Lillian’s Eden

by Cheryl Adam

  Food was beginning to rot in the fridge in the tropical heat. There was no water in the taps. Nowhere to wash. No washing machine – or computer – no phone. The mobile telephone tower had gone. Those items that our life revolved around had vanished.

  It took six weeks to get the telephone landline back and several weeks before electricity returned. You could not ring the tradespeople whose businesses were booming in the ensuing days after the cyclone. Even to book the slipping yard to get Providence V out to be fixed was impossible. There was no one there to receive calls. Worse still, we couldn’t track Debbie’s movements. Or tell our loved ones we were okay.

  Our daughter Jess came around that day after the cyclone with her boyfriend Steve. They brought a bottle of red and a mobile phone that had reception. Sitting on the dilapidated deck around the pool we drank a glass. Jess posted some photos on Facebook. It was the first sign anyone had seen that we were still alive. I found out later that my father had taken his mobile phone into his art class. He never carried it usually. My daughter had left hers switched on when she was attending a university class. Gradually in the ensuing months, our sons likewise confided that they thought we were gone. The Facebook shot of us drinking red wine trivialised the moment. It told nothing of our trauma or our plight.

  I found out later an elderly man in an electric wheelchair had been stranded nearby with no way of getting to any food source. A neighbour had alerted everyone to his plight. The final number of boats that loosened from their moorings and broke free during the cyclone is hard to fathom. Unconfirmed reports estimated 47 yachts were missing from Shute Harbour. One of our casual skippers, Mal Priday’s, yacht was pushed 18 metres into the mangroves. The insurance company took months before eventually writing it off.

  I posted my rage on Facebook, heading my post:

  THE FORGOTTEN TOWN

  So five days post Cyclone Debbie and our neighbourhood is still without power and water and fuel only arrived in town yesterday. One of Australia’s favourite holiday destinations with more than half a million visitors each year nationally and more than 200,000 international visitors. Shame on you – local state and federal governments … Boil your drinking water – what with Premier? When there is no power and Bunnings have run out of generators? If you ever want to experience the end of the world as we know it – that’s what it’s been like in Airlie Beach. No sign of any SES, Army – power said to be out for a fortnight – and electricity poles across the road untouched by human hand.

  Refusing to accept nothing can be done, I employ ‘shoe leather’ (the journalism adage of visiting the scene of the action instead of phoning people). I am rewarded almost instantly. A woman at the petrol station, which we used to frequent for our ice and milk supplies, tells me that the road to Bowen is open. And they have fuel in Bowen. Airlie Beach is out of everything. Of all of the petrol stations I visited the common refrain was: “Fuel maybe in a few days.”

  We have to get Providence out of Airlie Beach. We have a business to run.

  Grant and I head to Bowen where we put jerry cans with fuel in the back of Bertha so we can fill up our boat. The holes in her side have luckily not affected her ability to go to sea. Our crew then set sail with our wounded warrior to Townsville. We are one of the first boats up on the slip. $40,000 worth of damage later, we discover, to our relief, that we are covered by insurance. Providence sits up on the hard dock in Townsville for a month. Our crew is paid for maintenance and we put them up in an Airbnb. Many in Airlie Beach are finding it hard to get work.

  Stories appear in the media with photographs purporting to be coal on a beach south of Abbot Point released by the Australian Conservation Foundation and Australian Marine Conservation Society. The Murdoch press, in particular, condemns the activists. The Environment Department later confirms it is a naturally-produced substance. Former Mayor and Councillor, Mike Brunker, is photographed on his hands and knees on Dingo Beach a little over halfway between Airlie Beach and Bowen. He is hell-bent on proving that the ‘blackness’ is a naturally occurring mineral magnetite. Resource Minister, Matt Canavan joins in the ridicule of the activists.

  The Mayor of the Whitsundays, Andrew Wilcox, who had reportedly spent so much on the junket to India, also appeared with a magnet on Dingo Beach to do his own scientific experiments.

  In spite of the cynicism about the earlier reports, on 11 August 2017, the newspaper headlines are stark. Adani has been fined $12,190 by the Queensland Government for a stormwater breach before and after Cyclone Debbie – after the company released more than eight times the amount of ‘suspended solids’ it was permitted to put into the ocean. Although not related to the claims of coal waste on the beaches150 nearby made by the activists, it confirmed concerns about Adani’s lack of responsibility regarding the environment. The company had been given a temporary licence by the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection to more than triple its suspended solids – up to 100mg per litre of ‘suspended solids’ between March 27 and 30, just before and after Cyclone Debbie.

  A statement from the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection released in August 2017 reads: “Temporary emissions licences and environmental authorities are not taken lightly by the department and there can be harsh penalties for companies that breach their approvals.”151

  Far from being the least bit apologetic, in the same vein as witnessed in India, company denial followed. When the company was confronted with allegations of environmental damage, an Adani spokesman initially claimed that no spill had made its way into the ocean. The spokesman went further, saying the company ‘strongly’ rejected allowing contaminated floodwaters into the nearby marine environment and said that the company was considering its options about the fine and would be defending the prosecution.

  If the release is found to have caused environmental damage, the fine could be $1 million according to Josh Roberts writing in The Guardian.152 In September 2017, a Queensland Government report confirmed that satellite images collected after Cyclone Debbie appeared to show dark waters downstream of the terminal leading into the wetlands. Sampling could not be done immediately by the Department but a preliminary assessment established that there was little evidence that coal ‘fines’ (tiny coal particles) from Abbot Point had contaminated the wetlands, home to migratory and water birds (up to 48,000 on site during high use times according to the Government Report, some of which are threatened). Some, however, had been sighted near the licensed discharge point. The fact that a large body of water had flowed through the wetlands would have mitigated the impacts from stormwater discharge, the Government Report stated.153

  The Environment Department also noted further assessment was needed downstream of the licensed discharge point and requested the company to notify the Department within 24 hours of any release from the port going into the wetlands. Commenting on the environmental approvals for the Adani mine in an article entitled: ‘Who is Responsible for Monitoring Adani?’ Samantha Hepburn, Director of the Centre for Energy and Natural Resources Law at Deakin University, said: “… assessment of the environmental impact of the mine was conducted under a bilateral agreement between both the Federal and State regulatory frameworks. This means that the project has approval under both State and Federal frameworks.” The issue, she states, is “a lack of delineation around management, monitoring and enforcement.”

  The combination of State and Federal scrutiny is supposed to strengthen the protection of our environment. Instead, it reduces it. This overlapping of jurisdictional authority recurs again and again in this story: when protecting groundwater; giving environmental approvals and leases to large mining projects and, more worryingly, any of these authorities’ concerns about the effects of irreversible decisions on climate change.

  “How much do you reckon the Great Barrier Reef is worth?”

  The local journalist from the Whitsunday Times is on the phone. I am about to turn into a petrol station to fill up Bertha and pull over to ta
ke the call.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I google the news before calling him back. It is July 2017. Deloitte Access Economics has just released a Report, which calculates the reef is worth $56 billion and contributes $6.4 billion to the Australian economy.154 Two thirds of the 1500 respondents consulted for the 90-page report have said they are willing to pay to protect it. The reef is, the Report states, worth $56 billion as an economic, social and iconic natural asset. At $29 billion, tourism is noted as the biggest contributor to the reef’s $56 billion value, followed by $23.8 billion from indirect or non-use value (those who haven’t yet visited the reef but value knowing it exists). Its value to recreational users ($3.2 billion) makes up the balance. It is worth more than 12 Sydney Opera Houses.

  How can you put some economic value on the only living organism to be seen from outer space? It seems like a cheap gimmick. But the journalist argues that politicians and business-people – who after all make the decisions about the future of the reef – will only listen to this kind of argument.

  Meanwhile, the public that they are supposed to serve, don’t want coal projects at the expense of coral and declare they value the reef. In February 2018, a ReachTEL poll, commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation, finds only 6.8% of people supported the idea of using public money to support coal mine projects.

  As reluctant as I am to take part in such a ruthless economic exercise I concede the journalist is probably right. Talk the talk of those motivated by profits like billionaire Gautam Adani and the gaggle of politicians who jump for the monetary bean. At least the newspaper headlines are putting the Great Barrier Reef out there again.

  Chapter 9

  The Ping Pong Politics of Climate Change

  In the Whitsundays in 2017 we have the hottest July in 100 years. No rain. Around the airport, the emerald-green lawns the wallabies once fed on are dry as a bone.

  “How good is this weather?” say the travel agents in the main street. ‘Mexicans’ (from across the chilly border – from NSW and Victoria) limber up to the tropics yawning in the warmth of the sun. “What a great season this. How good has the weather been?”

  It’s a honeymoon after Debbie that lasts and lasts. The tourists love it. I think of the impending summer. That winter, the heat was relentless. No doona-covered nights in the middle of winter. It’s still hot enough for a fan. The quilt-lined jackets I’ve ordered for the crew are still at the uniform shop. The inevitability of coral bleaching is forever in my thoughts. There is now not even an opportunity for the coral to be protected in the cooler months due to global warming.

  I dive with my GoPro camera into an ocean that already feels like summer. Warm enough to stay in for 20 minutes or more. A pleasant coolness envelops me, not the biting chill of winter, but a near perfect temperature. Beneath me there is coral. Colours yes. And fish of turquoises and pinks and zebra stripes and a parrot fish. But, somehow, when I look at the photos they seem overexposed and I want to go to ‘edit tools’ on my iPhone to fix that so the colours dazzle more. The corals seemed more faded than on my snorkel at Blue Pearl the previous winter, which took my breath away. Three quarters of the world’s coral can be found on the Great Barrier Reef. In between the sepia-toned colours, the wreckage of coral lies like withered bones in a long forgotten graveyard. One patch of finger coral is ghostly white. A tiny turquoise fish looks back at me – did I detect an expression of fear? Look what you have already done! What are you capable of doing next?

  The coral around Border Island on the way to Whitehaven Beach takes us more than a month to find. After the cyclone we return to places we traditionally offered our guests to snorkel – Dumbell Island – where beneath us, even from the dinghy, the colours used to radiate as we headed closer to shore. It was gone. All gone. “Oh,” our skipper said after a few days, adding, “right at the end of the island on the north-east side, there’s still some.”

  Cyclones are the most severe form of mechanical disturbance. On the back of severe bleaching, however, a cyclone can have an even more devastating effect as the coral struggles to recover from structural damage. Fate helped us survive the worst bleaching in 2016. According to GBRMPA, the late summer cooling of ocean temperatures from ex-Tropical Cyclones Winston in February 2016 in Fiji and Tatiana in the same month 1000 kms off the coast of Mackay, helped keep our oceans cool.

  These are the kind of conversations we expected might occur if more bleaching did happen and the coral did not recover at all – maybe a decade or so from now, maybe two. We’d all be squabbling over what remained … but we were already guarding what remained. Boats watched other boats to see where they were taking their tourists to provide the ultimate snorkelling experience. TripAdvisor reviews across most of the tourism operators’ ratings are full of complaints. Some people wanted their money back. The response – “There’s been a cyclone,” did not seem to cut the mustard.

  Tropical cyclones are low-pressure systems that form over warm tropical waters – they are basically a non-frontal low-pressure system according to the Bureau of Meteorology. Cyclones do not form unless the sea surface temperature is above 26.5°C. Cyclones, of course, are naturally occurring phenomena with the potential to wreak catastrophic damage. The Climate Council, however, states that climate change can affect tropical cyclone behaviour in two ways.155

  Firstly, the formation of tropical cyclones occurs when there are “very warm conditions at the ocean surface and when the vertical temperature gradient through the atmosphere is strong.” As the climate continues to get hotter, however, the difference between the temperature near the surface of the Earth and the temperature higher up in the atmosphere, is likely to decrease as the atmosphere continues to warm. As this “vertical temperature gradient” weakens, the good news is fewer tropical cyclones are predicted to form.

  However – and here’s the catch – the combination of the warmer temperatures of the surface ocean and the upper atmosphere conditions, leads to more intense cyclones because the cyclone draws energy from the surface of the ocean. This, according to the Climate Council, is reflected in terms of maximum wind speeds and the intensity of heavy rainfall that occurs along with the cyclone. Cyclone Debbie is an example of this. The floods that crossed south-east Queensland and as far south as northern New South Wales brought about by heavy rain were responsible for the lives lost in that cyclone.

  As the intensity of cyclones increases, damage to the Great Barrier Reef and other reefs worldwide also increases. Damage from Cyclone Yasi in 2011 caused coral damage across 89,000 square kilometres of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park with 15% of it sustaining some damage and 6% being severely damaged. The ecological impacts of severe tropical cyclones like Cyclones Larry, Yasi and Debbie are likely to be around for several decades according to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.156 As already noted in the 2017 review of GBRMPA, Dr Wendy Craik stated that although in 2016, there had been “a significant co-ordinated response to mass bleaching including the largest ever series of in-water surveys” that “a similar response was not undertaken for the mass bleaching in 2017 due to a lack of resources.”

  Australian Institute of Marine Science’s long-term survey of the reef, which has been running for 30 years, did not survey the damage caused by Cyclone Debbie, as each section of the reef is surveyed on rotation so I was unable to find the kind of detailed report on the effects of Cyclone Debbie on the reef we visit. However, GBRMPA157/158 has stated that 28% of the total reef area in the Marine Park was within the ‘catastrophic damage zone’ of the cyclone’s path according to its surveys, and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service revealed that some sites have suffered significant damage (up to 97% coral loss) and are down to very low coral cover, while others received less damage and still have moderate coral cover.

  As we can expect to have more intense and more damaging cyclones because of climate change, have we got the resources to continue to monitor these disasters so we have more knowledge
for the future?

  The second aspect brought about by climate change affects the level of storm surge. Storm surges occur because of strong onshore winds and/or reduced atmospheric pressure, states the Report. Storm surges are riding higher now than ever before because of the higher sea levels caused by climate change due to warming oceans and melting ice sheets, according to the Climate Council. The Pacific Islanders who hardly contribute to global warming, are confronting disappearing coastlines and losing their lives and homes as the sea level rises.

  Coupled with the rising warmer oceans and acidification causing bleaching, the Great Barrier Reef is struggling against great odds.

  On 22 May 2017, the Chair of GBRMPA, Russell Reichelt, warned a Parliamentary Senate Committee that the coral’s resistance to such pressures as bleaching, tropical storms and other threats, such as the crown-of-thorns invasions, would not give the coral enough time to recover. He told the Committee that the best science suggested global warming needed to be limited to 1.5°C to allow a good survival rate for coral.

  “There had already been a 0.7°C warming over the past century … I draw the public’s attention and the Committee to the fact the unprecedented back-to-back bleaching we’ve seen is occurring on a fraction of a degree [rise in temperature],” he said.159 “The safe levels [of warming] for coral reefs, probably we’ve passed already.”