The Last Rivers Song

Book excerpt: In The Last Rivers Song, Lloyd Godman presents a stunning series of black and white photographs that show the raw, natural, beauty of Clutha River (which flows from Lake Wanka) and Kawarau River (which flows from Lake Wakatiku, Queenstown) before the water was stilled with the filling of Lake Dunstan at the completion of the hydro dam at Clyde in Central Otago, New Zealand. The hydro dam was planned to provide power to an aluminium smelter at Aromana which due to protests never eventuated. In an age where rivers are increasingly under threat from development, it offers an emblematic, evocative portrait of a wild, free-flowing river that has been lost to hydro development. The publication includes a detailed introduction to the conception of the project and the technical challenges of producing large mural photographs (which are gold toned from gold mined from the very river itself) and were first exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. From photographic stop motion to time exposure the aura of the river is captured beyond human vision. Exhibited at the Marshall Seifert Gallery, to compliment the murals at the DPAG, was a series of smaller photographs, the Clutha Panels, which show the expansive mood of the river. The full suite of photographs is included in the book. Hyperlinks within the publication link to animated video using sequences of the photographs and an original soundscape composed by Trevor Coleman and Paul Hutchins to accompany the DPAG exhibition. "Water surges, sprays, foams, whirls, ripples and rests, framed by very black rock which, when devoid of detail cameos the textures of its movements. In other instances a chiaroscuro lighting throws forward rock surface, its water-worn texture combining in rhythmic counterpoint with the current. The mural works are more expressively extreme, and have a greater over-all movement, each work capturing a different mood, from candy-floss fibres of foam in mural five, to the bone-crushing torrents". Alastair Galbraith