The impacts of coral mining - The Great Barrier Reef: An Environmental History - page 168

into another contract for lime with the Chillagoe Railway and Mines Company.
Subsequently, in 1914, coral mining was carried out by Ishimoto, who was paid
£2 per ton by the MCMC to deliver coral lime to the old wharf on the Mossman
River (Kerr, 1995, pp93-4).
Another early coral mining operation took place near Innisfail, where E. Garner
of Clump Point reported taking coral for agricultural lime from the foreshores
of the Barnard Islands in 1900 and from Kings Reef in 1918; those activities
pre-dated the introduction of the coral licensing system by the Queensland
Government. Garner reported difficulty in taking much coral because 'we can
only get on Kings Reef for about two hours at dead low water springs each day '. 5
However, that operation appears to have continued for many years; later, stating
that he was too old to continue coral mining, Garner asked for the mining permit
to be transferred to his son, Edward Henry Garner, who also operated at a coral
area on Kings Reef during the 1930s.
Before 1920, other than Garner's permit, coral mining in the Great Barrier
Reef appears to have been unregulated. Oral history evidence indicates that, by
1920, extensive coral mining had taken place at Snapper Island (Figure 11.3) . 6
Coral mining at Snapper Island reef may have been continuous since the
operation by Jerry Doyle; before the First World War, a German settler - possibly
Albert Diehm - operated the lime kiln at Snapper Island and took coral from the
fringing reef on the south-western side of the island. One informant, a farmer and
recreational fisher, who recollected the mining operation stated: 'I can remember
the railway lines across the reef at Snapper Island, on the south-west corner,
where the spring is' . 7 T he same informant also recalled:
There was a German man there […] until during the First World War, or
just before it, and he was mining the coral off the big flats of coral there: it's
mostly dead coral. He had a railway line across the reef. He would push out
his little trolley, smash the coral off with a crowbar, put it in, wheel it up the
reef - or had horses to pull it up - and take it up and burn it in a kiln that he
had gouged out of the rocks there - and I think that is still there - chop the
trees down on the island to burn them, and cook the coral down into a lime
that he supplied to the Mossman Mill for settling their sugar . 8
That informant stated that, at Mossman Mill, the settled mixture was removed as
filter mud - or filter press - and spread on the cane fields. He reported that this
practice continued until a terrestrial source of lime replaced the use of coral lime
as a flocculant. He believed that the coral mining operation continued until the
outbreak of the First World War, when the German settler was interne d. 9
Another oral history account, by a retired cane-cutter, indicates that coral
mining was carried out at Snapper Island by Jim Tyri e. 10 That informant reported
that large pieces of coral - that could be lifted by a man - were removed from the
fringing reef using crowbars and were loaded into horse-drawn wagons. Those
wagons were transported to the island along rail tracks that were laid across the