Another telegram from the Australian Antarctic base at Davis Station read: “Will be there in spirit if not body, Saturday. Concerned few, David Station, Antarctica.”

Dr Brown, who wore a tie especially for the occasion, confirmed that the society was spending $2000 a day on the fight and welcoming up to 50 new supporters every morning.

Even with an estimated 150 greenies in Hobart’s Risdon Jail (one apparently in solitary confinement for refusing to call the superintendent “Sir”) about 300 remained ready to continue the battle in Strahan.

Dr Brown will probably spend a week cooling his heels in prison rather than agree to a bail condition of not returning to the area.

Before heading off to court in Queenstown, he tried to explain his stand by leading a party from the river bank, through the rain forest to a 3000-year-old Huon pine.

“This tree looked much the same as it does now when Abel Tasman sighted Tasmania in 1642,” he explained. “If the dam goes ahead it won’t have much longer to live.”

Protesters are being told to carry an extra pair of socks and underwear to make that part of their campaign in the fast-filling Hobart jail a little more comfortable.

The fuss being made nationally and overseas over the Franklin is distressing for many people here who have never paid much attention to a wild river winding through the remote south-west of the State.

Ask a Taswegian what he thinks about the proposed Gordon-below-Franklin dam and likely as not, his eyes will glaze over and he will shrug his shoulders. It is a case of dams being a four-letter, but somehow still respectable, word.

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In Strahan, the closest town to the area listed this week by the World Heritage Council, you are an outsider if you live 40 kilometres away in Queenstown. Anyone foolish enough to travel further is going “away”, and deserves to be lumped in with that most distrusted of species, “main-landers”.

The 400 residents of Strahan, mostly fishermen, timber workers and unemployed, can’t come to grips with all the fuss being made about a dam their State Government says will flood a “leech-ridden ditch” and create jobs.

They particularly cannot comprehend the hundreds of young volunteers who camp on the edge of town and keep the south-west in the news by choosing jail rather than agree to a Hydro-Electricity Commission demand to stay out of the Franklin Basin.