We suspected oil and gas lobbying was reaching cyclonic intensity, pressuring governments to approve the final components of one of the largest fossil fuel developments in the country’s history. At the centre of the storm lies Scott Reef, a remote and breathtaking ecosystem that could arguably claim the title of Australia’s least known, yet most globally important, natural wonder.
With an actual cyclone season looming, it was now or never to amplify the reef’s story. So a group of us — a dozen marine scientists, filmmakers and conservationists, including my old friend Tim Winton and guitarist and singer John Butler — pooled resources to charter a vessel to the reef to document the threats posed by Woodside’s Browse gas proposal.
It’s a privilege to visit places like Scott Reef, and despite having first advocated for its protection nearly 20 years ago, I doubted I’d ever be able to dip a fin in its waters. It’s halfway to Indonesia and a long overnight voyage from the closest point on Australia’s mainland.
Departing from an old pearling base on the remote Kimberley coast north of Broome, we waded through the turbid water, transferring swags and special camera equipment from a 4WD buggy to a big catamaran’s tender. Joining the campaign leads as we headed offshore into the tropical night was a group with deep experience in marine biology and filmmaking.
An expedition certainly wasn’t in Tim’s diary, but I had rung him anyway, despite his erstwhile plans to decompress after touring his new climate-themed novel, Juice. (He keeps a relentless schedule that would have even a young rocker reaching for the uppers.) His involvement would help to get the word out, and I knew he’d want to experience the place directly. Being the trooper he is, Tim breathed deep and agreed to join the crew. Another dedicated environmentalist, John Butler, also beloved by many, wedged the trip into his end-of-year crunch.
Scott Reef does not disappoint — even for those of us, like Tim and I, who’ve been fortunate to experience 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 like a skyscraper of coral rising from the ocean floor. Approaching it, one minute you’re in sleepy reverie, watching the cat’s hulls slice the surface of the endlessly deep, dark blue, with flying fish and narrow-winged seabirds the only hint of life. The next you’re scrambling into tenders, leaving the mothership behind — the only vessel for 100km or more — picking the moment between oceanic swells crashing onto the giant crescent of coral, then tracking inside Scott’s sheltered coral lagoon.
The water in here shifts and ebbs languidly, like gel. It’s all kinds of turquoise, and you don’t need a mask to see the carpets of coral and the fish scattering under the bow. Still, every fibre wants to be in that water. Tim and I share that compulsion. In two days we saw and filmed manta rays, sea snakes, vast clouds of fish, and corals and sponges of impossible hues and shapes, as well as dolphins, turtles and reef sharks.
It is a spectacle like the famed atolls of Australia’s east coast, but Scott Reef is inevitably categorised differently in our national psyche. That’s because it’s off WA, a cultural Bermuda Triangle where different norms and values seem to apply. We were determined not to allow Scott’s misfortune of being on the wrong side of the country, and its consequent “out of sight, out of mind” handicap, to render it vulnerable to fossil fuel exploitation.
Woodside leads a consortium — its main shareholder is BP, no stranger to controversy after the Gulf of Mexico disaster — which is seeking to drill 50 wells around Scott Reef and noisily suck out fossil fuels via all manner of industrial equipment, including a de facto port where enormous vessels would be permanently anchored to store and export petroleum products. Climate change-inducing gas would be piped south, past yet more reefs, for processing and export at the Burrup Hub, adding to the unconscionable acid pollution already damaging rock art at World Heritage-nominated Murujuga.
Not far from where we marvelled at Scott Reef is the site where the Montara oil and gas operation blew out 15 years ago — despite the reassurances of industry — spewing millions of litres of toxicity into the ocean. A spill of any kind around Scott Reef would be shameful for Australia. Such profound disrespect for a thing of beauty and wonder like a coral atoll would persist in our collective memory forever, like the indelible imprint of oil-cloaked, suffocating seabirds of the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Even if ministers can somehow convince themselves that it’s worth rolling the dice on the risk of an accident, they’d still be endorsing industrialisation of this place and its impacts on threatened animals like sea turtles, pygmy blue whales and sea snakes. And while Scott Reef is still a kaleidoscope of colour and life, scientists know that successive climate-induced underwater heatwaves will push it to the brink.
If arguing about whether to drill around a coral reef for the very substance that’s already cooking it doesn’t capture the madness of the moment we’re in, what does?
Postscript: The WA government has just approved Woodside’s North West Shelf extension for a half-century, which would process vast quantities of gas from the Browse Basin around Scott Reef, as part of the giant Burrup Hub processing plant. The final decision rests with Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek. The WA and federal minister’s decisions on the separate environmental assessment of the Scott Reef-Browse Basin component are also due.
