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This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the author. Researchers can access this thesis by asking their local university, institution or public library to make a request on their behalf. Monash staff and postgraduate students can use the link in the References field.

This chapter describes the challenges faced by biologist William Saville-Kent, the first both to catalog and represent the extraordinary variety of coral on the Great Barrier Reef – without diving gear and in an era before colour or underwater photography. Saville-Kent had previously mastered innovations in the aquarium, the great nineteenth-century technology for exhibiting live undersea creatures on land. In documenting corals on the Reef, he showed his mastery in nature photography, working in stringent conditions to produce informational photographs of great clarity, which, for example, could only be obtained when the coral was exposed at low tide. At the same time, in black and white photos, the distinctive colour of these formations, along with their beauty, were lost. In Saville-Kent’s opus, The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, reviewers appreciated unmediated access to “the thing itself,” which, McCalman shows, emanated from Saville-Kent’s inclusion of a range of supplementary media: black and white photos, scientific description, poetic phrase and Saville-Kent’s own brilliant, finely drawn chromolithographs.

[Extract] I grew up in Nyasaland in Central Africa, many miles and several countries away from the sea, which I saw only on occasional visits to South Africa. Instead, I spent a good deal of my boyhood holidays swimming and sailing in Lake Nyasa, a vast freshwater lake 587 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide, whose main aquatic hazards were crocodiles and hippos.

[Extract] In the year 1972 young Charlie Veron felt bewildered as he swam underwater among the dazzling corals of the Great Barrier Reef. Perhaps this was a moment of nemesis, he mused; he’d fluked a job as the first full-time professional scientist on the Great Barrier Reef without any qualifications in marine biology, and now the identity of the corals he saw among the fringing reefs off Townsville eluded him.

[Extract] The afternoon of August 25, 2001, is the closest I've come to full filling the dreams of my boyhood, when I would lie in bed looking up at the mosquito net and imagine I was Captain Hornblower, sailing a square-rigger to exotic places. And now here I am, sitting on a small beach of scuffed white sand that curves to meet the vast Pacific Ocean. Tamed by the shoulders of the Great Barrier Reef just over the horizon, it kicks up little white breakers that streak toward shore. In the distance bobs a three-masted bark, the HMS Endeavour-a replica, admittedly, but real enough for me.

[Extract] In the spring of 1842, the British Admiralty gave orders to the naval corvette the Fly to survey the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef and the surrounding waters and reefs of the Torres Strait. The Admiralty wanted particular attention paid to this area because so many British vessels trading in the South Seas or with India had come to grief trying to navigate the uncharted coral reefs and the Strait’s perilous narrow entrances. Joseph Beete Jukes, the ship’s 31-year-old naturalist, was officially charged with investigating the geological character of the Great Barrier Reef and the structure, origins and behaviour of reef-growing corals – the first scientist ever to be specifically assigned such a task.

Sir David Attenborough, the well-known naturalist, stands at the lectern of the royal Society in Carlton House Terrace in London, on July 6, 2009, about to bring the afternoon’s speaker to the stage. A ripple of expectation passes through the audience, eagerly anticipating a lecture entitled “Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?” Then Sir David introduces J.E.N. Veron, the then 64-year-old former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. “But,” says Sir David, smiling broadly, “I’ll call him Charlie, a name he carries because he shares Mr. Darwin’s obsession with the natural world.” Without specifically saying so, Sir David is telling us that we are about to hear from a modern-day Charles Darwin.