'The Franklin would be dammed today': Australia's shrinking environmental protections

The nation is losing the political will to protect our pristine places - and biodiversity is suffering

What if the Franklin river hadn't been saved?

Stopping the Gordon-below-Franklin dam was one of the Australian environment movement's great victories: in the late 1970s, the state-owned Hydro-Electric Commission wanted to flood one of three last temperate rainforests in the southern hemisphere to create a power station.