Family turns bare island into reef oasis after guano mining destroys it

Guano mining left Lady Elliot Island a barren wasteland. Now it's a tropical oasis For thousands of years the tiny island at the southernmost tip of the Great Barrier Reef was alive with cacophonous birdsong. But within a decade of guano miners arriving in force with their picks and shovels in the 1860s, Lady Elliot Island was silent, denuded of all foliage and bereft of the seabirds that once lived there. It remained a barren wasteland for more than 100 years before one family decided to revive it and started planting trees. The cotton-wool clouds separate to reveal the first glimpse of Lady Elliot Island. A ring of waves crashes on the outer edge of the reef, and the island's airstrip is a prominent ribbon of jade encased in forest green. From the sky, the coral cay 80 kilometres off the coast of Bundaberg is a picture of pristine natural beauty. On land, birdcalls fill the air. Humans now have a permanent presence here, but for millennia, this island belonged solely to seabirds. That's what made it such a prize to guano miners in the mid 19th century. "The thing that seabirds do really well is poo," says Christine Dudgeon, who manages the island's research and rehabilitation program, Leaf to Reef. "It was covered in about two metres of guano, and this was a really valuable substance at the time for fertilisers." Guano, the accumulated waste from birds or bats, is rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium. This nutrient powerhouse fuelled the new world of modern, input-intensive farming that emerged in the early 1800s. After German explorer Alexander von Humboldt took samples of guano back to Europe, farmers' demands for the fertiliser soared. Commercial guano mining started in Peru in 1840, but the profitable global trade quickly expanded to hundreds of Pacific and Caribbean islands that were uninhabited by humans. Seabird colonies along Australia's east and west coasts were displaced as miners moved in, destroying entire island ecosystems to meet agriculture's insatiable demand for fertiliser. With hundreds of thousands of seabirds nesting, feeding and pooing on the 45-hectare Lady Elliot Island, settlers quickly identified the coral cay as a guano goldmine. At the time, it was a valuable commodity, fetching more than £5 per tonne. However, initial attempts to remove guano from Lady Elliot Island in the early 1850s were thwarted when two ships, the Bolton Abbey and The Countess of Minto, came to grief — one was wrecked on the reef encircling the island and the other was driven out to sea. Ten years later, in 1863, the Queensland government granted Jack Askunas the first official mining lease for the island for £300 per year. He cleared trees, shrubs and grasses to reach the guano, destroying habitat that had supported birdlife for thousands of years. An estimated 20,000 tonnes of guano, with a raw market value equating to about $30 million today, was removed from the island over the next decade. In his wake, Askunas left a demolition site, uninhabitable even by the seabirds that used to nest there. "This became like a moonscape, absolutely barren," Dr Dudgeon says. "Then after that, they [the miners] put some goats onto it just in case there were shipwrecks, so that there was some food [for survivors]." Any plants that sprouted were eaten by the goats. Then came the lighthouse keepers — who arrived with very pretty, but very invasive plants, which the island's environmental staff are still trying to eradicate. It took the bird's eye view of an entrepreneurial aviator to change the island's fortunes. A man with a plan, a woman with a green thumb Aviator Don Adams saw the potential for tourism opportunities when he flew over Lady Elliot Island in the 1960s and was immediately attracted to its coral reef. But with almost no vegetation, he knew substantial rehabilitation of the island would be essential. All that remained were eight Pisonia trees that the miners had left behind. Those trees still stand today, making them at least 160 years old. Mr Adams and his wife Moya reached an arrangement with the Commonwealth Department of Transport to build an airstrip on the island, in return for a lease on a portion of land for recreational purposes. Their son, Peter Adams, remembers many weekends and holidays sharing the island with daytrippers who his father would take snorkelling and scuba diving on the reef. At that time, it was far from a luxurious resort. "The accommodation was pretty basic. We had an A-frame house, we had kerosene fridges and gas lights. We only had tank water," Mr Adams recalls now. "Before the airstrip, the lighthouse keepers used to refer to it as the Alcatraz of the Barrier Reef because … you got sent there and that was it. "But [with] the aeroplanes, you could be in Bundaberg within half an hour." Mr Adams spent the last half of his childhood, from ages nine to 18, on the island and recalls flying model aeroplanes, go-karting and riding motorbikes around its two-kilometre circumference. He distinctly remembers that the vegetation was so sparse at the time that you could see from one side of the island to the other. Wanting to rehabilitate the coral cay correctly, Don and Moya started by surveying native species growing on similar islands in the Great Barrier Reef. Coconuts collected from Dunk Island were used to grow coconut palms on Lady Elliot that are still standing. But the real engine room of the revegetation project was a nursery created in the backyard of the Adams family home in Hervey Bay, where Moya propagated casuarina, pandanus and umbrella trees. The family flew hundreds of saplings to the island. Then the hardest part started — hand-planting and hand-watering. "I distinctly remember digging holes in the coral with a crowbar," Mr Adams says. "I remember … walking around with a bucket of water trying to keep these things alive for a long time." He says "it was a start" to the rehabilitation program that won Don and Moya a conservation award from the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1974. "I remember somebody saying, 'Why did you cut down the trees to make the airstrip?' And, well, the airstrip was there before the trees grew," Mr Adams says. The island became Don's happy place. "It was a bit of a sanctuary for Dad out there," he says. "Out of all the things Dad did in his life, I remember him once saying his small involvement with Lady Elliot was the thing he was most proud of." 'They will be seen, they will be heard' Now known as the Home of the Manta Ray, Lady Elliot Island's menagerie of marine creatures and its spectacular coral reefs, are marketed as its main tourism drawcards. But it is the ubiquitous birdlife, which has triumphantly reclaimed this island in recent decades, that provides the holiday soundtrack for visitors to its eco-resort. The view of the sun setting over the horizon is crisscrossed by thousands of dark streaks as white-capped black noddies return to nest after a day of fishing, swooping between guests on their way to dinner. They are among a diverse range of seabirds now nesting and roosting on the coral cay once again. By day, wedge-tailed shearwaters, or muttonbirds, along with brown boobies and crested terns soar over the breaking waves, looking for their next meal. On land, red-tailed tropicbirds can be found hunkering under shrubbery as they keep their newly hatched chicks warm. It is perhaps not so surprising then to find that earplugs are supplied in the resort's rooms to help guests block out the birds' night-time calls. It's a professional hazard that brings much joy to University of the Sunshine Coast seabird researcher Zerra Egerton. "We are in their territory. I always think of us as guests here," she says. "So when I hear the babies crying all night long, I am just stoked. They can wake me up as much as they like. "It's true that maybe not a lot of people necessarily come here to experience the bird life. But once they're here, and especially in summer, you cannot avoid the birds. "They will be seen. They will be heard. They will be felt, occasionally." The birds have an intricate and symbiotic relationship with the island's vegetation. The trees and foliage once again provide protection and nesting materials, while the birds bring nutrients from the sea to the land, which supports vegetation growth. "There was no-one here [in the 1800s] except the birds," Ms Egerton said. "To [the miners], it just looked like a resource that they could take without any moral implications … it was just an opportunity. "But now we see that system so differently." Solar panels fuel 'beating heart' nursery The care and preservation baton has been passed on to the Gash family. Husband and wife duo, Peter and Julie, first visited the island in the 1980s and became involved in its tourism activities in 1997, when their company, Seair Pacific, began flights to and from the island. Once their daughters, Amy and Chloe, arrived, the family's attachment to Lady Elliot's unique beauty deepened, and the Gashes became the island's custodians (leaseholders) in 2005. Determined to continue the rehabilitation work started by the Adams family, and maintained by the intervening leaseholders, the Gashes investigated ways to create an even more eco-friendly resort. Two decades on, 33-year-old Amy Gash is now the resort's executive general manager, and often scoots around the island on a battery-powered buggy. "We believe it's our responsibility to keep this place as pristine and as beautiful as it is for today, and also [for] the future," she says. "We really wanted to … minimise our footprint and basically transition from that traditional reliance on fossil fuels." In 2008, the family built a "first-of-its-kind hybrid solar power station", and has installed more than 1,000 solar panels and 250 batteries on the island. "We can almost confidently run 100 per cent of the time on solar power," Ms Gash says. Over the past two decades, more than 20,000 trees have been planted on the island. "We carry on that program that was started in the 70s by Don Adams," Ms Gash says. "We're really proud to have partnered with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation in about 2017, which really helped us accelerate the planting of trees here at Lady Elliot. "Everything you see … has been planted by hand on Lady Elliot Island, or it's been introduced by a bird species bringing out its seeds along the way." Liam Turner, the ecosystem manager of the revegetation program, said that in the 10 years since the island's nursery was established, staff had propagated 22 species of native trees, shrubs and grasses. "The nursery is the beating heart of the whole program," he says, adding that revegetation has been completed across about 70 per cent of the island. However, taking care of the environment is a never-ending job, as 120 species of introduced weeds compete with native grasses and ground covers. "You can't just remove weeds and expect everything to return to some sort of semblance of what it was prior to guano mining," Mr Turner says. "In place of those weeds, we've got to put in all the native [plants] … And on top of that, we've got to continue doing maintenance in those areas to keep the weeds away and allow that native vegetation to establish. "They do suppress and naturally compete with the weeds once they start getting established, but you've got to get them to that point." This is where the eco-resort plays a role, with all food scraps providing an essential ingredient for the nursery's potting mix. "It gets mixed in with cardboard and woodchips, goes through a big auger and then that gets turned into a pretty nasty putrefied substance [that comes] out … after about two weeks," Mr Turner explains. The substance is then mixed with green waste and isolated for two years. "We get this beautiful black soil at the other side of it, which we use for all our potting mixes that we have in the nursery," he says. "It's good that we can produce it here so we're not importing soil to the island and … [potentially] introducing all sorts of pests and diseases. "My big dream is that eventually we'll get to a point where none of that's necessary and the ecosystem's kind of self-sustaining and can sort itself out, which we are seeing signs of, which is fantastic." 'We never want it to go quiet again' The thriving seabird population on Lady Elliot Island is testament to the success of Don Adams' vision to rehabilitate the barren wasteland left by guano miners in the mid 1800s. Dr Dudgeon says the birdlife has made "an extraordinary recovery". The primary species responsible for the nutrient flow is the black noddy, about 100,000 of which nest on the island each year, up from just a few thousand in the 1960s. Another of the island's notable species is the red-tailed tropicbird, which is only found in two locations in Queensland. "Tropicbirds started nesting here in the 1980s and it certainly seems that their nests are increasing over time, which is parallel with increasing vegetation that's available for them," Dr Dudgeon says. She says seeing the changes to the island's ecosystem is encouraging. "A lot of us work in places where you're seeing the more negative impacts all the time," she says. "It's a great privilege to get to work out here and see … what a healthy environment is, what a biodiverse environment is. It's a very inspirational place." Like Dr Dudgeon, Ms Egerton is astounded by the transformation from desolate island to subtropical paradise. "It was quite bleak, just a bare white rock and quite a gruelling place to exist on for months on end," she says. "It's incredible what's been achieved in such a short period of time in terms of the seabirds returning and the vegetation." While the birdlife can be noisy, sleep-disruptive and a tad smelly, Ms Egerton wouldn't have it any other way. "It's very, very special to have seabirds that breed [here] because that means that this island is literally sustaining their populations," she says. "We love this island and we love the animals here, and we don't ever want it to go quiet again." Credits: - Reporters: Grace Whiteside and Johanna Marie - Photographers: Grace Whiteside, Johanna Marie, Peter Adams, Mat and Cathy Gilfedder and others where specified - Digital producer: Rachel Kelly - Editor: Rachel Kelly - Share options - Copy link - X (formerly Twitter)