The Coral Battleground

Judith Wright

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781742199030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Great Barrier Reef lies off the coast of Queensland: 2000 kilometres of spectacular coral reefs, sand cays and islands, Australia's most precious marine possession. Teeming with life, it covers 350, 000 square kilometres. In the late 1960s the Reef was threatened with limestone mining and oil drilling. A small group of dedicated conservationists in Queensland – John Büsst, Judith Wright, Len Webb and others – battled to save the Ellison Reef from coral-limestone mining and the Swain Reefs from oil exploration. The group later swelled to encompass scientists, trade unionists and politicians throughout Australia, and led in 1976 to the establishment of a guardian body: the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.That it still survives is a legacy of activists, artists, poets, ecologists and students. In 1967 they were branded as 'cranks'; now they should be recognised as 'visionaries'.

1

The First Manoeuvres

My qualification for writing this book is that I was privileged to be one of the people who fought the battle for the Reef itself. My own contacts with it have been few. I was ten years old when I passed through the Reef waters, in a steamer sailing north, and I did not see the water-gardens. I remember the marvellous blue of calm waters, the green islands of the Whitsunday Passage rising out of them and passing by, and not much more.

I did not see it again until in 1949 I spent a few weeks on Lady Elliott Island, the southmost of the Reef’s coral isles, staying in a lighthouse cottage. The island was already spoiled; its guano had been stripped and shipped away, and little was left of the vegetation except a few pisonia trees nibbled by the herd of wild goats left there for the lighthouse meat supply long years before. But the offshore reef was still beautiful, and I wandered over it amazed at the colours of the corals, 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 crags. I fell in love with the Reef then, through that small and southmost part of it.

Fourteen years later, I helped to form a conservation society in Brisbane, the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, and here my part in the Reef’s story begins, and my involvement with many others who knew and loved the Reef, or who wanted something from it.

Our society was a small one then; it started with less than a hundred members, and our chief aim at that time was to start a magazine which would be a forum for conservation and would educate people in the value of wildlife. It was a hard struggle to get this magazine going, and it took most of our time. It was an education for us too. We met and heard from many people and began to learn a great deal about what was happening to Australia, and particularly Queensland, as the rush of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ increased. We learned to dislike the sound of those two words.

Most of us in the society at that time were people who were concerned and troubled at the destructiveness of much that was happening, but had no professional qualifications in biology. However, we had to teach ourselves a great deal, and ask questions, and before long we were joined by people who did know a good deal: botanists, biologists, naturalists. Letters began flowing in, and we reached out to other people at a distance; we read and we discussed. We had one lucky hit early on, when we decided that we needed an ecologist to help us get our priorities right; this came to the notice of one of the few qualified ecologists in Australia, Dr Len Webb. He was then working in the rainforests of Queensland’s far north, and when he came to Brisbane and offered his help, we seized on him and made him a vice-president at once.

In northern Queensland he had met many people who were interested in the fate of the northern rainforests, and one of these, John Büsst, was also a lover of the Great Barrier Reef. John’s involvement with the society came later, but he was to be a chief figure in the story.

In 1963, we became concerned over reports of what was happening to the Great Barrier Reef. Coral collectors, shell collectors and tourist interference were increasing rapidly, and some people in the north were unhappy with this. The photographer Noel Monkman, who with his wife Kitty was living on beautiful Green Island offshore from Cairns, was one of our correspondents. He was troubled over the future of his beloved reefs and islands. We began to wonder whether anything could be done to help, and the idea of the Reef’s becoming a great underwater park was brought up.

It was an idealistic notion at the time; and we were duly pooh-poohed by most of the people we approached with the suggestion. But we learned something from that early approach, nevertheless.

It seemed that the responsibility of looking after the Reef, if there was such a responsibility, lay with the Queensland State Government, and that the Commonwealth Government was not particularly interested in what happened to it. The Queensland government had made a few regulations on Reef exploitation, notably about the removal of live coral, and had declared some protection. Wistari Reef, off Heron Island, was the main protected area, and there was a small scientific research station on Heron Island itself, funded by meagre grants, and run by a body called the Great Barrier Reef Committee, a small, nonprofit-making scientific body, for many years the only independent organisation specifically concerned with the Reef, and at this time the only authority on matters of Reef administration and biology.¹ Beyond that area, and Green Island, information was scanty about what controls there were even over the taking of corals.

We made a few approaches on the question of marine national parks – of which at that time there were few in the world. The departments concerned were not interested; the zoologists and marine biologists we spoke to were of the opinion that nothing needed to be done. They told us that shell-collecting and coral-taking were negligible and that the Reef resort proprietors looked after their own areas and would not welcome our notions or our interference. We were too busy to pursue the idea, but we put it away in the hope that we might get more encouragement later, and then we might think once again about the problems our northern friends told us were real enough.

The next step came in 1966, a year when,from being a small collection of cranks labelled as anti-progressive visionaries, conservationists (as we are now called) began gathering strength. The society already had several branches in areas outside Brisbane and was moving into further fields: we now had more than 600 members and more people were willing to take an active hand. It was easy to see that the shibboleths of growth and progress needed a balancing force, if the future was going to be lived in a world fit for humans.

Queensland, always a state that longed for more of growth and progress, was forcing its pace. It had few areas of reserved land where its great variety of plants and animals could look forward to protection, and it was wide open to every proposal for development, mining, industry and settlement. The northern rainforests were fast being felled, often with disastrous results in erosion, silting of streams and estuaries, and poverty-stricken farms. Len Webb, a vital and urgent man with a love for the magnificent forests he studied, travelled to and fro, talking to people and making himself unpopular, but also being heard by those with foresight.

He would come back to Brisbane imbued with the tragedy of the forests and keep us all alerted to their needs. He and his small team had studied many of the forest areas and made plans and proposals for national parks, few of which got a hearing from the government. The rainforest continued to be felled and burned, and plants and animals unknown, or almost unknown, to science, and never to be replaced, went up in smoke. Progress was the cry, and progress we got, no matter how destructive and planless.

At Innisfail Len Webb had an ally in John Büsst. I met John and we talked. He was an artist, Melbourne-born, who had moved to one of the lovely islands offshore from Innisfail, Bedarra, and with his wife Alison had lived there many years, painting and boating and swimming and learning about the forests and reefs. Now he had moved back to the mainland at Bingil Bay and built a house there; fired by Len on their expeditions through the rainforest he had formed an organisation consisting only of himself, as president, secretary and treasurer, with its own letterhead, to help save some of the Innisfail forest.

He was a slender, enthusiastic man full of laughter, a compulsive smoker and a lover of good company, a friend of the then Prime Minister, Harold Holt, who himself had a ‘hideaway’ house not far from El Arish. John had spent much time with the Holts on their northern holidays and they had talked of the Great Barrier Reef and its future; Holt was a convert to John’s ideas on the need for protecting the Reef, and this was to be a beginning of a change in thinking in Canberra on the Reef, which had been left so long to itself and its distances.

There were others round Innisfail with an interest in the rainforest and the Reef areas and a concern for both, and now John decided to push for a branch of the Wildlife Preservation Society there. In August 1966 he called a meeting, and the branch came into existence with John as president, and Mrs Billie Gill, an amateur ornithologist of great vigour and enthusiasm, as secretary. Billie was another of the friends of Len’s rainforest team, working with them often and identifying rainforest birds. A farmer’s wife, she had a busy life of her own to attend to, but the birds were and are her first love, and she is well known to many ornithologists who have visited North Queensland and indeed to many who have not. I didn’t meet Billie for another year or two, but when I did I found her a rare person, living up to and beyond Len’s description. The Innisfail branch was off to a good start.

There were other moves in the south that were to be no less important. In 1965, the University of New England had held a seminar on Wildlife Conservation, and a number of us from Queensland had gone down to deliver papers, including Len and his offsider botanist Geoff Tracey, and myself. There we had talked with Dr Francis Ratcliffe of CSIRO in Canberra, who was working towards the establishment of a national conservation body. Len and many others were enthusiastic about the idea, and finally in late 1966 the Australian Conservation Foundation held its first meeting. Len and I were both invited to be members of the Provisional Council soon set up.

All of us began to feel we were no longer lone operators. We had now met many other people working in our field, we were full of the euphoria that comes to small embattled groups when the idea they are working for begins to break through; in spite of some internal doubts and disagreements, the conservation movement began to feel itself a happy few, a band of brothers and sisters, but with achievements ahead.

Also we were meeting more and more people from overseas, biologists and naturalists and conservationists, who had come to see Queensland’s rich forests, reefs and animals and to warn us of the need for working to get protection for them and to tell us sad exemplary tales of what had happened overseas. We scarcely needed telling by now; but they were a further inspiration and very useful publicity. Many of them became our friends and correspondents.

In 1967, another new society had appeared at the University of Queensland, the Littoral Society of Queensland. Most of its members were young: students interested in marine and freshwater and like problems of biology, and more clued-up on problems of water pollution than we were then. They took up the question of marine national parks, and we got in touch with them at once and suggested cooperating.

We had had problems in the fragmentation of conservation groups; we were considered rather hotheads by elder groups whose main interests were in naturalist study or whose policies were already fixed. We were demanding action, and we were thought to be publicity-seekers; as for the magazine, few outside the society thought it had a chance of success, and indeed its early struggles had often discouraged us. But during 1966-67 we had managed to organise it onto a more secure footing; it was now edited by a good naturalist with a flair for publicity, Vincent Serventy, and it was going all over Australia, into schools and libraries, and acting as a forum everywhere, as we had hoped. We had time to turn some of our attention to wider problems.

Some of the young men from the Littoral Society came onto our Council; including Des Connell, working towards a higher degree in chemistry and especially interested in water pollution, and Eddie Hegerl, a collector of marine organisms in the Department of Zoology. Their knowledge and youthful enthusiasm set us off again on new questions. It was not long before we were to put all this new human equipment to its first big test.

In mid-1967 the Innisfail branch got in touch with us urgently. In our June newsletter, Des Connell had contributed an article on marine conservation, with special reference to Queensland’s responsibility for the Great Barrier Reef.

‘We in Queensland have particular responsibility,’ he wrote, ‘as we virtually hold the Great Barrier Reef in trust for future generations throughout the world.’ He suggested that the declaration of marine national parks in particularly rich areas of the Reef was the most hopeful method of conservation; that this would not only provide new attractions for Reef visitors but areas where base stocks of fish could be protected for replenishing marine fisheries. And he pointed out that pollution was a real danger to the Reef. Huge fish kills from chemical pollution were being reported overseas; but ‘the diversity of forms pollution can assume … can vary from sediment stirred up in mining operations to radioactive fallout’.

That reference had caught John Büsst’s eye at the right moment. He had discovered a limestone-mining application for removal of coral from Ellison Reef, offshore from Innisfail, advertised in the local papers. The Innisfail branch had lodged an objection. Would we do so, too?

We did; so did the Littoral Society. John approached the Australian Conservation Foundation and many others. The ACF too lodged a written objection. The fight was on. It was the first stroke in a battle which was to occupy our minds and time for years ahead. We were plunged at once into a mystifying controversy.

The grounds that John had chosen for objection were twofold: first, the danger to Ellison Reef itself, but further, the danger of establishing a legal precedent for mining that could lead to widespread commercial exploitation of the whole of the Reef.

Ellison Reef is an isolated outlier from the main body of the great barrier and lies inside it, eighteen miles east of Mourilyan Harbour. It was therefore closer to the mainland than the outer barrier, and fairly easy of access, at least in fine weather. It lies wholly underwater, but its upper surface comes close to tidal levels during low tide, and removing coral would not have been a difficult job, in calm weather. Coral is composed of almost pure carbonate of lime; where mainland lime must be mined and purified, coral limestone needs little treatment beyond crushing to be suitable for use in farming.

The coast of northern Queensland, where conditions are suitable, is one of the most important sugar-growing areas. The cane-growers need a good deal of lime, and this can be expensive. An enterprising cane-grower, one D. F. Forbes, had seen an opportunity to get lime, as he claimed, at less expense to cane-growers, and had applied to dredge Ellison Reef for the purpose.

This was the first application of its kind relating to coral mining in Reef areas, and as such it had an importance far beyond its immediate aspect. Cane farmers all along the Queensland coast are an important group with political influence. If this application were to succeed, we could foresee many more such applications and a running series of battles all along the coastline.

Any form of mining or dredging, on such reefs, would create just the problem that the Littoral Society had pointed to, of siltation and water pollution, not only in the immediate area but along the currents that make an intricate network of patterns throughout the Reef, as far as the silt might be carried. Silting had been proven to damage living organisms, particularly sedentary ones such as coral. The Littoral Society had been working on an underwater survey in the Tweed River, where dredging had recently been taking place, and had seen what silting had done to the underwater ecosystem.

Some of the young biologists had also been working from the Heron Island research station, where various operations intended to make a boat-harbour for tourists had silted the offshore reef with consequent damage. They were deeply concerned at the possible implications of granting limestone-mining applications along the Reef, and the Littoral Society was alerted at once. Their cherished project of marine national parks might come to little if the Reef was subject to the damage caused by dredging and blasting for limestone.

We knew that in other mining situations, the establishment of a precedent for granting mining was important for subsequent applications. It seemed to us a clear case; if the Reef was to be protected, the Ellison Reef application was a spearhead for establishing the evidence necessary to show that limestone mining would harm it.

The Great Barrier Reef Committee’s scientists, who ran the little Heron Island research station, were mostly based at the Universit...