The ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.

It could be said that correcting such omissions is simply part of the job for historians – but for Iain McCalman, one of Australia’s most public-spirited and accomplished humanities scholars, the absence of John Büsst from the pages of Australian history made him uneasy. McCalman, author of The Reef: A passionate history (2013), a fascinating history of the Great Barrier Reef told in twelve tales, had featured Büsst as an important figure alongside Judith Wright and forest ecologist Len Webb in the exhaustive campaign to protect the Reef from being drilled for oil, dredged for fertiliser, and quarried for cement in the 1960s and early 1970s. McCalman named them ‘the poet, the painter and the forester’, and deftly portrayed their friendship as a kind of enlightenment in which the arts and sciences came together, sparking the social movement that led to the Great Barrier Reef marine park. But had he, McCalman worried, emphasised the painter’s role in what was effectively the initiation of environmental policy in this country? Had he conveyed the significance of this incisive, energetic man? After all, hadn’t Wright herself said that Büsst had masterminded the campaign? After one tactical victory, Wright wrote to him: ‘Good on you, mate!’ – adding that their success was ‘All because of YOU.’