#SaveWritingNSW

The week before last, the NSW writers’ centre, Writing NSW, received the devastating news that their multi-year funding would be discontinued. The fate of the writers’ centre is now at risk, as is the ecosystem of writers, teachers and readers that the Writing NSW supports. New South Wales also risks becoming the only state without a writers’ centre.

When I was a young writer living in Sydney in the noughties, Writing NSW (then known as the NSW Writers Centre) was vital to the development of my literary career. They published a little yellow book which listed all of the journals and magazines that accepted submissions. I thumbed through that book religiously and repeatedly sent out my work (in hard copy, with stamps!). The majority of it was rejected, but without this resource, I wouldn’t have published the first few pieces that gave me a leg up into the writing world.

In 2001, I attended a day long festival on writing historical fiction at the Writers Centre with my friend Robin Barker, with whom I was studying writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. It was a clear and bright winter’s day, and at lunchtime I sat in the sun with Robin and her friend and editor, Julia Stiles (who would edit my first novel, A Curious Intimacy, with the aid of an Australian Society of Authors mentorship), and outlined the idea I had for my second novel, though I was still writing the first. I had a strong sense, that day, that I was forming my identity as a writer through the people I was meeting.

Later, in one of the sessions, Robin and I were seated with most of the audience, waiting for the speakers to come in. I sensed a disturbance in the room, and when I looked around for the source, I saw an elegant woman taking her seat on the left-hand side of the front row. ‘That’s Tara Moss,’ Robin explained to me, ‘she’s a model and a writer.’

Tara Moss and I went on to become successful authors (though Moss has written and sold truckloads more books than me!), both of us benefitting from the networks and events associated with the Writers Centre.

Another example: in 2016 I flew from Brisbane to the writers’ centre to attend Quantum Words, a one-day festival centred around writing and science. I knew very little about science writing, but I was interested in learning about how one could communicate plant science. I thought that the ecobiography I was writing could be one way of doing this and wanted to share and test my ideas. Quantum Words was one of the best festivals I’ve ever attended. It was small, which meant it was relatively easy for me to meet people, and the sessions were fantastic, with a keynote by Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty. Four years later, I drew on a number of the ideas and contacts I made that day to put together Science Write Now, the platform which scientist & author Amanda Niehaus and I are launching this Wednesday to publish and promote creative writing inspired by science.

A writers’ centre isn’t just a place where people go to attend workshops. It’s an ecosystem that nourishes connections, helps with building a literary profile, and offers critical support for the often hard and relentless journey of writing.

One of the saddest aspects of Create NSW’s decision is that the funding Writing NSW asked for is only $175,000 a year. Given the amount that politicians waste (flying business class, for example), how hard can it be to come up with these funds? The centre isn’t a white elephant, as two-thirds of its income is derived from courses, membership and workshops.

Disturbingly, too, only 5% of ongoing funding from Create NSW was dedicated to literature. This means that the state’s future storytellers will not get the support and publication opportunities they need to develop as a writer, and that the stories of people in NSW - particularly marginalised groups who may not have the resources to persist with a writing career - will not be told. This seems to be part of a larger trend of defunding literature in Australia, which the literary scholar and historian in me cannot help but link to book burning by authoritarian regimes, because books disseminate ideas.  

If you would like to protest Create NSW’s decision, here are some actions you can take:

• Write to or phone your NSW Member of Parliament. Contact details for all state MPs are here. Customise this template letter to make your views known.

• Send a copy of your letter to the Honourable Don Harwin, Minister for the Arts: office@harwin.minister.nsw.gov.au.

• Post about the funding decision on your social media platforms tagging @writingNSW and using the hashtag #SaveWritingNSW

• Spread the news to your colleagues and friends in the writing community and ask them to make their views known

• Sign this open letter to Create NSW and the NSW Minister for the Arts from writers and active members in the literary community

• Sign this petition from Jamie Parker, MP for Balmain, to NSW Minister for the Arts, the Honourable Don Harwin.

#AuthorsForFireys (and a bit of science)

When I was in primary school, my mother bought an illustrated book on the greenhouse effect. I read it avidly from cover-to-cover (perhaps indicative of my early environmental consciousness) while my brother used it in a school project for which he received top marks (although that was nothing unusual). The book was published in 1984, which means that information about global heating, accessible to 8 and 9 year olds, was available NEARLY FORTY YEARS AGO.

In 1988, Dr Tom Beer published the first study in the world on the impact of the greenhouse effect on bushfires, predicting the catastrophic conditions that have burned through 12 million acres, killed 23 people and affected half a billion animals, with many populations expected to become extinct (I would add that plant populations are likely to be severely affected too).

The Garnaut Climate Change Review, published ten years later in 2008, indicated that ‘fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense.’ These effects would be ‘directly observable by 2020.’ Well, that’s a bit of an understatement.

Over the last decade, when we should have been acting on this science, public sentiment was instead swayed by lobbying and the Coalition (those two things are linked). For evidence on the ways in which the Coalition has contributed to the terrible situation in which we find ourselves, read this thread.

The Liberals’ obsession with the surplus, together with their indifference to the ecosystems upon which they rely, have reached their apothesois in Scotty from Marketing, who tries to sell his belated response to the emergency with an ad featuring the ADF (who aren’t trained in firefighting) to the dinky tune of Tropical Beats. No wonder he was fired from his Tourism Australia job. No wonder a comedian has donated more money to the climate emergency than he has.

The ABC has been valiant in its reporting (and of course the government wants to cut their funding again next year), and have produced a page listing ways in which you can help. Writers across Australia are also mobilising through #AuthorsforFireys on Twitter. As of today, for six days, you can bid on Twitter for awesome literary goodies such as packs of books, signed copies, mentoring and manuscript assessments, a visitation from Trent Dalton to your bookclub (he will bring French champagne), artworks and prints (I have donated a copy of Hearing Maud). The proceeds will be donated to the Country Fire Authority.

I am hoping that this terrible disaster will mean change. People are pissed off – even beyond the echo chambers of my social media channels – and I hope this means that they will vote for the ecosystems that keep them alive. As scientist Dr Joëlle Gergis writes, ‘There genuinely is no more time to waste. We must act as though our home is on fire – because it is.’

11,000 scientists have called for urgent, necessary action, and in this article there are also some suggestions for what individuals can also do (it’s not radical stuff). I would hasten to add, however, that we must privilege Aboriginal people’s voices in discussions about Australia’s environment. They have worked with fire on this continent for thousands of years, & while colonisers have buggered a lot of things up, it doesn’t mean Aboriginal knowledge is redundant, and as it’s not as if the current policies are working very well.

Bid on a book. Sew a pouch for a possum. Donate to firies and wildlife groups. Read about cultural burning and support the groups that do it. Vote to protect our precious ecosystems, not only for humans (who are, aside from dickwads like oil moguls & Scotty from marketing, largely good and kind) but for the myriad non-humans that don’t deserve to burn at our hands. They keep us alive; we should protect them in turn.

Swim for the Reef 2018

This Saturday, on January 20th, I’ll be taking part in my third Swim for the Reef to raise money for the Environmental Defenders Office so they can protect the Great Barrier Reef. I’m with the Avid Readers and Writers for the Reef team, swimming with luminaries such as the amazing bookstore owner Fiona Stager and writer Anita Heiss. The day is at Musgrave Park Pool and it’s a wonderful community event. It also includes an inflatables race!

Last year we were temporarily top of the chart! (in laps that is; we aced it in fundraising)

Today I met my training goal of swimming three kilometres, aided in no small part by Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, his memoir on running and writing. A fellow runner gave Murakami the mantra ‘Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.’ Thus getting through long distances, whether over the earth or in the water, is about a frame of mind rather than what’s happening to your body.

The first fifteen hundred metres of a swim are always fine, but after that it starts getting hard. I find the best trick for getting through another fifteen hundred metres is to distract myself by thinking about my work, or a piece of writing, or by imagining myself in the sea surrounded by sharks (I am, I tell myself, learning transferable skills). Today there was ample enough diversion in trying to breathe and stay afloat while a swim squad chopped up the water in the lane beside me.

As I’ve written in earlier posts, I love swimming. I grew up in a place where the heat stretched into the 40s in summer so I was always in the pool (and I have 50 billion freckles to show for it). Those waterborne hours inspired a short story that was published eighteen months ago in Griffith Review. Just as running and writing go together for Murakami, swimming and writing go together for me.

If I have a problem with a piece of writing, I take it into the pool, and by the time I’ve finished my laps I’ve usually solved it. Today I tried to work out the first turning point for a novella, but was stymied by the buffeting of said squad. Still, my characters revealed a little more of themselves, which was helpful. And the water, if it’s sunny, is so glorious it’s poetry. The sunlight creates shifting patterns on the floor of the pool, bubbles peel away from my hands like mercury, and I wish I had gills so I never had to lift my head up for air. The floor of the pool is slightly less poetic: there are bandaids or squares of Elastoplast, hairpins, strands of hair and, once, a two dollar coin that I dived down to collect.

Inflatables race!

All this enjoyment (and pain) aside, the reason why I’m swimming is to keep the likes of Adani from building their terrible coal mine, which will pump more CO2 into the atmosphere. The oceans have absorbed about half of the world’s man-made carbon dioxide, which has slowed global warming. However, when carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, carbonic acid is formed, leading to higher acidity in the water. Increasing acidification of the oceans will cause coral to become brittle in a form of what Iain McCalman calls ‘coralline osteoporosis’ (The Reef: A Passionate History, p. 331), which will be a disaster given the increase in wild weather caused by climate change. Eventually coral will become soluble in seawater, dissolving like Disprin. And of course bleaching will continue to happen more regularly with rising temperatures.

It’s not looking good for the world’s largest living structure, which might be one of the reasons why this year has been designated the third International Year of the Reef. If you’d like to support the Reef via the Environmental Defenders Office and my interminable laps, my fundraising page is here. If you’re a social media fan, you can also follow what’s happening on the day via #swimforthereef

Last year's team of stellar swimmers.

On Science Communication

A few weeks back I presented at a symposium at UQ hosted by the Translational Research in Creative Practice group, which explores how creative practice can translate complex research in the humanities into the public realm. It borrows this idea from the medical sciences, which translates knowledge created in the lab to everyday environments – the phrase used to describe this is ‘bench-to beside’, which I like. I signed up to present on writing an ecobiography, because I’m interested in how writers can use their craft to convey science, and I think it's imperative to transmit knowledge from the academy to the public.

Last year I presented at the inaugural Quantum Words Science Writing festival hosted by the NSW Writers’ Centre, where I met plenty of wonderful writers, including poet Carol Jenkins who wrote the marvellous Fishing in the Devonian, and Indigenous writer Tony Birch, who is doing interesting and important work on colonialism and climate change, looking at how the resilience of Indigenous communities surviving colonialism might educate people on how to negotiate the increasing instability which climate change brings. I also caught up with my pal Cat Sparks, a spec fic writer who has just published Lotus Blue and who makes every occasion entertaining, even when she’s talking about the coming environmental Armageddon (which really is on its way, although Cat maintains we’ll be killed by robots first).

At this festival, Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty gave a marvelous keynote. He expressed his ideas clearly and had a very good sense of humour, which was a balm for everyone’s depression about the US election and the implications of this for our climate. He mentioned how one of the difficulties about communicating science is that science is about quantifying uncertainty and is therefore conservative in its analysis, whereas journalism, which relies on headlines on to sell its news (at least in these days of clickbaiting), is more interested in dramatisation (these are not his exact words, but the gist of them - I had to consult ecologist-philospher-b/f for clarification).

Another part of the difficulty in communicating science is confirmation bias: the more emotionally charged an issue is, the more people will interpret information (especially ambiguous information) in favour of their beliefs.

So, what to do?

Jamie Freestone, a literature PhD student at UQ, talks about the need for making science fun, and points to the success of the World Science Festival in Brisbane. He also mentions films such as Interstellar, and I would also add that docos such as David Attenborough’s Earth II can raise awareness, although Attenborough was criticised for creating an ‘escapist wildlife fantasy’ in which‘worldwide mass extinction is simply not happening’.

I’m a bit disappointed that Freestone didn’t mention literature, however, especially as this is his field of focus.

And mine too. While entertainment has its place, I also believe in seduction, in pulling the reader into a text through imagery, language, plot and character. And this is what I’m trying to do in my ecobiography, as I explained in my presentation. The impetus for writing the book is to raise awareness of the South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) which is one of 25 biodiversity hotspots around the world (and the only one in Australia), by rendering the lives of the plants Georgiana Molloy collected. I’m following them from the south-west at the time she collected them in the 1830s, to England, where they were distributed by James Mangles, a plant middleman, and then back to the south-west to see how they’re faring now. This forms the book’s plot. The characters are Georgiana and the Noongars with whom she interacted, the botanist Mangles to whom she sent his specimens, and his acquaintances, among whom he distributed Georgiana's’s specimens.

The plants, too, are characters, with different colours and textures, and ways of trapping and acquiring food, and responding to air and light. Through rendering them, I’m trying to explain that they are as just as important as humans. In a traditional biography, a human is the focus of the work, but in an eco-biography, the non-human is of equal significance. My premise is that, if we want to have a life, we need to write the lives that support us. And language is of the utmost importance in this respect - through it, I show readers the beauty and vitality of plants.

I’m nearly halfway through the project, and soon I’m heading to England to do research on Mangles and his botanical buddies, which will require much trawling through archives. Hopefully I’ll have time to post as I go, but if not, I’ll be updating my Instagram and Facebook author pages fairly often, in case you want to see what I uncover of 19th century science!

Days in the Life of a Deaf Woman

A little while back I went to a play at La Boite Theatre at QUT which a friend had written. I really wanted to see the play because I knew she’d been working on it for a long time and it had received rave reviews. However, I’d previously been to The Wizard of Oz at La Boite in 2013 and hadn’t been able to hear it because the loop system wasn’t working. My experience with loop systems is that they’re rarely fixed and my complaints go unheeded. Nonetheless, I really wanted to see the play.

So I bought a ticket for myself and my b/f and phoned the theatre beforehand to check that the loop system was working.

‘Yes, it’s working,’ I was told.

My b/f & I went to La Boite, had a drink and located the theatre manager, who said we needed to sit in a particular spot and that she would reserve those seats for us. She mentioned she had also reserved seats for another deaf person and her friend. Inside we found the seats. I put my hearing aid on its T switch, which picks up sound from the loop system and cuts out background noise. It wasn’t working.

I introduced myself to the lady who was sitting next to me and asked if she was deaf.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I’m deaf too. Is your hearing aid working with the loop? Mine isn’t.’

She tried her T switch. ‘No, it’s not working.’

We consulted the manager, but she couldn’t get the technicians to fix it before the play started. Nor could she sort it out at half-time. At least I had a nice chat to the lady next to me, who signed and worked as a translator.

Meanwhile my b/f laughing uproariously throughout the performance and I felt left out.

At the end of it, the manager was hugely apologetic and offered for me and the other lady to come back and watch the play again, but I knew it was pretty much booked out and I wanted other people to have the chance to see it, and I was flat out at work. Besides, a similar situation had happened some 15 years before at the Sydney Opera House, when I was invited to see a play again after the staticky loop system made hearing anything impossible. However the magic had gone. The manager with whom I was dealing was so terrible that I never went back to the Opera House again, except to see dance performances that didn’t need hearing.

The manager at La Boite also asked - and I could see she was trying to be tactful - how deaf I was. I don’t have a speech impediment so people don’t always believe me when I tell them I’m deaf, or forget very quickly how little hearing I have. I guess she was checking that I wasn’t faking it, but I was annoyed. My b/f reassured me it was just that I challenge the idea of what a conventional deaf person is, which is precisely why I tell people that I’m deaf. I also had the sense that, if the lady who was also deaf hadn’t been with me, I would have been disregarded (which has happened frequently before).

However, the manager’s response was certainly a damn sight better than of the staff at the South Bank Cineplex around the same time, when I went to watch La La Land. The last time I’d tried this cinema was in 2006, when I watched Happy Feet with my sister and her kids. I figured that, in eleven years they would have worked out that it was discriminatory not to have any means of helping deaf or hearing impaired people at their cinema.

I approached the counter. ‘Do you have a loop system that will help me to hear the film?’

‘No, sorry, we don’t.’

I was too tired to be surprised or to put up any kind of a fight. I walked out. They didn’t deserve my money.

A few weeks later I went to a World Science Festival talk at the Queensland Conservatorium a few weeks later and found the loop system was too faint to hear (despite have called beforehand and mentioned this to them, as it was quiet the last time I used it when I went to listen to Elizabeth Gilbert). The nice man on the door offered to seat me down the front but I was totally disheartened.

‘Forget it, I can’t be bothered,’ I told him.

I was sick of having to stand up for myself, and tired of the consistent message I was getting: that people simply don’t care. Later that week, I emailed the World Science folk to see they had made a recording of the talk that I might be able to listen to with headphones, but I didn’t receive a reply.

It’s sometimes hard to feel relevant to a society that, for all of your life, has shown that it doesn’t really give a damn about deaf people. However, I doubt that I’m alone. Australia has become meaner and harder and nastier and more small-minded since John Howard. I'm sure refugees, people of colour and Indigenous Australians feel like me a lot of the time.

If more places made more of an effort for their patrons with disabilities, they’d probably sell more tickets – not just to the folk with disabilities, but to the family and friends they bring with them. It makes economic sense to try harder.

At the end of the evening at La Boite, before my b/f and I walked away, I said to the manager, ‘Thank you for caring, because no one else ever has.’ She had tried, and that alone made me feel like it was worth coming back to listen to another play.

Read. Think. Speak. Vote.

Show us your arts!

You’ve had a long and tiring day at work. You catch the train home and take out your phone to watch a movie, but they killed off the script writers and set designers so it’s like watching charades when you’re drunk. You get home. You switch the kettle on for a cuppa and load up your laptop to play a game, but the coders have been sent home. On the TV, there’s only the news. The newsreader is monotonous because the speechwriters were sacked. You flick through a magazine. The photos look like something you might have taken when you were eight and the page layout reminds you of your gran’s scrapbook. You think about picking up a novel, but the writers were the first to go, because they were the most outspoken. There are no longer any novels. You sigh, sit on the floor with your tea and pick at the carpet.

Welcome to a world without creativity. The one which our Liberal government is engineering.

Those of you who follow happenings in the arts might have realised that things have been kind of awful over the past few years. The fact that I’ve had to write two submissions to public inquiries in under twelve months signals that artists and writers are under siege.

Last year I protested against the savage cuts to the Australia Council for the Arts, the national funding body for artists, and the establishment of the National Program for Excellent in the Arts, which wasted money by duplicating administration and has definitely not made its decisions with transparency, as with the Australia Council. The effects of these cuts have meant that many arts organisations, particularly those that are small, are struggling to remain viable. From little things, big things grow, but we’re never going to have the next Cate Blanchett or Patrick White if there are no fertile plots of earth from which to spring.

And this time I have written a submission on the Productivity Commission’s draft report on copyright.

The Productivity Commission is arguing that we should remove Parallel Import Restrictions. Currently, books are published in Australia by Australian publishing houses. If this restriction is removed, this means that cheaper editions by international publishers can be imported and sold alongside the Australian editions.

What’s wrong with that? I hear people asking. Surely cheaper books means more readers?

The problem is that it means less money for Australian publishers, which means they can’t afford to support as many Australian writers, which means fewer Australian stories. This has already happened in New Zealand – they removed PIR a few years ago and their literary industry has been decimated. The UK and the USA have, unsurprisingly, not gone down this route.

Fewer Australian stories also means less diversity. Over the twenty years that I’ve been writing, not only have I seen writers’ incomes dwindle (my own included), but publishers have become increasingly conservative and averse to risk. This often means that voices which are not mainstream are missing out.

Why should we care?

I have read time and time again how children love to see themselves reflected in books, particularly if they have a disability, are queer, or Indigenous, or have a migrant background. Melina Marchetta, author of Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca explains this situation well (and her whole blog post on this issue is worth reading too):

If these copyright rules are changed, kids today are back in a world similar to the one I grew up in; reading fantastic novels about places over there, but needing something more. I wrote Looking For Alibrandi from a selfish place. I wanted to see me on the pages of a book, because I loved reading and I loved film, but I never felt that I counted outside my extended family and my high school friends. I wanted to be part of a bigger identity.

Imagine if this situation is replicated on a larger scale, and Australians can’t even see themselves in their books at all. If we want Australian stories, we need to nurture Australian authors.

And now I hear a people clamouring to ask: why should taxpayers pay for artists? To which I reply: give me an industry which is not supported by the government in some way – what of mining, farming and manufacturing, for example? The investment in artists is miniscule (the Australia Council granted approximately $200 million in 2013/14), but the payoffs are huge: the GDP of the creative sector was valued at $86 billion in 2014. I appreciate that artists and writers are not the whole of the creative sector, but they make a significant contribution, and their prizes, grants and training are taxed, unlike sportspeople who also contribute to the entertainment industry, but get a free ride.

These cuts are indicative of a wider contempt for freedom of speech and expression. As I watch the Liberal government in action, I keep returning to novelist Anna Funder’s words when she accepted the Miles Franklin award for All That I Am (a novel about the encroachment of Nazism) the same day that Queensland Premier Campbell Newman axed the state’s literary awards: ‘I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them, and the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.’

Tellingly, in the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts there was no mention of funding for writers, and the cuts to the Australia Council are already having ramifications. In the recent UNESCO report on climate change, every mention of Australia (and the appalling state of the Great Barrier Reef) was excised. Journalists are referred to the police, and doctors and teachers are gagged, for speaking about asylum seekers and detention centres.

It isn’t difficult to join up the dots. In this current political climate, writers and readers are threats. As Richard Flanagan said in his speech at the Australian Book Industry Awards on 19th May 2016, ‘Who benefits from ignorance and silence other than the most powerful and the richest?’

A person who reads is a person who is informed. A person who is informed is a person who can challenge and argue. A person who challenges is a person who participates in democracy. Quelle surprise, then, that Turnbull, who has retreated miserably from his bold pitch for ideas and innovation, is invested in killing off the people who provide differing viewpoints: Australia’s writers.

The answer, as Richard Flanagan said, is simple: ‘If you care at all about books don’t vote Liberal at this election. If you care at all about what books mean, don’t vote Liberal. If you value how books can enrich lives, don’t vote Liberal. If you think Australian books matter to an Australian society, don’t vote Liberal.’

I will be voting for the Arts Party, even though I usually vote Greens. The party was set up in 2013 to support the arts industry & has the endorsement of luminaries such as Bryan Brown. Australia's writers have also spoken out angrily against the threats to our industry, and have the support of huge international names such as Jonathon Franzen and Jeanette Winterson.

You can also make a submission to the Productivity Commission. Submissions close on Friday 3rd June. You can make a submission here. You can also register to attend a public hearing.

Above all, though, we need to continue to read and to buy Australian books and support Australia’s authors. As Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things, said in her acceptance speech for the Stella Prize:

It often feels to me that we have entered a new dark age – an age in which science is rejected in favour of greed and superstition, in which our planet is in desperate need of rescue; an age in which bigotry and religion are inseparable, and presidential candidates promise to punish women for controlling their own bodies. I feel that in the midst of this gloom we need art more than ever. Art is a candle flame in the darkness: it urges us to imagine and inhabit lives other than our own, to be more thoughtful, to feel more deeply, to challenge what we think we already know.

Read. Think. Speak. Vote. 

Swim for the Reef

My first encounter with the Great Barrier Reef was in a glass-bottomed boat near Brampton Island at Easter in 1985. For a small girl from the country who only saw the sea once a year in the summer holidays and who was used to the contained and chlorinated water of swimming pools, the purple and red coral and shoals of sparkling fish were astonishing. And terrifying. When I snorkelled above a giant clam, I surfaced, gasping, and asked my mother, ‘What if my feet get trapped in its mouth?’

Just as it was difficult for an eight year old to comprehend the foreignness of the reef’s creatures, so too is it hard to take in the magnitude of the reef itself. It is, as Ian McCalman writes in The Reef: A History, ‘so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who’ve seen its full length from outer space’ (3). Made up of tiny coral polyps, it is the world’s largest living structure and largest coral reef system, roughly the size of England and Ireland put together. The beauty and complexity of its formation and ecosystems have drawn explorers, scientists, writers, tourists and photographers to its atolls and cays.

McCalman notes that the Reef was ‘built by human minds as well as by coral polyps’ (9), which goes some way to explaining the many histories of the Reef that begin with the first substantial record of a European encounter with it, Captain James Cook’s journal. However, it has of course existed long before Cook’s ship became wedged on a piece of coral. The present reef structure is estimated to be 6,000-8,000 years old, while there are more than 70 Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Traditional Owner groups that have long and continuing relationships with the Reef region and its natural resources. As Wright opens The Coral Battleground, her account of the fight to save the reef from mining in the 1960s, ‘This story has no real beginning and no one knows what its end will be.’ The end, however, may be looming.

A 2012 paper from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the University of Wollongong noted that the Great Barrier Reef had lost half its coral cover over the last 27 years. 48% of this was due to storm damage, while 42% was from the invasion of crown of thorns starfish, and 10% due to bleaching on account of increasing acidity of oceans from global warming. Despite this, in December 2013, Federal environment minister Greg Hunt approved a plan for dredging to create three shipping terminals as part of the construction of a coal port.

In the ensuing outcry, the government backtracked, and a consortium of developers resubmitted a proposal for onshore dumping. They proposed dumping on the Caley Valley wetlands, which are a filter for water running into the reef. When the new Labor government was elected in Queensland in 2015, they made a decision to prevent dumping. On 1st July 2015, UNESCO made a decision to put the Reef on probation until 2019 and expressed their disappointment in the decline of the quality of the Reef.

Meanwhile the price of coal is dropping, major investors such as the National Australia Bank have withdrawn their support for Adani and in November 2015, the Queensland government passed a ban on dumping. However, the Reef’s health continues to deteriorate despite state and federal efforts, as outlined in this article in The Conversation.

I protested for the Reef at a rally in 2013, I give money to Getup to agitate for political action to protect it,  I’m writing a speculative fiction novel about the reef and climate change, and on Saturday I will be taking part in a swimathon organised by the Queensland Environmental Defenders Office. I’m part of Avid Readers and Writers for the Reef, a collection of fantastic writers and readers put together by the wonderful and independent Avid Reader bookstore in West End.

I adore swimming. I grew up in north-west New South Wales where it was so hot that we spent most of our summers in the pool. It’s also useful for me creatively: if I’m stuck with something that I can’t work out in my writing, I take it into the pool and think about it as I swim. By the time I get out, I’ve usually come up with a solution. I’m not so great with my swimming technique though, as the only lessons I had were at Boggabri Primary School and they didn’t extend to tumble turns (which I still can’t do).

However, swimming with the literati on Saturday! I’m so excited. Other swimmers are Mary-Rose MacColl, Anita Heiss and Ellen van Neerven, plus some Avid staff (who are so lovely you sometimes want to steal them) and readers (without whom there would be no writers).

If you’d like to make a donation to support our swimming efforts and to conserve this gorgeous and irreplaceable (at least in our lifetime) piece of the environment, you can do so on this page.