Rafting Tasmania's Franklin River by Andrew Bain

If rivers are a metaphor for life, Tasmania’s pristine Franklin River is breath itself. Doused by three metres of rain a year, water levels rise and fall so quickly it’s as though the river is inhaling and exhaling. In the Great Ravine, a high-sided gorge described by its discover in 1840 as a ‘hideous defile’, rafters can fall asleep beside a gentle stream and wake to a raging, unraftable torrent.

Though the Great Ravine stretches just five kilometres, it will take us a day to manoeuvre our rafts through its gut-sinking rapids. We will paddle the rafts and push them, but mostly we will carry them, dragging them forward inch by laborious inch. It will be the toughest of our eight days on the river, though by some standards we’ve raced through the Great Ravine. Rafters before us have been stranded here for days by rising water.

An Insolated Waterway

The Franklin River is, in practical terms, among the world’s most remote rafting waterways. Though located just a few hours’ drive from the Tasmanian capital, Hobart, it’s remote in a way not expressed by mere distance. Its catchment is entirely inside World Heritage-listed lands and contains no cultivated land or settlements. For the eight days we’re here, we’ll see not another person, barely a mark of humanity and not a scrap of rubbish.

Such isolation has helped created one of the world’s most challenging rafting journeys. While rafting trips on most rivers are completed in just a few hours - a couple of sharp shots of adrenaline then off to the bar - river runs on Tasmania’s most famous waterway extend for more than 100km and around eight days. Quite simply, once you begin you are all but bound to raft to its end.

The Franklin has ‘exhaled’ for our arrival. Just two weeks earlier, high water had marooned a group of rafters in the Great Ravine for five nights, but as we prepare to launch our two rafts on the Collingwood River, a tributary of the Franklin, water levels are barely sufficient to carry us through the first small rapid. The sun burns in a cloudless sky, suggesting even lower levels to come.

Our guides, Casey and Jack, have seen all conditions before. Casey, a Kiwi, has just returned from a season in Norway; Jack is fresh from a law degree. Somebody has made the mistake of reading their horoscopes this morning. For the two men expected to guide us safely down a river that drops more than 300 metres, the stars are even more foreboding than the sun.

The First Rapids

‘One of those weeks when you constantly do the wrong thing...back off; let people make their own silly mistakes,’ trip leader Casey is assured. For Jack there’s little more cause for optimism: ‘A project you thought would be a snack turns out to be a millstone... Health: Minor injuries.’
Not wanting to suffer from my own silly mistakes, I pile into Jack’s raft (they are to be his injuries not mine, after all) with Jess and Rebecca. Our luggage and more than a week of food divide the raft into two.

When river levels are high, the few kilometres from Collingwood Bridge to the Franklin River can be rafted in less than an hour. This day we take three hours, the raft running aground in almost every rapid, Jack leaping out to wrench us free each time.

Late in the afternoon, the Collingwood River spits us into the Franklin immediately below a narrow gorge, its flow just enough to carry us through the first rapid. After the last few hours, it seems like an epochal event.

For the rest of the day - indeed, for large parts of the coming week - we do little more than drift downstream. For long periods of time I’m content to sit back and watch the myrtle beech and Huon pine sail by, dipping an occasional paddle to stir the river like coffee. Beside me, Rebecca has fallen asleep, lullabied by the soft slap of water beneath the raft.

Franklin: Part of Australian Lore

Conversation the first night turns inevitably to the one bit of Franklin knowledge we all share: the blockade by conservationists in the early 1980s to protest plans to dam it. Around 1400 protestors were arrested, but they helped swing a Federal election, with the Australian Labor Party voted in on a popular promise to prevent the dam. The river was saved, transforming it into a part of Australian lore.

‘The fact they almost dammed the river was the best thing that ever happened to it,’ Phil insists. ‘It’s what ultimately brought us all here. They should almost dam a few more rivers.’ It’s perverse if compelling logic. Would any of us even know of the river if the blockade hadn’t made international news?

For the first four days the river’s flatness is broken only by a few speed-bump-like rapids. It’s minimal preparation for the Great Ravine into which we now plunge, portaging its every rapid, sometimes tiptoeing along narrow rock ledges high above the river as Casey and Jack perform heroics, bundling the rafts over rapids, then diving in after them. It’s hard work that’s tempered by the rugged beauty of this primordial land. In the Great Ravine even a depleted Franklin River is a place of awe.

Tackling the Great Ravine

But the best rafting moments come beyond the Great Ravine, as the rapids slow to tremors after the fury of the ravine. We lurch through the foamy drops of Newland Cascades, crashing over its final rapid, which is about as high as the rafts are long, to a soundtrack of happy screams.
After six days of pure sunshine, a contrary part of me - and I’m not alone - has started hoping for Noah-like rain in order that we might see the river rise from a puddle to a power. That night there is hope, as a sound-and-light spectacular of thunder and lightning cracks open the darkness.

At 3am we are dancing among raindrops as we hurry to string tarpaulins over our beds. A few hours later the storm concludes in a bruising shower of hailstones. Within minutes the sun is back, seemingly fiercer than ever. Steam leaches from the earth and the river, which has risen just centimetres. It’s a wish half-granted.

From our camp beside Newland Cascades, beneath a cliff overhang, we have two days left on the river. Almost all the rapids are behind us. The Franklin widens and flattens, becoming more open, offering views to forested ranges instead of rocky cliffs. The sun commands the sky - it has been the driest trip either Casey or Jack can remember - and we float on down this river as dark as stout. Sea-planes out of the tourist town of Strahan buzz overhead with increasing frequency, and I begin to resent the suggestion that we’re nearing our return to so-called civilisation.

As we lurch through one of the last rapids, Jack’s hand brushes across the limestone edge of a cliff, slicing open his knuckles. Blood spreads across his wet hand. It’s the first injury of sorts for the journey, a horoscope forecast come true. That night the rains finally arrive, smothering the stars that have taken all week to be proved correct.