Olegas Truchanas (22 September 1923 – 6 January 1972) helped raise public awareness of the importance of the south-west Tasmania.
Early life
Truchanas was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania. In 1941, he graduated from the Šiauliai Gymnasium. After the 1945 fall of Lithuania to the USSR, he fled to Munich, Germany. Though he enrolled in a law degree at UNRRA 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, which was necessary under Australian migration law of the time. During that time, he began to take an interest in the Tasmanian wilderness.
South West Tasmania
In 1958, Truchanas became the first person in recorded history to kayak the length of the dangerous Serpentine and Gordon Splits.
Most of Truchanas' early photographs were lost when his house was destroyed in the Hobart bushfire in 1967. However, over the next five years, he substantially rebuilt his collection of photos of the Lake Pedder area. 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 played an important role in the publicity of 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 is now among the only remaining records of the pre-dam era Lake Pedder, Truchanas realised that the campaign was lost. He turned his attention to the Pieman, Gordon and Franklin Rivers.
In 1972, Truchanas drowned in the Gordon River after he slipped and fell into the current. His body was found by Dombrovskis, trapped beneath a log.
Legacy
He lived to see the failure of the Lake Pedder and Pieman River campaigns although the actual damming did not occur until after his death. The campaign to stop the Franklin Dam and thus save the Gordon and Franklin rivers, was ultimately successful.