IT’S YOUR TURN TO HAVE A SAY

The anomaly that has been the year 2020 has writ large one thing. Tasmanians love kunanyi/Mt Wellington – the Mountain. The fascination with Disappearing Tarn and a social media-led pilgrimage to this incredible phenomenon highlighted a powerful local connection to the Mountain and a widespread desire to experience it at its best – in its natural state.

It’s why 5000 people turned out on an overcast Autumn day in 2018, to rally against the desecration of kunanyi/Mt Wellington by a massive private commercial development on the pinnacle and a cable car that cuts directly across the iconic Organ Pipes.

It’s why people have hung banners off the Organ Pipes; put placards in their front yards; successfully lobbied the Cascade Brewery; and rose pre-dawn to stand as sentinels on the summit to mark out the large impact zone of the multi-level development that would privatise the top of the Mountain and demean it for dollars.

The cable car and its restaurants, function center, whiskey bar, café, gift shop and 34 toilets would require excavation of over 3000 cubic metres of rock on the summit, blasting dolerite bedrock to a depth of 12 meters below natural ground level. A new road to the proposed base station would push through a threatened forest community. Both occur in publicly-owned conservation reserves protected for their important natural and cultural values.

For a community enamored with the Mountain, a cable car would alter it forever.

If you’re lucky enough to be able – get out on her slopes, ramble her tracks, picnic by her streams and stand in awe on her summit.

Stick with our campaign to protect her forever and help give her the respect she deserves as a natural and cultural landscape, backdrop to a special city and a unique place that is etched deep in our hearts.