Part 3.  New Growth – Central Great Barrier Reef, April 2024

There might be 3,000 coral reefs but what makes a special reef, what makes John Brewer Reef the jewel in the crown considering the central region of the Great Barrier Reef – something of greater value amongst other valuable things?

This coral reef to the north-east of Townsville was once home to a floating hotel, that was back in the 1980s.   More recently, and somewhat more modestly, John Brewer has been given its own Museum of Underwater Art.

Hanging baskets were installed into this underwater museum, and they are now chandeliers.  That is how I describe the bouquets of coral, that you can see in my feature photograph at the top of this post.

Thankfully the MOUA and its chandeliers were not damaged by the cyclone, being at some depth.

I first visited this coral reef on 10^th April 2022, exactly two years ago tomorrow.   My buddy on scuba was Leonard Lim, and he took the most exquisite photographs of these huge plate corals.   They have since been smashed up by TC Kirrily, into what Stuart Ireland now describes as Bull-in-a-China-Shop Alley.

I have witnessed a coral reef go from healthy to algae.  Not to the zooxanthellae-type algae that live within the coral polyps, but to macro-algae that grow over the corals, smothering them.   It was like being in a coral graveyard: seeing the outline of once healthy corals overlaid with dark slim.   That is NOT John Brewer Reef, I am describing an inshore coral reef, not far off-shore from the north Queensland town of Bowen following Tropical Cyclone Debbie.

When I first visited John Brewer Reef after Tropical Cyclone Kirrily my stomach churned, wondering if this jewel-in-the-crown would become so infested with algae the corals would all be smothered.   Diving the reef again last Thursday, ten weeks after TC Kirrily, I can see that there is something different and special about this location.

There are large schools of algal-eating fish passing through, mowing the algae as one might mow grass.   And so, from the pieces of broken coral that have fallen from the reef crest, there is opportunity for new growth.

That was the most wonderful thing that I saw on Thursday: new polyps pushing out from broken pieces of Acropora coral.

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So much thanks to Adrenalin Dive for getting us safely so far off-shore, and to the Institute of Public Affairs for funding this return visit.