The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (39 page)

more than scorpion or snake

and dying of the venoms that we make

even while you die of us.
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“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.
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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 about 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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*   *   *

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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*   *   *

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.
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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.
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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.
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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

S
IR 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.
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Many of the scientists in the room already know how apt this comparison is: there are uncanny resemblances and intellectual links between today’s speaker and the Royal Society’s greatest-ever fellow, Charles Darwin. All Charlie Veron’s friends know, too, that against the countervailing conditions of the modern world, he has made himself an internationally famous scientist without ever losing Darwin’s fierce independence, unquenchable curiosity, and passionate love of nature.

Charlie Veron
(Courtesy of Charlie Veron)

Charlie, Sir David continues, is one of the world’s greatest scientific authorities on corals and coral reefs. He’s discovered and described more than a third of the known coral species and produced definitive catalogs of all the world’s corals. For much of his life Charlie has been blessed with the most enviable job imaginable. He’s swum among the reefs of the world to explore coral cathedrals of “beauty, wonder, and astonishment” that most of us know only from our television screens.

But today—Sir David’s voice takes on a somber note—Charlie comes with a different task: to show us how coral reefs are the keys that can unlock the truth about the bewildering changes we’ve unleashed in our climate. Perhaps he may answer the question that nags at us all: Do the reefs tell us that the future is worse than we realize?

When the applause subsides Charlie walks to the lectern, a wiry, tanned figure wearing a red shirt and dark jacket. In his husky Australian voice he thanks Sir David, and then answers his concluding question. “Yes,” he says bluntly, things will be worse than most of us realize, and so, sadly, “I will not be telling a happy story.” For the next forty minutes he tells the silent audience why the Great Barrier Reef and all the world’s reefs face a likely mass extinction within the life span of the younger listeners present.

At one level this Royal Society lecture—and the book that underpins it,
A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End
(2008)—marks a shift in theme and tone for a man who has written so joyfully about coral reefs. For forty years Charlie has celebrated their astonishing multiplicity and complexity. Now we watch him focusing all his intellect and passion to prophesy a reef apocalypse. It’s obvious how much he’d like to avert what he predicts. To have any chance of this, though, Charlie must answer the skeptic’s question: How do you know? And then its brutal follow-up: Why should we care anyway?
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