The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (2 page)

Most nights I also heard stories of spray-soaked outings in tinnies (small, unpainted metal motor boats used for recreation) to spear stingray, green turtle, and dugong, or to catch barramundi, Spanish mackerel, and trevally. They assumed that these fish and animals were theirs to eat or sell, yet they also expressed a strong connection to them as fellow creatures and a genuine concern for their species’ survival. Under existing Queensland and federal legislation in Australia, “limited traditional rights” to marine resources are recognized. In some park zones Aborigines can be issued with permits to hunt dugong and turtle under restricted conditions, though the practice has attracted strong criticism from some environmental quarters.
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Critical of Cook’s legacy as an imperial invader, each of the three elders had decided to join our voyage to draw attention to their people’s struggle to secure land and sea rights. As long as anyone at Yarrabah could remember, Rico told me, the clans living around Mission Bay had used Green Island as a seasonal base for fishing and hunting, yet the community had just lost a legal case claiming long-term association with the cay and its waters because a European farmer once held a lease there during the nineteenth century. Such was Australian law. Now, Rico said, that same law protects Green Island’s fancy tourist resort.

On deck, in the slow, early-morning hours of anchor watch, the three men told stories of how their families and clans had been scattered by the frontier expansion that began in the Reef region in the 1850s and which has continued ever since—successive waves of European settlements, institutions, and policies that also wrested children from parents “for their own good.” Behind the men’s stoicism I glimpsed endless sequences of fracture and migration, of families and friends being shunted between missions, foster homes, stations, townships, prisons, and reserves.

On August 31 the replica
Endeavour
anchored off modern-day Cooktown, where Cook and his crew had come ashore to repair the ship’s coral-impaled hull. While our botanists were being filmed foraging for plants, we historians were allowed ashore to meet with local Aboriginal representatives. Bob Paterson introduced us to his famous relative, the MP and Hope Vale elder Eric Deeral, who was accompanied by his daughter Erica.

Eric described how the sight of our
Endeavour
replica in the mouth of the river had overpowered him. He’d felt a direct frisson of empathy with his ancestors across the centuries, picturing them standing on the grassy knoll and watching the strange spectacle of the three-masted bark. He and his clan group, the Gamay Warra, are part of the black cockatoo totem, and a subset of the Guugu Yimithirr people. To support their claim to the surrounding district of Cooktown, Eric had assembled a set of portfolios placing local oral traditions and topographical investigations alongside research done on Western lines, thereby creating an empirically based record of the long-term presence of this tribe and its clans in the area. In 1997 the Guugu Yimithirr of Hope Vale were among the first Aboriginal people to be given legal ownership of their lands under the Native Title Act 1993 that followed the pathbreaking Mabo case of 1992, which for the first time gave Australian Indigenous peoples the legal right to own their traditional lands, provided they could prove continuous occupation by their clan or linguisitic group.
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Eric and Erica admitted that it was thanks in part to Cook’s journals that their claim had succeeded. Eric’s understanding of the history of Cook’s visit was nuanced and realistic; he did not gloss over the tragedies that many of his people see as its consequence, but he himself no longer felt any anger. After all, he said, grinning broadly, Cook was now helping to repair some of the damage he’d begun.

*   *   *

The Reef presented yet another face to me on September 4 when we anchored off Lizard Island, 150 miles north of Cairns. We’d again prevailed on the BBC organizers to allow us a few hours to visit this crucial site of Cook’s original voyage, and after being taken ashore at 6:30 a.m. three of us set off under the guidance of Debbie, a young scientist from the island’s marine research station. Debbie invited us to follow her up a steep rocky peak known as Cook’s Look.

Apart from a clump of palm trees that had been planted around the resort, Lizard Island managed to resist the stereotyped South Sea images I’d started out with. From a distance, streaked by early-morning mist, it looked bleak and forbidding; close to, it was dry and brown. We clambered over jagged tourmaline outcrops and pushed past gums that had been stunted and twisted by the southeast trade winds and then scorched by bushfires. In between them grew ragged-edged paperbark trees and kapok bushes covered in yellow flowers. Debbie found some tiny green bush passion fruit that we devoured, reveling in the scent and flavor. Clumps of tussock grass brushed at our ankles and two species of doves tried to drown out each other’s calls.

That walk proved to be life-changing in two ways: I found the island’s land and seascapes achingly beautiful, falling in love with what I now realize is a distinctively northern Reef aesthetic, and I had my first intimation of the threats to the Reef’s survival. I’d read a few newspaper stories about stresses to corals around the world, but never taken them too seriously.

Debbie was proud of the efforts of the research station to preserve the pristine character of the local reefs, but had to admit that even with this much care the corals were showing alarming signs of degradation. She doubted their capacity to resist impending forces of destruction that I only later came to understand. What I did gather from the somber tone in her voice was that she and her scientific colleagues at Lizard Island believed the entire Reef system to be under threat of extinction.

When we reached the summit I stared northward to the horizon, where Cook and Banks had first seen the monstrous “ledge” of reefs that threatened to entrap them permanently. The thin, creamy line in the water now looked to me more fragile than fearsome.

We walked in sober silence down the hill to wait for the longboat. I took a quick farewell swim. Gliding over the multicolored bommies—stand-alone towers of coral—I watched tiny pink-and-blue shell fragments pulsing on the sand with the movement of the waves. Goggle-eyed parrot fish flicked out of reach between clumps of emerald seaweed. Suddenly all of this—even the faux Hawaiian resort around the corner—seemed inexpressibly precious.

*   *   *

Since that voyage nearly a dozen years ago I’ve visited the Reef many times, and as I got to know its seascapes and stories better I fell deeper under its spell. The Great Barrier Reef, as I learned, was built by human minds as well as by coral polyps. To adapt what Robert Macfarlane says in his wonderful book
Mountains of the Mind
, coral reefs are contingencies of geology and biology, “products of human perception … imagined into existence down the centuries.” Now that we’re in the Age of the Anthropocene, where humans have for the first time begun to influence geological change, this “collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans” has surely never been more important.
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This book is a story of encounters between Reef peoples and places, ideas, and environments, over more than two centuries, beginning with James Cook’s bewildered voyage through a coral maze and ending with the searing mission of reef scientist John “Charlie” Veron to goad us to act over the impending death of the Reef. It explores how the Reef has been seen variously, and sometimes simultaneously, as a labyrinth of terror, a nurturing heartland, a scientific challenge, and a fragile global wonder. Yet I don’t pretend to offer a comprehensive survey of its modern history. Being drawn instinctively to human stories, I’ve chosen to write a series of biographical narratives—of around twenty extraordinary individuals, men and women, who’ve shaped our ideas and attitudes to the greatest marine environment this planet has ever seen.

I’ve focused mainly on three types of people: first, the Western explorers, resource seekers, and scientists who investigated the Reef; second, the Indigenous peoples, and the castaways they adopted, who lived on and managed the Reef’s coasts, islands, and seas just before these were overrun by Europeans; third, the romantic beachcombers, artists, photographers, and divers who found creative inspiration in the Reef’s beauty.

Some of my protagonists are descendants of people who have inhabited the Reef for at least as long as it has existed in its present form. Others were thrown there by chance, and discovered nurturing and love from the kindness of strangers. Some sought money or power, some fled there to escape civilization’s discontents or the guilt of personal crimes. Some were drawn by ambition, revenge, or scientific curiosity, some by the beauty and marvels of the corals, beaches, forests, and creatures. Whatever their motives, they all eventually shared one thing—a passion for this coral country that is like no other in the world.

In the process of writing I’ve also come to a strong personal conviction. It is only by melding our specialized scientific understandings of the Great Barrier Reef with the ideas it engenders—the sensory, the spiritual, the aesthetic—that we will fully appreciate why it demands we be its global caretakers.

PART ONE

Terror

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LABYRINTH

Captain Cook’s Entrapment

J
AMES COOK DID NOT KNOW,
on Sunday May 20, 1770, two weeks after leaving Botany Bay on the east coast of New Holland, the western portion of the continent, named by the Dutch captain Abel Tasman in 1644, that the HMS
Endeavour
was sailing into the southwest entrance of a vast lagoon where reef-growing corals began their work. It was a channel that later navigators would call the Great Barrier Reef inner passage. Cook didn’t realize that then, and he never would.

The point, obvious enough in his journals, needs stressing because so many historians inadvertently treat this phase of Cook’s first voyage of exploration to the Southern Hemisphere as if the Great Barrier Reef we know today already existed somewhere in the back of his mind. As if he unconsciously knew he was about to enter into combat with a constellation of deep-water “barrier reefs” that ran more or less parallel with the Australian coast for some 1,400 miles, creating between them and the mainland a shallow lagoon of uneven depths interspersed with three hundred reef-fringed coral cays and striated with sand, rock, and coral shoals. In reality he sailed unknowingly within the reef lagoon for around 500 miles before he became aware of something resembling a coral “labyrinth.” Like explorers before him, he’d had no intimation at all of the possible existence of this freakish phenomenon.

The map used by Cook, showing a still unexplored coastline of New Holland with Tasmania joined to the mainland.
Carte réduite de l’Australasie, pour servir à la lecture de l’histoire des terres Australes, 1756
by Robert de Vaugondy
(National Library of Australia)

For us to have any glimmer of understanding of the experiences and reactions of Cook and his crew, we, too, must rid our minds temporarily of the existence of this vast geophysical phenomenon—a region of land and sea that in 1770 had never been imagined in its totality by any human being, and that would remain substantially unimagined even after the
Endeavour
had sailed through it.

Cook had at this point partially completed his mission. He had fulfilled the orders of the Royal Society to make accurate observations of the transit of Venus from Otaheite (Tahiti), and was now faced with two larger and more covert tasks: to best the war-vanquished French by upstaging their scientific and imperial ambitions in the Pacific; and to discover, chart, and claim for the King of England—with the agreement of any native peoples—the elusive great southern land that geographers had so long hypothesized. Having made landfalls on the isles of present-day New Zealand between September 1769 and March 1770, the
Endeavour
had on April 19 sighted land along the coast of what Cook called New South Wales. On April 28 he finally managed to land on this tricky coastline, at what would become known as Botany Bay, a paradise of plants only slightly marred for him by the elusiveness and hostility of the native inhabitants.

Since leaving Botany Bay on May 6, Cook had sighted lines of breakers suggestive of submarine shoals on several occasions, but it was only on the morning of May 20 that he was confronted with a long “shoal” projecting eastward from a finger of land he called Sandy Cape, which forced him to edge northeast for several miles before finding clear water. He named the shoal Breaksea Spit, because after weathering it the ship suddenly entered “smooth water,” a consequence of the sheltering effect of the Swain reefs that were far out of sight. Neither was there anything to suggest that the present shoal might be a coral reef rather than an extension of the rocky shoreline, though we now know it to be an extinct coral reef covered in sand.
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