The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (37 page)

This small local victory would ultimately change the face of the conservation movement for decades, and the fate of the whole of the Great Barrier Reef. It marked the moment when the Reef became the central cause of conservationists all over Australia, and it unleashed a fourteen-year campaign, “Save the Reef,” that Judith Wright would later call “The Coral Battleground” and John Busst “The Battle.”

There’d been earlier ruckuses, of course. At the beginning of the 1960s the underwater filmmaker and amateur naturalist Noel Monkman, who lived with his wife, Kitty, on Green Island, became so worried about the depredation by coral and shell collectors and Taiwanese fishermen that he publicized the need for a Great Barrier Reef marine park. He was among those, too, who at Green Island in 1963 discovered the first coral damage wrought by crown-of-thorns starfish—an infestation of which was soon reported to be spreading all over the Reef. Monkman and several other naturalists were adamant that human behavior, such as overfishing and pollution, was responsible for the plague.
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Some Australians were also alerted to these dangers by a superb trilogy of books about America’s coasts and seas, written by biologist Rachel Carson. Shortly before her death, Carson caused a further international sensation with the publication of her searing
Silent Spring
(1962), which exposed the pervasive spread of toxic chemicals into habitats worldwide. Needless to say, coral reefs were among these.
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In June 1967 Wright, Webb, and Busst had been made aware of specific problems on the Barrier Reef by a short article in the Wildlife Preservation Society’s own magazine, written by their diver allies in the Littoral Society. After making the point that Queenslanders “hold the Barrier Reef in trust for future generations throughout the world,” the authors argued that a Florida-style marine park should be established on the Reef to protect declining fish-breeding habitats, prevent increasing damage to water purity and food chains, and attract nature-loving tourists.
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Following the Ellison case, and the confirmation of the rumor that the Queensland government was opening most of the Reef to oil prospecting and other forms of mineral extraction, local attacks by conservation groups ballooned into full-scale war. Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who became premier of Queensland in August 1968, didn’t care that the government had lost the first skirmish, or that a few eccentric intellectuals were outraged at the prospect of oil mining; he had the hide of a rhinoceros and the mind-set of a hyena. After instructing Minister Camm to reiterate the government’s right to mine the Barrier Reef when and where it chose, he ordered him to have the entire length of the Reef zoned in preparation for leasing. Since Camm had already secretly issued oil-prospecting leases to six petroleum companies, even this proposed zoning was window dressing.
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Although Robert Endean, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Committee, supported the government’s oil policies, he was so angered by Camm’s indifference to the starfish plague that he quietly leaked the details of these leases to the Wildlife Preservation Society. John Busst in turn passed on the news to the Queensland public. He told the local
Advocate
newspaper that the government had secretly completed a geophysical mining survey of the entire Reef province, an action that showed its willingness to jeopardize Australia’s oceanic food supplies and to squander a natural asset whose “potential for research is inestimable and … aesthetic value for untold millions of tourists incalculable.” If Bjelke-Petersen was not stopped, Busst warned, “we shall earn the unenviable reputation … as those Australian barbarians who destroyed one of the seven wonders of the world.”
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Although the Ellison Reef campaign had forged an alliance among Wright, Webb, and Busst, the tiny trio looked ill-equipped to lead a war. A poet who’d barely visited the Reef, an obscure government forestry scientist, and a dropout artist seemed unlikely figures to halt the juggernaut of politicians, local developers, and international mining interests.

Judith Wright, born in 1915 in the New England region of New South Wales, grew up in an arresting landscape. A solitary child, she fell in love with “my blood’s country,” the lean, dry highlands around her family’s ranch. Blessed with a brilliant imagination and a gift for language, she began from an early age to feel alienated from the conservative gentry values of her peers. Though she never stopped loving her family, she came to feel that they, along with most Australian settlers, had dispossessed the land’s ancient original peoples and fostered a rapacious culture in their stead.

Judith was a romantic in the profoundest sense: someone who strove through the power of language, myth, and symbol to absorb the harsh beauty of the Australian continent and the environmental ethos of its Aboriginal peoples. Like the writer Patrick White, her distant cousin, she wanted to create “a country of the mind,” instead of a country of mindless greed. This sense of dissonance between the Australian landscape and the culture of its colonizers pushed her into unorthodoxy. As her daughter recalled, Judith’s sense of estrangement led this strong, intelligent woman always to side “genuinely and passionately with the outsider.”
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Jack McKinney, a former drover and war-veteran-turned-philosopher who later became Judith’s husband, helped give intellectual shape to this dissidence. Living together in an old timber cutter’s cottage among the rain forests of Mount Tamborine on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the couple were united in their dislike of modern Western civilization. They were repelled by the lust for money and progress, the brutal ideologies and technologies of power, and the indifference to humane moral values. After reading works like
Man and Nature
(1864) and
A Sand County Almanac
(1949) by American conservationists George Perkins Marsh and Aldo Leopold, they concluded that Australia’s redemption must come through a revolutionary change of heart that embraced the Aborigines’ ancient ethic of “caring for country.”
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Friendships with two like-minded women, Aboriginal poet Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and wildflower artist Kathleen McArthur, inspired Judith to join local conservationist campaigns to stop patches of rain forest being gobbled up by Gold Coast developers. By 1962 she and several Brisbane friends had decided that the state government’s drive for development demanded a more proactive campaign, one which could educate the Queensland public in conservationist principles. In September of that year, she and three associates formed the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, with a mission, through its journal
Wildlife
, to promote “the preservation of all forms of … flora and fauna and the education of children and adults in the principles of wildlife protection and conservation.”
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Judith had little time to think about the Great Barrier Reef during the tenuous early years of the society’s existence, when the journal was short of money and without a professional editor, yet the Reef’s unique beauty had lodged more deeply in her consciousness than later opponents would claim. In 1949 she and Jack had stayed for several weeks at Lady Elliot Island on the southern boundary of the Reef, sharing the lighthouse keeper’s cottage with Jack’s daughter. Shocked at the evidence of destruction on the island caused by goats and guano miners, Judith was nevertheless enchanted by its fringing coral reef: “I wandered over it amazed at the colours of the coral, the shellfish and the tiny darting fish and crimson and blue slugs and stars and clams in its pool-gardens, and stared down from a small boat at its shelfs and coral crabs. I fell in love with the Reef then…”
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The sublime architectural creations of these tiny coral polyps became her personal symbol for how brave individuals like Jack McKinney worked, for they were like coral “Builders,” creating structures of moral value and defiance in the face of oceanic forces of destruction:

Only those coral insects live

that work and endure under

the breakers’ cold continual thunder.

They are the quick of the reef

that rots and crumbles in calmer water

Only those men survive

who dare to hold their love against the world;

who dare to live and doubt what they are told.

They are the quick of life;

their faith is insolence; joyful is their grief.
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It was soon after setting up the Wildlife Preservation Society that Judith met Len Webb. The rain forest ecologist was another lone “Builder” and poetry lover, and was keen to join her cause. As she got to know him, Len proved to be “a vital and urgent man with a love for the magnificent forests he studied, [who] travelled to and fro, talking to people and making himself unpopular, but also being heard by those with foresight.”
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Lean and leathery, with a thin mustache, a tanned complexion, and spectacles like navigator’s goggles, Len was five years older than Judith and, like her, the product of a rural family, although by upbringing he was closer to the shearing shed than the homestead. Born to a station-cook mother and a horse-breaker father, he’d grown up acutely aware of “the gulf between … the squatters and the station hands.” But there were no gulfs between Builders, and Judith delightedly persuaded him to become the society’s vice president.
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Len’s scientific education had been hard won. He began his working life as a junior clerk in the Queensland Department of Agriculture, before becoming a trainee chemist at the state herbarium. After obtaining his high-school certificate at night school, he enrolled as an evening student at the University of Queensland, where his politics led him to the Radical Club, and his chemistry to wartime appointments in munitions factories in Melbourne and Sydney. The army also gave him the opportunity to study biochemistry at night at Sydney Technical College. Then came a life-changing job offer from the Commonwealth government. In a phytochemical survey of Australian rain forest plants prompted by a shortage of drugs, Len was to look for specimens containing chemical alkaloids suitable for medical use.
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Over the years 1944–52 Len developed a passion for the towering rain forests that skirted the Barrier Reef. With thousands of unknown plants to study, he learned to test for alkaloids using every tool available, including his formal knowledge of botany and biochemistry, a knack of tasting alkaloids on his tongue, and an arsenal of folk wisdom acquired from Aborigines, timber workers, and tin miners. Around campfires he discovered that many of these tough, solitary men shared his sense of “the mystery and sacred beauty of the rainforests.”

One day while working in the forest, he experienced a type of epiphany that produced an uncanny feeling of intimacy, or “cathexis,” with the surrounding flora and fauna. He was suddenly “overwhelmed, without feeling claustrophobic or afraid, by this complex terrestrial ecosystem.” In later conversations with Judith Wright and John Busst, he likened this enchantment to being infused with “soul,” “heart,” or “spirit.”
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As Len and his self-taught assistant, Geoff Tracey, traveled through the Reef forest, they had to devise ways to categorize the vegetation types they encountered, and to understand their patterns of growth and association. Groping attempts to find a suitable language led them both to the nascent science of ecology. Len undertook a pioneering doctoral degree in the subject at the University of Queensland, and then persuaded the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), his employer, to fund a two-person rain forest ecology unit based in Brisbane. Len and Geoff’s daunting first task was to map the diversity of Australia’s rain forests from Cape York to Cape Otway, in Victoria, and to discover what caused the varying patterns of community and distribution.

It was an awesome responsibility, and one that engaged all of Len’s emotional and scientific sensibilities. As he later liked to say: “Trees have no blood banks to succour them after fire and mutilation, yet without the green stuff of their sap, there would be no redness in animal blood, no sun’s energy and no life for us who cannot dine on dust. A tree is a magic creature, whose ancestors are lost in the mists of time.”

He and Geoff identified so deeply with the rain forests of the Reef that they came to see themselves as custodians of a natural heritage that seemed everywhere under siege. Heretically, they’d arrived at the now orthodox view that Australian rain forests were unique fragments of the ancient vanished continent of Gondwanaland, an idea that generated heated arguments with development-minded CSIRO colleagues who wanted to clear the northern forests for agricultural and pastoral use. As a result, Len claimed, he woke up one morning in the early 1960s to find himself “an adversary of the powers that be.” He’d become a radical conservationist.
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Like most converts, Len wanted to evangelize. One of his earliest targets was John Busst, whom he’d met in the late 1940s when the artist sent him a poisonous shrub from Bedarra Island for testing. The two hit it off at once. On Len’s regular visits to the island, they discovered a common “avidity for scientific-romantic ideas,” as well as a passion for Tennyson’s poetry, Wagner’s music, and the euphoric effects of ethanol.
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By birth and education, the two men were poles apart. A decade older, Busst was born in 1909 in Bendigo, Victoria, into the family of a wealthy mining warden. He went to elite Wesley College, then to the University of Melbourne, and was intended for a glossy legal career like his friend Harold Holt. Instead, something impelled him in the early 1930s to drop out of university and become an artist. Aligning himself initially with the womanizing painter Colin Colahan, he switched allegiance to the ascetic arts-and-crafts guru Justus Jorgensen, whose Montsalvat artists’ colony in Eltham, Victoria, was modeled on the communal ideals of William Morris and Leo Tolstoy. Busst had limited talents as a painter, but he was able to use subsidies from his father to sustain a bohemian lifestyle throughout the Depression, and to learn the skills of working with adobe, wood, glass, and stone.
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