Among the Cays: Coral Islands in Embryo

Abstract

Without knowing much of the Great Barrier Reef, anyone living on it or in it, comes gradually to understand that it is not a single continuous wall. Yet that was the way it had appeared to my very naive intelligence before I saw it. I seemed to see a great sheet of shallow and fairly still water dotted with islands extending a tremendous distance up the coast to Cape Yorke. Ten miles, or was it 20 or 50, out from the mainland that rather shallow water met a barrier, a reef wail of inconsiderable height but vast depth, almost as deep as the water of the ocean that is kept out. This little coral island, Green Island, off the coast near Cairns, has its own vast and irregular reef about it, the size and depth of the lagoon varying on the lee and weather sides. The lagoon at high tide, and especially in rough weather, appears almost to be one with the deep sea, yet there are never any serious breakers on the island beach, for these are all stayed by the existence of the reef. Green Island, then, with its trees charted as 64 ft high, is a little tussock of verdure in the midst of a coral table, and beyond it, when the lagoon is golden brown, and shallow at low tide, we see at most parts the dark blue of the contrasting ocean waters. So we say to some learned fisherman who calls on us in rough weather, "How far out is the Barrier Reef itself" and he replies "This is part of it." Then we ask him more questions, and he sits down on the sand and draws a plan of the Reef in these parts as he knows it and submits to it. "Here's the island with its reef and near it, along the north, there' another reef in a curve like this and it runs right over to the reef that's round Oyster Cay. And there's another reef towards the south-east in a halfmoon shape and . . ." The mind begins to whirl with circles and half moons. So we understand that there is not continuously deep sea round the environs of this island, and that it is not for nothing that the fishermen's boats are flatbottomed. We understand too, that while this honeycomb of reefs is immense, the flat coral islands that emerge upon it here and there are the merest and rarest incidents. The attractive knobs on the reefs, emerging several miles apart and hardy dignified as yet by the name of island, seem to be what ours was before its mass of trees had turned it into the likeness of a flat fern basket drifting on the waves.