A new biography of conservationist John Busst outlines how much more needs to be done today to protect the Great Barrier Reef, writes Rosemary Sorensen.
IF THE DREDGING and drilling don’t get it, the warming water will.
You’d think Australia would want to protect the Great Barrier Reef, but barely 50 years since we came awfully close to seeing the Queensland Government open up the Reef to mining, here we are again, watching the Federal Government sitting on its hands as the corals die en masse.
There are people who see this natural wonder and think, that’s wonderful, we can both enjoy and learn from this. Then there are those who don’t see anything but a “resource” that needs, therefore, to be exploited. If the latter dominates the governments tasked with managing so-called resources, we are faced with a scenario that campaigners warned about 50 years ago — the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
What was crucial to staving off the devastation back then, it becomes clear in Iain McCalman’s new biography of campaigner John Busst, was a friendship. If Busst had not been close friends over many years with Liberal Prime Minister Harold Holt, the “mad idea” to mine the Reef for oil, gas and sugarcane fertiliser might well have gone ahead.
McCalman’s first book about the Reef, published in 2013, treated the heritage site as the global star it is, describing the influence it has had on the human imagination as well as the gradual understanding of the ecosystems that create and sustain it.
That book was hailed as a first, combining scientific research with the historian’s curiosity not just about how people affect places, but how places influence people.
Soon after, McCalman was invited to Mission Beach, south of Cairns, by two women who thought he might be interested in finding out more about John Busst. This artist and conservationist, who lived at Bingil Bay near Mission Beach, has taken something of a secondary place in the history of the fight to protect the Reef, but he was possibly the one person standing between the coral and destruction.
McCalman is a delightful writer, who has a respectful kindness in how he goes about his task. He not only credits Liz Gallie and Sandal Hayes with making this book possible for him to write but also describes the ‘fierce honesty’ and ‘great charm’ of these women.
When he has to criticise, he does so with restraint, although goodness knows there are people in this story who deserve full-throated howls of derision. It would appear that McCalman is rather like his subject in this respect: he is controlled and polite but unwavering and persistent. Good qualities for both writers and campaigners.
While he makes it clear at the outset that Busst’s legacy as a campaigner for first the Queensland rainforest and then the Reef – a titanic effort that overwhelmed his life and damaged his health – is the focus of the book, the first half is equally absorbing. Melbourne readers may be surprised by how Busst fits into the story of the Montsalvat arts colony, as McCalman builds his portrait of this impressive man.
The story begins in conservative Catholic Bendigo, where John’s father, Horatio, made a great deal of money as a mining registrar. An interesting fact in a book full of such nuggets is that Horatio was a benefactor of Bendigo’s Golden Dragon Museum (a memorial bust was placed in the foyer of that magnificently endowed building).
John and his sister Phyllis were enrolled at the University of Melbourne, but, to their parents’ horror, they both dropped out to join notoriously bohemian painting groups. They did, however, keep receiving an allowance from their parents, which made it possible for them to live as they chose. When their mother died in 1936, they reconciled with Horatio and family money supported John’s endeavours all his life.
It’s heady stuff, this entertaining history of Melbourne’s 1930s arts scene. Some of McCalman’s story intersects with the one told by Gideon Haigh in A Scandal in Bohemia about the unsolved murder of Mollie Dean in 1930, whose death put the group under pressure. (The women tended to thrive less well than the men.)
John did much of the work on the Montsalvat building and continued to learn as a visual artist. When another charismatic arty fellow crossed paths with the Montsalvat group in 1939, John was attracted by the idea of an artists’ colony on Bedarra Island, which, along with his inheritance following his father's death, was the incentive to move to north Queensland.
Again, it’s a rich and redolent narrative, as the hard-working Busst tries to make island life work for him and others around him. There’s a lovely detail included of him weighing up his desire to sit and contemplate the beauty of the place against the need to forge ahead with the plans to create a workable place to live.
When he meets a young scientist, Len Webb, he begins to get interested in the new field of ecology. When he and Alison, the woman he married in 1950, move to Bingil Bay on the mainland, they gradually learn about the ecology of the rainforest.
McCalman writes:
‘The psychological impact of these ecological lessons on John Busst was nothing short of explosive. Len’s revelations of the Queensland rainforest’s supreme diversity and acute peril triggered in him something akin to a conversion that deeply penetrated and transformed his psyche.’
In short, he becomes a conservationist — and a hugely effective one.
Central to his success is his friendship with Harold Holt, who visits the Bussts at Bingil Bay and who, as we know, loved the sea. Down the track in this story, we hear of John’s distress when Holt goes missing in the ocean off Portsea in December 1967. He and Alison were staying with the Holts at the time.
It was the Australian Army's plans to use a chunk of the rainforest for testing the defoliation poison Agent Orange (to help out the Americans, said obliging Army Minister Malcolm Fraser) that propelled Busst into activism.
That disaster is averted through a busy media and letter-writing campaign. Less than a decade later, however, Busst becomes aware of applications to dredge coral for limestone — which even the carefully picked marine geologists on the Great Barrier Reef committee believed was reasonable. This was being euphemistically called “controlled exploitation”. Such cynical hypocrisy would have won the day if it wasn’t for Busst and poet-activist Judith Wright, working with young scientists and conservationists.
So many moments will make you gasp in this narrative, like the one when Don Chipp, at the time Minister for Tourism, worried that ‘overblown conservationist alarms would cause a slump in Reef tourism’. I'll tell you what will cause a bigger slump — a bleached Reef.
The Save the Reef campaign succeeded in bringing to public attention both the importance of this ecological wonder and the way mining businesses were hell-bent on exploiting it. The battle pretty much killed John Busst — he died of cancer in 1971, aged 62, with a commission underway into the management of the Reef. Four years later, the Reef was finally protected by Commonwealth law.
McCalman’s book is a fine homage to a dedicated life. It’s also a portrait of the kind of person who makes a difference. Busst was clever, charming, thoughtful and, perhaps above all, a good, strategic communicator.
He called Holt “chum” and meant it. He wrote letters to powerful people that were tonally perfect without being dishonest. He even realised that Australians are not very good at taking heed of people unless there’s a position title attached, so he created impressive-sounding organisations to add the necessary credentials to his activism.
The question that looms very large at the end of John Busst: Saviour of Reef and Rainforest is, was it all in vain? Has the ridiculously ineffectual Great Barrier Reef Foundation overseen the demise of something wonderful?
What do you say, managing director Anna Marsden? According to your pretty website, you’re ‘solving the most complex and challenging problems facing the survival of the Great Barrier Reef’. How’s that going?
John Busst: Saviour of Reef and Rainforest can be pre-ordered from UNSW Press for $36.99 RRP.
Rosemary Sorensen was a newspaper, books and arts journalist based in Melbourne, then Brisbane, before moving to regional Victoria, where she founded the Bendigo Writers Festival, which she directed for 13 years.
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