AustLit

'This river, banked in forest, carries the fallen sky to the ocean. Where it runs was once a glacial melt, before the first people crossed a land bridge to the island, on land now sea, and made a thousand paths and smokes of their dreaming over a new land, long before the white man’s name; before mineral prospectors broke rainforest tracks; before mud from tin-dish panning and railway bridges built with London money to carry materials for mines and towns, taking copper, tin, gold and silver, all of those towns and camps now gone; before 30 million super feet of Huon pine was cut for timber and floated down-river; before a million tonnes of effluent from the Rosebery mine and mill flowed in grey, steaming silt, smelling of sulphur, into the river from the Stitt; before that stopped, and the banks cleared, hiding sludge; before the 200-metre-high Reece dam, and all the dams behind it, flooding valleys for hydroelectric lakes of the Pieman Power Development Scheme. Before you left.' (Introduction)