Hero of Barrier Reef Conservation Honored in New Biography

A new biography by conservationist John Busst outlines how much more needs to be done to protect the Great Barrier Reef today, writes Rosemary Sorensen.

If the dredging and drilling don’t cut it, the warming water will.

You’d think Australia would want to protect the Great Barrier Reef, but barely 50 years since we came very close to seeing the Queensland government open the reef to mining, here we are again, watching the federal government who sits on her hands while the corals die massively.

There are people who see this natural wonder and think: that is beautiful, we can enjoy it and learn from it. Then there are those who see nothing more than a “resource” that must therefore be exploited. If the latter dominates the governments charged with managing the so-called resources, we will face a scenario that campaigners warned about fifty years ago: the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

What was crucial to averting devastation at the time, as Iain McCalman’s new biography of campaigner John Busst makes clear, was a friendship. If Busst had not been good friends with Liberal Prime Minister Harold Holt for years, the “crazy idea” of mining the reef for oil, gas and sugar cane fertilizer might well have gone ahead.

McCalman’s first book on the reef, published in 2013, treated the heritage site as the global star that 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 scholarly research with historians’ curiosity not only about how people influence places, but also about how places influence people.

Shortly afterwards, McCalman was invited to Mission Beach, south of Cairns, by two women who thought he might be interested in learning more about John Busst. This artist and conservationist, who lived in Bingil Bay near Mission Beach, has occupied something of a secondary place in the history of the struggle to protect the reef, but he may have been the only person standing between the coral and the destruction.

McCalman is a delightful writer, with a respectful kindness in the way he goes about his task. He doesn’t just credit 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 criticize, he does so with restraint, although God knows there are people in this story who deserve a loud howl of derision. It seems that McCalman is quite similar to his subject in this respect: he is composed and polite, but firm and persistent. Good qualities for writers and campaigners alike.

Although he makes it immediately clear that Busst’s legacy as a campaigner for first the Queensland rainforest and then the Reef – a Herculean effort that overwhelmed his life and damaged his health – is the focus of the book, the first half is just as compelling. Readers of Melbourne may be surprised by how Busst fits into the story of the Montsalvat art colony, as McCalman builds his portrait of this impressive man.

The story begins in conservative Catholic Bendigo, where John’s father, Horatio, made a lot 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 beautifully decorated building).

John and his sister Phyllis studied at the University of Melbourne, but to their parents’ horror they both dropped out to join notoriously bohemian painting groups. However, they continued to receive benefits from their parents, which allowed them to live as they wished. When their mother died in 1936, they reconciled with Horatio and the family money supported John’s efforts throughout his life.

It’s heady stuff, this entertaining history of Melbourne’s art scene in the 1930s. Part of McCalman’s story intersects with Gideon Haigh’s story A scandal in Bohemia about the unsolved murder of Mollie Dean in 1930, whose death put pressure on the group. (The women tended to do 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 artsy fellow crossed paths with the Montsalvat group in 1939, John was attracted by the idea of ​​an artists’ colony on Bedarra Island, which, together with his inheritance after his father’s death, was the impetus to move to northern Queensland. to move house.

Again, it’s a rich and fragrant story, in which the hard-working Busst tries to make island life work for him and others around him. There’s a nice detail included where he weighs his desire to sit and reflect on the beauty of the place against the need to move forward with the plans to create a workable place to live.

When he meets a young scientist, Len Webb, he becomes 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 about the supreme diversity and acute danger of Queensland’s rainforest caused him something like a conversion that penetrated deeply 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 frequents the Bussts in Bingil Bay and who, as we know, loved the sea. Later in this story we hear of John’s distress when Holt went missing in the ocean off Portsea in December 1967. He and Alison were staying with the Holts at the time.

It was the Australian military’s plans to use a patch of rainforest for testing the defoliation poison Agent Orange (to help the Americans, said helpful Army Minister Malcolm Fraser) that spurred Busst into activism.

That disaster is averted by a busy media and letter campaign. Less than a decade later, however, Busst becomes aware of applications to dredge coral in search of limestone – which even the hand-picked marine geologists on the Great Barrier Reef Committee found reasonable. This was euphemistically called ‘controlled exploitation’. Such cynical hypocrisy would have triumphed had it not been for Busst and poet-activist Judith Wright, who worked with young scientists and conservationists.

There are so many gasp-inducing moments in this story, like the moment when Don Chipp, then Minister of Tourism, worried that ‘Exaggerated alarm signals from conservationists would cause a collapse in reef tourism’. I’ll tell you what will cause a bigger collapse: a bleached reef.

The Save the Reef campaign succeeded in bringing to public attention both the importance of this ecological wonder and the way in which mining companies were determined to exploit it. John Busst was virtually killed by the battle; he died of cancer in 1971, aged 62, while a commission to manage the Reef was underway. Four years later, the reef was finally protected by Commonwealth law.

McCalman’s book is a beautiful tribute to a dedicated life. It is also a portrait of the kind of person who makes a difference. Busst was smart, charming, thoughtful and perhaps above all a good, strategic communicator.

He called Holt “buddy” and meant it. He wrote letters to powerful people that were tonally perfect without being dishonest. In fact, he realized that Australians aren’t very good at paying attention unless there’s a job title attached to it, so he founded impressive-sounding organizations to add the necessary credentials to his activism.

The question that looms large at the end of this story John Busst: Savior of reef and rainforest is, was it all in vain? Did the ridiculously ineffective Great Barrier Reef Foundation oversee the demise of something beautiful?

What do you say, Director Anna Marsden? According to your beautiful website, yes ‘solving the most complex and challenging issues facing the survival of the Great Barrier Reef’. How does that work?

John Busst: Savior of Reef and Rainforest is available to pre-order from UNSW Press for a suggested retail price of $36.99.

Rosemary Sorensen was a newspaper, books and arts journalist based in Melbourne and then Brisbane, before moving to regional Victoria, where she founded the Bendigo Writers Festival, which she directed for 13 years.

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