The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

by Iain McCalman

  Such a fusion might also bridge one of Western civilization’s most tragic divides, providing “a point at which a new spark can perhaps jump across the gap that at present separates the arts and the sciences—to the great detriment of each—and allow a new kind of cooperation and understanding to grow up between men.”31

  Though emboldened by their collaboration, none of the trio underestimated the enormity of the task ahead. The Queensland government had openly signaled its intention of allowing petroleum companies to explore for oil and gas anywhere within an area encompassing 80 percent (eighty thousand square miles) of the Great Barrier Reef. Stopping them looked almost impossible: it was a “David versus Goliath” confrontation. As a “fringe” group of unpaid and powerless amateur volunteers without government recognition, Judith recalled, “we were opposing wealthy interests, entrenched government policies and political forces that seemed immovable.”32

  In Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his government, they were pitted against one of the most ruthless and effective populist governments in modern Australian history. The premier was adept at exploiting Queenslanders’ suspicions of southerners and “interfering” federal governments, and he grabbed every opportunity to represent conservationists as “a lunatic fringe” of “nitwits,” “cranks,” and “rat-bags” (eccentrics). Untroubled by consistency, he and some of his ministers also accused the campaigners of being flower-sniffing sentimentalists, “commies” intent on overthrowing the Australian way of life, and agents of American capitalism aspiring to plunder their state.33

  Bjelke-Petersen was equally quick to exploit any chink of division within the conservationist cause, relishing the naïveté of the leaders of the ACF and the GBRC, who believed that appeasing the state government and the oil companies would produce the “responsible” partitioning of the Reef for mining. Afraid of the electoral effects of Queensland National Party populism, successive Liberal federal governments had been too nervous to challenge the state’s shaky constitutional claims to own the Reef. In twin parliamentary acts of 1967 the federal and Queensland governments agreed to “co-operate for the purpose of ensuring the legal effectiveness of authorities to explore for, or to exploit the petroleum resources of those submerged lands.”34

  Lack of detailed biological research into the ecology of the Reef played further into Bjelke-Petersen’s hands. Without such expert evidence, the WPSQ conservationists could do little but call for a ten-year moratorium on mining, and urge funding for a federal marine research station in the region. Neither suggestion troubled Bjelke-Petersen, who shrewdly exploited long-standing disciplinary divisions between Australian geologists and biologists on the issue of mining the Reef.

  Never one to miss a trick, Bjelke-Petersen appointed an American geologist, Dr. Harry Ladd, to undertake a survey of the potential impact of mining on the Reef. Ladd, a man with extensive mining experience, managed to achieve this mammoth task in less than a month—flying over much of the area in the company of officials from the Queensland Mining Department. As the state government had hoped and the conservationists feared, Ladd in his report of March 1968 considered the outlook for oil and gas discoveries to be “promising.” He further recommended that “non-living” parts of the reef should be developed as sources for agricultural fertilizer and cement manufacture.35

  A furious Judith Wright likened this to using the Taj Mahal for road gravel, and John Busst urged his journalist friend Barry Wain to spread the word that Ladd’s report was “scientific nonsense.” At a major ACF symposium of scientists, government officials, and oil miners in 1969, Australian Museum director Frank Talbot observed that geologists tended to believe no harm could come to the Reef from any activity, while biologists “were less confident because they were aware that living matter was more fragile and sensitive than geological matter.” Several of the geologists’ papers scoffed at “hysterical” conservationist claims that oil spills might damage corals and other marine organisms. Well-publicized quotations from a second American geologist that the Reef should be “exploited immediately, and to the hilt” also delighted the Queensland government. Given that “oil companies and the like” were funding most of the Reef geologists’ research, Judith Wright found such views unsurprising. John Busst simply wrote off the whole symposium as “a bloody shambles.”36

  Academic disdain for the fledging discipline of ecology was a further obstacle. Such attitudes weren’t unique to Australia: the Canadian ecologist David Suzuki has admitted that when he graduated as a geneticist in 1961 he regarded ecologists as the kind of people who strolled down the road listening to birds and calling themselves scientists. Geoff Tracey and Len Webb experienced similar prejudice from CSIRO colleagues, on the grounds that they were field-workers who used “unrespectable” methods. “Instead of a null hypothesis,” Len explained, the community-based ecology (synecology) that he practiced, “requires the generation of a new hypothesis—which might or might not be amenable to later test—in a mental procedure more closely akin to the balanced personal judgment of an English history scholar.” Like historians, the ecologists depended on “the inductive synthesis of fragments of evidence from many sources” for their interpretations.37

  This suspicion of ecology as “the subversive science” only began to lessen, Len thought, when he could use computing tools to create simulation programs able “to synthesize complex systems from a multitude of interacting parts.”38

  * * *

  During the torrid conservationist campaigns of 1968–69, such respectability was still a long way off, and influential supporters hard to find. The odds were worsened by a succession of personal setbacks. Judith, still suffering from Jack’s death in 1966, was also troubled by advanced hearing loss due to a childhood disease. Her close friends Arthur Fenton and Kathleen McArthur both suffered collapses trying to cope with the heavy workload of WPSQ business. John Busst, devastated by the disappearance and probable drowning in December 1967 of Harold Holt, confided to friends that he had throat problems, which were feared by his doctor to be the onset of cancer.

  Fortunately, sickness didn’t diminish John’s energy. After Holt’s death, John wrote to American President Lyndon Johnson to solicit support for a series of “Harold Holt Commemorative Marine Reserves,” which would culminate in a Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Starting at the top as usual, he also lobbied the new federal Liberal prime minister, John Gorton, and the leader of the opposition, Gough Whitlam. Having cornered both of them while they were vacationing on the Reef, he followed up with a barrage of letters.

  Citing a newfound academic ally in Cyril Burdon-Jones, professor of zoology at Townsville University College, Busst stressed that the need to save the Reef transcended adversary politics: “it was a matter of international concern, too important to be made a political football or subject to parochial state interests.” He urged Gorton and Whitlam to test in the High Court a recent opinion of constitutional legal expert Sir Percy Spender that Queensland had neither domestic nor international sovereignty over Reef waters.39

  Even with the heroic support of John and Len, Judith Wright was sometimes brought to the edge of despair under the cumulative weight of so many handicaps, her own and the cause’s. This was reflected in her poem “Australia 1970.”

  For we are conquerors and self-poisoners

  more than scorpion or snake

  and dying of the venoms that we make

  even while you die of us.40

  “If the Barrier Reef could think it would fear us,” she fretted, “… we have its fate in our hands.” Every day it experienced a bombardment of human-generated toxins. Following her reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she believed that oil and gas would simply be the coup de grâce, given the damage already done by fertilizers, pesticides, dredging, sugar-plant effluent, and urban sewage.41

  Somehow, she and her friends had to persuade Australians to feel that the Reef belonged to them, and they to it—in the same way that coastal Aborigines had thought abou
t and cared for the Reef in centuries past. European Australians needed to see it as a core symbol of identity, or at least as the fabric of a new and affirmative Australian myth. The Reef had to be something that plumbed the deepest reservoirs of Australian imagination, intuition, and knowledge; it had to be seen as more profound and urgent than any temporary accession of material wealth. Conservationists had to show their countrymen that the struggle for the Reef went far beyond stopping greedy state politicians and reckless resource companies: it was a clash between good and evil, between “life and death.”42

  To Judith, the Reef’s fate was “a microcosm of the fate of the planet. The battle to save it is itself a microcosm of the new battle within ourselves.” The Reef is “a symbol,” she later wrote, “of humanity’s failure to recognize its responsibility and of the whole relentless process of commercialization and industrialization, pollution, self-interest and political importance.” Len agreed that the Reef was a bastion whose fall would unleash orgies of deforestation and oceanic plundering all around the world. John Busst foresaw the Reef becoming “a quarry surrounded by an oil slick.”43

  Australian conservationists were fighting for nothing less than the biosphere—“the thin covering of living organisms supported by earth, air, water and sunlight.” To win such a war would be epochal; it would be an expression and a marker of Australia’s having at last become “a country of the mind” rather than a haunt of predators and a shrine of Mammon. A country where the Aboriginal ethic of biocentrism and stewardship of nature had at last taken root, and where, Judith wrote, a “re-imagining of nature” could encompass “the arts, affirming the truths of feeling, and the sciences, affirming the truths of intellect.”44

  * * *

  Though Judith and her friends did not yet know it, the tide of war had already begun to turn. In part this was due to pure chance. The 1967 Torrey Canyon oil tanker disaster in Britain had generated ripples of negative publicity for the global oil industry, and this turned into a torrent in late January 1969 when a rig started spewing crude oil into the blue waters off Santa Barbara, on California’s coast. Nightly television programs showed infernos of rotting fish, oil-clogged seabirds, and viscous black beaches. Bjelke-Petersen’s bleat of “Don’t you worry about it; it won’t happen in Queensland” sounded increasingly hollow in the face of American citizens publicly pointing out that the same assurances had been made in Santa Barbara. Looking back, Judith Wright believed that the Santa Barbara disaster was the watershed moment when popular sympathy in Australia began to flow the conservationists’ way.45

  While the Reef campaign was starting to attract new support, its enemies were for the first time beginning to take some direct hits. One of the most telling was a newspaper revelation that Bjelke-Petersen and some of his ministers had invested heavily in the oil companies they’d licensed. Some risible public utterances by the Queensland minister for mines didn’t help their case either: Camm gave a speech arguing that oil, being protein, would actually provide nutritious food for fish and other marine organisms.

  Toward the end of 1969 a series of local polls conducted by the WPSQ at rural shows and festivals and in urban shopping malls showed that a majority of Queenslanders now opposed the idea of mining the Reef. Around the same time, a bipartisan group of politicians and citizens formed the Save the Reef Committee, chaired by outspoken federal Labor parliamentarian Senator George Georges. Despite his growing unease, Bjelke-Petersen insisted that oil exploration must go ahead because the licenses couldn’t be rescinded without serious financial loss.

  The conservationists’ cause took a decisive turn at the beginning of the new decade when John Busst’s lobbying of trade unions finally produced results. In early January 1970 George Georges warned the consortium of Japex and Ampol petroleum companies that their survey ship the Navigator would be placed under a union black ban when it reached Repulse Bay. Powerful national and local unions also declared their support, both for making the Barrier Reef a marine reserve and for mounting a legal challenge to Queensland’s claim to Reef sovereignty. On January 13 Ampol announced the suspension of its Repulse Bay survey, and a month later their Japanese affiliate, Japex, canceled the contract. “Now at last, the breakthrough has come,” John Busst declared. “It has taken two and a half years to find the weapon.”46

  Within a month the federal government agreed to dedicate three million Australian dollars for an institute of marine science at Townsville, to study “ways of researching and protecting the Great Barrier Reef”—the need for which was underscored when news broke soon after that a fully laden Ampol oil tanker had been holed near Tuesday Island in the Torres Strait. Out of the ship’s hull oozed a six-mile oil slick that killed hundreds of birds and fish and impaired the livelihood of Islanders for years to come. Backed into a corner by popular outrage, Bjelke-Petersen was forced to agree to an inquiry into the mining of the Great Barrier Reef—later upgraded to a royal commission. On April 16, 1970, Prime Minister Gorton introduced a bill into federal parliament claiming Commonwealth sovereignty over the Reef and its waters.47

  At this point the Great Reef War was effectively won. The election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972, the affirmative report of the royal commission, and the High Court’s decision in favor of Commonwealth sovereignty all paved the way for an eventual settlement. Both the cautious ACF and the pragmatic GBRC now strongly supported the formation of a marine park. Patricia Mather, secretary of the GBRC, even consulted with Judith and her WPSQ “stirrers” when drafting plans for its governance. Judith and her colleagues were unenthused by Mather’s concept of a “multi-use” marine park, which was nevertheless incorporated in the Whitlam government’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act, passed in 1975 but not fully promulgated until 1979. The act prescribed that most of the Reef province become a marine park governed by a committee of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which was in turn answerable to a federal government minister.

  Finally, on October 26, 1981, the Great Barrier Reef received what two of its finest historians, James and Margarita Bowen, have called “a conservation climax”—World Heritage listing “as the most impressive marine area in the world.” The Reef met all four of UNESCO’s “natural criteria.” It was an outstanding example of the earth’s evolutionary history, an arena of significant ongoing geological processes and biological evolution, a superlative natural phenomenon, and a significant natural habitat containing threatened species of animals or plants with exceptional universal scientific value.48

  * * *

  John Busst had prepared materials to take before the royal commission, but he didn’t live to present them. Early in 1971, at the age of sixty-one, he quietly “dropped off his twig,” as Len put it. Judith composed a simple tribute for his Bingil Bay memorial: “John Busst / Artist and lover of beauty / Who fought that man and nature might survive.” His two friends-in-arms missed him sorely.49

  Judith died in 2000 as one of Australia’s finest twentieth-century poets and was widely mourned. Len left his beloved rain forests behind eight years later, having been much awarded for services to their ecology. Both had remained proud of the success of their small band of amateurs in helping to win the Reef war, even though they realized that the victory would always be provisional.

  Judith ended the twentieth-anniversary edition of her Coral Battlefield (1996) with a chapter called “Finale Without an Ending”: she feared that the looting and poisoning of the Reef was continuing. Popular memory was short, and onslaughts on the Reef’s oil and mineral resources could resume anytime. She was deeply troubled, too, that Aboriginal people had emerged from the war with nothing to show for the loss of their heart’s country.50

  The trio died without having achieved that vital fusion between the emotional arts and the intellectual sciences they’d wanted. It had taken fire in their minds, but not in the country as a whole. Judith was even publicly lambasted in 1971 by a professor of agricultural engineering for using “lay conservationists
” and “emotional arguments” to defend the Reef. “I will go in and try to arouse public feeling, and have done, and on this my conscience is more than clear,” she replied bitterly.51

  The still-yawning gulf between the arts and sciences would one day cost the Reef dearly, and that time was not far off.

  12

  EXTINCTION

  Charlie Veron, Darwin of the Coral

  SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH stands at the lectern of the Royal Society in Carlton House, London, on July 6, 2009, about to introduce the afternoon’s speaker. Printed below him are the words “Celebrating Three Hundred and Fifty Years,” to remind us that this august “Society for Improving Natural Knowledge” was founded around 1660 and is among the oldest learned scientific bodies in the world.

  The video of the occasion catches a ripple of expectation among the audience. It suits the lecture’s confrontational title: “Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?” Then, in that familiar tone of breathy intimacy, Sir David introduces J. E. N. Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. “But,” says Sir David, smiling broadly, “I’ll call him Charlie, a name he carries because he shared Mr. Darwin’s obsession with the natural world.” Without specifically saying so, Sir David is telling us that we are about to hear from a modern-day Charles Darwin.1