At the beginning of the twenty-first century renewed emphasis on the Reef as a World Heritage Area has come to dominate planning and management, with a heightened recognition of the social and economic implications of World Heritage listing and the interrelationships between natural and cultural heritage. Underlying this is an increasing awareness, formed during the final decades of the twentieth century, that the Reef and its hinterland must be regarded as a dynamic ecosystem: dealing with environmental issues as localised problems on an individual basis is no longer an adequate basis for policy. Faced with continued population growth, mounting tourist traffic and rapid expansion of urbanisation and commercial infrastructure, forward looking planners recognise that the entire area – from the watershed of the Great Divide, through the coastal strip and across the waters of what is called the ‘lagoon’ to the edge of the continental shelf – must be understood and managed with a recognition of the high levels of connectivity within what is in effect a single ecosystem, if optimum environmental balance and sustainable resource yields are to be maintained. Activities in the rainforests, on coastal farmlands, in urban developments, in factories and industrial complexes on the foreshores of harbours and bays all exercise a direct, mutually reinforcing impact – literally, from ‘Divide to Drop-off’.

The voyage of the Endeavour was to have profound political and scientific consequences in Europe. The immediate result was an almost complete cartography of the world's oceans: the myth of a single great southern landmass was dispelled and Cook's careful mapping of the Pacific, amplified in his second and third voyages, 1772–75 and 1776–79, with the aid of William Harrison's new marine chronometer, enabled the first accurate world maps to be published. Such accuracy had a stunning impact on Europeans: it revealed, finally, the vastness of the Pacific, reaching some 16 000 kilometres from the Arctic to the Antarctic – from Bering Strait to the Ross Sea – and from Panama to the Philippines, some 18 000 kilometres. Even so, in the days of square-rigged ships when overseas voyages were reckoned in many months and often years, the geographical extent of the Pacific remained virtually incomprehensible. Along with scientific discoveries of strange biota, the reports from French and British voyagers of previously unknown exotic societies in the Pacific gave a stimulus to the newly emerging science of ethnology. Once relayed to Europe and heightened by the popular and sensationalising press, each new report dazzled the imagination.

Cook's voyages occurred in the same period as the apogee of the French Enlightenment, promoted by Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopedists.

CABINET COLLECTORS AND MUSEUMS: DARWINISM RESISTED

The final surveying of the Reef by the Herald and the subsequent development of a port and a more secure navigation structure by Heath and the Marine Board marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new phase. The work of the naturalists, however, had made no comparable advances. Apart from the few scientists who were carried aboard the British naval survey vessels, whose findings were taken back to England to be integrated into the maturing disciplines of biology and geology, little progress occurred in the colony. Natural history in Australia, in contrast, in its formative years had been the preserve of a minority of conservative and wealthy gentlemen amateurs and cabinet collectors. Although membership in the naturalist societies was limited to men, a few talented women also made contributions. Their efforts, however, were almost entirely limited to botany, and then chiefly as illustrators, and some of their work has enduring distinction, including that of the sisters Harriet and Helena Scott; and Ellis Rowan, whose paintings of Queensland flora are excellent examples of botanical illustration. The one woman to achieve distinction in both botany and zoology was the German collector Konkordie Amalie Dietrich (1821–91) who travelled throughout Queensland on behalf of the Godeffroy Museum of Hamburg. Unfortunately, all of her specimens left the country (Moyal 1986).

ENVIRONMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE GREENHOUSE DECADE

Over the final decades of the twentieth century the rapid development of industry and the pursuit of continued economic growth for corporate profits had accelerated changes to the entire world environment. The incredible expansion of organic chemistry had produced thousands of synthetic compounds for industrial manufacturing that have no counterparts in nature, and against which nature has no defences. In 1962 Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring had brought dramatically to world attention the issue of organochlorine contamination of American farmlands, and in turn, rivers and seas, from agricultural runoff. Carson was followed by a sequence of concerned critics – Lynn White Jr, Paul Ehrlich, René Dubos, Barbara Ward, among many others – who began constructing the pattern of connections of massive global environmental degradation that led to the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the World Environment of 1972 and the concept expressed in the title of its publication Only One Earth (Ward & Dubos 1972). That concern, however, was not taken seriously, and the quest for development under the mantra of economic ‘growth’ continued, not simply unabated, but with mounting impact.

THE EXPEDITION TO TAHITI

The Royal Society, in fact, had begun discussing the scientific advantages of the Venus observations early in 1767 and that year invited to their meetings Alexander Dalrymple, an experienced navigator and, briefly, ship's captain of the Cuddalore while in the employ of the British East India Company in Madras from 1752 to 1767. Dalrymple was active in promoting the theory of the counter-balancing continent; he was also a well-informed historian, an avid collector of Portuguese and Spanish exploration and colonising documents, maps and charts. Moreover, he was keen to implement the Royal Society's recommendation to lead the expedition to Tahiti. The Admiralty, however, insisted upon a naval officer to command the vessel that had already been selected by Dalrymple, the Earl of Pembroke, re-commissioned as the Endeavour, and extensively rebuilt. Instead, they chose James Cook, a warrant officer known for his navigational ability and meticulous hydrographic skills in Newfoundland and the St Lawrence region during the conflict with France in Canada. Dalrymple declined to travel as anything other than overall commander, although Joseph Banks, a gentleman naturalist, readily accepted the opportunity to take charge of the scientific aspects of the voyage.

Promoted to lieutenant, Cook supervised the provisioning of the ship at Deptford, and then set out from Plymouth on Friday, 26 August 1768, recording in his Journal that he ‘got under sail and put to sea having on board 94 persons including Officers Seamen Gentlemen and their servants’ (Cook 1770:4).

As Queensland's colonial decades progressed the Reef was also developing into a region of marine industries, based chiefly on four products: bêche-de-mer, tortoiseshell, turtles and pearling. All found a ready market in Asia: bêche-de-mer for Chinese cuisine, green turtles for meat and soup, tortoiseshell and pearling for overseas manufacture in the luxury jewellery trade. For over a century the dominant ethos was that of the open frontier of an unlimited resource potential, simply there for the taking, a process designated as ‘resource raiding’ (Ganter 1994). So, as cabinet collectors became obsolete and natural history evolved into science, one major concern became directed towards discovering and exploiting economic products to sustain the increasing numbers of settlers who moved along the Reef coastline. That process, however, was slow to develop since in Reef waters there was, at first, no understanding of limited resources. The abundance of the marine environment was taken for granted, even though the dangers of such practices were already evident in the almost extinct sandalwood trade. Only when resources were close to extinction was scientific inquiry brought to bear.

One of the early European exploitative activities in tropical Pacific waters, along with the extensive spice trade in the Dutch East Indies, was the logging of sandalwood that had a ready market in China, where various species – red sandalwood (Santalum album) being the most prized – were used for building temples, houses and reliquaries.

CONSERVATIVE ASCENDANCY: UNRESTRAINED EXPLOITATION, 1953–1968

By 1958, the three Reef island research stations – Heron, One Tree and Lizard – were still, in world terms, small, under-resourced, and limited to vacation and short term projects by individuals or small groups, yielding at best, the random unrelated results that had bothered Talbot. The British Low Isles Expedition of 1928–29 thirty years earlier had made the only major in-depth study within the Reef since Mayor's in 1913, which Australians still had no prospect of emulating. Nor did any of the Reef stations enjoy the advantages of the Enewetak Marine Biological Laboratory (EMBL), nor the lavish funding provided. At the end of the 1960s that situation was to change markedly; Reef science was to enter, for the first time, a new phase of development as the Commonwealth and Queensland governments were forced to recognise, after pleas for assistance for almost a century, that it was a seriously neglected area that had to be remedied.

Yet, the stimulus to research and funding came, not as a positive response to scientists' requests, but negatively when the Reef became the catalyst for what a national newspaper called the ‘most sustained public campaign in memory on a conservation issue’ ever experienced in Australia after people had mobilised in their thousands under the slogan ‘Save the Barrier Reef’ (The Australian 24 December 1969).

NATURALISTS, TURTLES AND EARLY TOURISM

In the mid 1920s, encouraged by the proselytising of Banfield, the Reef had increasingly gained a popular image as a fascinating, exotic realm. Following his lead, and with a growing interest in GBRC Reef research as extensively reported in the popular press, a number of individuals began organising small trips to a few of the easily accessible locations – under the banner of ‘naturalist expeditions’ – which grew into the beginnings of a tourist industry. Those early efforts are not well documented but possibly the first was conducted by E. F. Pollock, a councillor of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, which sponsored the trip, to the Capricorn and Bunker island groups in the southern part of the Reef in November and December of 1925. Pollock gathered together a party of active members of naturalist societies – including Anthony Musgrave and Gilbert Whitley of the Australian Museum – to travel to various locations in a chartered vessel, both observing and holidaying for several weeks, a venture that he repeated on at least five more occasions.

Throughout the three pearling decades of the late nineteenth century the major problem confronting the industry was continuing fluctuations in supply as beds became exhausted by the depredations of resource raiding, for which the Japanese had become the prime targets of abuse. The problem, however, was much more systemic. Ship owners wanted the best possible return from each venture and to that end developed the bonus incentive for higher yields described earlier. Following the first serious decline in the late 1870s the industry was stimulated when new fields near Badu, but also stretching to New Guinea, known as the ‘Old Ground’, were discovered in 1881. Again these were raided and by 1885 were so depleted that many of the luggers, and their schooner ‘mother ships’, left for new fields off Broome in Western Australia. As the larger shells had virtually disappeared, smaller and smaller sizes were harvested, down to 5 inches internal nacre measurement, which made them ‘practically valueless [since] … no workable mother-of-pearl or nacre is left’ (Saville-Kent 1890a:4).

Queensland had attempted its first regulation in 1881 with the Pearl-Shell and Bêchede-Mer Fishery Act, the same year that New South Wales, concerned over depletion of its table fish stocks, established the Macleay Royal Commission that recommended controls. Both colonies found that legislation was easy, enforcement difficult. In the pearling grounds, consequently, further decline continued as both quantities, and quality, fell.

On his return from the Endeavour voyage, Banks was the dominant figure in British botany. Well connected to the governing establishment, his London home commanded resources unrivalled in Britain, and equal to many in Europe. In 1778 Banks was elected president of the Royal Society and until his death in 1820 was its autocratic and unquestioned leader, which enabled him to promote natural history as a counterbalance to the previous emphasis on mathematics. Three years after election, in 1781, he was created a baronet with the title Sir Joseph, gaining further stature in society.

The decision to abandon the Florilegium in 1784 must have been a great disappointment to all concerned, although by then Banks was involved in a multitude of activities that took all of his energies. His major preoccupation was directing the Royal Kew Gardens which were playing a major role in the rapidly changing economy of Britain, as the nation became increasingly dependent on its colonies for economic survival in the face of French and Dutch competition. Following the occupation of the New World by Portugal, Spain, and then Holland in the seventeenth century, tropical crops had become essential to the European economy, and intense rivalry ensued.

Throughout the 1930s the Reef in the north was a scene of ongoing conflict with Japanese workers who had resumed aggressive resource stripping in the pearling industry, practices that had been arousing antagonism in Queensland ever since the 1880s. Tension in Australia was rising, evident in continuing denunciation of their impact in both the parliament and the press, exacerbated by a heightened fear which had been building up for decades. Japan's aggressive moves to gain military and economic hegemony over Asia, now combined with the growing threat of a rearming Nazi Germany, was creating alarm in Australia over what seemed an inevitable drift to war.

Hostility over Japanese depredation of Reef marine resources and towards Asian immigration had been of much longer standing. When the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 implementing the ‘White Australia Policy’ was passed by the first federal government, although persons engaged in the pearlshell and bêche-de-mer industries were exempted, allowing access to Japanese divers, its provisions continued as a serious irritant. Even though Japanese citizens were not permitted to emigrate, and Japan itself opposed all foreign immigration – an effectively racist policy – the Act of 1901 was seen as an affront to national prestige and Japan's standing as an international power (Sissons 1972:193f.). Despite such objections, Australian hostility over access to Reef resources persisted.

DARWIN'S OPPONENTS: SEMPER AND MURRAY, 1863–1880

Debate over Darwin's claimed solution to the problem of coral reef formation continued to gather momentum for more than a century. First ignited by Carl Semper, it was fanned by John Murray, and then erupted into what became a rather captious confrontation in Darwin's declining years, and even after his death, with the aggressive Alexander Agassiz, the most vocal among a number of dissentients.

In the years 1857–65 the naturalist and explorer Carl Gottfried Semper (1832–93), having graduated in natural science from the University of Würzburg, travelled throughout the Spanish Philippines, spending a year in 1862 on Pelelui and the other five major atolls in the Pelew, or Palau, group (now Belau) a little to the east of the island of Mindanao. Semper had read Darwin's 1842 volume and in 1863 sent to a German zoological journal a short twelve-page Reisebericht (Travel Report), in which he took issue with Darwin's central hypothesis of subsidence as the primary determinant of reef formation, asserting that the irregular configuration of the Pelew island chain with areas of both elevation and possible subsidence created serious problems for Darwin's theory.

On his return to Würzburg, Semper joined the university staff and in 1869 was appointed director of its zoological institute. In 1877 he was invited to Boston to present his researches to the Lowell Institute, a philanthropic foundation that sponsored lectures by distinguished persons.

REEF SURVEYS OF THE RATTLESNAKE: 1847–1850

Under command of Captain Owen Stanley (1811–50) the Rattlesnake sailed from Plymouth on 11 December 1846 to continue the survey of Reef and New Guinea waters begun by the Fly and the Bramble. Aboard was John MacGillivray, on his second tour of duty, this time as official naturalist. He was accompanied as assistant surgeon by the 21-year-old and totally inexperienced Thomas Henry Huxley, who recorded that he had prepared a program of studying the ‘corallines’ and other marine species. Due to the untimely death of Captain Stanley in 1850 from some unidentified tropical illness contracted during the third northern cruise of 1849–50, MacGillivray later also assumed the task of writing the official report, Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake. In addition, the artist, Oswald Walters Brierly (1817–94), kept extensive observations in a series of diaries which enable further reconstruction of the voyage.

On 11 October 1847 Stanley sailed with the Bramble to improve the survey of the inner route through the northern Great Barrier Reef and find other reliable openings besides Raine Island. The first landing was to examine and report on Port Curtis (modern Gladstone) where a party of eighty-eight had attempted to found a new colony of ‘North Australia’ in January 1847 but had been forced to abandon the enterprise after a few months.

The theory of chemical structure was developed in the 1850s and 1860s, a product of the efforts of a number of leading European chemists. By the late 1860s it was regarded as a mature and powerful conceptual scheme that not only gave important insight into the details of molecular architecture in an invisibly small realm of nature, but also furnished heuristic guidance in the technological manipulation of those molecules, providing assistance in the creation of an important fine chemicals industry. The theory continued to develop in its power and subtlety throughout the following decades, until by the end of the century, it was by all measures the reigning doctrine of the science of chemistry, dominating investigations in both academic and industrial laboratories. Consequently, the story of the rise of this theory is an important component of the history of basic science, and also of the manner in which scientific ideas are applied to industry.

EARLY STRUCTURALIST NOTIONS

Speculations concerning geometrical groupings of the imperceptible particles that make up sensible bodies go back to the pre-Socratics. However, for our purposes, it is expedient to begin the story with the rise of chemical atomism, since structural ideas presuppose atoms in the modern chemical (post-Lavoisien) sense. The founder of the chemical atomic theory was John Dalton (1766–1844), and it is suggestive that immediately following the proposal of chemical atoms, Dalton and others began to speculate how they might be arranged into molecules (often then called “compound atoms”). As early as 1808 – about the time Dalton’s ideas first began to be known in the chemical community – William Wollaston was “inclined to think … that we shall be obliged to acquire a geometric conception of [the] relative arrangement [of the elementary atoms] in all the three dimensions of solid extension.”