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Summary
Summary
Stretching 1,400 miles along the Australian coast and visible from space, the Great Barrier Reef is home to three thousand individual reefs, more than nine hundred islands, and thousands of marine species, and has alternately been viewed as a deadly maze, an economic bounty, a scientific frontier, and a precarious World Heritage site. Now the historian and explorer Iain McCalman takes us on a new adventure into the reef to reveal how our shifting perceptions of the natural world have shaped this extraordinary seascape. Showcasing the lives of twenty individuals spanning more than two centuries, The Reef highlights our profound desire to conquer, understand, embrace, and ultimately save the world's most complex ocean ecosystem.
Opening with the story of Captain James Cook, who sailed unknowingly into the southwest entrance of this vast network of coral outcroppings, McCalman shows how Cook spent months navigating this treacherous underwater labyrinth, struggling to keep his crew alive and his ship afloat, sparring with deceptive shoals and wary native islanders. Through a series of dramatic tales from intrepid explorers, unwitting castaways, inquisitive naturalists, enchanted artists, and impassioned environmentalists who have collectively shaped our ideas about the Great Barrier Reef, McCalman demonstrates how this grand natural wonder of the world was built as much by human imagination as by the industrious, beautiful creatures of the sea.
A romantic, historically significant book and a deeply personal journey into the heart of a marine environment in peril, The Reef powerfully captures the delicate relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Author Notes
Iain McCalman is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a historian, a social scientist, and an explorer. He is the author of the award-winning Darwin's Armada , The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro , and Radical Underworld . A professor of history at the University of Sydney, he has served as the president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. McCalman has also been a historical consultant and narrator for documentaries on the BBC and ABC, and has been interviewed by Salon and the World Science Festival.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This lively, detailed, and unabashedly Eurocentric history of the interaction between navigators, castaways, scientists, and the Great Barrier Reef tells a story of place through the biographies and first-person accounts of the notable individuals who have encountered the Reef. McCalman (Darwin's Armada) delivers the facts with a deft blend of Robinson Crusoe-like adventure tale, hearty sea shanty, and society gossip rag. The dozen stories start with James Cook's 1770 "discovery" of the massive coral structures around New Holland, move through William Kent's 1880s research projects as the first "scientist-photographer" (which gave the Western world an understanding of the Reef's beauty), and reach the present day as coral expert Charlie Veron tells the Royal Society that greenhouse gases are killing the reefs-"the canaries of climate change"-and acidifying of the oceans. While McCalman briefly acknowledges Aboriginal Australians-as travel companions on a BBC-funded recreation of Cook's voyage-the indigenous point of view is notably missing, with the native people of Australia only described through outsider reports as noble savages or fearsome cannibals. Though McCalman successfully brings his exploring protagonists from the historical record into life, the choices of stories this piece tells lean unnecessarily toward colonialist exoticism. B&w illus. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Flat-out astonished when he first set eyes on the Great Barrier Reef in 2001, British historian McCalman (Darwin's Armada, 2009) quickly became concerned about all that imperils the ongoing vitality of this gigantic maze of coral structures and magnificent marine world, especially global warming. Now his mission is to illuminate the reef's glorious complexity by recounting the stirring, wild, and surprising stories of fraught encounters between islanders and outsiders. He begins with vivid accounts of Captain James Cook's nearly disastrous reef collision in 1770, followed by the 1802 expedition of Matthew Flinders, the true European father of the Reef. Here, too, are beachcombers, artists, a tropical Thoreau, and shipwrecked Barbara Thompson, a nineteenth-century Scotswoman who lived for five years among the Kaurareg people. McCalman also profiles intrepid scientists who advanced our knowledge of reef-building corals and their role in this precious ecosystem, a World Heritage site, from naturalist Joseph Beete Jukes to scandal-evading William Saville-Kent, a pioneer in marine science photography, to today's ardent reef advocate, Charlie Veron. McCalman's passionate history is a call to save this fragile global wonder. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
OUR PLANET'S CORAL REEFS offer nourishment and sanctuary to as many as nine million species, running the gamut of life, from single-cell organisms to whales. The Great Barrier Reef, shimmering beneath the turquoise shallows of Australia's east coast, surpasses all other coral ecosystems in scale and fame. This colossal spine of life stretches for 1,400 miles, roughly the distance from Boston to Havana. Today the Great Barrier Reef seems obviously spectacular: a World Heritage Site visible to astronauts in outer space and acclaimed as one of the earth's greatest natural wonders. Yet as Iain McCalman reveals in his enthralling book, "The Reef," little more than 200 years ago no human had any inkling of its dimensions, far less any inkling of the complex science of its precarious vitality. McCalman, the author of "Darwin's Armada," takes us on an extraordinary excursion through the protean interpretations of the reef, including the fiercely contested evolution of coral science. Of late - too late, perhaps - scientists have come to view the reef as a very large canary in the coal mine of anthropogenic climate change. Acutely vulnerable to warming, acidifying oceans, reefs are on course to become the first major ecosystem worldwide to be extinguished by human actions. But humanity's impact on the most remarkable of the reefs has been not only chemical but cultural. McCalman explains how the Great Barrier Reef has been imaginatively transformed by changes in the economic, political, technological, scientific and aesthetic values projected onto it. At different historical moments, European maritime rivalries, the rise of evolutionary theory, the racist pseudoscience of phrenology and the emergence of ecology, oceanography and climate science have all profoundly altered perceptions both of the reef and of the human and nonhuman communities it sustains. The advent of scuba diving, underwater cameras and mass tourism has also altered assessments of the reef's character and worth. The Great Barrier Reef wasn't always wondrous, exquisite or fragile; it wasn't even always that great. To borrow from Shakespeare's Malvolio, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em." It took a while for the reef to achieve its greatness, which, for thousands of years, had been invisible to the coastal tribes that subsisted off local fragments of the larger whole. Here McCalman's story echoes the cultural history of natural splendor told by Stephen J. Pyne in "How the Canyon Became Grand." Pyne notes that when 16th-century Europeans first encountered the canyon, they barely remarked upon it, except to express annoyance at the vast barrier hindering their quest for gold. Before a romantic aesthetic of the sublime took hold, the grandeur that now seems to emanate from reef and canyon alike was not at all self-evident. Certainly, when Capt. James Cook's ship the Endeavour crashed into a coral ridge off the coast of Tasmania in 1770, perforating the hull and stranding his crew for months, Cook had no idea what hit him. Not until the 19th-century exertions of Matthew Flinders and Charles Darwin did humans have any concept of the reef's dimensions or the dynamic science of its formation. It is a long journey from Cook's horror at his entrapment within "an insane labyrinth" to the contemporary reef scientist Charlie Veron's rhapsody to an underwater wonderland that he likens to "walking through a rain forest dripping with orchids, crowded with birds and mammals of bewildering variety and trees growing in extreme profusion." McCalman, an animated storyteller, navigates the maze of reef science and history by following a set of charismatic characters. Despite a few longueurs, his cast is memorable and diverse: Cook and the explorers he inspired; coastal Aborigines; European castaways; Darwin and his rivals; photographers, beachcombers, coral scientists, divers and activists. In one uplifting chapter, McCalman recounts how three ordinary citizens - a forester, a poet and a painter - campaigned to safeguard the reef during the 1960s when unregulated fishing, shipping, coral plunder and mining ambitions left its fate in the balance. Thanks to the group's resolve, a social movement emerged that persuaded the Australian government to declare the Great Barrier Reef a marine sanctuary in 1975. But a sense of human stewardship toward the reef long predated that landmark event. For thousands of years before Cook's ill-fated landing, Aboriginal tribes had depended on the cycles of reef life. Those ancient peoples honored certain seasonal set-asides: critically, toward the 300-pound green turtles fundamental to their diet McCalman argues convincingly that a clash between Aborigines and Cook's crew was triggered by the sailors' slaughter of turtles during the protective season. Indeed, a highlight of "The Reef" is McCalman's rescripting of Aboriginalwhite settler history, including Australia's most lurid and tenacious captivity narrative, that of Eliza Fraser. In 1836, after her husband's ship ran aground, Fraser spent six weeks with the Badtjala tribe. When a London hack got wind of her hardship, he spiced up her account with "hints of diabolical sexual violations too disgusting to specify, and lingering details of bestial native cruelties and cannibal practices," creating a blockbuster in the short term and, over the long term, an enduring national myth of racial savagery and ravaged Victorian womanhood. McCalman's most profound story of divisiveness concerns reef biology itself. For their renewal, the great coral ramparts depend on an elaborate alliance between invertebrates and algae. Tiny, tentacled coral polyps host algae that possess an indispensable power, photosynthesis, that the coral lacks. The algae feed the polyps, freeing them to secrete calcium carbonate, which, as new coral replaces old, builds limestone deposits. The polyps, in turn, provide the algae with carbon dioxide, completing the symbiosis. To survive, a living reef must incessantly rebuild in this collaborative manner to counter the corrosive effects of pummeling waves, predatory fish and boring worms. but our failure to contain carbon emissions is now stressing the animal-algae partnership. More acidic and warmer waters prompt the coral host to evict its algae tenants, thus starving itself of nutrients and terminating the system's replenishment. The result: a ghostly underwater mortuary of bleached reefs. The Great Barrier Reef is better protected than most, but even so, over the past three decades it has lost 50 percent of its coral cover. McCalman channels his account of sundered symbiosis through the book's final, most vivid character, the scientist Charlie Veron. Veron has dived hundreds of reefs and has discovered over 30 percent of the world's coral species. His verdict is blunt: Without an abrupt decline in greenhouse gas emissions, "there is no hope of reefs surviving to even midcentury in any form that we now recognize. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world's marine biodiversity." Bearing witness to this gradual annihilation, Veron concludes, is "like seeing a house on fire in slow motion." By the end of McCalman's transformative book, we feel the full force of this slowmotion emergency. In story after story of fascination and trepidation, in revelations and in requiems, this passionate history brings to life the Great Barrier Reef's magnificent mutability. McCalman's closing appeal is well earned: We have seen the splendor and now we need to act to slow the vanishing. ROB NIXON'S latest book is "Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor."
Choice Review
The Great Barrier Reef has been inhabited by human beings throughout its existence but was "discovered" by Europeans in the persons of the explorer Captain James Cook and his crew only in 1770. In this engaging historical examination of the reef, McCalman (Univ. of Sydney, Australia), author of Darwin's Armada (CH, Feb'10, 47-3142), relates the stories of 20 individuals across two centuries. He begins with Cook, who never realized the true nature and extent of the reef and regarded it mainly as a navigation hazard, and concludes with Charlie Veron, a scientist who has devoted his life to studying coral and the reef. Attitudes toward the reef varied over the years, from fearing the obstacles and dangers it presented to ship navigation to regarding it as an idyllic tropical paradise or a natural resource to be exploited to eventually recognizing its importance as a subject of scientific study. McCalman's subjects were each intimately connected to the reef in some way. Each story reveals some aspect of humans' interdependence with the corals, including the geology, plants, and animals and the beliefs about and attitude toward the reef and its native peoples on the part of Europeans. A timely history of a vital ecosystem. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --Amy C. Prendergast, University of South Alabama
Kirkus Review
The history of the Great Barrier Reef told through the stories of men and women who have loved or hated it, lived there, studied it, exploited it or tried to save it.McCalman (History/Univ. of Sydney; Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution, 2009, etc.) loves the reef and fears for its future. His account begins with Capt. James Cook, whose ship Endeavor ran aground there in 1770 and who feared being trapped and destroyed in the labyrinth of coral reefs. Some three decades later, while exploring the reef, Royal Navy officer Matthew grasped its immensity and named it the "Great Barrier Reefs." In the 1840s, the naturalist and geologist Joseph Jukes wrote glowingly of the area's beauty and accurately of the culture of the indigenous people living there, contrary to fictitious accounts of cannibalistic savages. In one fascinating chapter, McCalman recounts the tale of a young Scottish woman who survived a shipwreck and was taken in by Aborigines. In the 1890s, the British scientist-artist-photographer William Saville-Kent studied the reef intensely for four years, producing a masterpiece that showed the world the wonders of its underwater world. In 1908, Australian E.J. Banfield's The Confessions of a Beachcomber presented it as multiple island paradises, and the 20th-century attempts of America zoologist Alexander Agassiz to disprove Darwin's theory of the origin of coral reefs made it the center of scientific interest. McCalman then focuses on two Cambridge scientists whose publications in the 1930s ignited the interest of tourists and inspired the actions of men and women determined to save the islands from exploitation. McCalman's final chapter, sadly titled "Extinction," introduces Charlie Veron, an authority on coral reefs, whose message is that forces already underway are destroying the Great Barrier Reef, a message that the author bravely, hopefully attempts to counter in the epilogue.McCalman selects his subjects judiciously and writes with flair, creating a multifaceted portrait of one of the world's great wonders. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Combining engaging accounts of early explorers with discussion of current scientific findings and their implications, McCalman (history, Univ. of Sydney; Darwin's Armada) presents the 430-mile-long Great Barrier Reef of Eastern Australia and the threats to its existence. He categorizes three types of people who have shaped our attitudes to the "greatest marine environment this planet has ever seen"-Western explorers and scientists, indigenous peoples, and beachcombers inspired by the reef's beauty. -McCalman presents passages from the writings of various naturalists extolling the diversity of reef flora and fauna, outlines the geological history of the area, and describes the chemical and biological aspects of coral formation. The establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (1976) was a triumph of conservation groups over the interests of economic, tourist, and industrial development constituencies. Alarming increases in temperature and light penetration over the last decades, bleaching, cyclones, pollution, and an uncontrolled crown-of-thorns starfish population, however, have caused half the coral to be lost. VERDICT While James Bowen's The Great Barrier Reef: History, Science, Heritage is a comprehensive, scholarly monograph covering the same topics, McCalman's book will be enjoyed by the general reader, students at the undergraduate level, those interested in the history of science, and travelers to this magnificent region.-Judith B. Barnett, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Kingston (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Map | p. ix |
| Prologue: A Country of the Mind | p. 3 |
| Part I Terror | |
| 1 Labyrinth: Captain Cook's Entrapment | p. 13 |
| 2 Barrier: Matthew Flinderss Dilemma | p. 34 |
| 3 Cage: Eliza Eraser's Hack Writer | p. 55 |
| 4 Bastion: Joseph Jukes's Epiphanies | p. 78 |
| Part II Nurture | |
| 5 Hearth: Barbara Thompson, the Ghost Maiden | p. 99 |
| 6 Heartlands: The Lost Lives of Karkynjib and Anco | p. 119 |
| 7 Refuge: William Kent Escapes His Past | p. 140 |
| 8 Paradise: Ted Banfield's Island Retreat | p. 164 |
| Part III Wonder | |
| 9 Obsession: The Quest to Prove the Origins of the Reef | p. 187 |
| 10 Symbiosis: Cambridge Dons on a Coral Cay | p. 208 |
| 11 War: A Poet, a Forester, and an Artist Join Forces | p. 229 |
| 12 Extinction: Charlie Veron, Darwin of the Coral | p. 249 |
| Epilogue: A Country of the Heart | p. 275 |
| Notes | p. 283 |
| Bibliography | p. 305 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 315 |
| Index | p. 319 |