szeman, “On the Politics of Extraction,” Cultural Studies 31, no. 2–3 (2017): 445, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1303436. ↑

12. Rodney Musch, dir., “Tasmania’s Road West (1970),” Libraries Tasmania, June 5, 2017, YouTube video, 12:33, accessed November 29, 2021, https://youtu.be/nlG_rtGacFs. ↑

13. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, “Two Discourses of Australian Film,” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 15, no. 16 (1983): 166. ↑

14. Deane Williams, “The Grierson Cinema: Australia,” in The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement, ed. Zoe Druik and Deane Williams (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 140. ↑

15. Harry Watt, “Films in Australia,” Documentary News Letter 6, no. 52 (1946): 22. ↑

16. Albert Moran, “Nation Building: The Post‐war Documentary in Australia (1945–1953),” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (1988): 59. ↑

17. The Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme was the largest nation-building project in generations. Constructed between 1949 and 1974, it had a dedicated film unit over this time to facilitate public goodwill. At least 130 complete films are held at the National Film and Sound Archive. ↑

18. Moran, “Nation Building,” 63. ↑

19. Albert Moran, “Documentary Consensus: The Commonwealth Film Unit: 1954–1964,” in History on/and/in Film, ed. Tom O’Regan and Brian Shoesmith (Perth: History and Film Association of Australia 1987), 97. ↑

20. Moran, “Documentary Consensus,” 90. ↑

21. Tasmanian Film Advisory Board, February 15, 1961, Minutes of Meetings of the Tasmanian Government Film Board, Tasmanian State Archives, Hobart, 1. ↑

22. Tasmanian Film Advisory Board, 1. ↑

23. Tasmanian Film Advisory Board, 1. ↑

24. Bob Connolly, The Fight for the Franklin: The Story of Australia’s Last Wild River (North Ryde, NSW: Cassell Australia, 1981), 123. ↑

25. Steve Bowman (Australian Tourist Commission) to Raymond Barnes (Department of Film Production), October 23, 1970, Tasmanian Department of Film Production Correspondence, Tasmanian State Archives, Hobart. ↑

26. Although any film focused significantly on the activity of travel can be understood as a travel film, the “travelogue” usually refers to examples expressing the formal and stylistic consistencies that developed in a kind of nonfiction filmmaking from the first decade of the twentieth century. For discussion of this lineage, see Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). ↑

27. Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau, introduction to Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry, ed. Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 2. ↑

28. Trish FitzSimons, Pat Laughren, and Dugald Williamson, Australian Documentary: History, Practices and Genres (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 74. ↑

29. Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, A History of the Australian Environment Movement (Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 145. ↑

30. Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6. ↑

31. Here Hutton and Connors refer to the “green bans” in inner Sydney and the widespread anti-nuclear campaigns as comparisons. They also note the importance, in the 1960s, of the “threat of pollution to the Great Barrier Reef by oil exploration that triggered the first major campaign in Australia since the 1930s.” Hutton and Connors, History, 90. ↑

32. Brett Hutchins and Libby Lester, “Environmental Protest and Tap-dancing with the Media in the Information Age,” Media, Culture & Society 28, no. 3 (2006): 433–451. ↑

33. Rosalynn Haynes, “From Habitat to Wilderness: Tasmania’s Role in the Politicising of Place,” in Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, ed. David S. Trigger and Gareth Griffiths (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 104. ↑

34. Haynes, 102. ↑

35. Tim Bonyhady, “The Art of Wilderness,” in Wilderness—The Future: Papers from the Fourth National Wilderness Conference, ed. Will Barton (Sydney: Envirobook, 1994), 172. ↑

36. Haynes, “From Habitat,” 104. ↑

37. Connolly, Fight, 34–35. ↑

38. Martin Clark, “Experiences of Coming to Law: An Interview with Bob Brown on the Tasmanian Wilderness Society as Client in the Tasmanian Dam Case,” Griffith Law Review 24, no. 1 (2015): 59. ↑

39. Connolly, Fight, 36. ↑

40. Clark, “Experiences,” 59. ↑

41. Amanda Stark, email message to author, May 27, 2022. ↑

42. James McCormack, “The Battle for the Franklin,” Wild Magazine, October 12, 2019, accessed November 29, 2021, https://wild.com.au/conservation/the-battle-for-the-franklin. ↑

43. Karen Alexander, TWS member who was involved in circulating the film, describes how screenings in Victoria were advertised to every relevant group they could think of, including environment groups (such as Friends of the Earth) but also field naturalists, bushwalking groups, the Youth Hostel Association, schools, local media, and libraries. Karen Alexander, email message to author, June 24, 2022. ↑

44. Rick Rolls with Bob Brown and Peter Thompson, “Ride the Wild River,” Habitat 5, no. 3 (1977): 10–16. ↑

45. These were particularly active in Tasmania (e.g., the North West Walking Club, the Hobart Walking Club). See, in particular, Peter Sims’s film, Tasmanian Wilderness (1972). ↑

46. Clark, “Experiences,” 59. ↑

47. Bronwyn Barnett, “Colouring Our World,” National Film and Sound Archive, accessed December 16, 2021, https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/colour-tv-part-2. ↑

48. Connolly, Fight, 34. ↑

49. Jeffrey Ruoff, “Introduction: The Filmic Fourth Dimension: Cinema as Audiovisual Vehicle,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 2–4. ↑

50. Jennifer Lynn Peterson, “The Nation’s First Playground,” in Ruoff, Virtual Voyages, 80. ↑

51. Andrew Brookes, “Doing the Franklin: Wilderness Tourism and the Construction of Nature,” Tourism Recreation Research 26, no. 1 (2001): 11, https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2001.11081172. ↑

52. Brookes, 11. ↑

53. Haynes, “From Habitat,” 98. ↑

54. As Brookes notes, “Personal testimonies illustrate how the meaning of the Franklin for particular individuals, and ultimately for the no-dams movement, was constructed through stories of particular river journeys and later, the experience of peaceful protest.” Brookes, “Doing the Franklin,” 13. ↑

55. Martin Hawes, Grant Dixon, and Chris Bell, Refining the Definition of Wilderness: Safeguarding the Experiential and Ecological Values of Remote Natural Land (Hobart: Bob Brown Foundation, 2018). ↑

56. Val Plumwood, “Wilderness Scepticism and Wilderness Dualism,” in The Great New Wilderness Debate, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 655. ↑

57. Timothy Neale, Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017), 9. ↑

58. Neale, 9. ↑

59. Natural and Cultural Heritage Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, Aboriginal Heritage of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA): A Literature Review and Synthesis Report (Hobart: Tasmanian Government, 2017). ↑

60. Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004), 4. ↑

61. Plumwood, “Wilderness Scepticism,” 658. ↑

62. David Carter charts this phenomenon in the 1970s and beyond in “The Wide Brown Land on the Small Grey Screen: The Nature of Landscape on the Australian Television,” Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 58 (1998): 116–126. ↑

63. Fred Duncan and Bob Brown, Notes for Franklin River Rafters and Bushwalkers (Hobart: Tasmanian Wilderness Society, 1980). ↑

64. The Last Wild River credits the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, the Launceston Walking Club, and the Tasmanian Conservation Trust for supporting the film. ↑

65. Michael Cordell: Oral History, Audio Recording, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, Australia, 2015. ↑

66. The Tasmanian Film Corporation was short-lived. In 1983, the government of the day fully privatized the corporation, leading to its demise a few years later. Tasmania remains the only Australian state without a government-supported film entity.  ↑

67. Connolly, Fight, 123. ↑

68. As a commercial body, the Tasmanian Film Corporation was ideologically agnostic when it came to the politics of conservation. In 1978, it produced Gordon Power for the HEC, a film explicitly documenting and celebrating hydro construction occurring earlier in the decade. In 1980, it produced Harry Butler’s Tasmania for the Department of Tourism, promoting national parks and conservation but sidestepping the heated controversy of the Franklin campaign. ↑

69. Michael Cordell: Oral History, Audio Recording, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, Australia, 2015. ↑

70. FitzSimons, Laughren, and Williamson, Australian Documentary, 76. ↑

71. For further discussion of the problematic deployment of wilderness claims, see Marcia Langton, Burning Questions: Emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Northern Australia (Darwin: Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, Northern Territory University, 1998); and Jenny Pickerill, “From Wilderness to WildCountry: The Power of Language in Environmental Campaigns in Australia,” Environmental Politics 17, no. 1 (2008): 95–104, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701811681. ↑

72. FitzSimons, Laughren, and Williamson, Australian Documentary, 77. ↑

73. Ursula K. Heise identifies this trend, writing that “these travelogues typically feature a journalist, scientist or activist who travels around the world to report on crisis hotspots and to highlight their connection to systemic ecological problems.” Ursula K. Heise, “Journeys through the Offset World: Global Travel Narratives and Environmental Crisis,” SubStance 41, no. 1 (2012): 63. ↑

74. For more discussion of this new wave, see Belinda Smaill, “Understanding Environmentalism as a Feminist Media Concern: Documentary Filmmaking, Argumentation, Advocacy and Industry,” Feminist Media Studies 23, no. 2 (2023): 440–455, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1979072. ↑

75. Tom Griffiths, “Environmental History, Australian Style,” Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 173, https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2015.1035289. ↑