THE GREAT BARRIER

Evening Star, Issue 22448, 19 September 1936, Page 22

THE GREAT BARRIER

A JAPANESE INVASION THE GATHERING OF TROCHUS FRICTION CAUSED Lately there has been some concern in Australia because of the frequent appearances of Japanese vessels in its northern waters and the casualness of landings made on isolated parts of the coast (writes Nettie Palmer, in the ‘ Christian Science Monitor ’). Lighthouse keepers have reported the incursions of these Japanese; holidaymakers camping in quiet bays have been alarmed to see landing parties coming ashore to forage for food and water. Naturally, the men fishing regularly for trochus and beche-de-mer have been disturbed by what they regard as the unfair competition of these Japanese from overseas, and have made serious protests to the Government. For it is to gather trochus that the Japanese come, and their visits are likely to raise a delicate international problem in the years immediately ahead. The crux of the problem is the Great Barrier Reef. For 1,200 miles it runs up the Queensland coast, a tissue of islands, cays, coral reefs, making a breakwater against the long roll of the Pacific, Inside there is a smooth channel, carefully charted and used by overseas and coastal boats. The Groat Barrier Reef runs at varying distances from the coast; hero it is 50 miles out, there 20; it marks the old continental shelf, and the quiet seas inside it have always been regarded as 1 Australian waters.

MAY BE DISPUTED. Yet it is possible that this may be disputed by the Japanese. For years they have been attracted by the richness of the Barrier waters and the value of the products that can be gathered from their shallow sea floor. There is the trochus shell, for instance. Something like 15,000 hundredweight, is exported from the Barrier waters every year, and the bulk of it ■goes, to Japan. A coarse shell, it can be ground easily, and Japanese families, owning their own machines, have completely captured the shirt button market from Americans and Europeans, who use the more expensive pearl shell. It is principally to secure cargoes of trochus that the Japanese invade the Great Barrier. Their usual method is to anchor the mother boats on the outer edge of the reef and send launches through the narrow passages to comb the inner waters. Having camped recently for a year on a tinv island in the Great Barrier, I can understand the difficulty of policing such waters and also the local luggerman’s attitude towards intrusions from overseas. Our island was one of the little atolls that can be found all along the great reef. Purely coral in structure, it was only about 40 acres in extent, but was covered with a luxuriant growth of jungle. Around it lay a shallow lagoon, ringed by an irregularly shaped reef, which at low tide left an exposed mass of crumbling breccia over which we could walk for miles. It was an ideal observation post; one could examine at leisure the structure of the Great Barrier and make acquaintance with the floating human life of the enclosed waters. THE REEF A SURPRISE. The reef itself is a surprise to those coming fresh to it. Beforehand, one thought of it as a continual wall of coral, forming a rampart along the coast In reality, it is a series of ram-

parts, mad© up of coral structures at every stage of their growths, reefs submerged at high tide, reefs completely above the water, older reefs covered with sand and coarse grass; finally, cays like our own that were old enough to have grown a beautiful little jungle and formed satellite reefs of their own. Within a day’s sail we had examples of all these. The human beings who visited us were chiefly mainland fishermen and island luggerboys. During the last half century an important marine industry has grown up in Barrier waters. The headquarters of it is at Thursday Island, in Torres Strait, where luggers with trim lines and shallow draft are built for the trade. Australian-owned, but manned by natives and usually skippered by Japanese. They come south in March, at the end of the rainy and cyclone season, and work slowly northward with the trade winds behind them, stopping a week or so in sheltered places and sending out small boats to dive for trochus. beche-de-mer, and sometimes pearl shell. Their activities are supervised bv the Australian Government, which rigidly guards against spoliation of the reefs; it is illegal, for instance, to gather trochus shell measuring less than two and a-half inches across the base. Supervision is made comparatively easy, because all the products gathered by these luggers must pass through Thursday Island, which is the clearing-house for shipments to China and Japan. WORK AND SPORT. Apart from the value of the industry, it is definitely useful in finding a fairly pleasant occunation for numbers of natives, both islanders and coastal aboriginals, who would be hard pressed by advancing civilisation. Eirq on the water is traditional for them; diving for trochus and _ beche-de-mer has an element of sport in it hike the ancient hunts for food. And the

Government encourages them to take on certain , responsibilities. I remember the first crowd of luggerboys who came to our island, strapping fellows with enough spare energy to amuse themselves by sailing races between their dinghies in the quiet waters of the lagoon. Their lugger lay at anchor just outside the reef. “ Who owns your boat?” I asked, looking over towards it. One of them gave a proud headshake. , . _ “Nobody don’t own our boat. We own it!” I found out that on ms island, Badu, the Queensland Government had for some years been experimenting with a policy of advancing money to the natives so that they might buy their own boats and run them on a co-opera-tive basis. The Government agreed to market the product, with a small .margin for overhead, and it seems the policy has succeeded. The men have even learned to build their boats on their own slips, and the profits of the little community have gone into a general improvement in the standard of living. A likeable crowd, those lugger boys of the Barrier! Racially, they are a mixed lot. Coming largely from islands in the Torres Strait (meeting points of different peoples for centuries), they show hints in their physiognomy of the Malay, the Polynesian, the Melanesian, the mainland aboriginal. Yet they have a strong local patriotism, and a pride in the Barrier waters. A pride also in their singing. It was never difficult, once they had come ashore, for a. spell, to get them to give a sing-song in our camp. THEIR OWN SONGS. Their songs were usually simple repetitive lyrics they had made themselves or picked up from their friends; descriptions of sailing races between dinghies, of storms at sea, of getting into port after a bad voyage. But they had corroborees, too, like those of the

coastal aboriginals; a complicated net. work of song and dance, with humors ous miming, concerted .movements o| great, power and rhythm, and usually m drama to link all together. Gradually these waters of the Bate rier. with their cays and other varied islands, are beginning to be known W others than those who earn their liven* hood there. Every sunny winter they are visited by tourists escaping from the cold south; and a few guest house# have begun to be built among the palm# and jungle. A few years ago a party of Bntisa natural scientists, headed by Dr C, M« Yonge, worked on Low Woody Islanda twin cay about. 40 miles north of the one where my' husband and I had our quiet camp They were investigating and nature of Plankton, that minute food of whales; —and whales were at most seasons passing up. that great channel to more tropical waters —and made advances in the problems of eoraq too. Another such expedition is aw nounced, partly sponsored by thf Queensland Government. The problem! presented by coral growths are innunw erable, and the islands of the Barrie! provide something, like natural laborer tories. , . , _ But the political problem, which I hinted at in the beginning, may prove a source of some friction. Is all the varying channel between the Great Barrier and the mainland to he considered an Australian preserve? And are the Japanese, when they come there gather, ing trochus so efficiently, really poach, ing? The Australian Government hae announced its intention of building fastmoving craft to patrol, the fishing grounds, but there is an immense area to police, and the theory of the 12-mile limit is not clear.