The Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth and the only one visible from orbit: two thousand three hundred kilometres of coral along the coast of Queensland, two thousand nine hundred separate reefs and nine hundred islands between the tip of Cape York and Bundaberg, a World Heritage site since 1981 and the sea country of more than seventy Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have fished it for sixty thousand years. It is not one place but a coast of them: from Cairns and Port Douglas the catamarans run an hour and a half out to the pontoons on Moore and Agincourt reefs on the outer edge, where the water drops off into the Coral Sea; Green Island is forty-five minutes from Cairns and Fitzroy an hour; Lizard Island in the north sits beside the Cod Hole and the Ribbon Reefs, where the dwarf minke whales come to look at swimmers in June and July; the Whitsundays in the south are seventy-four islands and the white silica of Whitehaven Beach, with the humpbacks between July and September; and at the far south, Heron Island and Lady Elliot are coral cays where the turtles come up the sand to lay between November and March and the mantas circle below.

The traveller sleeps in Cairns or Port Douglas, or on an island, and gives the reef at least a day on the outer edge — the pontoon at Agincourt or Moore for the snorkel and the introductory dive, or, better, a small boat that moves between three sites in a day; a night or two on Lizard, Heron or Lady Elliot for the reef at the doorstep and the dawn snorkel; the Whitsundays by sailing boat, two nights, Whitehaven and Hill Inlet at low tide; and, if the traveller dives, three or four nights on a liveaboard to the Ribbon Reefs and the Cod Hole, or a day to the SS Yongala off Townsville, which is among the great wrecks of the world. On the coast, the Daintree rainforest meets the reef at Cape Tribulation, and the Kuranda train and the Skyrail climb into the tableland behind Cairns.

The Guide's honesty: the reef has bleached in mass events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024 — five in eight years, driven by marine heat — and stretches of it are grey where they were colour; it is alive, and on many reefs it is astonishing still, but it is wounded, and the Guide will not sell it as untouched; the traveller who wants to see it should go, choose operators who work with the Marine Park Authority and the Traditional Owners, and go without illusions; the stinger season runs from November to May and the suits are not optional; the cyclones come in the same months; the reef is a two-hour crossing on a moving sea for those who feel it; and the outer edge on a still day in July, with the coral wall falling away into blue and a minke whale turning to look, is still, for all its wounds, one of the great sights on this planet.