The impacts of coral mining - The Great Barrier Reef: An Environmental History - page 180

surface of the reef . 53 W hile Snapper Island was less accessible than the nearshore
reefs at Kings and Alexandra Reefs, a dwelling was built on the island, which
facilitated the relatively prolonged exploitation of that reef. In common with
other inshore and fringing reefs, Snapper Island reef was particularly vulnerable
to human impacts. However, unlike Kings and Alexandra Reefs, in the 1990s,
Snapper Island reef contained a very large cover and diversity of living corals,
as one oral history informant - a marine biologist - reported. Consequently, the
visible impacts of coral mining may now be more apparent in the landscape of
that island than in its fringing reef . 54
Summary
Coral mining in the Great Barrier Reef was more extensive than has previously
been acknowledged. Between 1900 and 1940, coral mining developed from
an isolated activity carried out by individuals into a well-organised industry,
encouraged by the Queensland Government and organised using a system of
licences and Coral Areas, and at least twelve areas in the Great Barrier Reef
were mined for coral. Although some locations - the Barnard Islands and Kings
Reef - were worked since 1900, and mining had begun at Snapper Island by
1914, more extensive operations took place during the 1920s and 1930s, which
attracted syndicates of investors as well as individual coral miners. By the onset
of the Second World War, coral mining had become an established and profitable
industry in northern Queensland, supplying cheap agricultural lime to sugar
cane farmers on the adjacent coast and industrial lime to sugar mills, and coral
extraction was concentrated in the Cairns and Innisfail areas where a cheap
terrestrial source of lime was not yet readily available.
This account of coral mining, however, is incomplete as a result of gaps in
the archival records, the difficulty in obtaining original oral history evidence
for the period before 1940 and the lack of extensive scientific monitoring of
the Great Barrier Reef before around 1970. The sequence of surviving records
of coral areas - which includes Coral Areas No. 1 (Cairns) and No. 3 (Cairns),
but not No. 2 (Cairns), for instance - suggests that more locations were mined
than are mentioned here. Furthermore, other instances of unlicensed coral
mining may have taken place that are not mentioned in the documentary record,
just as extensive operations took place at Snapper Island without, apparently,
any documentary evidence surviving in the records of the QDHM that were
consulted at the QSA. Therefore, this account gives an overview of what may
have been a more extensive industry in the Great Barrier Reef. Nevertheless, the
evidence presented in this chapter suggests that coral mining probably caused
significant changes in at least some parts of several coral reefs. Several of the
reefs that were once mined - especially Kings and Alexandra Reefs - now appear
highly degraded. The ecological effects of coral mining are difficult to determine;
nonetheless, all of the coral mining locations described in this chapter would