The story of this place
In 1972, the Tasmanian government flooded the original Lake Pedder — a pristine glacial lake with a unique pink quartzite beach found nowhere else on Earth — to create a hydro-electric reservoir. The flooding happened despite massive public protest and the founding of the world's first Green political party specifically to stop it. Lake Pedder became the first battle of the global environmental movement: if it could happen here, in one of the world's last wildernesses, it could happen anywhere.
The Gordon Dam itself is a stunning feat of engineering — a 140-metre double-curvature arch dam where visitors walk along the top and look 140 metres straight down to the river below. But the campaign that the flooding provoked never died. The later battle to stop the Franklin River Dam in 1983 — which would have flooded another Tasmanian wilderness — was won, partly because the defeat at Lake Pedder had taught environmentalists how to fight. Bob Brown, who led the Franklin campaign, went on to found the Australian Greens party.