EXPANSION OF THE COLONY: FIRST DECADES

The Napoleonic Wars had consumed most of Britain's energies throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, and – as the failure of the publishing projects of Banks, Brown and Bauer testify – the natural sciences now had a lower priority. The infant colony at Sydney received little attention from London and grew only slowly under a succession of naval governors – Arthur Phillip, John Hunter, Philip Gidley King and William Bligh – all of whom experienced considerable difficulties with the army officers and senior public officials. Both of those groups sought extensive privileges and large grants of land with the intention of recreating the social structure of the mother country, establishing themselves as a colonial aristocracy and using the transported convicts as a serving class.

All four governors sought to administer wisely and evenhandedly, but were hampered by lack of real legislative authority and were glad to leave the colony, especially Bligh who had done his best to correct the many abuses – trafficking in rum and the indiscipline of the New South Wales Corps – and to resist the growing demands of the privileged sector. When Lachlan Macquarie arrived in 1810 with his own trustworthy highland regiment the colony began a slow upward climb to stability and development, characterised by expansion of the settlement across the adjoining Sydney plain and exploration of the regions beyond, a task becoming particularly urgent since the water supply in Sydney Town was inadequate and unpredictable.

Well before the Royal Commission had ever been considered, pressure for Reef protection had continued to grow strongly following the ACF symposium in May 1969, when a few of the more determined advocates came together to press for political action on the final resolution. In the following years, two complementary, interacting processes were in operation: on the one hand continued conservationist efforts were being exerted to mobilise public support for Reef protection; on the other, was the drawn-out contest between the Commonwealth and Queensland governments to reach an acceptable resolution of difficulties to enable political and legislative change.

FROM RESOLUTION TO IMPLEMENTATION: FIRST DRAFTS OF AN ACT

A leading protagonist throughout was Patricia Mather, acting officially in her capacity as honorary secretary of the GBRC, but in large part driven by sheer personal determination to see that the Reef would be saved from mining and any other form of blight. In preparation for the symposium, on 21 February 1969 she sent Chief Justice Barwick a résumé of the deliberations of the GBRC over the previous two years in examining the legal issues relating to protection. Having described them in careful detail she then presented the crux of the GBRC case: ‘The most pressing requirements at the present [are] … to extend the protection afforded all marine flora and fauna to territorial waters surrounding all national parks … to prohibit mining of minerals below high water … [and] to investigate setting up of further national parks’.

Ever since Captain James Cook charted the Great Barrier Reef in 1770 it has exerted a fascination that shows no sign of diminishing. Over those centuries its chequered history has moved through a sequence of phases: from a navigation hazard to be feared and then conquered, to a geological challenge and a realm of extraordinary plants and animals offering a seemingly inexhaustible range of natural resources for scientific study and exploitation.

In recent decades the Reef has come into the international spotlight as the world's greatest marine park with its listing by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1981 as a special World Heritage Area of ‘superlative natural phenomena’ containing ‘formations of exceptional natural beauty [with] superlative examples of the most important ecosystems’. It also was recognised as an ‘outstanding example of the major stages of the earth's evolutionary history’, and ‘of significant ongoing geological processes, biological evolution and man's interaction with the natural environment’. Of profound relevance today is its further listing as a site of ‘the foremost natural habitats where threatened species of animals or plants of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation still survive’ (UNESCO 1980:22–23).

This cultural and environmental history, then, has a special objective. It takes the reader through the endlessly absorbing story of the impact of Western discovery and settlement on the Great Barrier Reef, and equally, the response of Western science to that encounter with the world's greatest living natural feature.

Throughout the first century of European involvement, the Great Barrier Reef, in addition to its daunting hydrographic challenges, and its significance for science – fascinating as it was to biologist and geologist alike – from its sheer magnitude exerted an even more powerful and determining influence on the social and economic history of Queensland. From the beginning of settlement, Queensland was the only Australian colony whose development was almost entirely constrained by a seemingly impassable barrier of complex reefs, with only the port of Brisbane directly accessible to the open sea. Reef waters, however, well before Queensland's separation from New South Wales in December 1859, were exploited from the earliest days. Whaling and guano mining, along with the later expansion of pearling, bêche-de-mering and fishing, came to assume economic importance in Queensland second only to the agricultural and pastoral industries. Although in the later nineteenth century the best possible interpretation was to be placed on its existence as the ‘Grand Canal’ or ‘a safe and secure harbour’ – today known as the ‘lagoon’ – the Reef was actually a serious impediment to development. As settlers moved along the restricted coastal lowlands – the only lands suitable for widescale permanent occupation – its effects on agriculture, grazing and industry were to often create intractable problems.

From the time of the First Fleet of 1788 there had been a continuing expansion of the original colony of New South Wales beyond the Sydney plain.

Throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century when British naval ships were actively surveying the waters of the Great Barrier Reef, the new science of geology was becoming increasingly important in the search for an understanding of the origin and structure of coral reefs. In particular, growing evidence of marine deposits on land, especially in elevated strata, was attracting much speculative attention and rapidly initiated a new direction of investigation in the long history of inquiry into the nature of coral.

MYSTERY OF CORAL: THE ANCIENT QUEST

Already, a formidable record of theories and explanations concerning coral had developed over several millennia: in terms of recorded observations, from the time of Aristotle during the reign of Alexander the Great in the fourth century bc. The word ‘coral’ itself first appears in the work of Theophrastus (c.372–c.285 bc) who succeeded Aristotle as director of the Lyceum. In his treatise on minerals, Peri lithon (‘On Stones’), Theophrastus described a kind of rock by the term kouralion, later transliterated into Latin as curalium, then, centuries later, into Italian as corallo, and French as corail, with cognates in all European languages. Only a fragment of Peri lithon survives today, but we find there the first mention of coral in a brief description: ‘coral is similar to a stone, is shaped like a root, and found in the sea’ (VII.39).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century renewed emphasis on the Reef as a World Heritage Area has come to dominate planning and management, with a heightened recognition of the social and economic implications of World Heritage listing and the interrelationships between natural and cultural heritage. Underlying this is an increasing awareness, formed during the final decades of the twentieth century, that the Reef and its hinterland must be regarded as a dynamic ecosystem: dealing with environmental issues as localised problems on an individual basis is no longer an adequate basis for policy. Faced with continued population growth, mounting tourist traffic and rapid expansion of urbanisation and commercial infrastructure, forward looking planners recognise that the entire area – from the watershed of the Great Divide, through the coastal strip and across the waters of what is called the ‘lagoon’ to the edge of the continental shelf – must be understood and managed with a recognition of the high levels of connectivity within what is in effect a single ecosystem, if optimum environmental balance and sustainable resource yields are to be maintained. Activities in the rainforests, on coastal farmlands, in urban developments, in factories and industrial complexes on the foreshores of harbours and bays all exercise a direct, mutually reinforcing impact – literally, from ‘Divide to Drop-off’.

The voyage of the Endeavour was to have profound political and scientific consequences in Europe. The immediate result was an almost complete cartography of the world's oceans: the myth of a single great southern landmass was dispelled and Cook's careful mapping of the Pacific, amplified in his second and third voyages, 1772–75 and 1776–79, with the aid of William Harrison's new marine chronometer, enabled the first accurate world maps to be published. Such accuracy had a stunning impact on Europeans: it revealed, finally, the vastness of the Pacific, reaching some 16 000 kilometres from the Arctic to the Antarctic – from Bering Strait to the Ross Sea – and from Panama to the Philippines, some 18 000 kilometres. Even so, in the days of square-rigged ships when overseas voyages were reckoned in many months and often years, the geographical extent of the Pacific remained virtually incomprehensible. Along with scientific discoveries of strange biota, the reports from French and British voyagers of previously unknown exotic societies in the Pacific gave a stimulus to the newly emerging science of ethnology. Once relayed to Europe and heightened by the popular and sensationalising press, each new report dazzled the imagination.

Cook's voyages occurred in the same period as the apogee of the French Enlightenment, promoted by Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopedists.

CABINET COLLECTORS AND MUSEUMS: DARWINISM RESISTED

The final surveying of the Reef by the Herald and the subsequent development of a port and a more secure navigation structure by Heath and the Marine Board marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new phase. The work of the naturalists, however, had made no comparable advances. Apart from the few scientists who were carried aboard the British naval survey vessels, whose findings were taken back to England to be integrated into the maturing disciplines of biology and geology, little progress occurred in the colony. Natural history in Australia, in contrast, in its formative years had been the preserve of a minority of conservative and wealthy gentlemen amateurs and cabinet collectors. Although membership in the naturalist societies was limited to men, a few talented women also made contributions. Their efforts, however, were almost entirely limited to botany, and then chiefly as illustrators, and some of their work has enduring distinction, including that of the sisters Harriet and Helena Scott; and Ellis Rowan, whose paintings of Queensland flora are excellent examples of botanical illustration. The one woman to achieve distinction in both botany and zoology was the German collector Konkordie Amalie Dietrich (1821–91) who travelled throughout Queensland on behalf of the Godeffroy Museum of Hamburg. Unfortunately, all of her specimens left the country (Moyal 1986).

ENVIRONMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE GREENHOUSE DECADE

Over the final decades of the twentieth century the rapid development of industry and the pursuit of continued economic growth for corporate profits had accelerated changes to the entire world environment. The incredible expansion of organic chemistry had produced thousands of synthetic compounds for industrial manufacturing that have no counterparts in nature, and against which nature has no defences. In 1962 Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring had brought dramatically to world attention the issue of organochlorine contamination of American farmlands, and in turn, rivers and seas, from agricultural runoff. Carson was followed by a sequence of concerned critics – Lynn White Jr, Paul Ehrlich, René Dubos, Barbara Ward, among many others – who began constructing the pattern of connections of massive global environmental degradation that led to the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the World Environment of 1972 and the concept expressed in the title of its publication Only One Earth (Ward & Dubos 1972). That concern, however, was not taken seriously, and the quest for development under the mantra of economic ‘growth’ continued, not simply unabated, but with mounting impact.

THE EXPEDITION TO TAHITI

The Royal Society, in fact, had begun discussing the scientific advantages of the Venus observations early in 1767 and that year invited to their meetings Alexander Dalrymple, an experienced navigator and, briefly, ship's captain of the Cuddalore while in the employ of the British East India Company in Madras from 1752 to 1767. Dalrymple was active in promoting the theory of the counter-balancing continent; he was also a well-informed historian, an avid collector of Portuguese and Spanish exploration and colonising documents, maps and charts. Moreover, he was keen to implement the Royal Society's recommendation to lead the expedition to Tahiti. The Admiralty, however, insisted upon a naval officer to command the vessel that had already been selected by Dalrymple, the Earl of Pembroke, re-commissioned as the Endeavour, and extensively rebuilt. Instead, they chose James Cook, a warrant officer known for his navigational ability and meticulous hydrographic skills in Newfoundland and the St Lawrence region during the conflict with France in Canada. Dalrymple declined to travel as anything other than overall commander, although Joseph Banks, a gentleman naturalist, readily accepted the opportunity to take charge of the scientific aspects of the voyage.

Promoted to lieutenant, Cook supervised the provisioning of the ship at Deptford, and then set out from Plymouth on Friday, 26 August 1768, recording in his Journal that he ‘got under sail and put to sea having on board 94 persons including Officers Seamen Gentlemen and their servants’ (Cook 1770:4).

As Queensland's colonial decades progressed the Reef was also developing into a region of marine industries, based chiefly on four products: bêche-de-mer, tortoiseshell, turtles and pearling. All found a ready market in Asia: bêche-de-mer for Chinese cuisine, green turtles for meat and soup, tortoiseshell and pearling for overseas manufacture in the luxury jewellery trade. For over a century the dominant ethos was that of the open frontier of an unlimited resource potential, simply there for the taking, a process designated as ‘resource raiding’ (Ganter 1994). So, as cabinet collectors became obsolete and natural history evolved into science, one major concern became directed towards discovering and exploiting economic products to sustain the increasing numbers of settlers who moved along the Reef coastline. That process, however, was slow to develop since in Reef waters there was, at first, no understanding of limited resources. The abundance of the marine environment was taken for granted, even though the dangers of such practices were already evident in the almost extinct sandalwood trade. Only when resources were close to extinction was scientific inquiry brought to bear.

One of the early European exploitative activities in tropical Pacific waters, along with the extensive spice trade in the Dutch East Indies, was the logging of sandalwood that had a ready market in China, where various species – red sandalwood (Santalum album) being the most prized – were used for building temples, houses and reliquaries.

CONSERVATIVE ASCENDANCY: UNRESTRAINED EXPLOITATION, 1953–1968

By 1958, the three Reef island research stations – Heron, One Tree and Lizard – were still, in world terms, small, under-resourced, and limited to vacation and short term projects by individuals or small groups, yielding at best, the random unrelated results that had bothered Talbot. The British Low Isles Expedition of 1928–29 thirty years earlier had made the only major in-depth study within the Reef since Mayor's in 1913, which Australians still had no prospect of emulating. Nor did any of the Reef stations enjoy the advantages of the Enewetak Marine Biological Laboratory (EMBL), nor the lavish funding provided. At the end of the 1960s that situation was to change markedly; Reef science was to enter, for the first time, a new phase of development as the Commonwealth and Queensland governments were forced to recognise, after pleas for assistance for almost a century, that it was a seriously neglected area that had to be remedied.

Yet, the stimulus to research and funding came, not as a positive response to scientists' requests, but negatively when the Reef became the catalyst for what a national newspaper called the ‘most sustained public campaign in memory on a conservation issue’ ever experienced in Australia after people had mobilised in their thousands under the slogan ‘Save the Barrier Reef’ (The Australian 24 December 1969).

NATURALISTS, TURTLES AND EARLY TOURISM

In the mid 1920s, encouraged by the proselytising of Banfield, the Reef had increasingly gained a popular image as a fascinating, exotic realm. Following his lead, and with a growing interest in GBRC Reef research as extensively reported in the popular press, a number of individuals began organising small trips to a few of the easily accessible locations – under the banner of ‘naturalist expeditions’ – which grew into the beginnings of a tourist industry. Those early efforts are not well documented but possibly the first was conducted by E. F. Pollock, a councillor of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, which sponsored the trip, to the Capricorn and Bunker island groups in the southern part of the Reef in November and December of 1925. Pollock gathered together a party of active members of naturalist societies – including Anthony Musgrave and Gilbert Whitley of the Australian Museum – to travel to various locations in a chartered vessel, both observing and holidaying for several weeks, a venture that he repeated on at least five more occasions.

Throughout the three pearling decades of the late nineteenth century the major problem confronting the industry was continuing fluctuations in supply as beds became exhausted by the depredations of resource raiding, for which the Japanese had become the prime targets of abuse. The problem, however, was much more systemic. Ship owners wanted the best possible return from each venture and to that end developed the bonus incentive for higher yields described earlier. Following the first serious decline in the late 1870s the industry was stimulated when new fields near Badu, but also stretching to New Guinea, known as the ‘Old Ground’, were discovered in 1881. Again these were raided and by 1885 were so depleted that many of the luggers, and their schooner ‘mother ships’, left for new fields off Broome in Western Australia. As the larger shells had virtually disappeared, smaller and smaller sizes were harvested, down to 5 inches internal nacre measurement, which made them ‘practically valueless [since] … no workable mother-of-pearl or nacre is left’ (Saville-Kent 1890a:4).

Queensland had attempted its first regulation in 1881 with the Pearl-Shell and Bêchede-Mer Fishery Act, the same year that New South Wales, concerned over depletion of its table fish stocks, established the Macleay Royal Commission that recommended controls. Both colonies found that legislation was easy, enforcement difficult. In the pearling grounds, consequently, further decline continued as both quantities, and quality, fell.