WHEN Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, snared on coral in 1770, the Great Barrier Reef
became his “labyrinth of shoals”, a life-threatening trap. About 30 years
later, Matthew Flinders, a British navigator, saw the reef in a different
light. Flinders is best known for circumnavigating Australia, and for giving
the continent its name. Less well known is that he was the first European to
discover the reef for its beauty. To Flinders, its corals were a “new creation”
with shapes “excelling in grandeur the most favourite parterre of the curious florist”.
For Charlie Veron, a scientist who has seen more of the corals from underwater
than anyone, the legacy after two centuries of human impact casts a more
chilling sight. Watching the reef’s disintegration, and perhaps its extinction,
is “like seeing a house on fire in slow motion”.
Iain McCalman, a historian at the
University of Sydney, has written a masterly biography of the Great Barrier
Reef through 12 stories like these. The idea came to him in 2001 when he joined
a group of historians, literary scholars, astronomers, botanists and indigenous
guides aboard a replica of Cook’s ship to re-enact his 18th-century voyage.
Most visitors today see the world’s largest reef as a tourist destination. Mr
McCalman found it so vast that no human mind can take it in except, perhaps,
“astronauts who’ve seen its full length from outer space”.
The reef extends about 2,400km (1,500 miles) along Australia’s east
coast, almost to Papua New Guinea, covering an area half the size of Texas.
Like Mr McCalman’s shipmates, and the colourful figures who inhabit his
stories, people are still trying to make sense of the reef’s origins and
character. Scientists on Lizard Island opened Mr McCalman’s eyes to the most
critical chapter of its story: its ailing health. Rising sea temperatures,
linked to global warming, have bleached the colour from much of its coral. Over
the past 27 years, half its coral has died, thanks to the bleaching, cyclones
and the spread of the predatory crown-of-thorns starfish...
... The biggest myth surrounds the
story of Eliza Fraser, a shipwrecked castaway who lived among aborigines in
1836, before a white man rescued her. John Curtis, a London journalist, wrote
up Mrs Fraser’s story as a sensational Victorian tale that pandered to the
racial prejudices of the time: a ravished lady plucked from a world of sexually
predatory savages and cannibals. There were other castaways: Barbara Thompson,
whom the reef’s Kaurareg people saw as a “ghost maiden” come back from the
dead; and James Morrill, a Briton, and Narcisse Pelletier, a Frenchman. All
survived with natives for years before re-entering white society. Yet, says Mr
McCalman, the toxic myth of Curtis’s version endures still; it has even
influenced versions of Eliza Fraser’s story by Sidney Nolan, an artist, and
Patrick White, a Nobel prize-winning novelist.
The
Great Barrier Reef, “the most impressive marine area in the world”, was listed
as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981, giving a sense of urgency to the
environmental problems that have mounted steadily since Cook’s voyage. Mr
McCalman’s sweeping and absorbing history is well timed. UNESCO recently
announced that as a result of industrial development and dredging along the
Queensland coast, the reef could be put on its “world heritage in danger” list
as early as next year. The battle that Wright termed a “finale without an
ending” still rages.
No comments:
Post a Comment