ALTHOUGH I was born and brought up in Australia, I never in my youth succeeded in get ting out to the Great Barrier Reef, along the continent’s northeastern coast. The Reef, one of the really spectacular fantasies of nature, like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, was always there in the background, but somehow the trip was put off from year to year. As children, my friends and I knew a good deal about the Reef, of course, for it is an important part of the geography that is taught in every Australian school. We knew, for instance, that it was an immense agglomeration of coral, the largest in existence, and that it was the haunt of strange tropical birds and fish. We were told that it rose up out of the ocean like a protective wall, and that it ran along the coast for twelve hundred and fifty miles, from the Tropic of Capricorn almost to the equator. Ships could sail in a navigable channel between the Reef and the coast, but those that lost their way there or got driven off course in a storm were apt to be badly holed on the coral. If put to it, we could no doubt have added a few general details about the coral polyp, the animal that builds the coral, but I don’t think we ever had a really clear picture of the Reef itself. It was not something that you could easily envis-age, like a canyon or a waterfall. There was a mysterious element in the living coral, and something rather frighten-ing in the stories we heard about giant octopuses and submarine forests. The Reef belonged to the Shangri-La world, half reality and half imagination, and I must confess that I was still more or less confused about the whole thing when, after an absence of many years, I recently returned to Australia. And then I finally did manage to see the Reef for myself.
It is no light journey get-ling to Australia in the first place. From England, it is at least a four-week trip by sea. If you are travelling from the United States, there are no regular passenger ships at all, and you have the long flight across the Pacific from San Francisco, via Honolulu and Fiji. To reach the Reef from Sydney, where you are likely to land from either point of departure, you have to go a thousand miles up the Australian coast, and once you have made the trip, you see nothing, for the coral lies at distances varying from ten to a hundred and eighty miles offshore, and only when there is a very low tide does it jut more than a few inches above the surface of the sea. So you must engage an ocean-going launch to take you out to the Reef, and on arriving at it the usual practice is to transfer into a small glassbottomed rowboat that has been brought along. Through the glass you can peer down at the coral. At low tide, you can get out and walk about on the Reef itself.
I had always thought of the Reef as a continuous wall of coral, and one of the first discoveries I made on my trip was that this is not true at all; in fact, the Reef is not one reef but thousands of small reefs, which run in all directions beneath the sea and sprout up to the surface like the hedges of an informal garden. Some of them are a few yards wide, others half a mile or more, and often there are lagoons of relatively shallow water between them. The captain of your launch has to pilot his way very skillfully through the shoals, until at last, far out of sight of the mainland, he reaches the final shoal, which is known as the Outer Reef, and here the coral plunges steeply down, like the face of a precipice, into the depths of the Pacific.