How Tim Winton hopes to inspire a generation of ‘ocean defenders’

Ningaloo is a name that inspires Tim Winton, Australia’s celebrated writer who most recently wrote a dystopian novel Juice about the end of days on a continent gripped by climate crisis.

“Ningaloo is a ‘hope place’ – our hopes and aspirations are attached to the health of this exceptional place,” he says of the world’s longest fringing coral reef that lies within swimmers’ reach off Western Australia’s north-west shores.

“It’s not like most other places in the state”, says the patron of Protect Ningaloo and a longtime defender of its wilderness.

“You can’t blow things up, you can’t drill through, you can’t suck the life out of it. So it’s a kind of refuge – for creatures, for common aspirations, for a sustainable future.”

In 2011, Ningaloo Reef was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

But it was not until two weeks ago that WA Premier Roger Cook announced that the entire Exmouth Gulf, encompassing Ningaloo, will become a 2600-square-kilometre marine park in which one-third is designated a no-catch sanctuary zone.

“It was a no-brainer that the whole of the gulf would have to be a marine park to fit in with the World Heritage values that UNESCO already recognised,” says Winton.

“In dark times, it’s great to have moments to celebrate and this is one of those.”

With perfect timing, the first children’s book Winton has produced in 20 years is about to be released next week.

“Ningaloo is still there to see now, but not because governments decided to protect it off their own bat.”

Tim Winton

Ningaloo: Australia’s Wild Wonder celebrates that move to formally protect creatures that inhabit every page of his book, with drawings in vivid “touch me” detail by award-winning illustrator Cindy Lane.

There are mottled whale sharks and majestic manta rays, elusive green sawfish and endangered dugongs so plentiful at Ningaloo that they are among the world’s largest population.

Ningaloo’s adjacent Cape Range karst canyons also form part of the land story, with eyeless fish and cryptic cave shrimps inside caves and, above ground, shy black-flanked wallabies.

“It was a way of seeing if we could provide a resource for young children to respond to big critters in beautiful pictures,” Winton says.

“You can read to a three- or five-year-old and just cherry-pick where you want to go. There’s solid information in it for a bright 10 or 11-year-old to get her or his teeth into the science of it. Or the first year high-schooler would find it a useful primer for what humans can do when we get things right.”

Ningaloo’s fate owes much to Winton’s personal advocacy, from his ABC TV series Ningaloo Nyinggulu two years ago to weary decades he spent campaigning to ward off oil drilling, industrial-scale salt pans, pastoral expansion and “the white shoe brigade” intent on building a Coral Coast resort on the reef shore line.

“Back in the early 2000s when I got involved in [stopping] that crazy marina development, I thought that would be all that was required of me, and then I could go back to my quiet life. I never imagined that we’d still be going 25 years later,” he says.

“We had plenty of losses, times when you just have to face the contempt of people who think you’re a lunatic or an extremist.

“Ningaloo is still there to see now, but not because governments decided to protect it off their own bat. It was because of the work that conservationists, activists and scientists put in to bring more attention to the science and the problem itself.

“We were able to bring more research effort to the gulf. The more we learned, the more important it became – to the point where it just became impossible for a government of good conscience to respond to evidence and data and ignore those facts. That’s kind of what’s happened.”

It also followed the release of a grim National Climate Risk Assessment that predicts severe impact on our oceans if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees. Coral reefs in particular will face increasing risks of bleaching and biodiversity loss.

The Ningaloo book is being launched next week, just after the federal government announced its target of an emissions reduction of 62-70 per cent by 2035 under the Paris Agreement.

“The government’s target is a beige response to a red-alert problem,” says a bitterly disappointed Winton.

“It puts us on track for 2 degrees of heating, which means the death of the world’s corals, including Ningaloo Reef. It’s difficult to applaud such a lack of ambition.

“They’re not even bold enough to pick a target.

“The prime minister seems to have range anxiety. Come the football finals, my guess is most coaches won’t be aiming for a range of outcomes somewhere between victory and falling badly short.”

The grim National Climate Risk Assessment released this week predicts severe impact on our oceans if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees. Coral reefs in particular will face increasing risks of bleaching and biodiversity loss.

As for the Coalition’s division over climate target policy, “it’s a confused rabble,” he says.

“There are good people in the Liberal Party trying to find other grownups to ally with on climate, but it must be a very lonely day in the playground for those people.”

Winton says Fremantle Press embraced his idea for an action page for younger readers, inviting them to sign on as “ocean defenders”.

“It makes perfect sense – if you are publishing for children in this moment in history, you want to be arming them with information and a sense of possibility,” he says.

“I think at Ningaloo, as at Tasmania’s Franklin Dam or at Kakadu in the Territory, we’ve helped to foster a change of culture about what we value and what we’re prepared to fight for.

“And the meaning of patriotism – we’ve taken the guns and flags out of patriotism. You can be a patriot without being a belligerent person and replace it with devotion to home.

“Young people respond to that – do they love their country? When they’re talking about that, they’re not talking about the flag and the state, but defending Country with a capital C.

“In a sense we’ve learned from the First Australians that our first allegiance is to the soil beneath our feet and the air we breathe.”

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.