Great Australian Railway Journeys from "Kuranda to Townsville "Series 01 E05

[Music] my 1913 bradshaw's handbook to the chief cities of the world has brought me to australia i will ride some of the longest trains and the world's steepest railway i'll climb blue mountains and cross red deserts i'll swim above coral reefs and walk upon golden sand as i journey across this spectacular continent i'll discover the gold and silver coal and wool on which this nation was built i'll encounter her indigenous people and her national heroes and discover the origins of the millions of immigrants who now call themselves [Music] australians [Music] i'm set to explore the coastline of northern queensland a state named after the british empress victoria bradshaw's remarks that it stretches to within 11 degrees of the equator where papua new guinea is just 200 kilometers away white settlers here battled against the humidity and cyclones but were rewarded with fertile land that enjoys plentiful sun and rain even a century ago tourists were amazed by the exoticism of the rainforest and the splendor of the great barrier reef my realm journey begins in the tropical rainforest village of kuranda from the popular holiday resort of cairns i travel south to beautiful art deco innisfail before heading to ingham where i hear how an irish cattleman stood up for indigenous people i'll end in townsville gateway to the great barrier reef along the way i get my hands on the controls of the sugarcane express the horn is a warning to aussies hom at the controls [Music] i sing along at the billabong you'll become a waltzing matilda with me and a new non-aquatic creature is spotted off the reef i've seen many of the wonders of nature before but nothing i think that struck me with such a sense of magnificence [Music] the coranda is described as a scenic railway but when it was built in 1891 it wasn't with a view to being spectacular if the engineers braved the hostile terrain and the appalling climate it was because the railway was needed and there is a danger that we look back now on enormous engineering feats and regard them as purely picturesque along its course the track rises steeply we pass through dense rainforests beneath towering cliffs and tumultuous waterfalls [Music] the scenery is magnificent the train inches its way across the stoney creek bridge above the stoney creek falls we are hundreds of feet here on steel pylons this must have been one of the most difficult of all the engineering tasks in constructing the line [Music] and now having reached 300 meters in height we have a superb view over the barren gorge and the ocean beyond [Music] may interrupt your viewing for a moment yes well what do you think yeah fantastic really enjoyed it so far how have we come to see this great wonder from from lincoln in england yeah oh you're from england right away and what expectations did you have in the trip today yeah i think it's surpassed the expectations i mean look now look at what we're passing at this very minute isn't that amazing yeah breathtaking the man in charge of operations is robert mccartney hello robert hello michael great to see you what a beautiful railway car tell me about that the carriages are all between 70 and 110 years old the oldest one we got was built in 1909 at the ipswich workshops down in queensland and with air conditioning yes it's great when we get the nice breezes coming off the coast up the gorge now this scenic railway for what purpose was it built the original purpose of building the railway was to get to the rich tin deposits up in herberton where they were doing the mining in the early 1880s hostile terrain and difficult climate tell me about the building of the railway well the construction of this railway was an engineering marvel they built the railway with their hands with hand tools and dynamite and they removed over two million cubic meters of earth and dirt and engineers today say i wouldn't consider building a railway here the rugged terrain posed enormous risks to the 1500 irish italian and chinese workers who built this railway so i'm afraid there must have been a big death toll yes unfortunately the construction of the railway took a quite a big toll on human lives official inquest records showed 23 deaths and the most of those deaths were attributed to explosions with dynamites there was also a lot of skull fractures as a result of rockfalls and cave-ins and people falling over the the huge drops that we have some falling over 200 meters into the barren gorge and dying as well the operators of the line were quick to spot its tourism potential and as well as hauling goods the railway brought sightseers to admire the landscape and to take the mountain air what a wonderful station historic railway architecture and an exuberant tropical garden [Music] the beautifully preserved signal box is still manned by station master glenn curry hello i'm michael oh nice to meet you michael how are you today superb signal box and um evidently it's not just for show it's for real you're pulling the lever yes yes this is a fully operational signal box but on the face it seems extraordinary that you need 37 levers why is that well i'll just explain them to you michael see the black levers control our point so i can change from road to road these blue leaders lock the points into place the red levers are for our signaling and these white levers well they're just spares they were originally put in when the signal cabin was built in case they expanded the yard well i've met an important man the manifold's the leaders yes the train has brought me to the wet tropics of queensland which stretched 450 kilometers along the coastline bradshaw says that the indigenous vegetation of the australian colonies is peculiar meaning particular of trees the eucalyptus and the acacias are the most common in fact here in the oldest continuously surviving rainforest in the world there are over a thousand species of tree and some of them well not only here at the time of my guidebook they date back 2 000 years i'm meeting rain forest guide warren clinton on the barron river warren nice to meet you michael welcome aboard so what do we mean by rainforest well to be clustered as rainforest we need certain types of things and one of them michael is rain we need one and a half meters of rain a year just to be classed as rainforests when the first tourists came here a hundred years ago they were road up river deep into the forest to explore thank you paradise thank you very much [Music] you see on our right here michael is a perfect example of a rainforest tree what species is this this is a crossword ash and it's a very good example of a buttress root you can see how this root spreads out over the forest floor to stabilize the tree yeah and uh early indigenous in here use it for communication if they hit it it has a beautiful low thud that reverberates all through the rainforest mine is a different though yeah we have a concerto here [Music] right traces of those early tours remain clearly we're on a man-made path here what is the history of this well michael you'll notice these stones down here on our left hand side well these were put in here by dan duggan we're at the start of his rain forest tour that started in about 1920 and he called it paradise rainforest tour and i'm imagining that in those days they wouldn't come exactly dressed for the rainforest no michael the journal would have their full suits on hats and the ladies were dressed in the you know the best attire of the day and long gowns and walking through here and they'd walk through this forest all day like that so their interest was probably quite uh romantic certainly was but when when does the place begin to attract botanist zoologists and so on well it was in 1901 they first discovered a primitive plant here in the wet tropics of north queensland now what do we mean by primitive well these are the first flowering families of plants on earth they're called angiosperms and they actually discovered 13 of these species here in the wet tropics and there's only 19 on the whole planet i mean that's why it's the world heritage site i suppose it really is that's one unbelievable significance yeah tell them about the creepy crawlies in here we have some of the biggest snakes in australia we have the amethystine python or scrub python we have two of the top ten deadliest in the world we have the taipan and the death adder in here taipan i've heard of very very deadly and the other one is in my guidebook from 100 years ago right the the death adder now they're very small species and they're very camouflaged in this leaf litter in the forest floor as well right during the daytime won't even see my killer dan duggan's paradise rainforest tour came with refreshments included and fortunately for me too the kettle has been boiled ah welcome indeed after our time in the rainforest and so the tourists who came here in the 1920s this is how they would have been entertained they would have they would have finished their tour with a nice cup of tea and cake it's easy to laugh at these edwardians but they weren't really the first tourists to show concern for the environment weren't they they were some of the first tourists of this part of north queensland and they came here for this uh for the wellness air of the rainforest and it's out we alternately skim the foliage as we go over the ridges and then fly high above the canopy as we pass the dips and the valleys and you get this idea of all the vegetation that is fighting its way towards the daylight and then the extent of the vast amount of rainforest thank you very much back on the ground there are more wonders to behold here the rainforest gives way abruptly and unexpectedly to bear rock this is the site of the barren falls which has set my imagination racing firstly to grasp the scale but i'm helped by those little dots around the top pool which are human beings and secondly we've had a dry spell i'm trying to envisage the falls after a cyclone i imagine that the entire rock would be covered in torrents of water [Music] protection of the natural environment is a top priority for the nation indigenous rangers like jeremy richards have an instinctive feel for the land you must have seen these falls in all conditions what what's it like when there's been a lot of rain um well basically yeah you don't see any of the rocks and it feels like because there's that much mist coming off yeah yeah you can actually wash your own face from all the water and the condensation there too it's an exciting place isn't it oh yeah especially for me being a traditional owner of the jabber guy people and this is one of our special places there too it's actually a sacred site we're sort of not allowed to be here at night yeah really that's one of our big laws because if i do i actually get haunted by my ancestors and when you come here during the day and you see this wonderful spectacle of nature are you still thinking about that human history uh yes when i do come to a place like this i actually do a welcome to country and a lot so for my language which is the jabaga language you say youramba jabaganjibama we the jabagai people which means home you come welcome it also connects me to my ancestors as well because this is [Music] [Applause] home [Music] the best of australia is experienced outdoors [Music] including morning coffee [Music] cairns sits very prettily on the pacific coast of north queensland framed by a ridge of mountains and the palm trees here lining the beach remind us that this is in the tropics but locals like to say that unlike some other tropical places in australia they do at least get two seasons here it's not always sticky and hot and certainly this morning has dawned cool and dry 165 000 people live in the cairns region [Music] its laid back atmosphere and tropical climate have made it a popular tourist destination [Music] built in the late 19th century for miners heading for the hodgkinson river goldfield it developed as a port and rail head i'm continuing my journey south on the spirit of queensland the north coast line runs from here to brisbane good to see you thank you [Music] what a lovely surprise these seats are like business class on an intercontinental [Music] flight good morning ladies and gentlemen queens and rowell welcome says customers have joined us today on board the spirit of [Music] queensland [Music] queensland says bradshaw's extends over 18 degrees of latitude that's about the same as aberdeen in scotland to marrakech in morocco thus offering a range of climate equaled by few countries the mean annual rainfall is up to 150 inches in the northern divisions of the state with all that water and the accompanying wind north queenslanders have had to become accomplished in the art of rebuilding and redecoration i'm a lighting at innisfail from where i'll head to the fertile coastal plain thank you bye-bye [Music] maize barley oats and rye are grown says breadshores and sugar is a staple production in the coastal districts sugar cane evidently introduced to australia by white settlers it has become big business for queensland bringing to the state the sweet smell of success john edwards is in charge of production at the tully sugar plantation john it seems that on all the flat land for as far as you can see there is sugar cane what makes northern queensland particularly suitable for the crop we don't have to do any irrigation at all you know here in tully we have one of the highest highest rainfalls in queensland and you know we average four and a half meters of rain a year the crop is notoriously hard work to harvest by hand why is that i guess as you can see this cane that we're walking past here there's lots of the dead leaves and that's what we call trash hanging off that makes it very hard to get into the cane because it has to be cut off at um at ground level with the with the hand knives the cane knives and then this cane is very very straight but it can be quite bent and twisted depending on storms and size and things like that sugar cane was brought to australia in 1788 on the ships of the first fleet but it was over 70 years before the first viable cane plantation was established along queensland's coast from the 1860s until the turn of the 20th century thousands of pacific islanders were brought in to harvest the crop many illegally and against their will it was back-breaking work but today the process has been mechanized how does the machinery compare with cutting it by hand i guess i i i harvesting group now michael will probably be able to do around about 800 tons a day whereas by hand a group of men would have maybe cut you know two or three or four tons in a day phenomenal difference yes these are some of the tools we use michael that would have been used in the in the um in the early days of the cane industry so you can see there we call these k knives um this one with the the bent blade that was used so it was actually easy to get into the ground and cut off and this one here you can actually see how much it it it has worn so it's quite a sharp thing isn't it it is a sharp thing yes which one would you recommend i try out um we should probably try this one i think it might be a little bit sharper than the the old event one okay keep my own limbs out of the way i guess hold on to the stick give it a wanna put the bottom out it comes and just take off the top yep take the top off that'll stay in the field and that'll get sent to the factory to get processed and so this this now has the sugar here is it would you like to try some of that yeah okay thank you very fibrous isn't it absolutely not a sweet of sugar maybe it needs to ripen a bit more and a little refinement yes [Music] this story of sugar has given me quite a rush but the fact that there's a sugar train is the icing on the cane [Music] thank you ah gentlemen i'm michael david david fab what a name what's that short for a ratio for retail so 36 ton locomotive let's open her up [Music] so our sugar train is underway and i think we're about to pass some sugar wagons are we fab yep to the wings so in the season when all this has been cut what do these wagons look like okay okay yeah but i mean tons and tons and tons tons of it yeah and this is a narrow gauge line yep two foot two foot gauge yep how long have you been doing this fat thirty four years always done what's the job like is it very tough in the season it is very challenging yeah because during the season you've got to look out for harvesters been tracked the drivers farmers and the general public you haven't squished anyone yet huh no i haven't i've been pretty close but yeah i haven't you want to have a drive michael uh i'd love to what are the controls right that's your brake yes that's your throttle yes so should we take the brake off take the brake off the horn is a warning to aussies hom at the controls [Music] there are fab i really enjoyed that brilliant the railway leads directly to the refinery where the raw cane is processed john the plant's on a massive scale and it's never struck me before how seasonal the business is so really until the crop is ripening in the field you cannot do any crushing and the factory is relatively quiet yeah it is relatively quiet now we're in a uh a maintenance and repair mode i'm having the plant available so when the cane is ready we can operate you know 24 hours a day seven days a week what does the crush achieve what goes on in the crush so basically the first step of the the crushing is to extract the juice out of the out of the fibrous material so that juices then then goes on to the process the fibrous material is then burnt in our boilers so so while we are operational we are totally self-sufficient energy-wise and what's the scale of what you're doing here um so you know in a normal day we'll be crushing about eight eighteen thousand tons of cane in a day and then from that we will make um about uh two thousand two thousand two hundred tons of of raw sugar every day well i shall never look at a packet of sugar again without remembering the immense scale of this operation amazing sugar has long been a staple here the town was established by a sugarcane farmer in the 1880s today in his fail celebrates its wonderfully preserved art deco architecture and other period pieces good morning excuse me disturbing you you gentlemen look as if you have an appreciation of things which are vintage yes yes um how do you feel about the architecture of the town you're all living here you all live here yeah yeah it's lovely you're into art deco are you yeah you're a man who likes color yourself i can see that oh thank you yes yes you he he looks a little bit like an art deco building that's got that style yeah thank you guys thank you have a good day hey ben morning michael come up please i've arranged to meet councillor ben heath at the johnston-shire hall hello ben good morning michael what a magnificent town full of art deco buildings this is extraordinary how did it come about well in as far as it stands today is the highest concentration of art deco buildings in the whole of australia how come about it was a 1918 cyclone and there was two buildings that stood after the cyclone and there was two reinforced concrete buildings which is one building just behind us here and one on the corner and the house 600 people and they survived but throughout the cycle we lost 37 people unfortunately the cyclone struck innisfail on the 10th of march 1918 it remains the worst tropical storm ever to hit a populated area of queensland you're telling me then that every building in the town bar 2 was destroyed devastated it was just horrendous and we didn't know the cyclone was coming the winds they're talking between 150 mile 180 mile per hour yeah it was it was really tragic we had to rebuild and there was this uh sense of how do we do it forgive me you're a small town you're a very long way from europe how earth did you decide to go the art deco route was just the style of the time it was about the pride and moving forward and sense of hype [Music] nowhere embodies that spirit more than the shire hall which has been rebuilt four times following the cyclone and three subsequent fires why did it matter so much to have a shire hall in the times everyone liked to dance but the consensus for innisfail is that we didn't have a good hall everyone else had a great hall but we didn't so it was about that pride and if we're going to do the architecture and get this right and build it we had to have the best the design work was one of the biggest projects in queensland at the time it was huge and everyone back in the day you drove the cars up and they danced and that's what we used to do and there used to be dance halls everywhere but this was the premier event was the shire hall in 2006 another powerful cyclone struck queensland and devastated the town again the beachside towns that line the final queensland coast bore the brunt of larry's fury frightened residents huddled indoors as winds up to 300 kilometres an hour tore through innisfail south of cairns we had to look at the option of uh knocking the building down and starting again or re or restoring what we've got here through the council at the time they decided to restore it but it cost at 17 million dollars [Music] just around the corner from the shire hall i'm drawn to a store with a european feel hello what a beautiful delicatessen you have it's superb thank you look at all these cheeses and sausages and hams i'm guessing italian right correct a lot of italians came to to innisfail correct they did back in the early 1920s mainly hello yes see your husband lee good to see you and you're anita i'm guessing by your shirt yes in the town today are you still quite cosmopolitan by origin yes we are definitely definitely here apart from italians what have you got we've got greeks maltese english yugoslav german it's actually very multicultural i'm thinking then that it's not impossible that you could offer me a capital tuna [Music] there you go michael thank you very much indeed thank you pleasure an excellent cappuccino and it's nice to see a town which is as lively as it is colorful [Music] in australia the hinterland is never far away and it teams with exotic plants and challenging wildlife bradshaws mentions the diamond snake the clack snake the brown snake and the death adder and goes on to comment there are no dangerous animals other than snakes in australia what what about the venomous spiders and in the waters the sharks and the stingray and even bradshaw's remembers to mention that crocodiles are found in the north nothing dangerous about crocodiles hello vince hello michael good to see you yes welcome board to sniping tourists i'm looking forward to seeing some wildlife well hope so hope so whether we see some crocodiles we might see stingrays you never know what we see vince gangaby will be my guide to what lurks beneath these apparently calm waters you always have to ask in australia i think is it saltwater crocs or freshwater crops that we're looking for all the ones we see down here today will be saltwater crocodiles and they grow to 29 feet six meters seven meters eight metres long and they're very aggressive compared to the freshwater crocodiles so if a freshwater crocodile would come down here if saltwater crocodile will eat it most likely because because they are territorial and they don't like anything in their space especially freshwater crocodiles there you go mile thank you very much let's see what we can find aboriginal people hunted crocodiles for their meat for thousands of years with little impact on their numbers the high commercial value of skins and the ready availability of rifles after the second world war changed all that crocodile populations plunged until north queensland introduced a law in 1974 to protect wild crocodiles they might be on the edge or actually sitting on the banks is that one no unfortunately michael that's a lot of people get to see what they think it's a crocodile but we call it a logger dial that's a lot [Music] there's one in the trees there i can see his eye now michael you'll be able to see in a second did you see the flash of oil i didn't see it you saw it oh yeah it was in here as i was in here was you [Music] good effort vince cheers michael thank you beautiful sunset isn't it [Music] [Music] hello today i set off from innisfail to continue my journey by rail to the town of england and from there to my last stop townsville i'll then go on by boat to the great barrier reef my guidebook written more than 100 years ago says with the continued advance of settlement the aboriginal numbers have shrunk in the more densely populated states they are practically negligible at the census of 1911 the number of full-blooded aborigines living in proximity to whites was only about twenty thousand the moment when white settlers first encountered the indigenous population is known as first contact a turner phrase that disguises a series of atrocities with which australia still struggles to come to terms thank you i leave the trainer ingham on my way to mondalla station an 807 hectare estate set amid the coastal wetlands of the herbert river valley my host is jacob cassidy hello jacob hi michael michael how are you good to see you hello gentlemen hi michael good to see you so what's going on here michael this is what we call a cup murray underground feast that has been cooking for about four hours and uh you're just in time to give us a hand to pull it out this is very warm yeah very warm um and this is a traditional way of cooking you know people have cooked like this for thousands of years maybe i'll give you a hand absolutely you might have your shovel this is like a treasure hunt isn't it for me i have no idea what's underneath you start to see the steam give you an indication of actually how hot it is yeah it's getting hot from very hot you certainly wrapped it up well and after that we come to some leaves banana leaves so layer after layer i was beginning to think there'd be nothing there at all i was going to think it was all a joke well what a feast what we need now is the 5 000 to feed [Music] and start to get a bit warm feel that water it certainly does i can't tell you how wonderful the aroma is from this piece of meat what do you think i've got here jacob that looks like pork this is lamb oh isn't that nice a bit of rosemary on there yes yes yes looks like you know what you're doing but i suppose after a few thousand years you get the hang of it well we've got some good cooks here what a feast yes that does look very very good tell me about this place today what what is this place well this is mongolia station it's a aboriginal owned and operated working cattle property we do tourism here conservation land management and i guess one of the most important things is that we provide education and training for indigenous people and what's the history of the station an irishman settled here in 1882 and the pioneering history is extraordinary in terms of what that first pioneer did looking after i guess and advocating for aboriginal people who was he came out of county antrim uh during the potato famine his name was james cassidy and eventually ended up here in 1882 and this is where he stayed until he died if i've got this right your name is cassidy that's right um is that a coincidence there's people all over australia aboriginal people that have taken on the name of the station owners because they didn't have second names so what is called first contact between aboriginal people and the white settlers how would you describe those times in those events for aboriginal people it wasn't a really good time especially up here in north queensland where the colony of queensland were issuing i think it was 100 year leases on country which meant early pioneers could come up here and select parcels of country that they want to lease and the fact that aboriginal people have been living there for thousands of years and had their own laws and systems in place didn't really matter and that's when conflict really started especially up here in the north and i guess uh all over australia i mean you you speak very gently of it you say that it wasn't good i mean it was actually a catastrophe wasn't it for aboriginal people it was horrific um the brutality in which uh uh aboriginal people were dispossessed i mean there's horror stories all over australia and there's horror stories that haven't been told uh throughout that that part of our history they use the term disperse which could describe anything from just moving aboriginal people on to wholesale slaughter of men women and children and into this murderous environment comes this white irishman james cassidy well that that's one of the really good stories about this place and um i guess it's very unusual for a white pioneer to actually advocate for indigenous people to allow aboriginal people to camp in their historical country uh their traditional country you know he he wrote letters complaining about the treatment of aboriginal people which i find to be an amazing story because that just wasn't done at the time do you think australia has faced up to these matters you know there'll always be conversations around um colonisation and the effect it had on aboriginal people one thing i really maintain is that no matter what we do we cannot change what happened in the past it's only together that we can change what happens in the future i like the idea that we can take charge of our own destiny i like the idea that we can be on a level playing field in terms of business and and uh enterprise development and uh empowering our younger people with with the proper education and training that that's going to sustain employment outcomes i'm really supportable while jacob looks to the future he keeps up the skills of the past what were boomerangs actually used for for hunting landing so what was the point what was body fit coming back point of it is if you're hunting birds on that side of the creek if you miss them they'll come back on this side of the creek the less you stay at the creeks around north queensland the better vibrate i found that out already if you do like a 45 degree angle bringing it back behind you and depending on the wind it should the idea is to come back around and hit the ball it's not as easy as jacob makes it look [Music] oh that is better very good my boomerang won't come back [Music] good evening sir do you happen to serve beer nice cold beer everybody yes yes please thank you beautiful place [Music] hi i'm michael that's amazing you've got three little joeys oh they're wallabies are they and what's the story why are they here with you um most of them come into care during a roadkill then then they're orphaned so i look after them and how long will you look after them for up to 12 months and then what and then i'll release them back into the wild well they're very very sweet i i hope they'll have a long life back in the wild one day how's it good evening madam now yeah bit of a singing song i think take it away keith take it away okay waltzing the teller yeah [Music] [Music] matilda with me [Music] [Applause] ready [Applause] [Music] so so last stop on this service is townsville which the guidebook tells me is the chief port of north queensland and founded by a merchant called robert townes but since veal is the french for town you could be forgiven for thinking that it was so good they named it twice [Music] only in australia [Music] for the tourist townsville is a gateway to the coast and the great barrier reef [Music] david good morning michael good to see you likewise i'm looking forward to this welcome aboard thank you very much [Music] my guide is dr david wackenfeld chief scientist for the great barrier reef marine park authority we're taking a boat to keep a reef a dive site about 40 miles of townsville [Music] racing across the pacific ocean at 17 knots towards the great barrier reef it's amazing where a railway journey will take you the great barrier reef is the only living thing on earth which is visible from space it stretches 1400 miles along australia's northeastern coastline actually it's not one but 3 000 separate reefs it was a choppy voyage out to the reef but we've arrived at our destination we're now sheltering in its lee and this is the point where the boat must be secured and a member of the ship's crew has swum out to secure an anchor for the bow and for the stern what is coral coral is an amazing animal at one level it's incredibly simple biologically it's very similar to a jellyfish but there's one big difference it makes a skeleton out of limestone and it's that limestone skeleton with millions of corals over thousands of years that has built the enormous structure of the great barrier reef that you can see from space the reef is as large as germany and through fisheries and tourism generates about six billion australian dollars a year a hundred years ago its importance was only beginning to be understood my guidebook of 1913 is fairly peremptory about the great barrier reef what did they know about it more than a hundred years ago in 1890 queensland hired its first ever fisheries inspector and that was a gentleman by the name of william savile kent in his spare time he was studying the corals of the great barrier reef and was really the first scientist to study the great barrier reef in a modern scientific way savo kent was a pioneer of the scientific management of fisheries his research and in particular his photographs of the corals were published to great acclaim in the 1890s today more than 2 million people visit the reef each year to experience these marvels at first hand [Music] and so the moment has come to sample the wonders and to brave the horrors of the australian deep fish bradshaw's observes are numerous in the seas around the australian colonies which is as wonderfully eye-poppingly true now as it was then [Music] the reef is a world heritage site it's one of the richest and most complex natural ecosystems on earth and home to 1500 species of fish and 400 species of coral and it's stunning a truly memorable event for me and not only because i can hardly swim i was introduced to a new world a giant structure created by tiny animals stretching for the size of a major country a thing of intense beauty i've seen many of the wonders of nature before but nothing i think that struck me with such a sense of magnificence but global warming now threatens the reef rising sea temperatures have encouraged the spread of a creature which is destroying it dr matthew dunbabin is leading the fight back matthew hi hi michael good to see you so what what is the particular threat to the coral that you're wearing particular threat is the cranathorn starfish now these are starfish that literally eat coral it's very spiny obviously uh they're actually poisonous but underneath they have a mouth that will just chew away at the the coral and basically kill it a single crown of thorns starfish can consume 13 square meters of reef in a year and each female can lay 60 million eggs in one spawning season in the face of such overwhelming figures matthew's team has turned to robots so what is the aim is it actually to kill them or to control their reproduction in this particular case we don't have a means of controlling the reproduction so we're looking at killing them this is our second generation of our underwater robots it's called rangerbot and it is quite sophisticated that he only uses robotic vision to navigate so that's know where it is obstacle avoidance but also to detect crownathorn starfish when it does that it'll actually deliver an injection of bile salts which is the agent that is currently used to kill them how does it recognize crown of thorns starfish well we've basically trained it the same way that you'd read a book looking at photos we've actually presented hundreds of thousands of photos to this vehicle and it has created its own model of what a starfish looks like and it's very accurate at detecting them in the wild the plan now is to recruit a citizen's army to deploy thousands of ranger robots in the war against the crown of thorns okay so we're just driving it now manually but when i press play it will run execute that mission that we just described so the robot has been programmed it'll follow a certain course and then start to look for the starfish and intercept and kill precisely it's quite james bond dude isn't it really it is [Music] townsville seems small enough and provincial enough but in the world of marine biology this is a hub and townsville is to the understanding of coral what silicon valley is to the world of information technology i've come to meet dr lina bay for a guided tour of the marine simulator or csim as it's known what a spectacular sight a laboratory in full flow it's beautiful isn't it it's absolutely wonderful when i see all these shapes all these wonderful forms and all these colors what am i actually looking at lots of people are really surprised to hear that corals are in fact animals yes and and what you're seeing is about 40 or 50 different species of corals in this tank alone the latest work here attempts to chart the effects of global warming on the coral reef and in the background there you can see a tank that's kept under current conditions so what we're seeing on the roof now yes and here's a tank that's kept at two degrees warmer than what the reef is so what i'm seeing straight away is that that one is uh highly populated this one is uh half empty that one has lots of corals that are growing up like almost like plant life well all those specimens look pretty good is that right that's exactly right so what you can see over in that tank is that we've got two species of coral we've got a branching coral and then we have the brain coral gets it now its name for obvious reasons and and those two species are happy under ambient or current day conditions but in this tank we've lost all the branching corals so they are quite sensitive and they just haven't been able to persist under these conditions and the brain corals what you can see here is is something that is quite astonishing corals are in fact individuals same as people and and some individuals are more tolerant than others so if you look at this guy here it's very happy and healthy it's grown a lot and it's got the algae in its tissue and the bright green color but in contrast here's another individual of the same species and you can see that it's completely bleached this variation is the fuel for natural selection is there a thought then that if you discover that some are genetically better programmed to survive in warm water that you could seed the reef with those species well that's one of the ideas that's on the table at the moment what we're doing is we're doing the basic science to understand whether uh we can actually capture and harness coral's natural ability to respond to the environment and use that for conservation into the future well congratulations and obviously i wish you the very best with your work thank you tropical queensland displays the bounties of nature whilst its cyclones wreak havoc its lush fields yield abundant crops and its rainforest houses a cornucopia of plant and animal life recently australians have come to talk of stewardship recognizing that the indigenous people were the custodian of this country's lands for millennia in the same vein humanity is now accepting guardianship of the planet including the delicate and irreplaceable marvels like the great barrier reef next time i'll mingle with marsupials hello grunt you're enjoying that you're a good boy which one of us i told you i'll ride the world's greenest train for the first time ever my tracks are solar powered and tackled training with an aussie rugby legend [Music] nice work very fierce [Music] to south america next on bbc2 for one of the biggest events on their footballing calendar their equivalent to the champions league final in match of the day live coming up you

Channel: JOURNEYS

Views: 98,303

Rating: 4.8548007 out of 5

Keywords: Great Australian Railway Journeys, MichealPortillo, Sydney, Australia, Canberra, Melbourne, Kuranda, Townsville

Id: tifRdBQdi5Y

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020