Island Home

  I’ve only held onto a handful of books from my childhood. Rolf’s Walkabout is one of those. Not even Harris’s late disgrace could convince me to give it up. I keep it out of nostalgia. Also to honour Vin Serventy, whose passion lit something in me that never died. To my mind it’ll always be Vin’s Walkabout. Rolf was just the beard. When I pull the book down from the shelf to check it against my memories, it falls open naturally to page 27. And there is a photo of Serventy’s daughter Cathy. Holding a long-necked freshwater turtle.

  For more than half a century, from Dryandra to Lake Pedder, Serventy seemed to leave his fingerprints on almost every attempt to save wild Australia from destruction. In the mid-sixties he joined forces with that other heretic, Judith Wright, with whom he embarked upon the long and bitter struggle to spare the Great Barrier Reef from a fate as a limestone mine. Figures like these and their early collaborator, Eddie Hegerl, then a young marine scientist, were seen as kooks and troublemakers for daring to suggest that the reef had value beyond the profits it might yield as a quarry. For the politicians and their clients in the business community of Queensland, such crusaders were a new obstacle to negotiate. At the outset their views about natural heritage were too outlandish to be taken seriously. These nutters simply didn’t understand the facts of life. Of course corals were pretty in their way, if you fancied that sort of thing, but like all facets of nature they were there to be exploited. This was the obvious order of things, so there was no fear of febrile and slightly effeminate notions like ‘intrinsic value’ and ‘ecological fragility’ infecting the minds of the young and impressionable. But the defenders of the reef refused to go away. This was when things really got nasty. Eddie Hegerl and his comrades were pilloried, defamed and menaced by the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen government. Reviled as they were by the burghers of Brisbane, the dissenters would not be dismissed, and to the great surprise of the establishment their view of the reef held sway. Years of dogged advocacy led to it being declared a marine park and finally accorded World Heritage status. Nowadays the reef is Australia’s most prized and visited natural asset. It’s one site that probably even deserves the ‘iconic’ status that’s so biliously overused in tourism bumf and infotainment. The place is sacred for any number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s the locus of a seminal turning point in our culture. The first major battleground upon which the conscientious objectors took the colours. Fifty years on, the eccentric outlook of the ‘ratbags’ who made it possible is more or less mainstream.

  But despite this, in the past thirty years coral cover has diminished by half. The reef is assailed every day by fishing pressure, toxic runoff from agriculture and coastal development, increased shipping movement, and the sedimentation associated with dredging. As if these weren’t threats enough to a system vulnerable to climate change, the federal government has been keen to exploit the world’s largest coal deposit in the Galilee Basin, and to dig seven new deepwater ports for coal terminals along the shores of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It was no surprise to hear scientists and tourism operators express concerns about the effect of millions of cubic metres of dredge spoil and massive plumes of sediment on the corals’ health, but it was startling to have a Queensland premier counter with the assertion that Australia was, after all, ‘in the coal business’. The prime minister, Tony Abbott, was even more dismissive. ‘Coal,’ he said, ‘is good for humanity.’ Utterances like these roused an entirely new generation to leap to the defence of the reef, and after many months of pressure, and critical scrutiny by UNESCO, the government staged a blustering retreat. The future of the reef is by no means secure, but there’s hope in the fact that public consensus about its value has neither waned over time nor been undermined by the best efforts of the fossil fuel lobby and their friends in government.

  In the 1970s environmentalists, as they’d come to be called, were still embattled outliers, but as a schoolboy in Albany, the last whaling town in Australia, I felt the first inklings of their disruptive and chaotic potential. Years before activists put an end to the industry in 1978 their ideas were slowly taking root in our community, where the legitimacy of whaling had rarely been questioned. At fourteen I was disturbed to discover that the sperm whales and humpbacks targeted by our local enterprise were on the verge of extinction. Overnight the ritual excursion to the Frenchman Bay whaling station to scoff and roar as tourists puked from the lookout above the flensing deck felt moronic. All this carnage and waste for fertilizer and cosmetics. What had always seemed normal was suddenly as absurd and reckless as it was grotesque, but to say so in Albany where whalers enjoyed a special reputation, an afterglow of colonial romance, was to risk alienation. I remember the look of shock and anger on the company manager’s face when I confronted him in an interview for the local radio station that began as an English assignment and got a little out of hand. In the early seventies a local burgher in a country town like ours wasn’t often challenged in any forum, let alone on air. Here was the representative of a venerated industry faced with a fourteen-year-old upstart who thought the best way to get to the bottom of things was to keep asking ‘Why?’ He survived my dry-mouthed and inarticulate grilling well enough but before long – and entirely without my help, I might add – the community was polarized on the matter. There were suddenly more and far smarter people asking questions, wondering why the industry persisted given the whales’ perilous status. Anyone who expressed reservations about it was deemed to have fallen prey to the influence of outsiders and big-city troublemakers. At high school the wrong word at an inopportune moment could earn you a smack in the chops.

  The debate took a few years to come to a head. By the time the ‘greenies’ came to town in force I’d moved away. In my first year of university, I followed the news from Perth. Day after day the protesters dogged the whale chasers in tiny inflatables, putting themselves between the explosive harpoons and the whales. They were brave people, foolhardy, really, and they had the good fortune to find themselves pitted against mariners of great skill and decency, without which some campaigners may well have died. One of the first Australian environmental struggles to feature this sort of high-stakes direct action, it was in its way a seminal campaign, but it was also clumsy and needlessly divisive. I was troubled by the high-handedness of some protesters. There was a contempt for working people in general, and country folk in particular, that disgusted me. The inclusive, democratic impulses of visionaries like Judith Wright and Vin Serventy were too often subsumed by something cultic and exclusionary, and the memory of these excesses helped temper my work as an activist later in life.

  In the 1980s ‘greenie’ subculture began to broaden and become a social movement, though it was still fractious and hectic. With its unlikely national reach and surprising political consequences, Tasmania’s Franklin Dam blockade was evidence of how widely the thinking of those earlier prophetic figures had spread, and how potent it was when amplified by a new and more diverse generation of activists like Bob Brown. By the 1990s the erudition, discipline and strategic patience of advocacy groups meant that ideas once thought to be harmlessly eccentric were shaping the vernacular mood and framing public policy. And by the turn of the millennium the status of a river, reef or forest could determine the outcome of an election. A forest campaign swept Geoff Gallop to power in Western Australia in 2001. Back then commentators suggested this might be an aberration, a one-off, but in 2015 Campbell Newman’s cavalier stewardship of the Great Barrier Reef was instrumental in him losing power in Queensland.

  While I was always passionate about nature, I never saw myself as an ecowarrior. In fact I avoided joining environmental organizations, even when my children were members in their primary school years. Still, by the early 1990s I was conscious of a diminution in the ecosystems I knew best, the limestone reefs and islets of the midwest coast. Wherever I swam in a mask and snorkel I was seeing more and more of less and less. Coastal development and fishing pressures were having an unmistakable impact. When
I was a kid abalone encrusted every shoreline shelf and surf-washed crag. They were so plentiful we baited our lobster pots with them. Nowadays they’re scarce and under immense fishing pressure. As a result the abalone season in Western Australia is five hours long. That’s five hours a year.

  In the end I felt I couldn’t avoid being involved in environmental matters. The natural world has always been my prime inspiration. I felt indebted. Soon after I became formally engaged in marine conservation, I got an unexpected letter from Vin Serventy. He was in his late seventies and still working like a man half his age. I had him and that letter in mind years later when I reluctantly became the public face of a campaign to save Australia’s second great coral reef. Vin didn’t hector. He had the great teacher’s gift of drawing people in and getting them interested in something about which they knew very little, and he sought to build bridges and harness goodwill. He died in 2007. I never met him. But whether helping defend sharks and turtles, or advocating for a national system of marine parks, I’ve tried, as a layman, to follow in his train.

  I was thirty-one and a father of three before I got to swim with a whale shark. As a kid I’d seen Hans Hass and Cousteau diving with these massive creatures in documentaries, but I never thought I’d get the chance until George King, a crusty rogue from Exmouth, took me out to Ningaloo Reef on his lovely old boat the Nor-Don. I assumed we were going to see some coral and maybe catch a tuna, but just beyond the breakers, in fifty metres of water, George pulled the engine out of gear, told me to get my mask and fins on and jump into the water without delay. I went over the side in my undies and came face to face with a creature the size of a small submarine. It was one of the most unexpected thrills of my life. I felt overcome by the reef, claimed by it.

  George was no greenie rabble-rouser. He was a legendary spearfisherman who made his living as a charter boat operator and publican. But he was passionate about whale sharks. He pioneered the ecotourism industry based upon them that’s now famous the world over. I think the old bugger knew exactly what he was doing when he pitched me over the side.

  Ningaloo is the continent’s largest fringing coral reef. Unlike the Great Barrier Reef, it’s close to shore. At certain points you can literally wade out into it to see turtles, black-tipped sharks, dugongs, lagoon rays, and dozens of species of coral. From a boat in a single morning – sometimes within an hour – you can swim with an eight-metre whale shark, a fleet of manta rays, and more fish than you can name, all within sight of the red desert ranges that rise from behind its beaches. Heading back to the lagoon you’ll usually see humpbacks, hyperactive schools of Spanish mackerel, and even orcas. But being so close to shore the reef is especially vulnerable to fishing pressures and coastal development. Since 1987 a developer had been trying to build a luxury marina resort right in the beating heart of the place. Successive governments were supportive and key media outlets openly barracked for the project. At the turn of the millennium the momentum for it looked unstoppable. But a handful of activists and organizers had other ideas. With pitifully modest resources they mounted a campaign to defend the reef. When I became the public face of Save Ningaloo I wasn’t only reluctant to step in front of the cameras, secretly I didn’t think we’d win. I thought the best we could hope for was to slow the process down and minimize damage to ecosystems. But we didn’t just stop the resort entirely, we helped rewrite coastal planning regulations statewide, and eventually saw Ningaloo added to the World Heritage list.

  Being a part of that campaign was an experience that brought home to me just how much attitudes had shifted. Western Australia is a politically conservative state, and yet the decision in 2003 by Premier Geoff Gallop to recognize the reef’s special status was overwhelmingly popular. About a hundred thousand people got involved somehow in the defence of Ningaloo and they took the new environmental ethic seriously. Some folks might have begun to take ‘greenies’ a little too seriously. In October 2002 the West Australian proclaimed that those thousands of citizens who’d declared their support for Ningaloo were part of a ‘presumptuous . . . self-proclaimed environmental elite’. In the years since, right-wing columnists have regularly warned against the emergence of a dangerous new ‘ruling class’ from a movement they imagine to be as monolithic as it is pernicious. They decry green views as ‘irrational’. Stockbroker Maurice Newman, whose wealth is largely derived from the so-called wisdom of the crowd, sees environmentalists and ninety-nine percent of climate scientists as fatally contaminated by ‘groupthink’. Mining magnate Hugh Morgan has long believed the new ethos to be an essentially theological issue. The folks opposed to mining in Kakadu are apparently ‘neo-pagan religious crazies and green antinomians’.5 These magnates fear for the safety of the ruling class with which they identify and to which they cleave so faithfully, because now the nonsense of sandal-wearing no-hopers is framed in legislation, it’s infected the language of business, it’s taught to kids in school.

  But environmentalism has not carried all before it. Power still largely resides with those for whom the war on nature is so deeply internalized the world wouldn’t make sense without it. Even so, there are now conservative politicians, tycoons, miners, farmers and fishers who will quietly concede that underlying the financial market there is a larger economy to attend to. The physical facts of life – that is, the fragile and finite elements of the natural world – underpin all our endeavours. Few on the right are completely unchanged by this development in thinking, even if green activism has replaced organized labour as the political enemy. The true zealots amongst them, devotees of Ayn Rand like Gina Rinehart, have themselves begun to look like eccentrics. As if unconsciously adopting the outsider role once inhabited by Judith Wright, Rinehart has gone so far as to write poetry and organize demos.

  In my own lifetime the environment has started to make the kinds of claims upon us that perhaps only family can. From the geographical ignorance and perfectly reasonable dismay of our settler forebears, we are coming, haltingly and haphazardly, to a new communal understanding. The early work of empirically minded naturalists and the specimens collected by thousands of amateurs and enthusiasts have been strengthened by generations of fieldwork in many scientific disciplines. Despite the claims of vexed tories guarding the battlements, this new ethos is not a cult. Nor is it underpinned by a misanthropic impulse – unless you believe that conceding intrinsic value to a shark or a bird is to betray your own species. Like every social movement environmentalism has its share of monomaniacs and hysterics, but at its heart is a reasonable, if sometimes disjointed, response to lived experience, disciplined study and hard-won data. Activists did not conjure collapsing fisheries, soil erosion, curdling wetlands and species extinctions from nothing. They did not invent Australia’s environmental challenges. They just noticed. They paid attention to their surroundings. They acted on evidence that everyone else around them was carefully failing to recognize.

  Thanks to those generations of lay interest, scientific inquiry and spirited public education, the anxiety and discomfort of our settler antecedents have given way to an affection and care they could not have foreseen. More and more of us take pride in our natural heritage. At last it seems we’ve begun to see past Dampier’s infernal flies, to behold in our remarkable diversity of habitats, landforms and species the riches of a continental isolation that so long troubled us. Things once seen as impossibly homely, weird or simply perverse are now understood as precious. This irreplaceable organic estate informs our aesthetics and politics, our notions of pleasure and recreation. In short, it shapes our mentality. Not only have we started to integrate and internalize all these lessons, we’re learning to appreciate the fragility of what sustains us.

  But heartening as this change of thinking has been, it’s come at a steep price. By the time we see what lies before us, much of it is compromised or ailing. It often seems that just as an ecosystem excites our interest and we start to notice its complexity, it’s already collapsing. Some species of plants and an
imals have been expunged before we even understood what they were. This tragic pattern is yet to be outgrown. Twenty-first-century governments continue to make decisions based on the assumptions of the nineteenth century, which is one reason Australia has the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world, and why UNESCO is still keeping a wary eye on our stewardship of the Great Barrier Reef.

  Still, the scruffy outliers of conservation are now suits with seats in parliament. The Greens are the third political stream in this country and in the past decade this has caused us to redefine old notions of right and left, radical and conservative, progressive and liberal. Some of the legislative outcomes have been messy. Public consensusover issues like climate change has collapsed, and with the election in 2013 of a prime minister who believes the science behind global warming to be ‘crap’, not even the sunniest idealist could suggest that the national mind is a steadily opening flower. There’s no denying that progress is partial and incomplete, made plain by Australia’s ongoing nostalgic lurch to the right. But the fact that a party putting environmental concerns at the forefront can gain seats and hold them for nearly two decades is an institutional marker for just how much our seeing – and therefore our thinking – has changed.