Inshore reefs and lagoon, Lizard Island - mass bleaching and coral mortality 2016
(Picture Gregg Borschmann)
The Great Barrier Reef:
The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem. Australians proudly thought that they had protected the reef, forever, in the 1970s and 1980s when the Great Barrier Reef National Park and World Heritage Area were declared.
Threats to the reef such as oil drilling, limestone mining, commercial fishing, mass tourism and terrestrial pollution and farm run-off were either banned, scaled back or proposed for better management based on new research. At the time – as many experts told Gregg Borschmann for this collection - not even the best marine scientists and managers were thinking that climate change may also one day threaten the reef.
It shocked Australians that in space of a few decades the reef reached an apparent tipping point, with some experts predicting that it could disappear or be unrecognisably degraded by 2050. That scenario is directly linked to coral bleaching triggered by global warming, record high sea surface temperatures and accumulated heat stress.
After two unprecedented back-to-back mass coral bleaching events over the summers of 2016 and 2017, Gregg Borschmann proposed a Great Barrier Reef Oral History project to the National Library of Australia (NLA).
Sixteen interviews were recorded for the collection including with leading coral and marine scientists, dive operators, reef and land managers, fishermen and women, spear-fishers and coral and fish collectors.
The National Library of Australia Great Barrier Reef Collection:
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/7466359
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Search/Home?lookfor=my_parent%3A%22(AuCNL)7466359%22&iknowwhatimean=1
Lizard Island Reef Research Foundation re 2020 bleaching
https://lirrf.org/posts/2020-coral-bleaching-at-lizard-island/
Harold Holt, the poet and 'the bastard from Bingil Bay': How reef conservation began