HOW TO SAVE A REEF
Townsville historian and high school teacher Rohan Lloyd’s first book shines the light on the politics, people and debate behind the campaigns to save the reef.
The Reef’s history is endlessly fascinating. The Reef itself clearly inspires adventure, but so too does its history.
Adeep respect and fascination for history has been a solid anchor in Rohan Lloyd’s life. Born, bred and educated in Townsville,
Rohan believes history is central to how individuals and a community see themselves.
“I always loved thinking about the past and that was largely encouraged by my parents,” Rohan tells NQ Weekend. Both, but particularly my father (who was a history teacher), always spoke to my brothers and I about the importance of history and a lot of the stories they told us were located in the past.
“I did history all through high school and wanted to be a history teacher. When I got to James Cook University, I found that I wanted more history in my world so I doubled-down and did a joint degree so I could do honours. A lot of the history courses had some environmental focus in them, but I really did love environmental history. “
For Rohan there is so much to environmental history that is “interesting and urgent”
“But for me personally, it gave me a greater sense of my relationship with the places I go and live in,” the Ignatius Park College teacher and adjunct lecturer at JCU explains. “My honours research was on Kuranda and the counterculture movement there in the late 1960s and 1970s. “I liked working in that period, but I wanted to do something more local to me. So, when I was thinking about doing more history, doing something in environmental history really appealed to me, but also on a place that I had greater connection to. The Reef fit that perfectly.
Rohan’s book Saving The Reef has recently been launched and he describes it as historical, environmental, political and sometimes controversial.
The meat of the book is the historical narrative of how settler-australia, and then federated Australia, engaged with the Reef.
It shows how the Reef environment came under a smattering of legislative protections throughout the 20th century and the attitudes that stimulated or encouraged those pieces of legislation.
“That section of the book ends with the Save the Reef campaign and the eventual creation of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in 1975,” Rohan explains. “Interweaved through these historical chapters are a series of interluding essays that try to link these elements of the past to the contemporary issues that underpin our understanding of the Reef’s politics today.”
For Rohan, the inspiration behind Saving the
Reef was its adventure and history.
“The Reef’s history is endlessly fascinating. I always wanted to live a life of adventure, but I’m accident prone which has dulled my risk-taking behaviour a bit, I think,” Rohan reflects. “Through history, however, you take yourself to all kinds of places. The Reef itself clearly inspires adventure, but so too does its history.
“There’s the obvious element of oceans, reefs, islands and all the beauty, violence, and awesomeness of the place, but it is also filled with people.
“The more I found in the archives about the way we interacted with the Reef in the past, the more I wanted to know. There is so much to learn about that big, beautiful place: it is an endless adventure.”
Rohan believes history is immensely important for the reef’s future.
“Climate change is at once a scientific, economic and social problem,” he says. “It is immensely complex and requires people to think about all kinds of contingencies and stakeholders.
“History, the discipline, allows us to sift through those threads to reveal important continuities but also changes through time.
More than that, it can be a source of hope as well. Through stories, history can tell us when things went better than we could imagine.”
Rohan hopes readers find hope in his book.
“It is not a manifesto on how to save the Reef; I’ll leave that to others,” he says. “What it does suggest, however, is that we can come together to protect the Reef based on one single, simple idea: we all value the Reef. It feels at times that this is lost, but it is what eventuated in its ‘saving’ in the past.”
Studying and documenting the history of the reef will undoubtedly help protect it in the future.
Rohan says studying any environment’s past can provide people with a sense about how we have interacted with it, and also how it has changed in response to our continued engagement with it.
“We can see what we have done right: what we have done wrong. With the Reef, we can find times when we did protect it, but also more reasons to keep protecting it.
“Documenting a long-held attachment to the Reef will only strengthen our desires to protect it and optimism in our capacity to do so.”
Rohan says one of the biggest issues for history today is the funding cuts to the institutions which collect and present our histories: libraries, archives, museums, galleries and the university sector.
“For us here in northern Australia, accessing this material is particularly difficult given so many of these places are in the larger, southern, capital cities,” he explains. “I wouldn’t be able to have written this without a number of these institutions across the land. I hope that our local politicians can advocate for the importance of these places given that they hold our histories within them.”
Save the Reef is available at all good bookstores.