Tourism is both one of the most powerful economic arguments for protecting the Great Barrier Reef and one of the most direct sources of damage to it. The GBR generates approximately $6.4 billion annually and supports 64,000 jobs. It is…
Tropical Queensland is, by most serious assessments, the finest birdwatching destination in Australia. This is not a claim I make carelessly. The Wet Tropics rainforest has the highest bird species density of any region in the country, including seventeen endemic…
Weather around coral reef islands rarely behaves exactly the way forecasts suggest. Even when meteorological reports predict clear skies and calm seas, local conditions can shift throughout the day in subtle ways. The islands themselves influence wind direction, cloud formation,…
The whale changed direction. That’s the thing I remember most clearly from my first Hervey Bay whale watching trip — not the size of the animal, not the spray from the blow, but the moment a 40-tonne humpback decided to…
The first time I saw a crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) outbreak in person, I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes. The reef slope ahead of me was covered in them — fifteen, twenty, thirty of the animals visible…
Nobody told me the reef would be louder at night. I knew it would look different — that was the whole point of the night dive, the reason I’d signed up for it at a small liveaboard operation off Osprey…
There is a version of reef engagement that requires no fins, no mask, no certification, and no boat. It requires only a low tide, appropriate footwear, and the willingness to look carefully at a metre of water. Reef walking —…
I’ve planted coral. I want to say upfront that I’m aware of the complexity around that statement — the debates about whether reef restoration is a meaningful response to a climate-driven problem, the questions about genetic diversity and transplant survival,…
I have never had a serious diving accident. I want to be careful about how I say that, because it could be read as smugness, and it isn’t meant that way. The more accurate statement is: I have never had…
Broome is a town that exists at the edge of several worlds simultaneously and has developed, over a century of multicultural history, a character that doesn’t quite resemble anywhere else in Australia. At the end of the nineteenth century, Broome…