Michael Green

Writer and producer

In the line of fire

In Social justice, The Age on

Jailed Australian journalist Peter Greste goes to trial in a Cairo court today. His arrest underlines the growing dangers faced by reporters just trying to do their job.

PETER Greste made his last live cross on Al Jazeera’s English network on Saturday December 28. “Egypt is still functioning pretty much as normal,” he said. “But what we’re seeing is a growing sense of unease, of disorder, of insecurity.”

Greste is normally based in Nairobi, Kenya; he had been in Egypt for two weeks of a three-week stint, filling in for a colleague over Christmas.

With the smoggy Cairo skyline behind him, he spoke of the hundreds of people arrested in recent days as police swept through the streets looking for protesters.

On December 24, the military-backed government had declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. Only six months earlier, it had formed the country’s ruling party under elected president Mohamed Morsi.

On screen, Greste said it wasn’t clear who had been taken into custody – whether they were Muslim Brotherhood members, sympathisers or simply bystanders – but all faced a maximum of five years in jail.

Their fate would now depend on the judges, he said: “It does look pretty draconian.”

He was broadcasting from the balcony of the Marriott Hotel, on the Nile, where the network had established a makeshift office. The next night, authorities raided the hotel.

They arrested Greste, along with the Cairo bureau chief Mohamed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohamed. The three have been imprisoned for 66 days. Their fate, too, now rests with the judges.

The journalists have been accused of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood, broadcasting false news to undermine state security, and working without accreditation. Fahmy – who is a Canadian-Egyptian dual citizen – and Mohamed are also accused of being members of the Brotherhood.

The managing director of Al Jazeera English, Al Anstey, describes the charges as “baseless, unacceptable, and wholly unjustified”.

“What is going on in Egypt right now is a trial of journalism itself, so it is critical that we remain resolute in calling for freedom of speech… and for the immediate release of all of Al Jazeera’s journalists,” he says.

The jailing of his employees has been reported all over the world, but in Egypt, it is only one incident among many. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York–based advocacy group, says press freedom has declined there more rapidly than in any other country.

Attacks on reporters had risen under Morsi’s presidency, and continued after the military-backed government took power in July. In 2013, half a dozen journalists were killed, dozens detained and scores assaulted. Al Jazeera was one of eleven news outlets raided.

Robert Mahoney, the committee’s deputy director, says a climate of state- and self-censorship has taken hold.

In that, Egypt is far from alone. The committee recently released its annual risk list, which highlighted increasing violence against journalists in Bangladesh and Russia, and new legislation stifling free speech in Ecuador, Liberia, Russia, Vietnam and Zambia.

In Hong Kong too, the committee says “media freedom is at a low point”. Last week, Kevin Lau Chun-to, former editor of the Ming Pao newspaper, was attacked and slashed with a meat cleaver, only days after thousands of people rallied against increasing censorship. His sacking as editor was one of the sparks for the protest.

In 1992, the committee began closely tracking the number of journalists killed around the world. Its tally has risen to 1044. Other advocates, such as the International News Safety Institute and the International Federation of Journalists, put the number significantly higher.

Until World War II, such fatalities were almost unheard of. Decade on decade, from the 1960s the number of journalists killed in conflict has risen steeply.

Imprisonment and kidnapping are also at record levels. Over 200 journalists spent the new year languishing in jail – that’s the second highest in the Committee’s records, behind 2012.

Mahoney says 80 journalists were kidnapped in Syria alone last year. About 30 of them are still being held there. “We’ve seen kidnappings in conflicts before – in certain parts of Somalia, in Afghanistan and Pakistan – but we haven’t seen anything on this scale.”

*

Robert Capa’s most famous photo, Falling Soldier, shows a Spanish republican soldier with one arm flung back, gun in hand, collapsing at the moment of his death. It was shot in 1936.

The Hungarian photojournalist would cover five wars before a landmine killed him in 1954 during the French Indochina war. By then, he had redefined conflict reporting.

“Capa put himself into a new position: between troops and incoming fire, often shooting fear’s effect on faces, or the fire’s effect on bodies,” says American journalist Frank Greve, who has written about the history of reporters’ deaths in combat. “After Capa, anything less was kind of boring.”

Capa was one of the first journalists to sidestep tight military control and censorship. Given that freedom, he took risks that few had taken before.

But since then, those risks have multiplied. While communications technology and travel have become drastically cheaper and faster, newsrooms and the public have required the stories to match.

Warfare too has changed, he argues. Reporters can find it hard to predict where bullets will come from, and can’t rely on combatants viewing them as impartial observers.

The reporters, photographers and citizen journalists in Syria today still produce work with Capa’s “hot immediacy”, Greve says. “But I suspect they spend more time risking their lives than he did.”

Dr Colleen Murrell is a former international news editor – she worked with Peter Greste at the BBC in the early 1990s. Now a journalism academic at Deakin University, Murrell researches the way foreign correspondents operate.

She says postings with a foreign bureau are the most coveted in the industry. Travelling to a danger zone has always been a way for young reporters to get a break. More people are trying their luck than ever before, but at the same time, those jobs are vanishing.

On-staff reporters always had the benefit of insurance, safety training and gear, and a support network if things went wrong. “Now it’s a lot more dangerous for a larger number of people,” Murrell says.

In the last two decades, a growing proportion of journalists’ fatalities have been among freelancers.

But Murrell says they’re beginning to organise. There are more than 4000 members of The Vulture Club, a hidden Facebook group where people exchange tips on safe border crossings, reliable interpreters and local conditions.

Likewise, the Frontline Club, a London-based network of foreign correspondents, recently established a freelance register and support collective.

Murrell says these two groups have also been pushing international media companies to take greater responsibility – either by not encouraging freelance contributors to go to dangerous places, or if they do go, ensuring they’re equipped to deal with the risks.

One way journalists can prepare is by undertaking hostile environment training. In mid-March, 20 reporters – of varying experience – will attend a seven-day intensive program in the Kanchanaburi region of Thailand, on the River Kwai. It’s coordinated by a company called Dynamiq, which works with Reuters and the ABC.

Shaun Filer has been running these courses for six years. Formerly a medic in the US Marines, and then a journalist, Filer leads his charges through sessions on emergency first aid and personal security.

The course culminates in a 24-hour disaster scenario on a Thai military base, in which participants must negotiate a border crossing, meet and vet interpreters, organise convoys, and make sure their kit and accommodation is safe, among other things.

They might need to sleep rough or deal with aggressive people at checkpoints. All the while, they must regularly file video, photos and text. “It’s a really fun week,” Filer says, wryly.

For now, however, few of the attendees are freelancers, and even fewer are local country journalists – yet they’re the ones who bear the most risk.

“Our local colleagues are the majority of the people imprisoned, assaulted and murdered,” Filer says. “But it takes an Australian journalist to be on trial for us to even have the conversation.”

In the past decade, foreign journalists have increasingly become targets. Even so, nine out of 10 reporters killed die in their own country. Most of the deaths are murders, not casualties of war.

“Local journalists are murdered because they’re rummaging around in stories people don’t want aired,” explains Robert Mahoney, from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“That’s always been the case. What’s even worse is that nine out of 10 of those murders go unpunished. When you don’t address the problem of impunity, journalists stop writing stories, because they think they’re going to get killed for it.”

Last year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to establish an annual “International Day to End Impunity” for crimes against journalists, on November 2.

Mahoney acknowledges that drug cartels, corrupt officials and authoritarian regimes are oblivious to such measures. But he says they’re worth pursuing. Some countries with many unsolved murders of journalists – such as Mexico, Brazil and India – are sensitive to international pressure.

“This is human rights work,” he says. “It’s long, it’s slow and it’s a hard slog.”

*

Last Thursday, protestors gathered in over 30 cities to rally in support of the Al Jazeera journalists.

The event was part of a huge campaign for their release, which has played out most publicly on Twitter, where it has attracted hundreds of thousands of hits. Thousands of people, including many prominent journalists all around the world, have posed for photos with their mouths taped shut.

In Sydney’s Martin Place, the federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Chris Warren, called on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to appeal directly to the Egyptian president.

Foreign minister Julie Bishop says she doesn’t believe that would help secure his release. “The advice I have received from other governments in the region is that we should not seek to humiliate the Egyptian authorities. We should seek to work as assiduously as possible behind the scenes,” she says.

“There’s a whole other issue about journalists facing significant risks in places of conflict and tension. I understand all of that, but my focus right now is to get Mr Greste home as soon as possible.”

Bishop says consular officials have met several times with the 48-year-old and his family, and also with Egyptian prosecutors. She had spoken directly with the foreign minister, Nabil Fahmy, but last week the entire Egyptian cabinet resigned.

The Greste family is keenly aware of the fragility of the Egyptian state – after all, that’s why Peter was called in to report from Cairo.

His parents, Lois and Juris, live in the Brisbane suburb of Sherwood. They spoke to him on Christmas day. “He was pretty cautious about going out on the streets, even at that time,” Lois says.

Greste has covered conflicts in the Middle East and worked as a correspondent in Latin America and, for many years, Africa.

“He’s no cowboy journalist,” Juris says. “He’s got a background of dealing with really tough situations.”

In 2005, Greste’s producer Kate Peyton was shot and killed in Somalia while the pair were standing outside a hotel. He returned six years later and his report for BBC from the streets of Mogadishu won a prestigious Peabody Award.

Al Jazeera has published two letters Greste wrote from prison in January. He described his broadcasts from Cairo as “some pretty mundane reporting”.

At first, after he was arrested, he hoped the authorities would understand he was caught up in a political struggle that was not his own.

The Egyptian government believes the Qatari broadcaster – especially its Arabic channel – promotes the Muslim Brotherhood.

But as the days passed, Greste realised that, amidst the broader crackdown on dissent, his arrest was not a mistake. One part of the struggle was his: “As a journalist, I am committed to defending a fundamental freedom of the press that no one in my profession can credibly work without,” he wrote.

“How do you accurately and fairly report on Egypt’s ongoing political struggle without talking to everyone involved?”

His brother Andrew has travelled to Cairo to support him, but despite several visits to Tora prison, his family remains unsure about what will happen when their son returns to court today. The processes of the Egyptian legal system, and even the charges he faces, seem hazy.

“You try to not build up too much hope,” Lois says, “but you can’t help but build a little bit.”

Read this article at The Age online

Lest we remember

In Social justice on

The Australian War Memorial was first advised internally to acknowledge the frontier wars way back in 1979. Our military historians accept that colonial conflict is part of our military history, but the Memorial still holds out. Why?

NEAR the end of his new book, Forgotten War, Henry Reynolds makes a demand: the Australian War Memorial must commemorate the frontier wars.

The book examines Australia’s violent colonial history, and reaches into some of our most challenging public debates – about land rights, sovereignty, and reconciliation. But here, Reynolds chooses one simple theme:

“A critical question is whether the Aboriginal dead will ever be admitted to the sacred centre of white Australian nationalism, the Australian War Memorial. If they are excluded in death from the pantheon they are excluded from the nation. That is surely axiomatic. We will know that we are all members of the same nation when a shrine in memory of the fallen warriors is placed side by side with the tomb of the unknown soldier.”

In September last year, Brendan Nelson, former Liberal Party leader and now the director of the Memorial, addressed the national press club. Reynolds’ book had just come out, and ABC journalist Michael Brissenden asked if the Memorial would acknowledge the frontier wars.

Nelson said the story should be told, but by the National Museum, perhaps. “The Australian War Memorial is not, in my very strong view, the institution to tell that story.”

I interviewed Nelson recently, and he maintained that position. Let’s consider his arguments.

“The origins of the war memorial are in the depths of World War I, in 1916, envisioned by Charles Bean our official historian who was with the troops at the front through the entire war. The Australian War Memorial’s purpose and function is to tell the story of Australia’s engagement in, and experience of, war and other operations on behalf of Australia. It is not the Memorial’s function to tell the story of disputes and armed conflicts where they have occurred within Australia,” Nelson says.

The memorial’s function is defined by its legislation: the Australian War Memorial Act 1980.

It says that, among other things, the institution must maintain a national memorial of Australians who have died “as a result of any war or warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service”. It must also disseminate information relating to Australian military history, including that of forces raised in Australia before Federation.

In a public statement late last year, the Memorial argued that under the Act, the definition of its role “does not include internal conflicts between the Indigenous populations and the colonial powers of the day”.

This is technically true: those battles aren’t expressly included. But neither are they excluded. The Act doesn’t specify whether the conflicts must be on home soil or overseas. The Memorial’s position appears to be a matter of politics and extraordinary inertia, not history.

Peter Stanley began working at the Australian War Memorial in 1980, and from 1987 until 2007 he was its Principal Historian. He’s written 25 books, and is now a professor at the University of New South Wales, at the Defence Force Academy in Canberra.

Stanley says the question of whether the Memorial should recognise frontier conflict was first raised by Geoffrey Blainey in an internal report in 1979, and Stanley himself presented a paper on it in 1981.

He argues that the institution’s public position is based a narrow reading of its legislation and a flawed view of history.

“The Act does allow the Memorial to deal with ‘warlike’ actions – and frontier conflict looks warlike to me: as I asked in 1981, ‘If it’s not war, what is it?’” he says.

“I gave the same advice as principal historian, but it was declined. It has come up repeatedly during the terms of successive directors and governments, but has been either outright rejected or avoided as too hard.”

This is what Nelson says:

“It’s questionable whether there was a declared war in Australia, a war declared by the colonies against Indigenous people. After the British garrisons left, the violence where it did occur was from police militia, colonial militia and Indigenous militia.”

This position is decades out of step with historical scholarship, Stanley says. “Australia’s military historians have long accepted that frontier conflict was a part of Australia’s military history. No military historians I know take the opposite view.”

In its public statement, the Memorial said it had “found no substantial evidence that home-grown military units, whether state colonial forces or post-Federation Australian military units, ever fought against the Indigenous population of this country.”

This, Stanley says, is “historically simply wrong”.

“Military forces raised in Australia did prosecute war against the Aborigines: the (Military) Mounted Police – which perpetrated the Slaughterhouse Creek massacre of 1838, for example – was raised in Sydney in 1825, so the Memorial is plain wrong to argue that there weren’t any soldiers raised in Australia which conducted the frontier war.

“But this is just legalism. An armed conflict occurred across the pastoral frontier for about a century: don’t tell me that that’s not an actual military conflict. It resulted in more than 30,000 deaths and involved the British army. To try to find legal reasons why it isn’t recognised is just logic-chopping and pedantry.”

Nelson, who began his directorship in late 2012, says he won’t discuss the Memorial’s internal deliberations. But the circumstances are exceptional: a publicly funded institution appears to have rejected expert advice for more than three decades. In the name of transparency, it should open its archive.

“Charles Bean was determined it should be a place of commemoration, of national unity. He wanted it to be a place that had a spiritual ambiance for the men of the 1st AIF and the women as nurses, as they were then,” Nelson says. “It’s simply inappropriate for the Australian War Memorial to be telling the story of violent armed conflict between Indigenous and non-indigenous people.”

Here, Nelson seems to make two arguments: that commemorating the frontier wars would upset the atmosphere of the Memorial; and that it must remain true to Bean’s original vision.

The history of the frontier wars has certainly been divisive – in part, because our history remains little known among the community. But it need not always be so. Indeed, Reynolds argues his case in the name of national unity.

Bean was adamant the Memorial must not glorify war. Given the significance of their fight for the land and the ongoing repercussions of colonisation, a shrine to the fallen warriors would surely pass that test.

What’s more, David Stephens, secretary of the Honest History website (Peter Stanley is the president), points out that we already recognise the Turkish resistance to the Diggers. On Anzac Parade, opposite the Memorial, is the Ataturk Memorial Garden, featuring a bust of Kemal Ataturk, commander of Turkish infantry at Gallipoli and, later, the first president of the Republic of Turkey.

Bean first spoke of his notion for a memorial while on the battlefield at Pozières in the Somme valley. But we can’t hold time still on his vision: the horse has bolted, and turned into a light armoured vehicle. Bean wanted a memorial to commemorate the forces in World War I. Then World War II happened. His vision had to change even before the Memorial opened in 1941.

The Memorial has changed as the years and decades have passed, and now commemorates several wars both before and after World War I, as well as our peacekeeping missions.

“I think the War Memorial’s council fears that acknowledging the truth of frontier war will somehow bring Anzac into disrepute,” Stanley says. “But the two are completely separate.

“It is not an aspect of Australia’s military history that Australians take pride in, but you can’t always cheer your history – sometimes you just have to accept it.”

*

In September last year, during his address at the press club, Nelson said that the Australian War Memorial “represents the soul of our nation”.

“It is about our past, it is about our history, but more importantly it’s actually about our future. A people that neither knows and nor, more importantly, understands its history, in my view, is dangerous,” he said.

Nelson was thinking about World War I, and all those cemeteries and battlefields he visited while he was the ambassador to the European Union and NATO.

But he has returned to the wide brown land. There is a military history here that must be known and understood too, and the Memorial’s council has a unique responsibility to help us remember and interpret it. If one day it comes to pass, the shrine to the fallen warriors may primarily serve non-Indigenous Australia, for its understanding and education.

The Australian War Memorial is on Ngunnawal land. I asked the United Ngunnawal Elders Council what they thought of Reynolds’ proposition, but they have not yet considered the issue. It need not be the only place.

I also spoke to playwright Jim Everett, a Plangerrmairreenner man, of the Ben Lomond people in northern Tasmania. “If they asked me, I’d say ‘no we don’t want to be stuck alongside you mob – we had to fight you’. If we want to remember our heroes, then we should be doing it ourselves,” he says.

“We should be dedicating a part of country to our fallen heroes – perhaps we could mark it with a rock. I don’t like the idea of statues.”

Wurundjeri elder Bill Nicholson is adamant that Australia should recognise that Aboriginal people fought for their lands. “It would be great to commemorate Aboriginal warriors – I’m just not sure yet if the War Memorial is the appropriate spot,” he says.

Reynolds has also suggested Aboriginal land councils throughout the country consider if they’d like to establish memorials, and if so, receive the funding to do it.

Nicholson approves. “I would love to see our freedom fighters commemorated everywhere over Wurundjeri country,” he says. “We’re still fighting for the same country today. The battle goes on. It hasn’t ended.

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website

Once were warriors

In Social justice, The Age on

As Melbourne plans a memorial to Aboriginal resistance fighters, momentum is growing for official recognition that the brutal colonial frontier wars were pivotal in this nation’s history.

THE two Aboriginal men were dressed wholly in white, including white caps and capes, for their public hanging. It was early in the morning on January 20, 1842. Maulboyheenner refused the outfit at first, but Tunnerminnerwait laughed as he was helped with the long white socks.

A gaoler asked why he wasn’t worried about dying. Tunnerminnerwait answered – so the story goes – that he had three heads: one for the noose, one for the grave, and one for Van Diemen’s Land.

The two men were drawn in a cart to Gallows Hill, the site now occupied by RMIT University next to the city baths. A quarter of Victoria’s white population at the time – 5,000 people – attended the execution. The atmosphere was like a “race-course”, the Port Phillip Herald reported, “… with spectators as anxiously awaiting the awful scene as if it were a bull-bait or prize-ring”.

The pair had been condemned to death for the murder of two whalers at Cape Paterson, during several weeks of raids conducted with three women – Truganini, Planobeena (Tunnerminnerwait’s wife) and Pyterruner. Theirs was likely an act of resistance on the violent frontier of newly settled Victoria.

Last December, the Melbourne City Council voted unanimously to establish a permanent marker to the men. It will vote again in late April to decide on the form of the memorial, after consulting with Aboriginal leaders here and in Tasmania.

The council’s decision comes after sustained pressure from a small group of citizens and Aboriginal leaders who have staged a ceremony on the anniversary of the hanging each year since 2006.

“These young men died for our country, for our people,” Boon Wurrung elder Aunty Carolyn Briggs said at this year’s commemoration. “They were put up on show.”

The new memorial will be established amidst renewed questioning of the way Australia commemorates the violence that occurred on the colonial frontier. They are questions that challenge the official military history marked by the Australian War Memorial, and even the sovereignty of the nation itself. 

Adding to this debate is a new book, Forgotten War, by historian Henry Reynolds. In it, he lays out evidence that colonial authorities and settlers regarded the conflict as war, and argues that this history must be acknowledged.

If these seem difficult questions now, it is no surprise; they were such from the earliest days of the colony.

Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner stood trial a month before they were executed. The three women were tried and found not guilty as accessories.

All five were from Tasmania; they’d been brought to Melbourne by George Augustus Robinson, the newly appointed Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip, two years earlier. He had argued they would be “most useful auxiliaries in conciliating the natives of Australia”. None were permitted to give evidence in court.

For six weeks, in October and November 1841, they raided stations in the forest from Dandenong to Cape Paterson, stealing guns and supplies, and eluded the large parties sent to catch them – once, by stealing a boat. Finally, a group of 29, including seven Aboriginal trackers, captured them at dawn near Venus Bay.

In research prepared for the council, historian Clare Land describes the five’s exploits, capture and trial as “the biggest story” in the newspapers of the day. The Port Phillip Herald reported they had committed “numerous depredations” and “unmentionable atrocities”.

Their defence counsel was Redmond Barry, the man who sentenced Ned Kelly to hang nearly four decades later. He argued, unsuccessfully, for a jury partially comprised of people who, like his clients, were not subjects of the Queen. Barry referred to the “destruction” of their nation during “the war” in Tasmania as motivation for their raids: “revenge in minds like theirs was not easily forgotten, and particularly for wrongs like theirs”, he said.

Yet in only half an hour, the jury reached its verdict. They recommended mercy on the death penalty, but Judge John Walpole Willis denied it. He told the men their punishment was designed to inspire “terror… to deter similar transgressions”.

In that respect it failed, explains Land. “There was guerrilla war and frontier violence in every district of Victoria at the time,” she says. “It went on from the late 1830s until the gold rush of the early 1850s.”

In his 2005 book, Aboriginal Victorians, Richard Broome concluded it was likely that 1,000 Aborigines and 80 Europeans were killed on the state’s frontier.

One squatter in western Victoria at the time, Nial Black, wrote in his diary that it was “universally and distinctly understood” that settlers needed to kill Aborigines to gain control over their properties.

The best way to get land, he wrote, was to “take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left”.

*

On January 26, thousands of people gathered in a shady park in Belgrave to celebrate Survival Day. It is the seventh time the event has been held, and the theme this year was the frontier wars.

The Yarra Ranges regional museum set up its marquee with a display on the “Battle of Yering”, near Yarra Glen in January 1840. A small memorial stands near the Melba Highway, marking the location of the clash between dozens of Wurundjeri men and troopers of the Border Police.

The Wurundjeri men attacked a homestead where their leader, Jaga Jaga, was imprisoned. While the troopers were distracted in a counterattack, others of the clan broke him free.

Wurundjeri elder Uncle Bill Nicholson says it began with a dispute over a potato crop – a sign that people were going hungry. “The Battle of Yering was a great symbol that Aboriginal people did not just sit back and let people take over their land. They fought for it, and fought hard,” he says.

“People in this city have to know how the Indigenous people were treated in that era, because only then can we move forward in reconciliation.”

The memorial is one of very few recognising frontier conflict throughout the state.

This imbalance in our official history – between our domestic and overseas conflicts – is the subject of Forgotten War, which last week won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction. As he announced the prize, Premier Denis Napthine described it as “a very important book for Victorians and Australians”.

Reynolds says Aboriginal organisations around the nation should be given the opportunity to consider whether or not they want memorials, and if so, funding for their establishment.

“We’ve raised war to be absolutely central to the national story,” he says. “But what about the most important war in our history, the one about fundamental Australian political issues – sovereignty and property?”

He contrasts the earliest campaign recognised by the Australian War Memorial – in Sudan, in 1885 – with the intense fighting that was occurring on home soil at the time.

The New South Wales government sent 770 men to assist the British to quell an uprising. The soldiers saw little or no fighting, but six died of disease.

“The 1880s was possibly the most intense period of conflict and mass killing, because miners, cattlemen and pearl shellers were penetrating right across north Australia,” Reynolds says.

“So you have this extraordinary juxtaposition: the Sudan campaign is treated reverentially, but the much more serious conflict is simply ignored.”

Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year in 2007, recently expressed his “personal sense of outrage” that Aboriginal warriors who fought and died defending their lands and people against white settlers are ignored by the Australian War Memorial.

The memorial’s director, former Liberal Party leader Dr Brendan Nelson, says the story of frontier conflict needs to be told, but not at his institution.

“Our mission is to tell the stories of Australians in the service of the nation in the defence of our country. [It] is not an institution which presents a story of armed conflict within Australia amongst Australians,” he says.

“It’s questionable whether there was a declared war in Australia. After the British garrisons left, the violence, where it did occur, was from police militia, colonial militia and Indigenous militia.”

For two decades, until 2007, Peter Stanley was the principal historian at the Australian War Memorial. Now a research professor at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Stanley says it is not only historians of our Indigenous past who regard the nation’s colonisation as war.

“Australia’s military historians have long accepted that frontier conflict was a part of Australia’s military history. No military historians I know take the opposite view,” he says.

“An armed conflict occurred across the pastoral frontier for about a century: don’t tell me that that’s not an actual military conflict. It resulted in more than 30,000 deaths and involved the British army.”

Stanley says the question of whether the Australian War Memorial should recognise frontier conflict was first raised by Geoffrey Blainey in an internal report in 1979, and Stanley himself presented a paper on it in 1981.

“I gave the same advice as principal historian, but it was declined,” he says.

Stanley argues that the memorial’s public position is based a narrow reading of its legislation and a flawed view of history: the ongoing denial that frontier conflict constituted war.

“It has come up repeatedly during the terms of successive directors and governments, but has been either outright rejected or avoided as too hard,” he says. “I think the war memorial’s council fears that acknowledging the truth of frontier war will somehow bring Anzac into disrepute. But the two are completely separate.

“It is not an aspect of Australia’s military history that Australians take pride in, but you can’t always cheer your history – sometimes you just have to accept it,” he says.

On the anniversary of the Melbourne hangings, Tasmanian writer and filmmaker Jim Everett said the council’s memorial would “be a very big step towards white and black Australia coming together and hopefully [to] a recognition that Aboriginal people are indeed their own people”.

“I’m a Plangerrmairreenner man,” Everett said to the crowd. “I hold my sovereignty as my shield.”

For his part, Everett doesn’t covet a place for Indigenous resistance fighters in the Canberra memorial. “If they asked me, I’d say ‘no we don’t want to be stuck alongside you mob – we had to fight you’,” he says. “If we want to remember our heroes, then we should be doing it ourselves.”

But wrangling over the appropriate place to recognise the wars doesn’t undermine the need for it. “I think this is the most important thing that Australia needs to think about,” Everett says. “You can’t have your roots in Gallipoli.”

*

When the five Tasmanian Aborigines began their raids, in October 1841, they had been in Port Phillip for nearly two years.

Clare Land says researchers have long debated their motives for fighting, but the remaining written documents are not definitive. Historians have speculated that they may have been driven by hostility towards whalers, disillusionment with their “protectors”, or by the overarching desire to resist colonisation.

All had been alienated from their land, witnessed the deaths of their families, and had direct or indirect experience of sexual violence by whalers and sealers.

Immediately before quitting Melbourne, Tunnerminnerwait had toured the western districts for several months with George Augustus Robinson, collecting testimony about frontier violence. On that journey, Robinson recorded evidence of the Convincing Ground massacre, near Portland in 1833-34, in which whalers killed between 60 and 200 members of one Gunditjmara clan.

The group’s reasons may have been many, Land says, but “it is likely they saw themselves as part of the colonial resistance of their countrymen in Tasmania and in Victoria”. Given their experiences, the question isn’t just “why they did what they did”, but rather, “why not?”

She argues the story is important not only for the past, but the future, because it illustrates the conflict over land and the legal status of Aboriginal people.

“It tells us about what Aboriginal people suffered in Tasmania and Victoria and about their resistance, and it stretches forward to the struggle for land rights today.”

The three women – Truganini, Planobeena and Pyterruner – left Melbourne within months of the executions. They returned to Flinders Island, where in 1846, their community petitioned Queen Victoria for the removal of their white superintendent.

The hanging of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner was botched: the trap did not fall fully at first. The newspapers reported it “a gross insult to public decency”.

Robinson, the Protector of Aborigines, did not attend. He waited beside two open graves, outside the boundary of the cemetery. The location is thought to be between sheds E and F of the Victoria Market. So far, it goes unmarked.

Read this article at The Age online

Memorials to frontier conflict in Victoria

Port Fairy: a stone monument to “the thousands of aboriginal people who were massacred between 1837 and 1844 in this area”.

Sorrento: a plaque in memory of “Aborigines who were killed or wounded during the first British visits to Port Phillip Bay” in 1803.

Yarra Glen: a plaque commemorating the “Battle of Yering”, which took place on January 13, 1840, between 50 Wurundjeri clansmen and troopers of the Border Police.

Orbost: a stone commemorating Dan (The Cook) Dempsey who was speared by Aborigines in 1851.

Benalla: a memorial at the site of an attack on settlers William and George Faithfull and their men in 1838. Eight of the settlers and one Aborigine died.

Peterborough: a memorial on “Massacre Hill”, five kilometres west of town along the Great Ocean Road, to Aborigines killed at that location.

Mt Dispersion: a cairn commemorating the naming of the area by explorer Major Thomas Mitchell in May 1836 after he ambushed and shot at a large group of Aborigines between Robinvale and Mildura. There is also a plaque to this incident in Shepparton, at the Bangerang Cultural Centre.

Source: monumentaustralia.org.au

Into the wind

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Planning restrictions and false health fears have stalled Victoria’s wind industry. But this may be changing.

GWENDA Allgood is a no-nonsense local councillor, five times a mayor, from Ararat. In mid-November she travelled east to Seymour to speak about wind farms at forum on energy held in the bowls club hall.

“We did not have one objection,” she told the audience, explaining the benefits of the Challicum Hills wind farm, built in 2003. “I can only speak as I find: there is no noise [from the turbines]. I don’t know why, but there isn’t. And they’re our best ratepayer – they pay well, they really do.”

There were about 50 people in the hall; almost all were renewable energy supporters. The event was hosted by a local environment group, with speakers on the topics of home retrofitting, community solar power and the campaign against coal seam gas.

But there was one key reason for the afternoon’s proceedings: the Cherry Tree wind farm, 16 turbines planned for a nearby ridgeline above the Trawool Valley.

The wind farm, proposed by Infigen Energy, was before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The project had become controversial in late 2012, following a meeting held by the anti–wind farm activist group, the Landscape Guardians.

After receiving 117 objections, the local council delayed and finally denied the permit, against the advice of its planning officers. The company appealed; the matter had already been before the tribunal for ten months.

When Allgood finished speaking at the meeting, a man named Gary Morris put his hand up. Sounding slightly nervous, he read from his notes about a survey criticising another wind farm. “I’m just concerned about the noise aspect,” he said.

“Instead of getting on the internet,” Allgood replied, “you need to go out and visit them. I invite you to Ararat, and I will personally show you around.”

Afterwards, Morris explained that his home was within 3 kilometres of the proposed turbines, but Infigen had never met with him. “My concerns aren’t just about noise. It’s about health, and it’s about this company,” he said.

*

Like the rest of the world, Australia urgently needs to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to avoid runaway climate change. A recent report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance says new wind turbines are already cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power stations, even without carbon pricing. And yet, the forecast for wind power is remarkably mixed.

In 2009, the South Australian government set a target for renewables to cover one-third of its energy production by 2020. It has nearly met the mark already. Wind power alone now accounts for 27 per cent.

But in Victoria, the industry has stalled. In August 2011 the state government stiffened its planning rules, giving people who live within two kilometres of wind farms the right to veto, and prohibiting turbines in several regions.

A new report from Victoria’s Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Professor Kate Auty, says wind power comprises less than 3 per cent of the state’s electricity generation.

The report strongly criticises the planning restrictions, arguing they discourage a shift to low-carbon energy, make it more difficult and costly to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and damage the local economy.

“Many proposals for new wind farms in Victoria have been withdrawn. Lost investment has been estimated at $4 billion and 3,000 jobs,” the report says, quoting figures from the Clean Energy Council.

The Labor party has promised to repeal the restrictions if it wins government in next years’ state election. In the meantime, the new federal government appears unlikely to encourage the industry.

A spokesperson for Industry minister Ian Macfarlane says the government will commission a study into “the potential health effects of wind farms”, and confirms that it will go ahead with a scheduled review of the federal renewable energy target, due next year. It has already tabled legislation to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which would otherwise invest $5 billion in renewable energy over the next 5 years.

*

Two weeks after the forum in Seymour, VCAT finally approved the permit for Cherry Tree. It is now only the second wind farm to win planning permission in Victoria since August 2011.

The tribunal said the Victorian and NSW heath departments had expressly stated “there is no scientific evidence to link wind turbines with adverse health effects”, and that view was backed by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

It rejected the survey evidence of health concerns tended by anti-wind groups, the Waubra Foundation and the Landscape Guardians.

“To be of any real value such surveys need to be carried out by qualified professionals on respondents selected by accepted random selection methods, and subjected to an analysis that yields statistically valid results,” it said.

The tribunal had earlier ruled that the visual and noise impacts of the project were acceptable, and that the turbines would not cause problems with bushfire, salinity, erosion, aviation or loss of wildlife habitat.

It was a comprehensive victory, both for the company and the wind industry at large.

On the same day, the South Australian Environment Protection Authority released the results of its study of noise from the Waterloo wind farm. Nearby residents who had previously complained were asked to keep noise diaries; in them, they noted “rumbling effects” even at times when the turbines had been shut down. The authority’s recordings showed the turbines meet local and international standards for both audible and low frequency sound.

Ketan Joshi, from Infigen, says his company understands that this evidence, and the VCAT decision, won’t change everyone’s minds. “We’re aware that a lot of these concerns don’t magically vanish as soon as you get approval.

“The industry really depends on good community engagement. People need to be deeply involved in the development, otherwise you’re likely to face opposition.”

Joshi confirms that Infigen hasn’t met individually with Gary Morris. “It’s hard to talk to everybody one-on-one, because there are a large number of people around our projects,” he says.

For Cherry Tree, the company had held two public meetings, as well as stalls at a local festival and a tour of the Hepburn wind farm. But for future projects, it is considering ways to give locals “a much bigger stake in the shape a wind farm takes”, Joshi says.

The anti–wind farm push in Seymour began with a public meeting coordinated by the Landscape Guardians. One of the speakers was Max Rheese, executive director of climate change denial groups the Australian Environment Foundation and the Australian Climate Science Coalition.

At a council meeting held in October 2012, just two days before the local elections, nearly 40 people spoke against the wind farm. Among them was Peter Mitchell, the chairman of the Waubra Foundation. Subsequently, the foundation, which has tax-deductible charity status, sought donations to fund its case against Cherry Tree before VCAT.

In response, BEAM, the local environment group, distributed a “myth-busting” flyer supporting the turbines, together with Friends of the Earth.

“They’d managed to scare the pants off a lot of people,” says Leigh Ewbank, from Friends of the Earth. “There’s no way developers can compete with a political campaign of that nature. And it isn’t dying down, despite all the evidence showing that wind energy is clean and safe.”

The “contemporary health panic” about turbines has drawn the attention of public health academic Professor Simon Chapman, from University of Sydney. Chapman, who is renowned for his work on tobacco control, has traced the health and noise complaints made about Australia’s wind farms.

In a paper published in October, he revealed that only 129 people have complained – a tiny proportion of the population who live near turbines – and almost all of them did so after 2009, when critics began publicising the alleged health worries.

There have been no health complaints in Western Australia, which has 13 wind farms.

“A majority of wind farms, even big ones, have no history of complaints at all,” he says. “The complaints line up with half a dozen wind farms that have been targeted by the anti–wind farm groups. That’s the ‘nocebo’ hypothesis: if you spread anxiety you’re going to get anxiety.”

“If you tell people that something is going to happen to them and you demonstrate people who are worried, then it becomes a communicated disease.”

The final speaker at the Seymour forum was Doug Hobson, a farmer from Waubra with a thick goatee beard. He has eight turbines on his property. “The wind turbines have helped underlay what we’re doing as a farming community,” he said. “It takes the lows out of farming.”

He explained that almost all the people of Waubra do not want their town’s name to be associated with the anti–wind farm group, the Waubra Foundation. In November they mailed a petition with 316 signatures asking it to change its name.

“Niney-five per cent of the people in Waubra are in favour of the wind farm,” he said. “Country people don’t like change, but it does just become part of the furniture.”

*

The only other wind farm approved in Victoria in more than two years is at Coonooer Bridge, a small farming community north-west of Bendigo. Its story is very different.

The project is being developed by Windlab, a spin-off company from CSIRO founded in 2003. It has since built turbines in Australia, Canada, USA and South Africa. Soon after it began, Windlab identified that the hills near Coonooer Bridge were particularly windy: in fact, their steady, strong winds offer a renewable resource among the best in the world.

But in 2012, when Windlab began to consider building turbines there, Luke Osborne, the project’s director, knew that wind energy was becoming controversial in rural areas. He knew from personal experience, because he has turbines on his family farm near Canberra.

“It had become clear that we needed to work on gaining a ‘social licence to operate’,” he explains. “It wasn’t good enough just to get it approved. It needed to have a much better level of local acceptance.”

His team began a series of town hall–style meetings with everyone who owned land nearby, as well as one-on-one conversations, in which they devised the ownership model for the project. “We said, ‘We not only want people living nearby to share in the financial benefits, we also want you to help guide how we do this’,” Osborne recalls.

In less than a year, the five-turbine project had been approved by the local council. It will produce enough electricity to power 11,000 households.

Thirty landholders are shareholders. The farmers with turbines on their properties agreed to take lower rent, and the company, slightly lower profits; those returns are shared among the neighbours. As with many other wind farms, it will donate money to the community – in this case $25,000 each year. Everyone within 5 kilometres of the turbines will get a vote on how it’s spent.

“We haven’t had any outsiders come in opposing the project,” Osborne says. “I hope that’s because we haven’t given anybody a reason to invite them in.”

Osborne modelled his approach on the research of Dr Nina Hall, from CSIRO, who is studying the idea of “social licence to operate” for wind farms.

In interviews with rural residents, her team has found “strong community support for the development of wind farms”, including from those who don’t speak out through the media or political forums.

Hall concluded that people’s attitudes to the local impacts are shaped by the way a project is run.

She noticed that people opposed to wind farms would initially talk about technological worries. “When we dug a little deeper, we often found their opposition was based more on concerns about process,” she explains. “Things like how they found out about the development, and whether they felt they had influence over the design, location and the final decision about whether it would go ahead.”

Ian Olive is one of those people. He has been farming near Coonooer Bridge all his life, continuing the work of his parents and grandparents. Now the 69-year-old tends his crops and merino sheep with the help of his two sons, whose young families live on the property too.

Although he supports renewable energy, Olive is not pleased by the prospect of turbines near his farm. His family would prefer “to keep the status quo”, he says. He expects the turbines, standing on the low mountain range on the south-western horizon, will be “a stark monstrosity against the natural beauty” of his skyline.

But equally, Olive says, Windlabs couldn’t have conducted its consultation any better: the scheme has created no resentment between neighbours. He says “the company has done a good job in helping the community” through its annual fund and the shareholdings for surrounding landowners, including his family.

For Osborne, gaining the trust of families like the Olives represents the project’s biggest triumph. “We’ve tried our best to make sure the benefits for the local area are real and well understood,” he says. “It’s not a silver bullet – not everyone wants to live near turbines – but for the majority it has made a difference.

“I’m a big believer in the fairness of this model. I hope what we’ve done here will help the industry.”

Read this article at The Age online

The Great Barrier Reef: just unwell or terminally ill?

In Environment, The Age on

Starfish, chemicals, climate change. If things continue the way they are, the reef won’t be great for much longer.

AT 3 pm on July 16, 1928, Charles Maurice Yonge and his team of scientists sighted the Low Isles, north of Cairns, from their boat. His wife Mattie, a doctor, described “a circular mound of sand about 250 yd. diameter”. That mound would be their home for the next year.

So began the first modern research expedition on the Great Barrier Reef.

As Professor Iain McCalman, from University of Sydney, describes in his new book The Reef – A Passionate History, they were an industrious group of young scientists from Cambridge University, both men and women.

Marine science was in its early stages and they’d been assigned one of the Earth’s uncharted treasures.

Their findings were published in seven large volumes; among them were revelations about the interdependence of corals and algae and the growth rates of corals – which had rings like trees, they noticed – as well as the first observation of coral bleaching.

In the 1970s, more than 40 years later, septuagenarian Sir Maurice – who by then had been knighted – returned to the Low Isles. He was dismayed by what he found; or more precisely, by what he didn’t. For all the silt from agricultural run-off, he couldn’t locate the places he’d conducted his experiments.

Sir Maurice may have been appalled, but scientists now yearn for the days of his disappointment, so badly has the reef deteriorated in recent decades.

In 1985 the Australian Institute of Marine Science began monitoring more than 100 locations on the reef. In the years since, coral cover has diminished by half, on average. At the current rate of decline, it will halve again by 2022.

The relentless degradation of one of the seven natural wonders of the world has not gone unnoticed. Next June, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee will convene in Qatar for its annual meeting. It has foreshadowed that “without evidence of substantial progress” it will classify the reef as “in danger”.

Queensland’s tourism industry nervously awaits UNESCO’s verdict. The reef is estimated to create up to $6 billion dollars annually for Australia’s economy, supporting 50,000 jobs.

Daniel Gschwind, from the Queensland Tourism Industry Council, believes a downgraded classification would deter visitors and could put his industry in danger. “Regardless of the actual health of the reef, the damage to our reputation as a destination of natural wonders would be serious,” he says.

In early November, in response to warnings issued by UNESCO, the reef’s management authority produced a 650-page, draft strategic assessment report.

It stated that the northern third of the reef is in good condition, but south of Cooktown, its health has “declined significantly”.

Biodiversity is deteriorating. While humpback whales are increasing in number, the populations of dugongs, turtles and some seabirds are diminishing. Coral reefs and seagrass meadows are “in serious decline”.

The authority declared that climate change is “still the most serious threat facing the reef”. The ocean is increasing in temperature and becoming more acidic, and sea levels are rising. “More frequent and severe extreme weather is also predicted,” it said.

Until now, the major cause of damage has been poor water quality. Wherever the land has been cleared for farming and settlement, polluted water drains into the inshore reef, laden with fertilizer and silt. In the last decade, cyclones and floods have battered the coast and consequently, rivers have clogged the reef with plumes of mud visible from space.

The authority noted another “key concern” caused by the development and operation of ports: the dumping of dredge spoil at sea. Overall, it concluded, “a business-as-usual approach to managing these impacts will not be enough”.

*

Dr Peter Doherty, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, began studying the reef in the 1980s. He helped create the long-term research program that revealed the loss of half the reef’s coral cover since monitoring began.

He says cyclones and the crown-of-thorns starfish are each responsible for more than 40 per cent of the damage, while coral bleaching currently accounts for about one-tenth.

Coral bleaching and cyclones are matters of extreme weather, Doherty says. Locally, we can do nothing to prevent them, but “we probably can do something about crown-of-thorns”.

Since it was first observed as a problem in the 1960s, there have been four outbreaks of the coral-eating starfish, roughly 15 years apart.

The cycle is too fast to allow the corals to recover naturally. “In the 1960s, there was a large-scale increase in the application of inorganic fertiliser to sugarcane fields,” Doherty explains. “It’s likely that this is a major driver in the frequency and severity of the current outbreaks of starfish.”

In 2003, the federal and state governments adopted Reef Plan, a ten-year strategy to reduce water pollution. Updated in 2009, it included targets to halve nitrogen and pesticide runoff, and dramatically improve the land management practices of graziers, sugarcane growers and horticulturalists.

Doherty sits on the scheme’s independent scientific panel. “In recent times we are putting 5 times more sediment, up to 8 times more nitrogen and 6 times more phosphorous into the reef than we should be. Turning that around is a very large task.”

So far, the results have fallen well short of the targets, which have been deferred until 2018. Both levels of government have committed more funding.

Doherty describes Reef Plan as “a substantial response”, which is beginning to show small gains. But it may not be enough. “Like anything, it’s going to get harder and harder to make deeper gains.”

Right now, just as the reef is in the most precarious condition we’ve known, the crown-of-thorns starfish is on the brink of its worst infestation.

Heavy rains in the last five years have flooded the continental shelf north of Cairns with “nutrient-enriched plumes”, creating what Doherty describes as “the perfect broth for feeding larval starfish”.

A large female starfish can produce tens of millions of eggs at each spawning. Carried on southerly currents, they’re causing cascading outbreaks in the central reef that could last for ten years.

The tourism industry is attempting triage. Funded by the federal government, teams of divers are killing starfish by injecting them one-by-one with bile salts. In the last 18 months, the program has culled more than 100,000 starfish, mainly around popular tourist sites.

It is a Sisyphean undertaking. “The target is in the millions, distributed over more than 1000 kilometres of reef perimeter,” Doherty says. “It’s extremely unlikely we’ll be able to effectively control the starfish population using divers with poisons.”

Instead, the reef is suffering death-by-report.

Dr Colin Hunt, an ecological economist from University of Queensland, was one of the authors of the first 25-year plan for the reef, released in 1994. Entitled The Great Barrier Reef – Keeping it Great, it called for the effects of runoff to be studied and targets set to reduce their impacts.

In practice, the goal of improving water quality has proven strictly aspirational.

Likewise, the marine park authority’s new strategic assessment stresses the need to measure “cumulative impacts”, rather than the narrow effects of each project or use of the reef. The Keeping it Great report made the same recommendation two decades ago.

More recently, the authority’s Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report declared the reef ecosystem was “at a crossroad” in 2009. “It is decisions made in the next few years that are likely to determine its long-term future,” it said.

Since then, there’s been a port-building boom along the coast, paving the way for increased coal trade and the beginning of a gas export industry.

These developments have alarmed UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. In June, it noted “with concern” that the impacts of “ongoing coastal development on the reef continue and progress towards addressing them is limited”. It requested that ports not be permitted outside existing locations.

In December, federal environment minister Greg Hunt will decide on applications to expand the Abbot Point port, north of Bowen, and a fourth gas export plant at Curtis Island, near Gladstone. Three further coal terminals are going through Queensland’s environmental approval process.

Colin Hunt expects UNESCO will watch those decisions closely. He says the impact of dredging is limited compared to agricultural runoff and climate change, but the cumulative effects of industrialisation are clear.

“These port developments are impacting wildlife and destroying part of the reef, there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “The coal and gas companies are responsible for doing their own environmental impact statements – the system is flawed because of conflicts of interest.”

Hunt believes polluters must bear the true costs of both runoff and port development. Farmers should be fined if they don’t meet water quality targets, and resources companies should pay for dredge spoil to be disposed on land, not within the reef’s waters.

“If we really want to tackle this problem, we have to make the polluter pay,” he says. “It is time to have a proper reckoning. The reality is extremely serious: unless these trends turn around, we’re going to lose the reef.”

*

In the early 1970s, when Sir Maurice returned to visit the location of his 1928 expedition, he was chaperoned by a knockabout young Australian scientist, Dr J. E. N. ‘Charlie’ Veron.

Granted a post-doctoral scholarship by James Cook University, Veron was the reef’s first full-time researcher.

“Sir Maurice was very formal and dignified – a real jacket-and-tie guy – but I got to like him a lot,” recalls Veron, who is rather less formal. (Years later, the young scientist found himself “in strife” for showing a nude photo of an expedition leader during a presentation at the Royal Society in London.)

The visit was a changing of the guards; subsequently, Veron became the world authority on corals and reefs. He devised a new taxonomy for corals and discovered one-fifth of all known species.

“In the 50 years I’ve been diving, I’ve noticed a heck of a lot of change,” he says. “The drop off in shark numbers because of overfishing is the most dramatic.”

One coral, Montipora – which grows like overlapping plates on a waiter’s arm – was once the most common species near the coast, but has now all but vanished.

“On the outer slopes of the far northern Great Barrier Reef, the corals look much the same as always,” he says. “There are now very few places on the reef I would say that about.”

In 2008, Veron published A Reef in Time: The Barrier Reef from Beginning to End, a book on coral reefs and climate change. He wrote that the prognosis for the world’s reefs “does indeed seem bleak, but it is not yet hopeless”.

Every summer, he becomes nervous about the risk of mass coral bleaching – a risk that worsens as the oceans warm. During the El Niño weather cycle, warmer currents pulse into the reef’s lagoon. With clear skies for a few weeks, the water temperature can increase beyond the corals’ ability to cope.

Energised by global warming, El Niño cycles will become more extreme. Humans have already created the conditions for more intense storms and floods, droughts that trigger erosion, and frequent mass coral bleaching.

Veron is also fixated by the threat of ocean acidification – a lesser-known consequence of carbon dioxide emissions – which causes a kind of coralline osteoporosis. If it goes unchecked, the reefs will eventually erode.

He considers the health of the world’s reefs an early warning of a broader collapse. If they fail, other ecosystems will follow, rapidly.

“We’re driving the Earth into conditions for the sixth mass extinction and we’re doing it very, very quickly,” he says. “I’ve got teenage children and it terrifies me to think what they’re going to face in their later life.”

In this context, the environmental impact statements for the new coal and gas ports are dangerously incomplete. Dredging may cause localised damage, but the ports’ very reason for being – to expand fossil fuel exports – exacerbates the Great Barrier Reef’s gravest existential threat.

The emissions associated with proposed coalmines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin alone would dwarf Australia’s total carbon footprint.

“We’re making money out of doing the things that drive climate change, which will destroy the reef,” Veron says. “We are a wealthy country – we have a moral obligation to future generations to keep coal in the ground. I can’t see any rational argument against that.”

Threats to the reef

Fertiliser runoff causes plankton blooms, which promote outbreaks of the coral-killing crown-of-thorns starfish.

Sediment blocks the light required by corals, sponges and seagrass and starves marine life of normal sources of nutrition.

Pesticides poison coral larvae, even at trace levels.

Climate change sets the conditions for more frequent and intense storms, cyclones, droughts and floods, which contribute to plumes of polluted runoff. Ocean warming increases the likelihood of coral bleaching. Ocean acidification weakens coral skeletons and slows coral growth.

Dredging causes plumes of silt and disturbs local habitats.

Overfishing and illegal fishing threaten important predators such as sharks and coral trout.

 

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