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.