Olegas Truchanas

Olegas Truchanas (1923 - January 6, 1972) was a Lithuanian-Australian conservationist and nature photographer. He was a key figure in the attempt to stop the damming of the ecologically sensitive Lake Pedder. His photographs, along with those of his protege, Peter Dombrovskis, helped raise public awareness of the importance of the south-west Tasmanian rainforest. Though he drowned during the unsuccessful Lake Pedder campaign, his photographs had helped begin a movement that successfully saved the Franklin River, stopping the construction of the Franklin Dam less than a decade later.

Truchanas was born in Lithuania and fought in the resistance during World War II. He fled to Munich, Germany after the 1945 fall of Lithuania to the USSR. Though he enrolled in a law degree at university, he was sent to a displaced persons camp, and subsequently migrated to Tasmania in 1948.

Upon arriving in Tasmania, Truchanas worked for a zinc company in Hobart for two years, as was necessary under Australian migration law of the time. It was at this time that he began to take an interest in the Tasmanian wilderness,. In 1958, Truchanas became the first non-Aboriginal to kayak the length of the dangerous Serpentine and Gordon Rivers.

Most of Truchanas' early photographs were destroyed when his house was destroyed in a bushfire in 1967. However, over the next five years, he substantially rebuilt his collection of photos of the Lake Pedder area. Though, as a clerk temporarily employed by the Hydro Electricity Commission, Truchanas was forbidden to speak about the increasing controversy surrounding the impending damming, his photographs began to play an important role in publicity for the campaign. He was once quoted as stating "This vanishing world is beautiful beyond our dreams and contains in itself rewards and gratifications never found in an artificial landscape or man-made objects."

After taking what are now among the only remaining records of the pre-dam Lake Pedder, Truchanas realised that the campaign was lost, and turned his attention to the Pieman, Gordon and Franklin Rivers. Around the same time, a book of his work was published, with an initial print run of 5,000 copies. Eight further editions sold out. In 1972, Truchanas drowned in the Franklin River after slipping and falling into the current. His body was found, trapped beneath a log, by his protege, Peter Dombrovskis. He had lived to see the failure of the Lake Pedder and Pieman River campaigns, although the actual damming did not occur until after his death. However, the campaign to stop the Franklin Dam, and thus save the Gordon and Franklin rivers, was to be ultimately successful. His photographs had played a vital role in turning rainforest conservation into a national issue.

Truchanas' story, along with that of his colleague Dombrovskis, was depicted in a 2003 documentary, Wildness. In the same year, a tribute, The Forest of Stumps, by artist Geoff Parr, was exhibited at Hobart's Ten Days on the Island arts festival, including a number of Truchanas' photographs. Some of his photographs have been turned into postage stamps by Australia Post, and a canoe used by Truchanas, and several other possessions, are part of the National Library of Australia's National Historical Collection. Singer-songwriter Bruce Watson stated, in his song Olegas, "the Franklin runs today because of what [Truchanas] began."