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In 1876 the world’s first hydroelectric turbine was established in England by William Armstrong to light his house at Cragside in Northumberland. Not as trivial as it sounds, Cragside being the size of a small village. It was only 40 years from the actual invention of the generator by Michael Faraday, a primitive device and really only a demonstration of the induction principle – how a magnetic field from a wire with electricity here will induce an electric current in a close by wire there. Just another 40 years later, the Tasmanian state government’s hydroelectric power station was operating at Waddamana, a village hidden in a deep valley among craggy mountains and silver lakes in the literal geographical centre of the state. Visionary is the only way to describe the plans and aspirations of the team that built such a revolutionary, pun intended, infrastructure. To me it is akin to the dream in 1962 of putting a man on the moon by 1970. Daring, idealistic, risky.

          The hum of massive vertical Pelton wheels spinning 50 times a second day and night from anywhere in the Waddamana village are among my earliest auditory memories. That and standing on the green metal viewing gantry high on the main wall of the incongruous art deco power station building, looking down on the rows of energetic turbines like terracotta sentries, or as cousin Greg suggested, terracotta snails, the noise preventing any conversation.

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          Waddamana was not the first electrical generator in the state. Amazingly, the first was in 1895, less than a decade after Cragside. That is almost impossible to put into perspective for a tiny state with a tiny population at the tail end of the world; this kind of accomplishment was more expected in the laboratories of someone like Edison in New Jersey. But there it is, Duck Reach Power Station, the first hydroelectric generator in the Southern Hemisphere, powering the arc lamps of the sleepy hollow called Launceston, the work of the Launceston city civil engineer with the unlikely name of Charles St John David. But it was, like they say, in the air; there were other small private generators; one in Queenstown, for instance, when this now almost abandoned centre for Mt Lyell copper mines was once one of the state’s largest towns. Mining generates money, generates commerce, generates invention. Australia’s first stock exchange, for instance, was in the remote Queensland mining town of Charters Towers. In Tasmania, it seems, mining generated generators.

          Charles Wesley was my science teacher and home class master for my first year at high school. He was very English, from England, and I remember learning about soft and hard water, despite Tasmania having no hard water, not understanding the relevance. And I remember his chemistry lessons, enthralling little bombs and explosions and smoke and smells. I learned that metals like zinc and aluminium required lots of electricity to electrolyse the ore and extract the minerals. Wesley was gruff, a prototype for Trevor Howard’s Captain Bligh and just as intimidating. So competent and knowledgeable about things that, like Bligh, he surely would have been able to navigate a dingy to shore from anywhere in the ocean. One evening’s excursion was to the school yards to identify all the stars, as if each were his favourite pupils, and I can still dole out the members of upside-down Orion, hunting on his head, and remember that there are seven sisters in Pleiades. I’m a Gemini and I learned to recognise Castor and Pollux. Like Bligh, Wesley would have navigated by the stars. I never had a better teacher. He secretly gave me lab glassware and chemicals to encourage my experimenting hobby at home, to supplement the chemistry set I received one birthday, which was ultimately used to etch the chromium off our kitchen sink with acids. The damage was so complete, so final, it was one of the few times I remember Dad looking in disbelief, too dumbfounded to give me the beating I deserved.

          As is often the case, the true visionary behind Waddamana was not the government. In this case it was an intense and bespectacled metallurgist and inventor from NSW, James Hyndes Gillies, who came prospecting for locations to build an electricity generator in Tasmania in 1906. It was an earth-moving infrastructure undertaking of a style and scale more reminiscent of Isambard Kingdom Brunel or John August Roebling and their awe-inspiring bridges and tunnels. Seems that three propitious names are a prerequisite for being a prominent civil engineering entrepreneur. Gillies had invented and patented processing techniques for calcium carbide and zinc, both requiring lots of electricity, which was his driving motivation. The project was massive enough to require government approval and new legislation.

          Regardless of his success at raising investment funds on trips back to London and acquiring the engineering materials from America, like my dad, a businessman he was not. Although it is debatable whether the political forces were deliberately set against him once the Tasmanian state government saw a cheap fire-sale opportunity for his patently brilliant plan. So, also like my dad, he ended up fighting the system, which in his case was the possibly unethical Tasmanian government, and losing. The double-dealing Labour government of the time was busy compiling a secret viability report on the project, clearly coveting it, at the same time as they were refusing Gillies additional time. Their very public investigation, probably with a duplicitous agendum, would not have helped either. Perhaps not so much business sense, as Gillies very adequately raised funds, gathered a talented team, and made considerable early progress on such a complex endeavour in such an inhospitable part of the planet, but more likely his not understanding the self-serving structure of political society. My dad hit his head against the brick wall of the same society and the machinations of politicians all his life. Machinations documented in Sun Tzu’s Art of War, perfected by Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince, and weapon of choice of Labour governments worldwide. It was another 20 years before the Tasmanian government saw fit to reward a much-deserved pension lifeline for the then destitute Gillies.

          One never wins against such a force. Inevitably, the Hydro-Electric Power and Metallurgical Co. Ltd. was listed on the London stock exchange, and a division of Gillies’ holding company, Complex Ores, became fatally financially stressed. A record cold snap in 1912 did not help in this terrain and weather, which is difficult at the best of times. The government’s newly created Hydro Electric Department acquired his works in 1914 and the finished power station, later known as Waddamana A, was operational from 1916. It is indicative of how far Gillies had come in his eight years that the government capital could complete his work in two years and be operational, earning revenues. In my marketing workshops I often say, ‘Everyone is lining up to be second.’ It is a lesson about those sitting patiently on the side, watching and waiting for good work to collapse under lack of resources, to vulture the scraps despite having invested little themselves.

          In my mind, Gillies deserves to be remembered more than he is, as the ‘Father of the Tasmanian Hydro’. The project was ingeniously simple. Tasmania’s largest lake, called, wait for it, Great Lake, emptied into the Shannon River high above the tree line on the plateau called The Steppes. The Shannon trickled a long way, eventually into the River Derwent, which is a deep, wide fjord bisecting the capital city of Hobart where I would also end up. A short way away from the Shannon River, at a much lower elevation in a very steep valley, was the Ouse River. A shortcut canal cut across The Steppes could conveniently divert the waters of the Shannon to precipitously fall to the Ouse. Falling water has energy, potential energy, potential to drive something like a water wheel or dynamo.

          But someone has to do the work to transform vision to reality. Along comes Alexander McAulay, professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Tasmania, with his ability to determine how much water flows out of Great Lake along the Shannon River, and how much would be needed to turn turbines in the valley of the Ouse River, which also flows to the River Derwent, whose water in turn flows out of the massive estuary to the Great Southern Ocean, destined to circle Antarctica, so all was okay. A small masonry dam at Great Lake to increase and control capacity was the gambit; then a canal to a penstock holding pond, a downhill pipeline, then a bunch of turbines feeding power lines on pylons to Hobart. Most of it across Crown Land, so no private property to purchase and compensate, along trails cleared by my Uncle David Branch. A small village of workers near the power station pops up and is called Waddamana, ‘running water’.

          McAuley loved the area. Rugged, isolated, and conveniently near his friends at the Wihareja property just off the unsealed country road to the lakes. Amidst the works, alongside the Shannon River and canal, he built a rustic but comfortable country lodge called Kanna Leena. This became the engineering and academic headquarters for the project, with all manner of interested political, industrial, financial and engineering parties visiting all the time including the particularly savvy John Butters, who managed to stay as the project’s chief engineer under each of the project’s ownerships as they changed. McAuley’s son, also a professor at the university, and his fiancée were also visitors. But with rugged wilderness and complex terraforming comes risk and danger.

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          Interest in the property waned after the tragedy of the drowning of Margaret Kathleen Hogarth, the bride of McAuley’s son Alexander Leicester McAuley Jr, on their honeymoon on 9 January 1931, while bathing in the Shannon River at Kanna Leena. By 1950, Kanna Leena was deserted. You wouldn’t read about such a misfortune except in an autobiography.

          When my newlywed father needed a place to live with his wife and a baby boy, we moved there, a couple of miles from his single men’s quarters on the other side of the Penstock Lagoon. I was the baby, and this was my first home. The house burned down some time ago, but before it did, I visited there several times. The first time was with my dad, who showed me the primitive living conditions – no electricity, of course, or internal plumbing – the nursery in the tiny room at the rear of the house where my cot was located, and the by then miniscule Shannon River to the side of the property. With the power stations decommissioned, and the massive pipelines removed, there was no longer a need for diverting water.

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​​          My dad was an apprenticed carpenter with the Hydro Electric Commission, living initially at a desolate temporary construction camp called Hill Top, adjacent to the high Penstock Lagoon, and part of the team that constructed the wooden stave pipelines down to Waddamana B station. The camp was for single men, no more than boys some of them. The remnants are still there if you wander off the road and search amongst the brush. You’ll find some foundations and prominent concrete steps leading nowhere – appropriate for this area known as The Steppes. Married men usually had a house in Waddamana village, at the bottom of the valley. When I was conceived and he married my mother, in that order, just in time, he had to find married men’s accommodation, none of which was available in the village. By then, though, Kanna Leena was abandoned, and it was offered to him. So, my first home was Professor Andrew McAuley’s country chalet, which had also been the first headquarters of the nascent hydroelectric scheme and the site of a horrifying drowning, on the trail of the canal from Great Lake to the Waddamana penstock.

          These were academic giants, these people before me, but there were giants in my early life too. One of my first jobs was as a junior technician with the Department of Surgery at the University of Tasmania, operating along with Professor Robert Mitchell pioneering kidney transplants, and where I learned that the same Alexander Leicester McAuley Jr, when a professor at the University of Tasmania, was instrumental in the creation of an optics facility to supply precision sights and lenses during World War II, pioneering revolutionary optical design science. And I knew of Grote Reber, a USA scientist but also a researcher at the University of Tasmania, pioneer of radio astronomy, because I recalled his acres of arrays of poles and wire antennae at Llanherne adjacent to the Hobart Airport, and because he retired to Bothwell, last stop before Waddamana, where he was a local, albeit eccentric, celebrity, having a beer with my brother at the Castle Hotel. Or Dr June Olley, food scientist at the University but previously with the Australian national science body CSIRO, and with whom I published an academic paper on measuring the quality of fish. Today the University, like many others in Australia, seems to me to focus on enrolment fees from overseas students and little else.

          There have been and are many Vandemonians. Most famous was probably Errol Flynn, born in Hobart to a biology professor at the University of Tasmania, to become the most prominent swashbuckling Hollywood actor of his era. Then there was Christopher Koch, who wrote the novel The Year of Living Dangerously, with its film adaptation starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver; Nan Chauncy, writing about children adventures; and Richard Flanagan, the Man Booker prize-winning author. Who else? Joseph Lyons, the only Tasmanian Prime Minister of Australia. Mary Donaldson, now Queen of Denmark. Bob Brown, founder of the world’s first Green Party. Cricketers Ricky Ponting and David Boon, world champion swimmer Ariarne Titmus. Media celebrity Charles Woolley. Martyn Bryant, Australia’s worst mass murderer. Truganini was the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine, and perhaps the only true Vandemonian in this list.