Ever since Captain James Cook charted the Great Barrier Reef in 1770 it has exerted a fascination that shows no sign of diminishing. Over those centuries its chequered history has moved through a sequence of phases: from a navigation hazard to be feared and then conquered, to a geological challenge and a realm of extraordinary plants and animals offering a seemingly inexhaustible range of natural resources for scientific study and exploitation.

In recent decades the Reef has come into the international spotlight as the world's greatest marine park with its listing by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1981 as a special World Heritage Area of ‘superlative natural phenomena’ containing ‘formations of exceptional natural beauty [with] superlative examples of the most important ecosystems’. It also was recognised as an ‘outstanding example of the major stages of the earth's evolutionary history’, and ‘of significant ongoing geological processes, biological evolution and man's interaction with the natural environment’. Of profound relevance today is its further listing as a site of ‘the foremost natural habitats where threatened species of animals or plants of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation still survive’ (UNESCO 1980:22–23).

This cultural and environmental history, then, has a special objective. It takes the reader through the endlessly absorbing story of the impact of Western discovery and settlement on the Great Barrier Reef, and equally, the response of Western science to that encounter with the world's greatest living natural feature.