The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (38 page)

A bequest from his father allowed Busst to follow in the footsteps of the talented painter Noel Wood, who lived on Bedarra Island. Enchanted by a short holiday on the island, John and his new wife, Alison, eventually bought half of Bedarra, where they stayed for seventeen years, building a mudbrick house, laying out a tropical garden, selling the odd painting, and living a hedonistic life. Like the Banfields, though, they were alienated by the growing intrusion of tourists. In the mid-1950s John published his first conservationist article—as it happened, on Banfield’s favorite subject, Bedarra’s breeding caves of gray-backed swiftlets.

Two years later the couple decided to move to Bingil Bay, where they hoped to buy enough land to insulate themselves from developers and “Philistines.” John told Patricia Clare that “the days for living on tropical islands have gone. Half Bedarra is now a resort and there’s no privacy any more. Speedboats everywhere, buzzing all around you.”
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Yet nowhere in the Reef province seemed sacrosanct. Even their new back garden at Bingil turned out to be at risk. A patch of rain forest at Clump Point, just behind their bungalow, was suddenly co-opted by the army for exercises in jungle warfare and defoliant bombing. Len Webb happened to be staying on the night the Bussts decided to fight this army takeover. He agreed that there were sound ecological reasons for protecting the forest, but suspected that the Bussts didn’t yet know them. They just “wanted to keep it virgin.” Len offered to instruct them in ecological principles, an education that ultimately helped the couple to rescue rain forest from the army at McNamee Creek as well as at Clump Point.
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These small victories fired John’s passion for conservation, to the point where he began to press for protection of the forest, river, and reef habitats of the whole Innisfail–Tully region, an area under severe pressure from prospective cane farmers. Gradually John’s small branch of the WPSQ widened its remit to campaign against chemical weed and tree killers, and in favor of government rebates for landholders who spared natural vegetation along watercourses. In conversations with Patricia Clare he was adamant that the reefs and rain forests were critically interdependent, because “the clearance of vegetation affected the coast’s relationship to the Reef waters alongside it. The river estuaries, mangrove swamps and shallow waters close to the coast supported life that was part of the whole marine system. These waters must be affected when vegetation was cleared and torrential rain stripped soil from the coast and dumped it into the sea.”
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*   *   *

As the friendship between Judith Wright, Len Webb, and John Busst deepened, they increasingly exchanged ideas and tactics. Even so, becoming “welded in a very deep companionship” wasn’t always easy. By inclination as well as by upbringing, John Busst was less democratic and tolerant than the other two. His “Irish blood” and the urgency of the cause often made him impatient. He liked to flaunt the belligerent nickname of “The Bingil Bay Bastard,” scorned the idea of “controlled exploitation,” and believed it was necessary to force environmental change on ignorant “Philistines.” All this made him chafe at his two friends’ commitment to slower, educative methods and long-term democratic goals.
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In November 1966, for example, he ranted at Len Webb about “the puss-footing, polite, ivory towered vapourings” of Webb’s academic associates in the ACF. “Look, chum, just forget about the education angle for a while, will you? It’s just bloody silly for the moment to educate future generations to preserve the rain forest—there won’t be any.” Judith went some way toward shifting his prejudice, however, when she linked John up with Barry Wain, a sympathetic young journalist on
The Australian
who agreed to publicize his prolific flow of letters.
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In 1966 Len Webb presented a talk to a group of student teachers which, when it was subsequently published by his two colleagues in their journal,
Wildlife
, also helped them to understand ecology—“the science of relations between living things and the landscape.” John and Judith learned from Len that reefs and rain forests were interdependent communities, or ecosystems, which couldn’t be exploited piecemeal without damaging the whole. Len advanced a scientific case for something Judith had always believed—that Aboriginal peoples had achieved a “precarious but stable equilibrium” between conservation and resource use, which was “blown apart” by the European introduction of sheep and cattle and the wasteful practices of overgrazing and tree clearing. These drastic environmental interventions, Len said, had triggered unplanned and unstoppable chains of change.

Len quoted lines from one of Judith’s poems to preface an argument that wilderness and nature reserves answered deep emotional and aesthetic yearnings within human beings: “we need,” he reflected, “a new word to convey that feeling of deep enjoyment and wonder, that feeling of privilege in witnessing the life of wild animals and birds, and in moving among wild scenery.” Yet he cautioned against being “sentimental” about nature, a point he made regularly, until Judith advised him sharply one day “that I should not be ashamed of ‘sentiment … It’s a good word—look it up in the dictionary.’” The definition, “thought tinged with emotional feeling bound up with some subject or ideal,” surprised and delighted him. Nothing could be closer to his own views. Her intervention, he later claimed, had introduced him to the crucial concept of “emotional intelligence.”
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An article Judith wrote soon after this, “Conservation as a Concept,” revealed the reciprocal impact of Len’s ideas. She attacked science for having “separated man from nature” by confusing objective methods of investigation with an abandonment of “any true and deep consideration of moral ends.” However, she continued, “a hopeful new science has arisen in the new studies of ecology, which are moving into the human as well as the biological fields.” She believed that a fusion of conservationist ideals with ecological methods could even fulfill the poet-scientist Goethe’s centuries-old plea “for a science of living experience”: “[It] does represent a groping movement towards a new kind of understanding which shall take into account actual living processes and interdependencies, and can see man as part of a wider process and subordinate to its laws.”

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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*   *   *

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