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A history of exploration and research
on the Great Barrier Reef
(Extract from AIMS: The First Twenty-five Years, Chapter 1
Background, pp. 6-12)
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Introduction
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The Great Barrier Reef is one of our planet's most impressive
natural wonders, a tropical chain of coral reefs and islands more than
2,000 kilometres long. It begins at the south coast of Papua New
Guinea near latitude 9°S and runs south and east generally parallel
to the Australian coast until about latitude 24°S, off southern
Queensland. Depicting it as a line on the map makes it look far
simpler than it really is; in fact, there are more than 2,000
individual reefs and nearly 1,000 islands making up what Queenslanders
usually call just 'the Reef’. Nor is it easy to decide where it
begins and ends, for outlying reefs continue south to Lord Howe
Island, west through Torres Strait into the Arafura Sea, and east
across the Coral Sea to link with those of Melanesia and the Pacific.
The Reef is a living thing, or more accurately an enormous host of
living things, composed of living coral growing on dead coral. It is
extremely ancient: parts of it date back to the Miocene era, perhaps
twenty million years ago. Many, many generations of dead coral have
built themselves into great walls of stone, 230,000 square kilometres
in area and in places approaching a hundred metres in height. This
vast mass of thousands of cubic kilometres of calcium carbonate is
awesome enough to contemplate in itself, but what every observer of
the Reef describes first is the vividness and diversity of the living
organisms that cover it. Coral, algae, anemones, sponges, fish, worms,
starfish, turtles, molluscs, snakes, crustaceans, an extraordinary
catalogue of thousands of species of animals and plants living in
ecological relationships of bewildering complexity.
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BC
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~37000BC |
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There must have been a long period of human contact with the Great
Barrier Reef for which we have no direct evidence. We know that
Aboriginal people occupied the greater part of the Australian
continent for the entire period that can be measured by carbon dating.
Dates at the limit of the technique, about 37,000 years ago, have been
obtained from occupational deposits at Nurrabullgin or Mount Mulligan,
inland from Cairns. For much of that period the coast of Queensland
has not been where it is today, but at the edge of the continental
shelf, on the outer edge of the Reef.
The entire Great Barrier Reef
and the continental shelf to its west is at a depth of less than one
hundred metres below sea level. This is considerably less than the
minimum sea levels reached during episodes of glaciation on more than
one occasion during the Pleistocene era, between 18,000 and 100,000
years before the present. The entire area of the Reef was thus dry
land fringing a wide flat coastal plain for thousands of years during
a time when we know that Aboriginal people were already occupying most
of the Australian continent. We can infer that much of today's Great
Barrier Reef was probably occupied by human beings 20,000 years ago,
but no physical evidence of this has yet been found.
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BC
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AD
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AD
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Better information is available about the activities of early
Europeans who came into contact with the eastern coast of Australia,
although there are some puzzles in the historical record. Almost from
the first, there are written descriptions of the Reef by those who saw
it. Marine science was one of the first activities carried out by
Europeans in Australia. Investigation of the physical environment
ranked high among the aims of voyages of discovery, and scientific
enquiry usually began with the arrival of European explorers on the
Australian coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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1500
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1522
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Cristovao de Mendonca
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In the pattern of Australia's exploration and settlement, north
Queensland is something of an untidy paradox, probably the first part
of the continent seen by Europeans, but one of the last to be settled,
and even today relatively undeveloped. It is now widely believed that
the east coast of Australia was first sighted by a Portuguese
expedition, probably led by Cristovao de Mendonca, in about 1522.
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1600
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1606
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Willem
Jansz
Duyfken
Luis de Torres
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Certainly the west coast of Cape York Peninsula was charted by Willem
Jansz in the Duyfken in about March 1606, commencing forty
years of Dutch maritime exploration in Australian waters, and a few
months later Luis de Torres sailed from east to west along the
southern coast of Papua, and sighted the islands of Torres Strait.
Given this international interest, it is not an easy matter to
determine precisely who were the first Europeans to see the Great
Barrier Reef. We shall probably never know for certain what the
Portuguese discovered in Australian waters, but the name 'Coste
Dangereuse' for the tropical Queensland coast on later French charts
is taken by many historians to imply that someone who spoke Portuguese
had first-hand and apparently unhappy knowledge of the Reef. Some of
the 'shoals' Torres reported may have been the northernmost atolls of
the Reef. Despite their vigorous efforts elsewhere, the Dutch
navigators never saw the east coast of Australia.
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1700
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1768
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Louis de
Bougainville
La Boudeuse
L’Etoile
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The earliest Europeans to give unequivocal documentary evidence of
sighting an outlier of the Great Barrier Reef were French. On 6 June
1768 Louis de Bougainville, commanding the ships La Boudeuse and
L’Etoile, approached the Australian continent from the east,
encountering Bougainville Reef in about the latitude of Cooktown. It
was one of those moments when historical events seem to turn on an
accident of fate; were the members of a French naval expedition to
become the first Europeans to gaze on the fertile east coast of
Australia? Was the fleur-de-lys emblem of the Bourbon king about to be
hoisted on a Queensland beach? No, the purpose of the voyage was
simply to determine whether the Spanish-charted land of Espiritu Santo
was linked to the Dutch-charted continent of New Holland, and clearly
it was not. Confronted by a threatening line of surf in the open
ocean, and short of food, Bougainville's scientific curiosity failed
him and he turned north toward the well-charted route to Asia along
the north coast of New Guinea.
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1770
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James Cook
Endeavour
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None of these early fleeting glimpses of the Reef yet constituted
anything which might be called scientific study. Less than two years
after Bougainville, the Endeavour under James Cook sailed the
length of the Great Barrier Reef from May to August 1770. The
aim of Cook's expedition was scientific discovery in the tradition of
the Enlightenment; among his complement were the botanists Joseph
Banks and Daniel Solander with a staff of four illustrators. Most of
the voyage was made well inshore, probably seeing little of the Reef
until about the latitude of Cardwell, although experienced mariners
would have inferred a lot about the barrier from its effects on the
onshore swell. However on 11 June, Cook's party became intimately
acquainted with it when they struck Endeavour Reef, north of Cape
Tribulation, and were forced to spend six weeks repairing the ship on
shore at the site of modern Cooktown.
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Recognise
it? It's from Captain Cook's chart of the east coast of Australia. Townsville is about where Cleveland Bay is marked. The present site of
AIMS is accurately drawn immediately under the D of 'C. CLEVELAND'
(147°9E. longitude, an error of less than four nautical miles).
The limited time Cook spent on the Great Barrier Reef, the
unexpected predicament that confronted the Endeavour, and the
terrestrial qualifications of his scientists all meant that the 1770 expedition was able to carry out very little direct scientific
observation of the Reef. But when the refloated Endeavour sailed
through the Reef and along its eastern face for the first time, Joseph
Banks clearly understood its scale and structure, describing it as
'the Grand Reef, and writing of it with awe: 'A Reef such a one as I
now speak of is a thing scarcely known in Europe or indeed any where
but in these seas: it is a wall of Coral rock rising almost
perpendicularly out of the unfathomable ocean' (Beaglehole 1963, vol.
2, p. 105). As a result of Cook's voyage, the international
scientific community knew that the Reef existed, and that it was of
very great extent. Cook's discoveries also led directly to the British
settlement of Australia in 1788. In future, investigation of
the Reef would be done not only by European-based expeditions in the
course of circling the world, but by small Australian-based vessels
with time and resources for detailed study of the environment.
See also -
Fortunate discovery
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1789
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William Bligh
Providence
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After Cook, the next navigator to chart the Reef was William Bligh
in the Providence. Bligh's second Pacific voyage is much less
famous than his first. After the celebrated Bounty mutiny of
1789,
Bligh was given another command to carry out his original mission
of taking breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies. In the course of
this voyage he spent two weeks of September 1792 charting
passages through Torres Strait. With the settlement of Sydney,
communication with Asia depended on the inner passage west of the
Reef, and finding a reliable route west through the straits to the
Arafura Sea.
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1793
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Bampton
Hormuzeer
Alt
Chesterfield
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In 1793 further surveys of the Torres Strait
section of the Reef were undertaken by captains Bampton and Alt in the
ships Hormuzeer and Chesterfield. This activity
inaugurated several decades of hydrographic surveying in northern
Australian waters, usually by small naval vessels. The first aim of
these surveys was to improve navigational charts for Admiralty use,
but they were also driven by a desire to investigate natural resources
for future economic exploitation, and to some extent by sheer
scientific curiosity.
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1800
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1801
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Matthew Flinders
Investigator
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Between 1801 and 1803, Matthew Flinders undertook the
monumental task of surveying the entire Australian coastline, which
the charts of the day showed as a patchwork put together by a dozen
earlier navigators. Flinders actually walked on the Reef, and gave a
lyrical description of his observations on the southern part of what
he named the 'Extensive Barrier Reefs' in October 1802: 'We had
wheat sheaves, mushrooms, stags horns, cabbage leaves, and a variety
of other forms, glowing under water with vivid tints of every shade
betwixt green, purple, brown, and white; equalling in beauty and
excelling in grandeur the most favourite parterre of the
curious florist' (Flinders 1814, vol. 2, p.88). Flinders' crew
tried stewing giant clams, the first record of exploitation of reef
products by Europeans, but he reported 'they were too rank to be
agreeable food'.
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1819
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Philip Parker King
Mermaid
Bathurst
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Hydrographer Philip Parker King carried on the
methodical task of filling in the spaces on the charts in two voyages,
commanding the Mermaid in 1819 and the Bathurst in 1820, and was responsible for accurately charting much of the
northern Reef in detail for the first time.
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1832 |
Charles Darwin / Wickham
/ Stokes
Beagle
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An early and influential writer on coral reefs was Charles Darwin,
naturalist aboard the Beagle during its world voyage between 1832
and 1836. The voyage is remembered for providing the
observations which led to Darwin's later formulation of his theory of
natural selection as the mechanism for the differentiation of species.
Darwin undertook a comprehensive study of coral reefs around the
world, and was also the first to study a fundamental problem in the
genesis of many tropical reefs - that they are built by
shallow-dwelling marine species, but have their bases in very deep
water - and in 1838 to hypothesise the process whereby this
situation developed. He referred at some length in his writings to the
'Australian Barrier-Reef. However, he never visited the Great Barrier
Reef; his comments on its structure are based on the charts and
writings of Flinders, King, Jukes and Bligh. The Beagle was to
return to Australia without Darwin for further hydrographic studies in
northern waters under Captains Wickham and Stokes in 1839-1841, and
some writers have confused these later expeditions with Darwin's epic
voyage.
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1842
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Blackwood /
J. Beete Jukes
Fly
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By the mid-nineteenth century, the British, New South Wales and
Queensland Governments were engaged in a nearly continuous process of
maritime surveys. Navigational safety was probably still their main
concern, but international scholars were making the study of the Reef
a regular feature of these voyages. J. Beete Jukes, trained as a
geologist, made prolonged studies throughout the full length of the
Reefs waters while aboard the Fly under Captain Blackwood in 1842-1846,
and his published observations remained for many years the most
detailed descriptions of the Reef. Jukes was as enthusiastic as
Flinders about what he saw on the Great Barrier Reef, but far more
knowledgeable:
Smooth round masses of maeandrina and astraea were contrasted
with delicate leaf-like and cup-shaped expansions of explanaria,
and with an infinite variety of branching madreporae and
seriataporae, some with mere finger-shaped projections, others
with large branching stems, and others again exhibiting an elegant
assemblage of interlacing twigs, of the most delicate and
exquisite workmanship. Their colours were unrivalled - vivid
greens, contrasting with more sober browns and yellows, mingled
with rich shades of purple, from pale pink to deep blue. Bright
red, yellow, and peach-coloured milliporae clothed those masses
that were dead, mingled with beautiful pearly flakes of eschara
and retepora; the latter looking like lacework in ivory. In among
the branches of the corals, like birds among trees, floated many
beautiful fish, radiant with metallic greens or crimsons, or
fantastically banded with black and yellow stripes. (Jukes 1847,
vol. 1, pp. 117-18)
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1843
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Blackwood /
J. Beete Jukes
Fly
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On 2 May 1843 the Fly anchored off Cape
Upstart and Jukes took a small party north in a cutter to explore the
coast. Jukes described Cape Ferguson, which he called 'the south-east
side of Cape Cleveland', as 'still more broken and abrupt, and also
more woody than Cape Upstart, having fine pines in many of its
gullies'. They landed there and found a freshwater pool behind the
dunes in a cove - almost certainly at the present site of AIMS - where
they bathed, and later had a friendly meeting on the beach with a
group of Aboriginal men. Jukes gave one of them a red flannel nightcap
(Jukes 1847, vol. 1, pp. 55-57).
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1848
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John MacGillivray /
Thomas
Huxley
Rattlesnake
Tam
O'Shanter
Bramble
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A succession of voyages by the Rattlesnake, the Tam
O'Shanter and the Bramble brought zoologist John
MacGillivray, who had been with Jukes on the Fly, and biologist Thomas
Huxley to Great Barrier Reef waters in the years 1848-1849.
MacGillivray concurred with Darwin on the processes of reef formation.
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1873 |
Spry
Challenger
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In 1873-1876 the monumental scientific expedition of HMS Challenger
circled the earth, identifying 715 new genera and 4,417 new
species, and in the process 'laid the foundation for the modern
science of oceanography' (Bailey 1953, p. 88). Challenger spent
part of August and September of 1874 surveying the northern Reef,
which one of her officers described as 'probably the grandest and most
extraordinary coralline structures existing in any part of the world'
(Spry 1877, p.199).
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1857
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As settlement spread up the, east coast of Australia, maritime
industries began to operate on the Reef; one account says beche-de-mer
fishing began on Green Island near the later site of Cairns as early
as 1857. North Queensland was settled in the 1860s, and as ports like
Bowen, Cardwell and Townsville began to act as bases for maritime
industry, there were economic incentives to study the Reef. The
research that had been done on the Reef in the nineteenth century was
summed up and extended by William Saville-Kent in his massive work The
Great Barrier Reef of Australia, published in 1893.
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 Saville-Kent's massive book, first published in 1893 and with a
second edition in 1900, gave the Great Barrier Reef almost instant
worldwide fame. Ever since, this, the world's largest coral reef and
the largest structure made by living organisms, has remained one of
Australia's most treasured possessions.
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This landmark volume comprehensively defined the state of knowledge
in its day, and became the standard reference on the Reef for decades.
Some conservation-minded modern readers will be disturbed by the
book's sub-title: 'its products and potentialities' Saville-Kent saw
the Reef principally as a resource for economic exploitation, pointing
out on the first page of his introduction that products such as pearls
and pearlshell, beche-de-mer, trochus shell and guano worth £100,000
were exported from the Reef annually, and enthusiastically pressing
for further development of 'the prolific resources of the region'.
However, he also saw clearly the need for conservation of maritime
resources. Saville-Kent was cultivating pearls in Queensland from 1890
onward, pioneering techniques that were later adopted by the Japanese
pearl industry.
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1888
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Sustained and systematic marine research in Australia also had its
origins in the requirements of the commercial fishing industry, as the
various colonial governments became aware of the need for better
knowledge of the resource. As early as 1888, the Tasmanian Government
briefly employed Saville-Kent as Chief Inspector of Fisheries, a role
which included research and experiments in fish culture. The following
year he became Commissioner for Fisheries in Queensland, the post
which gave rise to his book four years later, and he subsequently held
the same position in Western Australia.
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1900
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1902
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In 1902, the New South Wales
Government likewise appointed Harald Dannevig to the position of
Superintendent of Fisheries Investigations, overseeing research into
fish hatcheries.
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1908
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Dannevig resigned in 1908 to take up the new
Commonwealth position of Director of Fisheries. This was the first
involvement of the Commonwealth in marine science, and Dannevig
commenced the first systematic program of oceanographic research in
Australia, surveying southern waters to establish their fishery
potential. This work ended abruptly when the Research Vessel Endeavour
was lost in the Southern Ocean with Dannevig and the entire crew
late in 1914. This was an enormous blow to the fledgling discipline of
marine science in Australia. The First World War intervened, and it
was 1933 before the Commonwealth again became directly involved
in marine research.
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1922
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The Great Barrier Reef Committee was founded in 1922 under
the auspices of the Geographical Society of Queensland, representing
universities, learned societies and government departments throughout
eastern Australia and New Zealand. Its aim was to 'promote and conduct
scientific enquiry into the fauna, flora and genesis of the Great
Barrier Reef; and to protect and conserve the Reef, and to determine,
report on and advise of its proper utilisation'. One of its first
field experiments was to drill a 600 feet deep borehole on
Michaelmas Cay, near Cairns, in an attempt to elucidate the Reefs
geological origins; the cores were poor, and the results inconclusive.
The Committee obtained funding both in Australia and from Cambridge
University to mount a major research expedition led by Maurice Yonge,
and in 1928-1929 a team of about twenty scientists, principally
from Britain, spent over a year camped on Low Isles near Port Douglas,
carrying out research in the vicinity. A start was made on the
taxonomy of Reef species, and for the first time there was sustained
study of the Reefs ecology, and its changes over time.
This impressive momentum could not be maintained. The Committee was
never really more than a loose confederation of research scientists
and others whose professional interests coincided in a concern for the
Reef. It had no legal powers or status, and precious little funding,
undertaking research on an opportunistic basis as funds became
available from one source or another. In 1951, with assistance
from the Queensland Government, it built a research station on Heron
Island near Gladstone which then for some years became the principal
location for scientific research on the Reef In 1961 the
Committee became incorporated into the University of Queensland.
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1930
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The Commonwealth re-entered the field of marine research in the 1930s.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) was
established by Federal statute in 1926. Its charter was to
provide research and development support for Australia's primary and
secondary industries and from the outset a large proportion of its
activity was in the field of agriculture. Under pressure from the
fishing industry, the Commonwealth in 1933 provided CSIR with
funding to establish a Fisheries Investigation Section which was in
operation in Melbourne by 1937. During the Second World War it
established laboratories and a marine base at Cronulla in Sydney and
was renamed the Division of Fisheries. After the war CSIR took on its
modern form, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation (CSIRO).
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1948
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The Division of Fisheries naturally concentrated on applied
research with commercial objectives in mind, and much of that research
was carried out in temperate waters where the bulk of the Australian
commercial fishing industry was located. There were some exceptions.
In 1948 CSIRO established a research station at Thursday Island
to study commercial pearlshell, an industry that did not have long to
run. By contrast, in the 1960s the Fisheries Division undertook
a major research project on the prawns of the Gulf of Carpentaria and
sparked a new industry, contributing to the establishment of Karumba
and Weipa as prawn trawling ports. Recognising the need for general
oceanographic data to underpin applied research, CS1RO extended its
mandate in the 1960s, participating in oceanographic surveys in
the Indian Ocean in cooperation with the Royal Australian Navy. The
Division is still the main agent of applied marine research in
Australia. It split into the separate Divisions of Fisheries and
Oceanography in 1981, and relocated its Marine Laboratories to
Hobart in 1985.
A fundamental technological development transformed the practice of
marine biology and all other underwater studies in the years following
the Second World War. For centuries scientists had studied marine life
by netting and dredging specimens and taking them home to the
laboratory. The massive Challenger report is in fact a study of
dead, dried, bottled and pickled specimens examined at leisure back in
Britain. The only people who had actually seen the living Reef
environment firsthand were those like Flinders who had walked on its
surface, or perhaps like Jukes put their faces a foot under the
surface of the water. By the late nineteenth century it was possible
to dive into that environment, but only by means of what we now call
'hardhat' diving, with a diver in a canvas suit, either dangling
helplessly from a rope or tramping around the bottom in lead boots and
a brass helmet, and breathing compressed air pumped down a hose from a
boat on the surface. This was how the pearl and trochus divers
operated for decades, and they suffered terrible casualties from the
bends, embolisms, and the other poorly understood effects of breathing
air under compression for extended periods.
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1950
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In the 1950s a new generation of technology reached
Australia, known as scuba, from the initials of 'self-contained
underwater breathing apparatus' Various schemes for taking a supply of
air underwater had been around for centuries, but where they all fell
down was the problem that for a human being to take a significant
quantity of air underwater, it must be under high compression. The
diver cannot safely breathe that air unless there is a simple and
reliable way of reducing the pressure of every breath to something
like that of the surrounding water. So mobile underwater diving
awaited the development of small high pressure tanks, a pressure
regulator, and better understanding of the physiological implications
of breathing pressurised air at depth.
These all became available during the Second World War, when most
of the combatant navies developed compact underwater gear to enable
divers to carry out demolition and salvage work. The most successful
regulator was that developed by Emile Gagnan in 1943, subsequently
adapted by Jacques Cousteau for biological research, and on the market
by the 1950s. Early designs were both expensive and clumsy, but
by the 1960s reliable scuba equipment was on sale at reasonable
prices in diving stores all over Australia.
The transformation this brought to marine science was tremendous.
For the first time, free swimming divers could enter the marine
environment and safely remain there for long periods. This meant
several things. First, parts of the underwater world that had never
been seen by human beings were now opened up to scientific
investigation. In addition, it became possible to observe a whole
ecosystem rather than simply its constituent parts, and to do so
without destructive intervention in the very environment being
studied. The scientist no longer had to haul individual creatures up
to the surface for study in isolation as dead specimens, but could
observe the natural interaction of living organisms with minimal
impact on them. The implications for marine research were as dramatic
as the difference between looking through a telescope at the moon, and
walking on its surface. A new generation of scientists could now go to
the Reef, instead of taking bits of the Reef back to the laboratory.
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1960
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By 1960, the major hydrographic studies of the Great Barrier
Reef had been done, but very little detail was known of its physical
oceanography or its biology: what species were there, how they lived
and interacted, whether they were resilient or vulnerable to change.
Probably not many more than fifty research scientists had ever visited
the Reef. Their studies had mostly been brief and piecemeal, providing
isolated glimpses of parts of the Reef, but not adding up to an
overall picture. Nor did that situation seem likely to change, with
only one poorly-funded research station at Heron Island on the
southern tip of the Reef, and occasional visits for specific projects
by a commercially oriented research institution whose main interest
lay in the temperate waters of southern Australia. But events on the
Great Barrier Reef were about to demonstrate a painful need for a much
greater marine research capability.
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September 5, 1999
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19990905