by Margarita Bowen
WISENET Journal 34, March 1994, pp. 13-14.
Science, it is important to remember, is not just about laboratories, experiments, mathematics and computing. All these are useful tools - tools that may, like the computer revolution, strongly influence the kind of science that emerges.
Essentially, science is about information and the ideas that give it meaning. These are the enduring outcome of scientific enquiry: ineffable and yet powerful, seemingly insubstantial yet surprisingly persistent over centuries.
And here, of course, the hard line that some traditionalists like to draw between scientists and poets can become blurred. For poets and writers, too, are experts in sharpening our perceptions, honing ideas out of confusion and, at their best, in shaping the conceptual structures through which we perceive the world.
In that context Judith Wright Mckinney has earned a distinctive place in the history of Australian science.
Poet, activist and incisive writer on some of the great issues of national conscience - nature conservation and the rights of indigenous peoples - she has been in the forefront of battles in which the scientific experts of the time were by no means always the first to perceive the need for change.
In the struggle of the 1960s and 1970s to establish the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and in the longer, painful campaign that led to the Mabo legislation of December 1993, Judith Wright's stature as one of Australia's leading poets, and her strengths as a writer and negotiator were of immense importance. Her book The Coral Battleground (1977) and her political and historical survey We Call for a Treaty (1985) record her contribution to those causes.
On so many occasions, as Nugget Coombs - another outstanding Australian - recalls, 'she was ahead of the scientists'.
Recognition of her achievements in revitalising the conservation movement also comes from others. Emeritus Professor R L Specht, from the University of Queensland, recalls that Judith Wright McKinney was the first president and one of the founding members of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ) in 1963. This group rejuvenated interest in wildlife conservation in Queensland. She was so well known that she was able to put the cause of conservation very effectively to the public. Her enthusiasm for conservation spread to the Australian Conservation Foundation.'
Adrian Jeffreys, current Director of the WPSQ, confirms the significant achievements of the Society's founders. 'This group formed one of the first modern conservation groups. That is, they adopted the advocacy role of the conservation group, and they recognised the integral role of environmental education in an effective conservation movement.'
Of the many campaigns those early volunteers won, the coral battle became their most famous. judith Wright, in a recent letter to WISENET, comments on her own record of it:
'The book I wrote on the issue - now long out ofprint - gives a conspectus of the work done by the Society and its northern branches up to the Whitlam years, when the question was finally settled in favour of the Reef and the legislation establishing the Marine National Park was passed. The book ends before that point but remains the chief if not the only account of the events leading up to that declaration.'
For an insight into the front-line political confrontation of those exciting and exhausting years, there is indeed no better source than Coral Battleground, published in 1977. It is an absorbing story, unfolded with great skill, and the tension mounts as she recounts each desperate effort to save the Reef from mining and oil drilling.
As she says, it was a David and Goliath struggle in those years, with a few outstanding fighters, and often a handful of supporters, as a nucleus against the forces of industry, the apathy of governments, and the general ignorance of the public. 'It was easy to see that the shibboleths of growth and progress needed a balancing force, if the future was going to be lived in a world fit for humans.'
It is a story of heroes and, as a leader among them, Judith Wright highlights the dedicated work of others, like the ecologist Dr Len Webb, defender of the northern rainforests, who became vice-president of WPSQ and with Judith as president joined Dr Francis Ratcliffe of CSIRO and others to form the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1966. Through Len, she met the artist John Busst of Bingil Bay, who was fired with the idea of protecting the Reef. Describing John as the man whose energy and devotion had first sparked off, and largely continued, the fight itself, she was deeply saddened by his early death in 1971.
Of herself she says, more wryly, 'I had the special advantage of being a kind of "curiosity" showpiece in the conservation movement - a poet who spent most of her time on conservation was, after all, newsworthy'. But there was no doubt of her ability to negotiate forcefully with politicians and officials.
Judith Wright was awarded the Queen's Medal for poetry in 1992, and a number of prominent authors are supporting her nomination for a Nobel prize for literature. Many Australians will endorse their view.
There is surely no better way to conclude this brief tribute than with Judith Wright's own message to us. From a visionary who has been an inspiration for change, these are words to challenge us for the next century.
I have followed the continuing story of the Great Barrier Reef since I published The Coral Battleground, with admiration for the work of GBRMPA and with increasing dismay over the so-called developments that have taken place, from the "FLOATING HOTEL" propositions to the new incursions on fishing grounds by commercial interests both Australian and overseas-based - let alone the continuing threats and disasters of oil spills, estuarine pollution and all the rest. Clearly no legislation or restrictions or other attempts to "save the Reef" will work as long as tourism, population rise, rise in demands for Reef use and disregard of all controls set up by the Authority continue, as (of course) they will do.
If we have in fact lost the "coral battle" we have also lost the world itself, since the Reef is a microcosm of the fading natural world.'
Judith Wright