The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (36 page)

In 1927 Mont joined a small “nature study and recreation” outing to Bunker and Capricorn islands, organized by E. F. Pollock, a councillor of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales. Inspired by the experience, Mont decided to stage a series of larger “Scientific expeditions” to the Whitsunday Islands, which would combine learning and recreation for around a hundred people, mainly schoolteachers. While exploring the Whitsunday Passage on his first expedition, he’d “discovered” Hayman, “a beautiful primeval little island, with trees, birds and beautiful coral.” In December 1932, after mounting eight further expeditions in the Whitsundays, he opened “The Hayman Island Biological Station.”
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Modeled on Yonge’s Low Isles station, it consisted of rough huts supplemented by tents, and a large central hall for dining, dancing, lectures, and research. An Embury relative, “Uncle Tom,” acted as chef; two motorboats provided excursions for fishing and scientific dredging; and a shark-proof enclosure, a crude tennis court, and several sets of homemade underwater goggles offered recreational variety. Of course, at one level it was simply a tourist resort. Some regarded Embury’s scientific pretensions as a ruse for making money under the nose of the Great Barrier Reef Committee, which restricted tourist developments. And there’s little doubt that Mont nursed commercial ambitions, for he also took out provisional leases on a series of other islands.
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Even so, the scientific dimensions of the expeditions seem to have been genuine enough. Embury trumpeted his links with Yonge’s expedition in his “Biological Station” advertisements, boasting that three of his leading lecturers, Frank McNeill, Bill Boardman, and Arthur Livingstone, were former Australian Museum members of “the British Low Isles Expedition.” Three others, Mel Ward, Harold Fletcher, and Joyce Allan, were currently working with the museum in a collecting capacity. Moreover, the administrators of the museum, though wary at first, did eventually begin to advertise and exhibit the marine collections brought back from Mont’s expeditions.

Paying visitors to Mont’s Hayman Island biological station were offered lunchtime and evening lectures accompanied by magic lantern slides, on such subjects as “The Form and Character of the Great Barrier Reef,” “Coral Reef Animals,” “Sea Stars and their Allies,” and “An Outline of Animal Classification.” Other scientific activities included participation in a Hayman Island bird census, and the tagging of a thousand birds under the supervision of a leading ornithologist, William MacGillivray. Mont’s brother, “Arch,” designed and used one of the first Australian underwater cameras, with which he photographed Mel Ward “swimming around the bottom of a pool probing amongst the rocks with his prospector’s pick.” Several “Biological Station” organizers also became pioneers of Reef conservation. From the early 1930s Mont and Frank McNeill, in particular, campaigned against the unsustainable hunting of Torres Strait pigeons, green turtles, and dugong, and the profligate collecting of rare shells.
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Edwin “Mont” Embury’s 1920s “nature study and recreation” expeditions to the Whitsundays were the forerunner of ecotourism.
(Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

Mont Embury’s pioneering ecotourist Reef expeditions were hurt by the Great Depression of the 1930s and then terminated by the Second World War. His undeveloped island leases later became wildlife sanctuaries. Yet his idea of popular scientific tourism didn’t die altogether. It was to be revived after the war by others, including Kitty and Noel Monkman, a remarkable pair of conservation-minded filmmakers and naturalists who still await their biographer.
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When the world-famous marine biologist Professor Maurice Yonge returned to the Low Isles for a holiday in 1972, he was distressed at the damage caused by pollution and uncontrolled tourism in the once lovely habitats. He was even said to have regretted his own role in publicizing the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef. Perhaps he might have felt less guilty if he’d known that his expedition and book had also inspired Australians who wanted to understand and conserve those same wonders. These disparate but passionate individuals would in a few years join together to save the Reef, in what was to prove a long and brutal battle.

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WAR

A Poet, a Forester, and an Artist Join Forces

L
IKE MOST WARS,
it began with a skirmish. Midway through 1967 the poet Judith Wright, who was also president of the five-year-old Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ), received a note. It was from John Busst, leader of a tiny new branch of the society in Innisfail, a coastal cane town one thousand miles north of Brisbane. Busst had just read in a local paper that a Cairns sugarcane farmer had applied to the Queensland government to dredge and mine Ellison Reef, an isolated clump of coral near Dunk Island. Claiming that the reef was dead, the farmer wanted to mine its limestone to use as cheap fertilizer on his canefields. Busst, sensing “a vital test case,” had immediately lodged an objection. Would the foundation branch of the WPSQ in Brisbane be willing to do the same? Judith Wright, already campaigning to protect a variety of Queensland habitats, quickly complied.
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She knew John only by repute. Len Webb, a Commonwealth government forestry scientist and the society’s vice president, had helped Busst to found the new branch the previous year, recommending him as a longtime friend and a potent asset to their fledgling cause. Busst belonged to a post-Banfield tradition of dropout artists who’d left the rat race for unbuttoned lives among the Barrier Reef’s tropical islands. But he was also, Len stressed, a highly educated, energetic, and practical man, with private money, influential connections, and a genuine love of the rain forests, reefs, and waters that abutted his house.

People often found John Busst hard to read. His neat dress, precise movements, and trimmed gray mustache struck the Reef writer Patricia Clare as more typical of a colonial administrator than a bohemian artist. Len Webb admired his friend’s practicality above all. A decade earlier, John and his elegant wife, Alison, had moved from Bedarra Island, in the Family group, to Bingil Bay, on the mainland near Innisfail. Together they’d built a white-and-blue-trim bungalow with wide verandas, handmade bamboo furniture, and sweeping views of the sea. In typical fashion John had also underpinned it with a fortresslike concrete substructure to resist the ferocious local cyclones.
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When Judith Wright eventually did meet Busst, she was struck most by his bonhomie, finding him a “slender, enthusiastic man full of laughter, a compulsive smoker and a lover of good company.” He had the gift of making friends from all walks of life, and of invigorating them all.
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*   *   *

John Busst threw all his energies into trying to stop the mining of Ellison Reef. He began his campaign with letters to local newspapers, arguing that there was no such thing as a “dead reef.” He said he’d seen cyclone-battered reefs at Bedarra Island, where most of the corals had been smashed, yet they remained hubs of marine life. Len Webb had taught him, too, that all reefs were complex and interconnected biological communities that could never be treated in isolation. Currents and waves would carry the smothering silt from any specific mining site to corals and breeding habitats far and wide.

When John Busst tried to put these points at the first hearing of the case before the Innisfail local magistrate, in September 1967, he made no progress. His marked-up books and his accompanying marine expert—a local caravan park owner, Bill Hall, with years of practical knowledge—were ruled inadmissible. The magistrate told John that he ought to have brought properly credentialed scientific experts to testify in person. Though he managed to squeak an adjournment, John now needed scientific help urgently.
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But scientists proved elusive. His first attempts to recruit support from biologists at the University of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef Committee drew a blank. The academics didn’t want to involve themselves in local political squabbles, and anyway they saw no reason to dispute that Ellison Reef was “dead.” The GBRC, being an advisory body to the Queensland government, had long been forced to accept the inevitability of the Reef’s economic development. Biologist Robert Endean, the committee’s president, hoped merely to confine economic intervention to partitioned sectors of the Reef; moreover, he thought Ellison to be an isolated, half-dead lump of coral with no distinctive biological significance.

John would have turned to Len Webb for scientific contacts and advice, but by ill luck the ecologist was in Europe on sabbatical. “Come ‘’ome,’” John begged by letter, “… I desire conversation with you—about 24 hours straight … will do! You got me into this, you bastard—and I’m enjoying every moment of it, so is Ali, who is even more ferocious (if possible) than I am!” He signed himself “The Enraged Amateur.”
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Infuriatingly, only fellow amateurs seemed willing to testify, though Judith Wright did eventually find some trainee professionals. She introduced John to a group of graduate science students from the Queensland Littoral Society, led by a talented twenty-three-year-old zoologist at the University of Queensland called Eddie Hegerl. He and two other young divers immediately volunteered to make an underwater investigation of Ellison Reef, provided John could help to fund it and organize the logistics. Within a few weeks, he’d persuaded friends to donate free airfares, boat services, and diving-equipment hire for a five-day survey of the reef. The Bussts offered their own house as a base.

Soon after, John lobbied for help of a different kind from another amateur diver: Harold Holt, the Liberal prime minister of Australia, and Busst’s oldest friend. They’d gone to school and university together, and John had later introduced Holt and his wife, Zara, to the pleasures of swimming, sailing, and spearfishing off Bedarra Island. Reveling in these sensual escapes, the Holts eventually bought a small holiday cottage at Bingil Bay, just around the corner from the Bussts. When John flew to Canberra to make his case, though, his old friend proved elusive. After five frustrating days of chasing him around Parliament House, John eventually caught Holt sleeping on a plane and forced him awake to hear a harangue about the threat to Ellison Reef.

It was not the only reef at risk, John insisted: the development mania of the Country Party–led Queensland government and its premier, Frank Nicklin, was limitless. Reliable rumor had it that the state government wanted to use Ellison as a precedent for granting scores of mining applications for oil and gas—most involving the drilling or seismic blasting of coral reefs.

Holt was genuinely sympathetic, but he was hemmed in by political constraints. The push for states’ rights, along the lines of the Queensland government, was also a potent electoral force in federal politics. No Commonwealth government had ever tested the legality of Queensland’s vociferous claim to own the Reef, but even so, Holt told Busst that if the Ellison mining claim succeeded and the Reef was endangered, “I will promise you personally that the federal government will take over the Barrier Reef.”
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At last Judith Wright found an impeccable scientific authority to testify against the mining of Ellison. Dr. Don McMichael was both an eminent marine biologist and director of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), an elite body established in 1964 to provide expert, objective, nonpolitical conservation advice to government and business. The foundation was respectable, conservative, and a proponent of the “rational exploitation” of the Reef, but it had a few fiery spirits like Judith Wright and Len Webb among its commissioners. By great good luck, too, McMichael revealed that he’d surveyed Ellison Reef himself in 1965.

When the Innisfail court resumed in November 1967, McMichael explained to the government-appointed mining warden that Ellison, like most reefs, contained both dead and living corals. Furthermore, he’d found a species of mollusc there that was unique to Queensland waters. This, when combined with Hegerl’s report of having seen 190 species of fish and eighty-eight species of live coral on the reef, was enough to persuade the warden to recommend against the mining application—a ruling grudgingly endorsed by the minister for mines, Ronald Camm, six months later.
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