Chapters 3 and 4 have shown how Huxley drew on literary and religious models to shape scientific identity, and how he contended and cooperated with men of letters and clergymen in the reform of curricula in public schools and universities, and in new elementary classrooms supported and administered by the state. The public controversies in which Huxley engaged with other leading social figures took place before a variety of audiences who often had quite different notions of what science, literature, and religion should be, and who did not merely defer to learned men. Thus the meaning of the cultural practices in which such men engaged, the values that they attached to their work, and their self-definitions were in large part dependent on the views of the people whom they sought to educate. The “cultural authority” for which learned groups contended was itself in question and could be acquired only by meeting the expectations of various publics. Men of science were called upon by their patrons in government and industry to be meritocratic and practical, while many of their audiences and publishers expected rational amusement, moral didacticism, and a display of specially endowed powers of intellect.

In 1894, Thomas Huxley wrote to the editor of Science-Gossip magazine, criticizing the appearance in its pages of a vulgar Americanism – the word “scientist.” For Huxley, the term denoted the sort of technical practitioner who was valued in a nation ruled solely by concerns for utility. Such a nation, he suggested, was so culturally impoverished that it fabricated words like “electrocution” (coined from “electricity” and “execution”), thereby associating science with an instrument of death, simply for linguistic economy. “Scientist,” he implied, was undignified for a person of his caliber, and improper for the community of which he was a member – men of broad learning and moral gravity, capable of pronouncing on matters of general interest. From the mid-1840s, the expression that he and other professional practitioners had used for self-designation was “man of science.” It was a title that, in common with those denoting other cultural leaders of the period, such as men of letters or clergymen, was free from the connotations of intellectual or commercial narrowness that could prevent men in Victorian England from entering elite circles of learning. As a community, Victorian men of science may have differed from the “natural philosophers” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in their sharper sense of distinction from other forms of learned activity (such as literature) and in their antipathy toward patronage.

Over the course of his career, Huxley worked to define the Victorian “man of science” through a complex set of discriminating categories embracing gender, gentlemanliness, literature, religion, and the relations of “elite” and “popular.” An absence of well-established career patterns and institutitonal structures made for an enormous diversity amongst practitioners. Scientific identity thus depended crucially on the assertion of social and cultural “others” to maintain its coherence and to secure its boundaries. In a variety of ways, Huxley's scientific self was positively constituted of these others. The “autonomous” scientific practitioner that allegedly emerged in the Victorian period as a result of professionalization was in fact a carefully wrought image that obscured a host of new social relations between men of science and heads of state, industrialists, publishers, and others. It also concealed substantial cultural borrowings from domesticity, from theology, from literature, and from empire.

Conflations of science with other social practices, such as literature and religion, facilitated friendships and working relations across professional boundaries and consolidated a more general authority of cultural elites. Science and literature were conjoined as symbolic, even fictive, creations of genius and imagination that refashioned material reality (and minds). Science and religion in turn were represented as essential components of biblical criticism and of the discovery of natural order. The joint efforts of elites in the domain of public instruction, such as the London School Board, provided spectacles of social solidarity while institutionalizing the common culture they produced.

By presenting Owen as a person corrupted by power and self-interest, and by portraying the reclusive Darwin as the epitome of the pure and detached researcher, Huxley helped to shape the identity of the scientific practitioner as autonomous from society. But Huxley and the new generation of researchers he helped to train were in fact much more like Owen, employed in government institutions or on state-sponsored projects, embedded in institutional politics, implementing imperial policies. Perhaps even more than Owen, Huxley embraced the public role of science and sought to advance it. In addition to his duties at the School of Mines and Geological Survey, his teacher-training courses, and his public lectures, Huxley worked as a Science and Art Department examiner and as an inspector of fisheries; he eventually served on seven royal commissions, reporting to the state on matters of education reform, the fishing industry, and vivisection. In these posts, he employed his particular expertise in marine zoology and as a teacher of science. But he also developed for the man of science a broader agenda as cultural critic and commentator, competent to intervene in matters of general public interest or concern. Secured by scientific methods and procedures – acquired and honed in the laboratory – against any corrupting social interests or influences, the man of science, Huxley claimed, was the best of public servants.

REEF RESEARCH: JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY AND THE AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF MARINE SCIENCE

Throughout the years of political confrontation between the Commonwealth and Queensland over the future of the Great Barrier Reef, the need for serious, institutionalised research had already been demanded for more than a decade by Queensland Senator Felix Dittmer, previously a marine science collector for museums. In his maiden speech of 27 August 1959 Dittmer had argued the case for more Commonwealth involvement in north Queensland, including ‘the establishment of a large marine biological site on the Barrier Reef’ (Senate Parliamentary Debates, 8 Eliz.II, V.S15, 354). Maintaining pressure throughout the following years, in the Senate Estimates Debate of September 1963 Dittmer questioned John Gorton, at the time Minister for Science, about allocation of funds for the much neglected area of marine research, asserting, in the flow of argument, that it was in need of considerable upgrading. ‘I believe’, he stressed,

The Great Barrier Reef, Australia's most outstanding natural feature, has captured the interest of scientists and tourists from around the world. Yet surprisingly, despite its immense attraction, scientific importance and heritage value, no single, comprehensive account of its fascinating history has ever been published.

My own interest in the Reef, arising from a lifetime of involvement with coastal and marine environments, was initially aroused by the Great Barrier Reef conservation conflict of the 1960s. During an academic career that included extensive publishing in the history of ideas and environmental thought, the present study was commenced as a visiting Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies of the Australian National University from 1984 to 1989. In that stimulating context the task was conceived as a project to bring into the public record the history of the Great Barrier Reef since its discovery by Europeans.

This became a challenging collaborative research project with Dr Margarita Bowen, scientist and historian. Following the original conception we worked closely together, guided by her wide experience in ecological studies and competence in the study of the development of scientific thought, originally presented in her impressive study of scientific ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Empiricism and Geographical Thought (1981). Published in the prestigious Cambridge Geographical Studies series, that work still challenges much ecological theory today.

THE PAN-PACIFIC UNION 1920

Following World War I a major new phase of Reef research occurred throughout the 1920s, stimulated by the efforts of Alexander Ford (1868–1945), a prominent newspaper publisher in Honolulu, who, in the same idealistic spirit that motivated President Wilson, dreamed of a fellowship of the Pacific nations, united in a common bond of ‘friendly and commercial contact and relationship’. To that end he worked tirelessly to create a formal organisation to further his vision, which also sought to promote Hawaii as a centre of Pacific cultural and research activity. Ford's efforts were rewarded when in 1919 the government of the Territory of Hawaii, as it then was, incorporated the Pan-Pacific Union as a trusteeship of twenty-one nation members appointed by Pacific governments with a comprehensive charter ‘to unite the races and countries in and about the Pacific in closer bonds of fellowship’. The central activity envisaged was promoting knowledge of their resources and opportunities by means of periodic conferences on a wide range of matters of common concern.

In those same years a separate movement had been initiated by William Morris Davis from Harvard University, one of the more accomplished of the foreigners invited to the British Association meeting in Adelaide and Melbourne in 1914.

RESEARCH ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE

While the focus of the Low Isles Expedition for the year was biological, although there was, in addition, an independent three month geomorphological survey of the Reef north of the Low Isles, from August to October 1928, financed by the Royal Geographical Society of London and conducted by a small team of three, led by James Steers. The aim of that survey, formulated in England, was to find further evidence on the origin of Reef foundations, and in particular, the relationship of the coastline to submerged reefs, cays, and continental islands, with the aim of assisting the biologists.

As soon as the main Low Isles Expedition team had settled in, the first task was to make a survey of the layout of the Low Isles themselves. The complex consists of two irregularly-shaped islands joined together, some 1800 metres in length and 1200 metres wide, with the long axis lying in a roughly east–west direction. The smaller island, the vegetated coral cay on which the lighthouse had been built and the expedition huts erected, is on the western (mainland) side. The cay itself is of regular oval shape, covering some 2 hectares at low tide, with an adjoining sandflat to the south of around 16.5 hectares. To the east is the mangrove and submerged lagoonal area of much greater dimensions. In the constriction joining the two islands on the northern side was the anchorage and expedition site.

ISSUE OF REEF BIOLOGICAL STUDIES, 1923–1927

Virtually no biological work appeared throughout 1923 and 1924. The years 1925 and 1926, in effect, were a low point in the development of Reef studies when a sequence of difficulties came together. On 25 September 1925 Nathan completed his term as Governor and retired to England as ‘Patron’ of the Committee where he worked on its behalf until his death in 1939. The Committee had now lost its most eloquent and influential advocate in Queensland. The ongoing fracas with the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Queensland (RGSAQ) was a major irritant that continued to destabilise the Committee, along with growing discontent that no significant biological work was in progress, especially in zoology which, apart from the work of Saville-Kent and Hedley, had still not developed any vigour. Then, on 14 September 1926 came the distressing news that Charles Hedley had died soon after he had returned to Sydney to farewell his wife Harriett and pack for the imminent Third Pan-Pacific Scientific Congress to be held in Tokyo. A lifelong asthmatic who had successfully found relief from the rigours of his native Yorkshire in tropic regions, he had contracted a chest complaint that exacerbated a heart condition to which he succumbed quickly.

The Great Barrier Reef burst suddenly into European consciousness in 1773. In that year the sensational account of James Cook's amazing voyage and discovery was released to the public as part of a huge three volume edition entitled An account of the voyages undertaken by order of his present Majesty for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere. Two years earlier, when he returned to England on 13 August 1771 after a three year voyage around the world, Cook reported that he had discovered and traversed the eastern and northern shores of the mysterious Great South Land which for centuries had been a quest for navigators. What became a central feature of the voyage was his description of a reef that beggared belief at the time: ‘a wall of Coral Rock rising all most perpendicular out of the unfathomable Ocean … the large waves of the vast Ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance make a most terrible surf breaking mountains high’.

By Cook's time coral reefs had already become well known and had acquired an extensive folklore, but nothing in the literature equalled the account of his nightmare travel through dangerous waters unmatched anywhere else in the world. For two years his journals were embargoed by the Admiralty to preserve their sensitive commercial information, especially from the French who were anxious to beat the British in the race to create an overseas empire.

Although issues related to the Great Barrier Reef in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – controversy over Darwinian theories of evolution and reef formation, and the final decline in the pearling industry due to unrestricted resource use – attracted considerable specialised attention, apart from occasional reports in the newspapers, they rarely reached the general public. In the same period, however, a new perception of the Reef was being presented by Edmund Banfield (1852–1923), a journalist for the Townsville Daily Bulletin, whose writings were to have a profound and lasting effect on public awareness and attitudes, and indeed, on many scientists. They marked, in fact, the beginning of a new understanding of the Reef. No longer primarily a navigation hazard, a strange separate creation to be catalogued by biologists, or a frontier to be subdued and a resource to be exploited to extinction, it was now interpreted as one of nature's most diverse and beautiful creations, to be respected and preserved. The Reef was to come into international prominence as, quite literally, a unique natural phenomenon.

In 1897 Banfield, due to ill health, moved with his wife Bertha north from Townsville to Dunk Island, a small but attractive continental island, some 5 kilometres out from the mainland, rich with unspoiled rainforest, beaches and coral reefs. There, for the next twenty-six years, he wrote numerous articles for Australian newspapers, several tourist pamphlets, and four widely distributed books which brought a new interpretation of the Reef to an ever-widening readership.

EXPANSION OF THE COLONY: FIRST DECADES

The Napoleonic Wars had consumed most of Britain's energies throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, and – as the failure of the publishing projects of Banks, Brown and Bauer testify – the natural sciences now had a lower priority. The infant colony at Sydney received little attention from London and grew only slowly under a succession of naval governors – Arthur Phillip, John Hunter, Philip Gidley King and William Bligh – all of whom experienced considerable difficulties with the army officers and senior public officials. Both of those groups sought extensive privileges and large grants of land with the intention of recreating the social structure of the mother country, establishing themselves as a colonial aristocracy and using the transported convicts as a serving class.

All four governors sought to administer wisely and evenhandedly, but were hampered by lack of real legislative authority and were glad to leave the colony, especially Bligh who had done his best to correct the many abuses – trafficking in rum and the indiscipline of the New South Wales Corps – and to resist the growing demands of the privileged sector. When Lachlan Macquarie arrived in 1810 with his own trustworthy highland regiment the colony began a slow upward climb to stability and development, characterised by expansion of the settlement across the adjoining Sydney plain and exploration of the regions beyond, a task becoming particularly urgent since the water supply in Sydney Town was inadequate and unpredictable.

Well before the Royal Commission had ever been considered, pressure for Reef protection had continued to grow strongly following the ACF symposium in May 1969, when a few of the more determined advocates came together to press for political action on the final resolution. In the following years, two complementary, interacting processes were in operation: on the one hand continued conservationist efforts were being exerted to mobilise public support for Reef protection; on the other, was the drawn-out contest between the Commonwealth and Queensland governments to reach an acceptable resolution of difficulties to enable political and legislative change.

FROM RESOLUTION TO IMPLEMENTATION: FIRST DRAFTS OF AN ACT

A leading protagonist throughout was Patricia Mather, acting officially in her capacity as honorary secretary of the GBRC, but in large part driven by sheer personal determination to see that the Reef would be saved from mining and any other form of blight. In preparation for the symposium, on 21 February 1969 she sent Chief Justice Barwick a résumé of the deliberations of the GBRC over the previous two years in examining the legal issues relating to protection. Having described them in careful detail she then presented the crux of the GBRC case: ‘The most pressing requirements at the present [are] … to extend the protection afforded all marine flora and fauna to territorial waters surrounding all national parks … to prohibit mining of minerals below high water … [and] to investigate setting up of further national parks’.

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.