"To save the reef, we need everybody involved"

Indigenous peoples may hold the key to protecting the Great Barrier Reef

- DOUG LOYNES

It’s a warm December morning off the coast of tropical Queensland and conditions are perfect for diving: a cloudless sky above; the ocean smoother than glass. Above the water, it’s a picture of stillness and serenity, but there’s a carnival of colour in full swing beneath the surface.

Shafts of sunlight cast dappling patterns across banks of coral that flash in shades of purple, pink and red. A school of fusilier fish rush past, yellow tails aglow, while a bright blue parrotfish lazily nibbles at the reef. On a towering wall of coral, two tiny clownfish, distinctive in their tangerine-and-white striped costumes, wriggle among the fluttering fingers of a sea anemone. For all the headlines about the declining health of the Great Barrier Reef, it looks in pretty good condition from where I’m floating.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s most famous underwater wonder, a UNESCO-listed system of nearly 3,000 individual coral reefs stretching for more than 2,250km off Australia’s Queensland coast. Each reef is made up of thousands to millions of tiny coral polyps, an animal whose external calcium carbonate skeleton forms the rock-like structure that gives the reef its shape – and provides food and shelter to nearly 9,000 known marine species.

Cruise experiences bring tourists up close and personal with some of those species, and back on a catamaran my fellow divers and I excitedly swap stories from a day spent trailing green turtles and shadowing reef sharks along cliffs of technicolour coral. But it’s the indigenous crew members running this particular tour who have the most important stories to tell.