We suspected oil and fuel lobbying was reaching cyclonic depth, pressuring governments to approve the ultimate elements of one of many largest fossil gas developments within the nation’s historical past. On the centre of the storm lies Scott Reef, a distant and breathtaking ecosystem that might arguably declare the title of Australia’s least recognized, but most globally vital, pure marvel.
With an precise cyclone season looming, it was now or by no means to amplify the reef’s story. So a bunch of us — a dozen marine scientists, filmmakers and conservationists, together with my outdated good friend Tim Winton and guitarist and singer John Butler — pooled sources to constitution a vessel to the reef to doc the threats posed by Woodside’s Browse fuel proposal.
It’s a privilege to go to locations like Scott Reef, and regardless of having first advocated for its safety almost 20 years in the past, I doubted I’d ever be capable to dip a fin in its waters. It’s midway to Indonesia and an extended in a single day voyage from the closest level on Australia’s mainland.
Departing from an outdated pearling base on the distant Kimberley coast north of Broome, we waded by means of the turbid water, transferring swags and particular digital camera gear from a 4WD buggy to an enormous catamaran’s tender. Becoming a member of the marketing campaign leads as we headed offshore into the tropical evening was a bunch with deep expertise in marine biology and filmmaking.
An expedition definitely wasn’t in Tim’s diary, however I had rung him anyway, regardless of his erstwhile plans to decompress after touring his new climate-themed novel, Juice. (He retains a relentless schedule that will have even a younger rocker reaching for the uppers.) His involvement would assist to get the phrase out, and I knew he’d wish to expertise the place instantly. Being the trooper he’s, Tim breathed deep and agreed to affix the crew. One other devoted environmentalist, John Butler, additionally beloved by many, wedged the journey into his end-of-year crunch.
Scott Reef doesn’t disappoint — even for these of us, like Tim and I, who’ve been lucky to expertise Ningaloo Reef’s majesty, and for the Ningaloo-based filmmakers with us whose adventurous lives are akin to a perpetual nature documentary.
Scott Reef is sort of a skyscraper of coral rising from the ocean ground. Approaching it, one minute you’re in sleepy reverie, watching the cat’s hulls slice the floor of the endlessly deep, darkish blue, with flying fish and narrow-winged seabirds the one trace of life. The subsequent you’re scrambling into tenders, leaving the mothership behind — the one vessel for 100km or extra — selecting the second between oceanic swells crashing onto the large crescent of coral, then monitoring inside Scott’s sheltered coral lagoon.
The water in right here shifts and ebbs languidly, like gel. It’s every kind of turquoise, and also you don’t want a masks to see the carpets of coral and the fish scattering below the bow. Nonetheless, each fibre needs to be in that water. Tim and I share that compulsion. In two days we noticed and filmed manta rays, sea snakes, huge clouds of fish, and corals and sponges of unattainable hues and shapes, in addition to dolphins, turtles and reef sharks.
It’s a spectacle just like the famed atolls of Australia’s east coast, however Scott Reef is inevitably categorised otherwise in our nationwide psyche. That’s as a result of it’s off WA, a cultural Bermuda Triangle the place totally different norms and values appear to use. We have been decided to not permit Scott’s misfortune of being on the flawed aspect of the nation, and its consequent “out of sight, out of thoughts” handicap, to render it susceptible to fossil gas exploitation.
Woodside leads a consortium — its essential shareholder is BP, no stranger to controversy after the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe — which is searching for to drill 50 wells round Scott Reef and noisily suck out fossil fuels by way of all method of commercial gear, together with a de facto port the place monumental vessels could be completely anchored to retailer and export petroleum merchandise. Local weather change-inducing fuel could be piped south, previous but extra reefs, for processing and export on the Burrup Hub, including to the unconscionable acid air pollution already damaging rock artwork at World Heritage-nominated Murujuga.
Not removed from the place we marvelled at Scott Reef is the positioning the place the Montara oil and fuel operation blew out 15 years in the past — regardless of the reassurances of trade — spewing tens of millions of litres of toxicity into the ocean. A spill of any variety round Scott Reef could be shameful for Australia. Such profound disrespect for a factor of magnificence and marvel like a coral atoll would persist in our collective reminiscence ceaselessly, just like the indelible imprint of oil-cloaked, suffocating seabirds of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe.
Even when ministers can by some means persuade themselves that it’s value rolling the cube on the danger of an accident, they’d nonetheless be endorsing industrialisation of this place and its impacts on threatened animals like sea turtles, pygmy blue whales and sea snakes. And whereas Scott Reef remains to be a kaleidoscope of color and life, scientists know that successive climate-induced underwater heatwaves will push it to the brink.
If arguing about whether or not to drill round a coral reef for the very substance that’s already cooking it doesn’t seize the insanity of the second we’re in, what does?
Postscript: The WA authorities has simply authorized Woodside’s North West Shelf extension for a half-century, which might course of huge portions of fuel from the Browse Basin round Scott Reef, as a part of the large Burrup Hub processing plant. The ultimate resolution rests with Surroundings Minister Tanya Plibersek. The WA and federal minister’s choices on the separate environmental evaluation of the Scott Reef-Browse Basin part are additionally due.
