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).