I am suspended in warm water as if I were a part of it, entering into some kind of prehuman condition of flowingness. The history of human evolution rolls backwards for this moment of re-entry into the oceanic past, and the planktonic ego is liberated, for the moment, free from responsibility for the earth. Air and sky are left behind, the sea washes over, and it is a different self that dives down to meet whatever moves below. Whatever it is that I search for, I suspect I shall not find revelation of my unique place in the cosmos. The Great Barrier Reef is listed as World Heritage for its cultural as well as its natural sites.
Coastal places have stories to tell for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
The World Heritage area includes Aboriginal middens and mythic sites, as well as historical shipwrecks and ruins of early European settlement. In so many different ways, reefs have become constructs of human imagination, hopes and fears. Sea places have stories to tell, of how other worlds connect to this world, of how this place came into being. The stories of coastal Aboriginal people are tales of sea creatures and their journeyings, stories that connect past mythic events with present coastal land and reefscapes. Here a spirit ancestor chased a whale or a dugong, there it lay down to rest, and if you look with the eyes of faith, if you see its shape in rock and its breath in the spray of the waves, the reef shimmers with mystic significance.