Personal reflections from Chrissy Grant, an Aboriginal (Eastern Kuku Yalanji). As First Nations people with deep connections to Far North Queensland ‘Country’, their reflections demonstrate the enduring power of their cultural science and practice, and how these have also sometimes become enmeshed with Western systems of knowledge and management.

The Great Barrier Reef has been bleaching yet again. If the Anthropocene had a colour table, bleached coral would hold an especially recognizable place within it. By some lights, chromatic behaviour — and chromatic disaster — are best apprehended as secondary qualities, as spectacles that offer to point the discerning observer beyond the tokens of human sense and toward an object’s (or ecosystem’s) essential properties. This article asks whether it is possible, and ethically viable, to recognise corallian colour practice as having meaning in and of itself. I argue that we should recognise coral colourism as the irreducibly relational comportment of species, sunlight, salt water, sediment and so on. Contrary to some influential views, the Reef’s performances are not simply constructed by the fantasies of human spectators, but by stimulating human sensoria, they do hail us as participants in the chromatic field. Reckoning the loss of hue as a discrete catastrophe might therefore generate tools for articulating value in a manner that is not strictly constructivist, naively scientistic or reactionarily idealistic. Caring for the Reef may be, not first of all but not least of all, a caring for colour — a caring against chromatic disappearance and a caring towards chromatic repair.

In the early twentieth century, great delight in the unique tropical beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, coupled with an opportunistic spirit for commercial development, inspired the commission of eye-catching posters and advertisements by Australian tourist organisations. The aim of this article is to discuss a pictorial device that developed alongside the rise of modern tourist advertising images of Great Barrier Reef – a split-level viewpoint that approximates the effect of looking at the Reef through the glass sides of an aquarium. Building on my earlier research published in 2019 on wildlife photography and the construction of the Great Barrier Reef as a modern visual spectacle, and combining art history with environmental history, this article also turns to coloured advertising lithographs. It argues that split-level visualisations separate human from non-human and elevate the idea of human superiority. With the Great Barrier Reef facing unprecedented ecological pressures, the historical images at the centre of this article are instructive for understanding the deleterious effects of anthropogenic impact, as well as early twentieth-century attitudes towards human–non-human relations.

The Great Barrier Reef is inscribed on the World Heritage List for its natural values, including an abundance of marine life and extraordinary aesthetic qualities. These and the enormous scale of the Reef make it unique and a place of ‘Outstanding Universal Value’. In the twentieth century, protection of the Great Barrier Reef shifted from limiting mechanical and physical impacts on coral reefs to managing agricultural runoff from adjacent mainland to minimise environmental impacts. By the early twenty-first century, it was apparent that threats to the Great Barrier Reef were no longer a local issue. Global warming, more frequent extreme weather events and increased ocean temperatures have destroyed vast swathes of coral reefs. Conservation scientists have begun trialling radical new methods of reseeding areas of bleached coral and creating more resilient coral species. The future of the Great Barrier Reef may depend on genetically engineered corals, and reefs that are seeded, weeded and cultured. This article asks whether the Great Barrier Reef can remain a natural World Heritage site or whether it might become World Heritage in Danger as its naturalness is questioned.

The likelihood that climate change may destroy the Great Barrier Reef has been a central motif in Australia’s climate change politics for more than a decade as political ideologies and corporate and environmental activism draw or refute connections between the coal industry and climate change. The media fuel this debate because in this contest, as ever, the news media always do more than simply report the news. Given that the Reef has also been central to the evolution of Australia’s environmental laws since the 1960s, it is not surprising that the Reef is now a leading actor in efforts to test the capacity of our environmental laws to support action on climate change. In this contribution, we examine the news coverage of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) 2015 challenge to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine to observe the discursive struggle between the supporters and opponents of the mine. Our analysis of the case shows that while the courts are arenas of material and symbolic contest in the politics of climate change in Australia, public interest environmental litigants struggle both inside and outside the courts to challenge the privileging of mining interests over the public interest.

In the late 1970s, Carden Wallace was at the beginning of her lifelong exploration of the Great Barrier Reef — and indeed, reefs all over the world. For Wallace, who is now Emeritus Principal Scientist at Queensland Museum, the beginning of her Reef career coincided with the emergence of both feminist and environmental movements that meant her personal and professional lives would be entwined with a changing social, cultural and political milieu. In this article, we couple the story of Wallace’s personal life and her arrival in coral science to identify the Reef as a gendered space ripe to explore both feminist and conservation politics. The article is part of a broader Women of the Reef project that supports a history of women’s contribution to the care and conservation of the Reef since the 1960s. In amplifying the role of women in the story of the Reef, we find hope in the richness of detail offered by oral history to illuminate the ways discourse on the Reef and its women sits at the intersection of biography, culture, politics and place. In these stories, we recognise women’s participation and leadership as critical to past challenges, and to current and future climate change action. By retelling modern Reef history through the experiences and achievements of women, we can develop new understandings of the Reef that disrupt the existing dominance of patriarchal and Western systems of knowledge and power that have led us to the brink of ecological collapse.

What conservation could possibly become commensurate with the rates of human-induced biophysical change unfolding at the advent to the Sixth Extinction Event? Any such conservation would require time-critical interventions into both ecosystems and evolution itself, for these interventions would also require domains of risk and ethics that shatter normative understandings of conservation. Yet a line appears to have been drawn in the sand against such experimental conservation. Holding the line will retain conservation practices that are null and void against the extinction debt facing multitudes of species. Crossing the line would invoke scales of bioengineering that appear abhorrent to normative morality. This article explores the question of whether this line in the sand could, and should, be crossed through a detailed case study of current and proposed conservation for endangered Chelonia mydas sea turtles on Raine Island, a small coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Chelonia mydas and Raine Island are presented as synecdoche for conservation across diverse species across the world because turtles are among the most endangered of all reptiles and Raine Island is the largest and most important rookery in the world for this species. With such lines disappearing under the rising seas, the article contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.