“Whether distant and strange, or close and familiar, I need contact with wild nature. It is as necessary to my soul as breathing and eating are to my body. It gives meaning to my life and reaffirms my kinship with all life.”
Peter Dombrovskis wasn’t a prolific writer. Instead, he preferred to express himself through his photography. His wilderness calendars, diaries and books remain some of the finest records of the Australian landscape.
Alongside his publications, he engaged ecologist Jamie Kirkpatrick to write detailed descriptions. While Tasmanian writers like Bob Brown and Richard Flanagan prepared poignant essays.
But Dombrovskis did share his experiences in the occasional interview and infrequent essay. Letting us in on his approach to photography and what drew him to these wild lands time and again.
So I’ve delved through second-hand stores and archival footage to collate a selection of his thoughts. And to share some reflections from those who knew him best.
The Wilderness Society: The Gordon Splits
Quotes by Peter Dombrovskis
Part I: On nature
“As a child, most of my thoughts and dreams were of the natural world. I remember spending a lot of time lying in the grass, climbing a tree and sitting on a branch just looking at what was around me. I think I simply needed nature. It was part of me.”
“An ethic of the land is needed because the remaining wilderness, that which makes this island truly unique, is threatened by commercial exploitation that will destroy its value to future generations. Machines are already shattering the silence of ages, invading the last forests and damming and drowning the wild rivers and gorges.”
“We have a chance now to save these places, to stop them being destroyed. Once they’re gone, they’ll be gone forever.”
“For some people, the wilderness may be experienced in terms of a physical thing like a gymnasium—for them it’s important to get from A to B in a certain time. At the other extreme, you have the person to whom the wilderness is something akin to a cathedral—he feels close to nature, he feels that he knows himself better.”
Reflecting on his February 1984 trip to the sub-Antarctic islands:
“The weeks that follow are filled with the excitement of new sights and sounds. I delight in this unfamiliar beauty and burgeoning life; and I stand witness to the everyday dramas and tragedies. For where life is thick, death is never far away.”
“In the summer of 1979, and again in 1980 and 1981 I followed in Bob Brown’s wake and made three full-length trips by rubber raft down the Franklin. The river was all that I had hoped and more—it was grander, wilder, more remote and touched me more deeply than any other place I had known in Tasmania’s South-West.”
“One by one the rivers we had known disappeared; their forests drowned, their rushing waters trapped behind grey concrete walls.”
“When you go out there you don’t get away from it all, you get back to it all. You come home to what’s important, you come home to yourself.”
Part II: On photography
“I took photographs for the simple pleasure of recording objects and places that were important to me, and because the discipline of photography increased my awareness of Tasmania’s beauty and made me appreciate more clearly the value of its wilderness.”
“What I’m trying to do is simply present nature as I see it. Without trying to alter it in any way. Nature, in a sense, is already so unknowable. That it’s simply sufficient to present it as it is.”
“The detail in nature I find appealing—perhaps even more so than the large landscape. You just leave yourself open to everything that’s around you. To the messages that may be written in the stones, or twigs or leaves around you.”
“My most productive days are when I move through the landscape with an attitude of acceptance—of leaving myself open to all possibilities rather than expecting to find anything in particular.
I look ahead to guide my feet over rocks and roots, but images are more likely to insinuate themselves from the edges of my view, the periphery of my perception.”
“In nature, subject matter is everywhere. Finding things to photograph is more to do with one’s state of mind rather than the particular environment in which you happen to be.”
“Making worthwhile photographs is a long-time exercise. You just can’t do it quickly no matter how much effort you put into it, no matter how hard you try. You go away on a trip — two weeks — under ideal conditions you might come back with three or four really good photographs. Quite often I go away for two weeks and come back with nothing.”
“A large-format camera imposes limitations — it’s big, it’s awkward, it’s heavy, it’s slow, it can’t be used other than on a tripod. For that reason the images have a studied deliberateness about them.”
“It takes you a few days to get in the right frame of mind, to get in tune with, in rhythm with, the environment around you. Being receptive to what is around you takes time. To really start seeing what is around you and try to make sense of it. You start to feel and hopefully you start to hint at it in photographs.”
Quotes about Peter Dombrovskis
“The photos he brought back spoke of a magic land: a place of mystery, a landscape largely unknown; with delicate natural gardens and unbelievable trees; of wild rivers and ragged mountains.”
“Though a nation, Australia is not one country but many, and one of these is the country of Tasmania. Both men [Dombrovskis and Olegas Truchanas] created an idea of Tasmania that could not be dismissed as regional or small, and that, like all powerful artistic ideas, contained a universe within it.
For many on the island, these two artists were liberating—they showed us we lived not imprisoned in a small place dully conformist to a weary, century-old trope, but as part of a world of infinite possibility. But in so doing they also drew attention to the profound human choice that went with that world. To seek to know it better, to love it, or to agree to its destruction.”
“It was not so much that Truchanas and Dombrovskis recorded national parks, as that national parks followed where they recorded.”
“His art played a key role in awakening the nation’s environmental conscience. It was fundamental to presenting Tasmania’s wild scenery to a delighted nation and world, and so to establishing the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.”
“A shy and modest man with an aura of calm serenity, Pete was the most gentle man I have ever met.”
“His large contribution to the conservation of the quiet land was achieved through the non-verbal communication of a vision of its beauty and soul, not through loud confrontation with other human beings.”
“Some of his most arresting scenes are in the frosty or misty stillness after dawn. Aware of the advantages of each of the seasons—and summer had fewest—he returned time and again to favourite places to catch the transience of flowers, snow or Tasmania’s unique deciduous beech turning autumnal gold.”
“Peter once said that something of the photographer should be evident in each image; something of how the photographer felt should leap from each photo, otherwise the photo was just a photo.”
“His images convey the forest’s beauty and a message for all of us to keep: We should never exchange this beauty for money. Through his images, Peter gave the forest a voice when it did not have one.”
“Peter’s photographs take you into the place where he has been. Across and through the barrier of the frame and into the heart of the image.
Together with Peter you slip down into a silent valley, sense the light sting of wind-blown sand and smell the ozone tang of the great fields of stranded kelp. You instinctively understand the need to slow down, the need to wait—alert for the moment of luminescence in which you open the shutter.”
“Your work, Peter Dombrovskis, has done positive good for the world and we, the inheritors of that great good, rejoice that you dedicated your natural genius to communicating to us the glory of your wild country.”
“He was a master. The exposures on the film were just bang on and there was very little leeway with that colour slide film. He’s always managed to maintain the highlights and detail in the shadows, often on days that were quite sunny when it would have been very difficult.”
“They found him kneeling, looking out to the south-west wildlands. He had been dead for some days, killed by a massive heart attack. As the weather was about to change, Peter had fallen to his knees, bowing before the world he had invited us to love and discover ourselves anew in.”