Indigenous peoples may hold the key to protecting the Great Barrier Reef says Doug Loynes
It’s a warm December morning off the coast of tropical Queensland and the coast of tropical Queensland and conditions are perfect for diving and seeing the Great Barrier Reef: a cloudless sky above; the ocean smoother than glass.
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Above the water, it’s a picture of stillness and serenity, but there’s a carnival of colour in full swing beneath the surface.
Shafts of sunlight cast dappling patterns across banks of coral that flash in shades of purple, pink and red. A school of fusilier fish rush past, yellow tails aglow, while a bright blue parrotfish lazily nibbles at the reef. On a towering wall of coral, two tiny clownfish, distinctive in their tangerine-and-white striped costumes, wriggle among the fluttering fingers of a sea anemone.
For all the headlines about the declining health of the Great Barrier Reef, it looks in pretty good condition from where I’m floating.
What is The Great Barrier Reef and how big is it?
The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s most famous underwater wonder, a UNESCO-listed system of nearly 3,000 individual coral reefs stretching for more than 2,250km off Australia’s Queensland coast.
Each reef is made up of thousands to millions of tiny coral polyps, an animal whose external calcium carbonate skeleton forms the rock-like structure that gives the reef its shape – and provides food and shelter to nearly 9,000 known marine species.
How threatened is The Great Barrier Reef?
Headlines in March 2024 confirmed the worst. The Great Barrier Reef was revealed to be suffering from its fifth mass coral-bleaching event in eight years after a year of record-breaking global sea temperatures, cyclones and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish (a predator that can strip a reef of 90 per cent of its living coral tissue).
Bleaching occurs when heat-stressed coral expels the algae that give them their colour and energy through photosynthesis. Without the algae, coral can’t survive for long, putting at risk the thousands of marine species that depend on the reefs for survival.
Freshwater run-off laden with sediment can cause bleaching, too, by smothering the coral so that photosynthesis can’t take place. Altogether, extreme weather ushered in by our planet’s changing climate has created a perfect storm for the degradation of the world’s coral reef ecosystems.
Bleached coral isn’t necessarily dead coral and the reef has shown remarkable resilience in bouncing back from the brink on previous occasions. But with these events becoming more frequent, conservation leaders and governments are turning to traditional owners and their ecological knowledge and cultural practices in a bid to save the Great Barrier Reef.
Why Australia’s Indigenous peoples could be the secret to saving the Great Barrier Reef
Cruise experiences bring tourists up close and personal with some of those species, and back on a catamaran my fellow divers and I excitedly swap stories from a day spent trailing green turtles and shadowing reef sharks along cliffs of technicolour coral. But it’s the indigenous crew members running this particular tour who have the most important stories to tell.
For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples lived on the land that now forms the seabed upon which the Great Barrier Reef has been formed. An oral tradition known as ‘dreamtime storytelling’ reveals how communities developed a strong spiritual and practical connection with the Great Barrier Reef after sea levels rose, along with an intricate understanding of its ecology and how to utilise its resources sustainably.
An indigenous person who holds ‘native title’ rights or cultural affiliations to an area within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is recognised as a ‘traditional owner’, and many still practice their time-honoured traditions in coastal communities today. They refer to the lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected as ‘Country’.
It’s a legacy that Dreamtime Dive & Snorkel – Australia’s first indigenous tourism venture on the Great Barrier Reef – pays homage to through a series of cultural demonstrations and storytelling performances that explore the significance of the reef to its traditional owners. Among the team are marine biologists and educators, such as indigenous master reef guide and cultural coordinator, Dustin Maloney.
Maloney, whose heritage comprises four Aboriginal Australian clan groups, believes that immersion in the world’s oldest living culture should be as essential a part of the Great Barrier Reef tourist experience as the underwater encounters. A strong conservation message also emerges from indigenous teachings about how to care for ‘Sea Country’. “Our ancestral knowledge spans over 60,000 years”, he says. “And the moral hasn’t changed – it’s always been about sustainability and preserving the reef for future generations.”
He goes on to give examples of sustainable practices handed down from his ancestors, including the seasonal hunting of larger mammals, and how he was taught to avoid the ocean during annual coral spawning events. “When that happened, the sea was closed,” he explains. “We knew we could take nothing from it”. Modern research has shown that physical disturbances and light pollution during periods of coral spawning can compromise the regeneration of coral populations.
Maloney’s ancestors, whose knowledge and practices were rooted in traditional ecological understanding, were thousands of years ahead of the curve.
Despite their wealth of ancestral knowledge, traditional owners haven’t always had a seat at the conservation table. Larissa Hale, a traditional owner belonging to the Yuku Baja Muliku people, recalls being the only indigenous woman ranger coordinator in Queensland. “I was in my early 20s and it was just me in a room with a lot of older, white men,” she recalls. “They couldn’t see any value in the fact that we’ve been looking after Country for a very long time.”
In 2008, Hale co-founded the indigenous-led initiative Yuku Baja Muliku Landowner and Reserves, which manages numerous local conservation projects, from sea turtle rehabilitation to seagrass monitoring across 22,500ha of Land and Sea Country in the Archer Point region. The initiative also delivers the Queensland Indigenous Women’s Ranger Network (QIWRN) – a programme founded in 2018 that has since trained more than 80 female rangers from Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds.
Hale believes that attitudes around indigenous involvement in conservation started to shift after QIWRN – for whom she acts as managing director – was awarded the Earthshot Prize in 2022.
Launched by Prince William in 2020, the prize is awarded annually to candidates who have developed innovative solutions to the world’s greatest environmental challenges. “It helped to get the message out there that indigenous people want to be involved in looking after their country,” she says. “People finally started to realise that our cultural indicators and traditional knowledge of Country could work in a package with western science to help us understand the reef better.”
Among other projects, Hale has been working alongside scientists at James Cook University to monitor coral using drone technology. When I catch up with her after Christmas, her coastal community is still reeling from the effects of severe floods caused by back-to-back cyclones.
Until then, the reef had been in beautiful condition, she explains, but she hasn’t been able to send the drone up since the storm. Rising temperatures, frequent heatwaves and floods that would likely have washed sediment from the rivers onto the reef have made her worried for its health. “Once we can get out there again, we’ll see how much damage there is. Hopefully it’s not too bad, but I don’t see our coral holding up well.”
What is the The Reef Trust Partnership?
The Reef Trust Partnership, a joint initiative from the Australian government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, has pledged AUS$51.8 million to traditional owner-led reef protection. It’s the largest ever investment in indigenous conservation on the Great Barrier Reef, with the budget going towards scaling up the work being done by traditional owners across the reef already and building new pathways for indigenous-led participation in reef governance.
The global challenges that threaten the Great Barrier Reef can’t be understated, but investment in collaboration with indigenous groups is helping to find solutions to local problems. At Hastings Reef on Yirrganydji Sea Country, for example, 700 Reef Stars – hexagonal frames planted with fragments of healthy coral – have been laid on the seafloor to spur regrowth on damaged sections of the reef, with encouraging results.
Meanwhile, dreamtime storytelling has helped marine scientists identify trends in the populations of juvenile crown-of-thorns starfish that could inform projects aimed at suppressing future outbreaks. The idea that ancient knowledge can complement modern science – and vice-versa – is becoming a cornerstone of conservation on the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s a two-way sharing partnership,” says Maloney. “Our stories sometimes parallel the science, but we also fill in each other’s gaps.”
Elsewhere, Jacob Cassady, a traditional owner belonging to the Nywaigi people, is fighting to save the reef on another front. When the Nywaigi traditional owners purchased Mungalla Station, a coastal wetland area adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef, the channels were choked with noxious weeds. It was affecting the health of the reef.
“Our Land and Sea Country are like our body,” Cassady tells me. “The waterways are our veins and the wetlands are our kidneys, purifying the land. If our kidneys stopped working and our veins became blocked, we’d get sick. It’s the same for Country.”
It was this deep understanding that led Cassady and the Nywaigi, in partnership with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, to successfully rejuvenate Mungalla Station in just two years by restoring tidal flows, so that the wetlands were able to resume their vital role of filtering out sediment and nutrients, and preserving water quality on the reef.
The Mungalla story is one of several conservation success stories linked to the Great Barrier Reef. Breathing new life into the wetlands has seen the return of birds, from magpie geese to the elegant painted snipe – with flocks of tourists hot on their trail. Tourist dollars are important for funding ongoing environmental projects but Cassady says there’s another, more important reason why he wants them at Mungalla: “To save the reef, we need everybody involved. Through the power of education, we can create an environmental conscience about caring for Country. Tourism is vital for sharing that message.”
With scientists working closely alongside tourism operators and custodians of indigenous knowledge on a united front, there is hope for the future of the Great Barrier Reef. But the spectre of the climate emergency creates an urgent need for a retelling of its story – perhaps not from any new perspectives, but from an ancient one.
After all, who better to teach us how to care for the Great Barrier Reef than the traditional owners who have been doing it for millennia?