Olegas Truchanas

In 2007 IHOS Music Theatre and Opera staged excerpts from a major opera, Olegas, based on the life of Olegas Truchanas. His work appears in the 2013 photographic exhibition 'Into the Wild: Wilderness Photography in Tasmania' at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania, and the catalogue of this exhibition.

Truchanas' and Dombrovskis' stories were depicted in a 2003 documentary, Wildness. In the same year, a tribute, The Forest of Stumps, by artist Geoff Parr, was exhibited at Hobart's Ten Days on the Island arts festival, including a number of Truchanas' photographs.

After taking what are now among the only remaining records of the pre-dam Lake Pedder, Truchanas realised that the campaign was lost, and turned his attention to the Pieman, Gordon and Franklin Rivers. In 1972, Truchanas drowned in the Gordon River after slipping and falling into the current. His body was found, trapped beneath a log, by Dombrovskis.

Most of Truchanas' early photographs were lost when his house was destroyed in the Hobart bushfire in 1967. However, over the next five years, he substantially rebuilt his collection of photos of the Lake Pedder area. Though, as a clerk temporarily employed by the Hydro Electricity Commission, Truchanas was forbidden to speak about the increasing controversy surrounding the impending damming, his photographs began to play an important role in publicity for the campaign. He was once quoted as stating "This vanishing world is beautiful beyond our dreams and contains in itself rewards and gratifications never found in an artificial landscape or man-made objects."

In 1958, Truchanas became the first person in recorded history to kayak the length of the dangerous Serpentine and Gordon Splits.

Truchanas was born in Lithuania. In 1941, he graduated from the Šiauliai Gymnasium. After the 1945 fall of Lithuania to the USSR, he fled to Munich, Germany. Though he enrolled in a law degree at UNRRA University, he was sent to a displaced persons camp, and subsequently migrated to Tasmania in 1948.

Olegas Truchanas (22 September 1923 – 6 January 1972) was a Lithuanian-Australian conservationist and nature photographer.