The Political Power of Emotions: Women's Political Letter-Writing in the Movement to Save Lake Pedder

In the early 1970s, the Tasmanian State Government and HydroElectric Commission inundated an area of the State's Southwest for a hydro-development scheme, flooding Lake Pedder. This incited mass protest on a local, national, and international scale-prompting the newly elected Labor Federal Gove...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLilith (Fitzroy, Vic.) no. 29; pp. 159 - 240
Main Author Waddell-Wood, Claire
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Wollongong Australian Women's History Network 01.01.2023
Subjects
Demonstrations & protests
Emotions
Environmental history
Environmental protection
Environmentalism
Letters
Political activism
Political power
Social activism
Society
Lake Pedder
Australia
Tasmania Australia
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Summary:In the early 1970s, the Tasmanian State Government and HydroElectric Commission inundated an area of the State's Southwest for a hydro-development scheme, flooding Lake Pedder. This incited mass protest on a local, national, and international scale-prompting the newly elected Labor Federal Government to appoint an official enquiry into the matter. Individuals wrote to this committee, adding their voices to the enquiry process in the hope of influencing political change. Using concepts and methodologies from the intersection of environmental history, the history of emotions, and political letterwriting historiography, I analyse three women's letters written to the Lake Pedder Committee of Enquiry. I argue that these individuals demonstrate the emotional frontier of the Lake Pedder environmental movement, through negotiating their personal emotions with the emotional regimes and communities surrounding them. The letterwriters use emotional language purposefully to link their individual experience to the public sphere, which also reveals their individual affective responses and how they aimed to invoke the same in the recipient. This reveals not only the motivational and mobilisation power that affect, emotion, and feeling hold, but how the disruption of the emotional/ rational dualism in social movements is essential to the dismantling of dualistic worldviews broadly.
ISSN:0813-8990