Editorial 06 June 2001

 More Than Time for a Sea Change

Harry Robinson comments on the potential for the birth of an Eco-Superpower
Australians don't know the half of it.  We think of our national real estate as a big, dry, dusty island with a green strip round the edges. The island has been as much a hard task master as it has been a home.  It has called for hard toil and it needs plenty more toil (with a sprinkling of science) to keep us in precarious comfort. 

We don't know or recognise half of the nation's real estate.

Australia is, says Sydney Morning Herald writer Paul Sheehan, an "Eco-Superpower."

Sheehan's name is mud to many apparatchiks of the multi-national establishment. He has drawn  hot fire. He sticks to his arguments, though, until better cases are made.  In his  1998 book, "Among the Barbarians", Sheehan wrote:

"On 16 November 1994 a whole new set of lines came quietly into force around the world when the United Nations Convention on  the Law of the Sea redrew the world's sovereign boundaries. No nation gained more under this law than Australia, which now has legal stewardship and exclusive economic rights over a prodigious expanse of land,  coastal sea  and continental shelf....When Australia's historic though dormant territorial claim and legal responsibilities under the Antarctic Treaty are included, the total amount of  Australian Territory is 28.4 million square kilometers, including 16.1 million square kilometers  of ocean territory."

On his calculations,  only Russia and the USA hold stewardship over larger areas.

This astonishing slice of the globe comes with strings attached.  It will attract disputes,  jostles and pirates. It demands defence and expensive care.  Much of it is, so far, unpromising.  And the implications are both sweeping and manifold.  They require a zoom-out of our national self image,  a reassessment and  realignment of national efforts and international relationships.  

All that granted, the promises can be greater than the challenges.  

Provided that we face one hard fact:  nothing will happen without a scientifically loaded workforce.  To begin exploiting a fraction of the ocean territory under Australian stewardship will require scientific surveys and assessments,  scientific calculation of costs and benefits, sceintific designs for ways and means, the application of high technologies based on  science. (Our Antarctic bases and territorial claims owe their legitimacy to our scientific work in the area. That work, splendid as it has been,  begins to look like an overture.)

It wasn't merely kind fate that delivered so much ocean territory to us.  It was our long, long coastline which, when projected offshore to the edge of the continental shelf, accounts for the enormous areas of exclusive economic rights.  Who knows what treasures of sea life, minerals, gas and heaven only knows other forms of wealth lie in our EE zones?  And who are the only people who can find them? Scientists.

Of course, we could hire scientists from elsewhere, we could form joint scientific ventures with competitors, we could water down our equity in a dozen ways.  But we shouldn't.  We should keep control of our assets through the imprints of our scientists.

Nothing worth a damn will happen without science.

Lack of science in exploiting our landmass has done enormous damage.  Of course there was precious little science when squatters began spreading cloven hoofed animals across the inland. There was no soil science, no pastoral science, no hydro science, no fund of knowledge to protect the cedar timber of the coastal strip and so on.  There's no need to gild the lily: the pioneers did the best they could.  And,  while they produced a lot of animal products and grains, they also produced salinity, erosion, bare earth. Some scientists are now trying to repair the damage.   They are too few and too poorly funded.

Australians go into the 21st century  virtually unaware that they are citizens of an Eco-Superpower.   Or rather, a potential Eco-Superpower.  Only a corps of scientists can turn the potential into reality.  Preferably scientists educated in this country for this country...sorry, for this Eco-Superpower.

(Among the Barbarians was published by Random House Australia.  The references to the Eco-Superpower were taken from an article titled "Australia Superpower" published in the Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 1995.)

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Harry Robinson  is a free lance feature writer who has contributed to many of Australia's major publications over the past 35 years. "You could call me a tramp...I have tramped across media and from place to place so wantonly that my reward is a media swag." He can be reached at Harob@Internet.net.au.