“This is the story of how an unlikely collaboration between a Romantic woman poet, Judith Wright, a maverick rain-forest ecologist, Len Webb, and a bohemian Reef artist, John Busst, fought and won a nation-wide conservationist war to protect the Reef. During the early 1960s small pockets of conservationist began to show concern over the damage to wildlife and rainforests caused by the development-mania of the Queensland state government. Focus shifted to the Great Barrier Reef in 1965 when a sugarcane grower applied to mine a supposedly dead coral reef for limestone fertilizer. Aware of the dangerous precedent for future Reef mining, an improvised amateur collaboration between Wright, Busst and Webb proved that Ellison reef actually nurtured abundant and rare marine species. Their small local victory forged a crucial alliance between the trio and launched a fourteen-year national political struggle to ‘Save the Reef’.”