Franklin: new film explores successful campaign to save river from Gordon-below-Franklin dam

It’s been 40 years since the legendary blockade of the Franklin River got under way and a new film is set to shine a light on the successful campaign to stop a controversial dam being built there.

When his father rafted down the Franklin River in 1982, Oliver Cassidy hadn’t been born yet – but the epic journey has shaped his life in ways he never could have predicted.

The late Michael Cassidy ventured down the remote river to join the famous blockade that precluded the scrapping of the proposed Gordon-below-Franklin hydro-electric dam the following year, as Bob Hawke’s Labor swept to power in Canberra.

Oliver has retraced his father’s 14-day journey for a new film, Franklin, which is billed as a celebration of peaceful protest and its centrality to a well-functioning democracy.

The 39-year-old describes himself as a “Franklin baby”, having been born in February 1983, during the last stage of the blockade.

When he made the trip down the river himself, Oliver was still recovering from gender affirmation surgery, adding a profound dimension to an already deeply personal story.

“I was still changing my bandages on the river,” he said.

Oliver Cassidy on the Franklin River. Picture: Luke Tscharke

Oliver said his father had kept a diary about his journey, which was used as a “motif” in the film.

“Out of all of the diaries that he kept, this one was particularly detailed,” he said.

“And I think, as far as he was thinking, if the campaign to save the river was lost, all these little ways in which that experience was recorded is the last way people might be able to experience it.”

Michael Cassidy died from complications of bile duct cancer in 2012, leaving behind him a legacy of passionate environmentalism.

Directed by Kasimir Burgess, Franklin is a son’s tribute to his father, an exploration not just of Tasmania’s deep wilderness and its significance but of the grief process and what it means to lose someone – or something – special.

Filmed in crystal-clear 4K, the film’s release comes on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the blockade, which galvanised the nation’s conservation movement and captivated people across the country.

Oliver Cassidy at Rock Island Bend on the Franklin River. Picture: Luke Tscharke

The plan to build the Gordon-below-Franklin dam, championed by then-Liberal Premier Robin Gray, ignited enormous controversy and was only scuttled when the Hawke government took the state to the High Court in May 1983.

The court ruled that work on the dam had to stop and that federal laws should be sustained in the state context when they upheld the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.

The Franklin River, which runs from the western edge of the Central Highlands and into Tasmania’s wild west coast, had been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site the previous December.

In his autobiography, Proud to be Tasmanian, Mr Gray wrote that the state Liberals wanted the dam built because the economy was “vulnerable and underperforming” and it would create thousands of jobs. He also said his government was a strong backer of hydro power as a “clean, low-priced and long-term form of energy”.

“The entire saga … signalled a historic turning point for Australia,” Gray writes. “States’ rights would be forever weakened, and the use by the Commonwealth of international treaties and conventions for domestic purposes enhanced.”

Oliver, of course, views the outcome of the campaign differently.

“Luckily we can actually go down and be part of that incredible landscape and wilderness today because of all the work that [environmental campaigners] put in at the time,” he said.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown, who led the anti-dam campaign, is participating in a simulcast Q&A session with Oliver that will screen alongside Franklin when the film is launched on September 4.

“I had a moment when I had a coffee with Bob Brown and Jenny Weber from the Bob Brown Foundation,” Oliver said.

“Bob was actually explaining to Jenny who my dad had been.

“He gestured to me and said, ‘It’s like we’re in the room with him now’.

“And it was just such a moment, I think, to really realise that, if anything, I’m sort of carrying [my father’s] spirit with me in some ways.”

Dr Brown said the film was being released at a time when chilling anti-protest laws were about to be passed through the Tasmanian Parliament.

He believes if such laws were in place in the early ‘80s, the Franklin campaign would have failed.

“I thought after [the campaign] we were in a new age of environmentalism in Australia,” he said. “But I’d underestimated the corporate response, which was to massively increase the lobbying of politics and the greenwash through advertising.”

“Things have got much, much worse. At the behest of corporations, we see the passage of laws to criminalise environmentalists in a way that would have stopped the Franklin campaign in its tracks.”

Nevertheless, the veteran campaigner hasn’t given up hope for a better future.

“It’s quite dire times but it’s the old story – when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” Dr Brown said.

Franklin will be screening at the State Cinema from September 4.

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