Peter Dombrovskis – Tasmanian Wilderness Photographer
Peter Dombrovskis, an acclaimed photographer of Australian landscapes, became well-known for his ability to capture the rugged and unspoiled terrains of Tasmania. His work played a vital part in the movement to protect the Tasmanian wilderness, and his artistic vision helped raise awareness about the significance of preserving Australia’s natural heritage. Sadly, he passed away in 1996 while photographing the remote Southwest National Park.
Early Years
Dombrovskis was born Pieter Herberts Dombrovski on 2nd March 1945 in a displaced persons camp in Wiesbaden, Germany, to Latvian parents. When Pieter was five, he and his widowed mother were resettled in Australia. Firstly at the Bonegilla migrant reception and training centre, Victoria, followed by Wollongong, New South Wales, before moving to Hobart, Tasmania. In Hobart, they settled into the suburb of Fern Tree on the slopes of Mount Wellington.
His mother worked various jobs in a factory, a hospital, and a domestic. Peter, as he was by now known, attended South Hobart Primary and Hobart High Schools. He and his mother shared a mutual love of bushwalking on Mount Wellington. On these walks, he would record what he saw with the 35 mm Zeiss camera his mother had given him at age six. After leaving high school, he studied botany and zoology at the University of Tasmania. However, he left without completing a degree and never formally studied photography. In November 1963, he and his mother became naturalised Australian citizens.
When he was seventeen, Dombrovskis attended an adventure camp led by Olegas Truchanas, a Lithuanian-Australian photographer and conservationist. Truchanas took a particular interest in the fatherless boy from a neighbouring Baltic country. He became his mentor and taught him bush survival skills, encouraging him to consider photography as a career and not merely as a hobby.
The fight for Lake Pedder
In 1967 the Tasmanian government revoked the status of Lake Pedder National Park. Despite strong local and international opposition to the flooding of Lake Pedder, it was all in vain. In 1971, just before the planned inundation, over two thousand people travelled to Pedder to see the lake before it was gone forever. One particular weekend in March 1971, so many visited it became known as the Pedder Pilgrimage. The concerns over the dam’s construction revolved around the loss of the irreplaceable pink quartzite beach of the Lake Pedder, coupled with an increased awareness of the unique wilderness area of the southwest of Tasmania.
Truchanas’ fight to save Lake Pedder from flooding for hydroelectric power generation inspired Dombrovskis. In 1972, Truchanas tragically drowned, aged forty-nine, while canoeing the Gordon River, and sadly, it was Dombrovskis who found his body. From then on, he vowed to continue his mentor’s conservationist role by creating powerful images of Tasmania’s landscape and flora. His first publication, a calendar of photographs for 1973, sold out on release.
Wild Wind Press
In 1974 Dombrovskis married Gabrielle Joan Teakle, a nurse. Together they had five children before the marriage broke down. With encouragement from his wife, he left his job as a draftsman at the federal Department Of Works to concentrate on publishing his photography full-time. To this end, he founded West Wind Press, publishing his first wilderness diary (1976). This was followed by a calendar and a book, The Quiet Land (1977), with poems by Ellen Miller.
‘I took photographs … because the discipline of photography increased my awareness of Tasmania’s beauty and made me appreciate more clearly the value of the wilderness.’
Peter Dombrovskis
Equipment
In 1976 Dombrovskis began using a large format Linhof Master Technika flatbed camera with three lenses. A 90mm Nikkor F4.5, a 150mm Schneider Symar-S (standard lens), a 300mm Nikkor MF9 and sometimes, a polarising filter.
The large camera required a sturdy tripod. However, the downside was the camera and tripod were cumbersome, particularly in mountainous terrain. On the other hand, its considerable depth of field allowed him to achieve crystal-clear images in full resolution from foreground to far distance. Furthermore, Dombrovskis favoured low light and misty air to intensify colours and developed a unique photographic style that captured the spiritual essence of the wilderness.
He perfected long exposures, whereby the flowing water became milky streams. Dombrovskis would also frequently focus on the detail of a single plant, evoking the concept of the wilderness as a pristine landscape.
Saving the Franklin River
Dombrovskis was happy spending weeks at a time, several times a year, alone in remote parts of Tasmania. In the late 70s and early 80s, he rafted down the Gordon and Franklin Rivers in the gorge country, recording images at the request of Bob Brown, director of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society. His photographs were a compelling statement on the unique beauty of these endangered rivers threatened by the program to build dams for hydroelectric power.
Brown selected Dombrovskis’s photograph Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, Southwest Tasmania, showing the heavily wooded banks of the Newland Cascades as the face of their campaign. While its isolation meant it was a location that few would ever visit, in March 1983, the image appeared as a full-page colour advertisement in newspapers with the slogan ‘Could you vote for a party that will destroy this?’
The message proved extraordinarily effective and prompted a groundswell of support. Additionally, the image was pivotal to the ‘No Dams’ campaign to halt the dam’s construction, being reproduced a million times. The Tasmanian government wanted the dam. Bob Hawkes’s labour party opposed it. In 1983 the High Court of Australia brought down a ruling that the Commonwealth Government was entitled to prevent the dam’s construction. Many believe that Hawkes’s support for the campaign played a large part in Hawkes’s party winning the federal election in 1983.
Second Marriage
Apart from Tasmania, Dombrovskis would also make photographic trips to other parts of Australia. These trips took him to the Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, the Daintree rainforest and Hinchinbrook Island, Queensland. Internationally he visited Fiji and Borneo.
In 1989 he married Elizabeth Grace Cairns Coombe, whom he had known since childhood. Coombe was also an active partner in West Wind Press. Despite being diagnosed with a heart operation in the early 1990s, he continued travelling to remote locations for photography. While his wife or a fellow photographer sometimes accompanied him, he was alone in 1996 when he died of a heart attack, aged fifty-one, near Mount Hayes in the Western Arthur Range.
He was survived by the two daughters and three sons of his first marriage, his wife, and his stepdaughter and stepson. The memorial service was held on the slopes of Mount Wellington.
In 2003 Dombrovskis was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. Significantly, he became the first Australian to receive the honour. Also, in 2003, Scott Millwood made a documentary film, Wildness, tracing the legacy of Dombrovskis and Truchanas. In addition, the National Library of Australia (NLA) acquired his archive of over three thousand colour transparencies. In 2017, the NLA mounted an exhibition of seventy prints titled Journeys Into The Wild.