Before the arrival of the Brits in 1803, there was a population of around around 4000 to 7000 inhabitants living on the island of Tasmania. Thirty years later they had been wiped out or forced to relocate to the remote Flinders island.

Many Australians never learned about this dire episode in their history at school, and it doesn't feature at all in this (Australian-made) doc, which considering that it dwells on the empty beauty of the Tasmanian landscape is disconcerting. It would be like talking at length about the desolateness of the Scottish Highlands without mentioning the Highland Clearances.

The doc tells the story of two celebrated photographers, Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, and their muse, Tasmania's rugged South-West. In a series of interviews and archive footage it recounts how the two strived to save their remote wilderness stomping grounds from hydro-electric dam projects by taking pictures and showing them to the masses. As friends and family recall, these were passionate, creative individuals, whose beautiful pictures provided a spur to the environmental movement in Australia. "Legends", as the voice-over suggests they were, is laying it on a bit thick, but then the narrative does suffer from that cloying tone that you usually find in tourist board advertisements.

The fact that the story is about relatively unknown (at least, outside of Tasmania and Australia) still photographers on a moving image medium puts the filmmakers at a disadvantage. Bluff observations of the kind, "When you think about artists, they're meant to be temperamental" and another describing Dombrovskis as a "shy little bloke" don't add much to our understanding of them or their "art".

There is no denying the evocative beauty of Truchanas and Dombrovskis' images and their contribution to wilderness protection in Tasmania. However, while raising these photographers to hero status, Scott Millwood draws a blind on Tasmania's history of genocide. Call it naïve or old-fashioned, or worse still irresponsible.