There is a tendency, in discussions of the Great Barrier Reef, to begin the story around 1975 — with the Marine Park Act — or 1981, with the UNESCO World Heritage listing. These are meaningful institutional moments. But they are recent, and they are partial. The fuller story begins before the reef itself existed in its present form: on a coastal plain that is now seafloor, inhabited by peoples whose descendants still walk its shores, paddle its waters, and carry an unbroken obligation to a Country that has shifted beneath the sea and kept on asking to be cared for.

A COUNTRY BENEATH THE WATER.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been linked with the Reef since time immemorial. Prior to sea level rise and the Reef forming over 7,000 years ago, they lived on what is now the seafloor, and cultural knowledge of that time’s practices and sites still remains. This is not metaphor. It is a statement about the depth and continuity of human occupation — an occupation that preceded the reef’s coral structures, that witnessed their formation, and that adapted across geological time without ever breaking its fundamental relationship to Country.

Most of the islands and coral cays of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area formed in the Holocene, following postglacial sea level rise. Continuous First Nations coastal occupation occurred in the World Heritage Area from at least around 9,000 years ago to the present, with increasingly intensive coast and island use evident by the Mid-Holocene. The archaeology of the reef’s islands and continental margins, documented by researchers at James Cook University and partner First Nations communities, has established this antiquity with increasing rigour over recent decades. The reef system that the world now recognises as a natural wonder was, in its formative millennia, also a cultural landscape being actively shaped, navigated, and managed by people.

Stories told by Australia’s Aboriginal peoples tell of the time, over 10,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age came to an end, and sea levels rose by 120 metres. These oral accounts are among the oldest accurately preserved historical narratives known to scholarship. Oral traditions from multiple clan groups describe this flooding process, with stories recounting how seas rose, islands formed, and landscapes transformed. These accounts represent among the world’s oldest accurately preserved historical narratives, maintaining detailed environmental information across hundreds of generations. What Western science has reconstructed from sediment cores and bathymetric surveys, First Nations cultures encoded in story and kept transmitting across thousands of generations. That is not a poetic flourish. It is a documented phenomenon that challenges any simple division between “scientific knowledge” and “traditional knowledge.”

THE MEANING OF SEA COUNTRY.

The term “Sea Country” deserves careful attention. It is not merely a geographic designation, a phrase used to describe coastal and marine environments. Sea Country refers to the marine and coastal environments that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have traditionally owned, used, and occupied. It encompasses a deep spiritual, cultural, and economic connection to marine and coastal ecosystems.

Land and Sea Country is not just a geographical area — it includes all living things, beliefs, values, creation stories, spirits and cultural obligations associated with it. To Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Land and Sea Country is not only a place of belonging, but also refers to an interdependent relationship between Traditional Owners and their ancestral lands and seas. The distinction that Western legal and environmental frameworks draw between land and water, between terrestrial jurisdiction and marine jurisdiction, has no real equivalent in the cosmologies of the peoples who have managed this region since before the present coastline existed. Country is continuous. The reef is not a separate thing from the communities that surround it — it is an extension of the same web of obligation, kinship, and spiritual relationship.

Sea estates refer to the coastal and marine components of a Traditional Owner group’s country, and extend along the coast and out to sea to varying extents. Physical features in a land or seascape — rivers, islands, mountains and reefs — often mark their boundaries. They may refer to an area large enough to encompass several islands or reefs within a cultural landscape, or to a smaller area such as a bay or a particular reef. These are not vague or informal jurisdictions. They are precise, maintained, and transmitted across generations with care. Such areas continue to be subject to a range of traditional management measures including taboos, traditional access restrictions and catch limits. Sacred sites occur in sea country as features in a landscape — rocks, reefs, cays and islands, channels and passages. Examples include traditional initiation grounds, women’s birthing places, dreaming story places, and ceremonial grounds.

SEVENTY VOICES ACROSS 2,300 KILOMETRES.

There are more than 70 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Traditional Owner clan groups situated along the Queensland coast, from the eastern Torres Strait Islands to just north of Bundaberg. Each of these groups holds a range of past and present heritage values for their land and sea country, and for surrounding sea countries. These values may be cultural, spiritual, economic, social or physical, or a mixture of these, and demonstrate continuing connections with the Great Barrier Reef region and its natural resources.

There are some 70 Aboriginal Traditional Owner groups with authority for Sea Country management in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Torres Strait Island Traditional Owner groups are also connected to the Reef and hold cultural knowledge of their traditional use of the Great Barrier Reef region more broadly. The diversity within this custodial community is profound. These are not one people with one voice but scores of distinct language groups, clan structures, and cultural traditions — for instance, the Guugu Yimmithirr language group (originating in Cooktown and the area north of the Starke River) call a dugong Girrbithi and a turtle Ngawiya, while the eastern Torres Strait Islander language groups call the dugong Deger and the turtle Nam in their Meriam Mir language.

Each language group carries its own body of knowledge about its specific Sea Country: its seasonal patterns, its significant species, its sacred locations, its rules for sustainable use. Knowledge of the environment and an inherent responsibility of First Nations peoples to maintain all living species, places or objects is passed down through generations in stories, songlines, totems and languages. The Reef Authority is working with Traditional Owners to ascertain whether it is desirable or appropriate to share knowledge for reporting and management purposes. That final qualification matters. Like traditional Australian languages, cultural stories belong to specific Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Permission to tell these stories can only be given by the custodians of these stories, and this should be respected.

SONGLINES AND DEEP MEMORY.

One of the most significant bodies of knowledge that First Nations peoples maintain about their Sea Country is encoded in songlines — navigational, spiritual, and ecological maps woven into song, ceremony, and story. A songline is a track across the land, sky or sea following a journey of a Creation Ancestor. Songlines are recorded in creation stories, songs, paintings and dance. A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the songs describing the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena. First Nations people could navigate vast distances by singing the songs in the appropriate sequence.

In the Great Barrier Reef region, a number of storylines and songlines run across the land and into the water, linking natural environments and Traditional Owner groups, and crossing modern-day jurisdictional boundaries. These are not purely navigational instruments, though they serve that function. They are also repositories of ecological knowledge: which reefs support what species at what season, where turtle nesting grounds lie, how weather patterns move through particular passages. Creation stories, songlines, and sacred site locations often reference both current and ancient landscapes, preserving memory of places that have been underwater for millennia.

The Yidinji oral traditions, originating in and around Cairns in far north Queensland, offer a striking example. Oral traditions relating to sea level rise and the inundation of the Great Barrier Reef recount the actions of Goonyah, the first man of Yidinji Country, who caught a forbidden fish during the Dreaming. As punishment for this act, the coastal seas rose to submerge what is now part of the Great Barrier Reef. That story encodes, in mythic form, an environmental event that can be dated to thousands of years before the present. It is an example of how rising sea levels and other disruptive natural phenomena could threaten communal survival, and so First Nations peoples placed a high value on codifying memories of such events and collective responses to them.

Saltwater People — people whose identity is intimately tied to the sea and whose Sea Countries include contemporary offshore islands — continue to see these places as retaining intimate aspects of their traditional obligations and custodial identity: the sacred; the spiritual; the creation; the linguistic; the named; the inherited; the known; the past and lived present; the sustenance for all life and human livelihoods; the future of current and unborn generations to come.

DISRUPTION AND CONTINUITY.

The period of European settlement brought to this system a violence that cannot be understated or euphemised. European settlement led to a multitude of users and pressures on the Reef and a major disruption to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ custodianship capacity. At the same time, the Reef experienced new pressures, loss of land and Sea Country rights, dislocation, disease, dispersion and disadvantage, disrupting the capacity of people to perform and pass on their cultural responsibilities and care for their Sea Country.

Erosion along the coast and islands has exposed burial sites and remains, and Traditional Owners have conducted some traditional reburials on islands within the Great Barrier Reef. On some islands there are massacre sites, which are very sensitive to Traditional Owners. The history of colonial violence in the reef’s coastal zones is inscribed in the landscape itself. It is part of the reef’s cultural heritage, as much as the fish traps and the rock art and the songlines — an unwanted but indelible layer in a story of extraordinary endurance.

Despite this recent history, many Traditional Owners remain connected to their Sea Country and strong in their culture. A vast, rich array of components with heritage value still exists and is actively maintained by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Many people work tirelessly through their communities and various Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations to maintain the remaining heritage values of the Reef, managing Sea Country, recording oral tradition and expressing living culture.

That continuity is itself a civic fact of the first order. The capacity of these peoples to maintain connection, knowledge, and custodial responsibility through two centuries of dispossession and displacement is extraordinary. It is also the foundation upon which all serious reef governance must now build.

TRADITIONAL USE AGREEMENTS: CUSTODIANSHIP IN FORMAL STRUCTURES.

Since the early 2000s, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority — the Reef Authority — has worked to formalise a partnership with Traditional Owners through mechanisms called Traditional Use of Marine Resources Agreements, or TUMRAs. A TUMRA is a community-based agreement, Traditional Owner-led and developed by saltwater Traditional Owners and clan groups to manage their Sea Country estate, in partnership with the Reef Authority and the Queensland Department of Environment and Science. TUMRAs are a unique partnership agreement that recognises and supports the Native Title rights and interests of Traditional Owners who hold an inherent spiritual connection to the Reef. They recognise and support Traditional Owner lore and customs with a robust legislative framework.

The Girringun TUMRA, which covers six Saltwater Traditional Owner groups around the Hinchinbrook region in north Queensland, was the first to be signed into being in December 2005. In the two decades since, the program has grown substantially. There are now 10 accredited TUMRAs, co-designed with the Reef Authority and Queensland Government, covering 43 per cent of Reef coastline, with a further three groups working towards a TUMRA.

In May 2022, the Darumbal people were officially recognised as the traditional custodians of an expanse of ocean covering 36,606 square kilometres off the Central Queensland Coast, making it the largest Traditional Use of Marine Resources Agreement on the reef. The Darumbal recognition was both a legal milestone and a statement of scale: a single people’s Sea Country jurisdiction covering a marine area larger than many nations.

Each TUMRA has a committee to manage the agreement and traditional use of marine resources in their Sea Country, including traditional take, if any, of important species such as dugongs and turtles. Their management of traditional use is based on both cultural lore and contemporary science, and agreements are also used for broader Sea Country planning and management. The weaving together of cultural law and contemporary science is not a compromise between two incommensurable systems. It is an acknowledgement that both carry real knowledge, and that the reef is better protected when they operate in concert.

Through these agreements, Traditional Owners are managing threats to the Reef including coastal development, poor water quality, illegal and unsustainable fishing, and the eradication of crown-of-thorns starfish. These are not ceremonial roles. They are substantive management responsibilities, exercised by people with both the deepest knowledge of their Sea Country and the most fundamental stake in its survival.

THE REEF 2050 PLAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF INCLUSION.

The formal policy architecture around Traditional Owner involvement in reef governance has matured considerably in recent years, though significant aspirations remain unrealised. Traditional Owners have launched the Reef 2050 Traditional Owner Implementation Plan, providing a cohesive framework of six Work Areas with a total of 71 actions for Traditional Owners. The plan was developed through a Steering Group and reflects years of advocacy by Traditional Owners seeking greater recognition of their rights within Reef governance structures.

The Reef was declared a Marine Park in 1975 and a World Heritage Area in 1981. Since that time, Traditional Owners have been seeking greater recognition of their rights, responsibilities and interests as the traditional custodians of the Great Barrier Reef. From the 1990s, Traditional Owners have been coming together to seek more cohesive approaches to securing their aspirations for a “Healthy Reef and Healthy People.”

The establishment of a Great Barrier Reef Traditional Owner Taskforce to develop an independent Sea Country Alliance is a milestone moment for the Great Barrier Reef and all communities that respect, care for, connect with and rely on it. This arrangement reflects in Western governance what Traditional Owners across the Great Barrier Reef have been doing since time immemorial: caring for Country, kinship, family and community.

The language of that Governance Charter — which acknowledges that custodial authority predates any contemporary administrative structure — reflects how the terms of the conversation have shifted. Traditional Owners of the Great Barrier Reef continue to assert their inherent rights and interests from their continuing connection to Land and Sea Country. As custodians of land and sea, Traditional Owners assert their special rights and interests extend beyond the definition of “stakeholders.” The distinction is critical. A stakeholder has interests. A custodian has obligations — obligations that exist independently of any government’s willingness to recognise them.

The Queensland Government is delivering its commitment to double the number of rangers in the Queensland Indigenous Land and Sea Ranger Program over three years to 200 rangers. To support the leading role Indigenous rangers play in reef preservation, the Australian Government has committed $100 million of protection and restoration work to Indigenous ranger organisations by the end of the decade. These funding commitments represent a meaningful, if belated, recognition that Traditional Owner-led management is not supplementary to reef protection — it is central to it.

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AS REEF SCIENCE.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are Australia’s First People who, for 60,000 years, have cared for their land and sea Country. They are the first scientists, farmers, engineers, innovators, and conservationists. They have successfully nurtured and protected their environment through changing seasons and climates, guided by traditional knowledge and customs passed down through generations.

That characterisation, from the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, is important precisely because it locates Traditional Ecological Knowledge within the category of science — not as a romantic alternative to empirical inquiry, but as its own systematic, tested, and sophisticated body of knowledge about how ecosystems work. The rich traditional knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is invaluable to marine science. It offers insights into sustainable ecosystem management, species behaviour, and environmental indicators. Recognising and integrating this knowledge with contemporary science is essential for effective marine conservation strategies.

There are fish traps in the intertidal zones of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, especially the islands — stone structures that use the incoming tides to bring fish into the trap, then retain the fish as the tides recede. Some fish traps are well known, such as those at Hinchinbrook Island, Magnetic Island, Gould Island and Boat Bay in Mission Beach. Extensive coral and stone-walled tidal fishtraps, some of the largest engineered structures created by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, appeared on the coast and islands of the region. These are not relics. They are evidence of a sustained engineering and management tradition that modulated fish harvests to maintain population viability across generations — a form of fisheries management that preceded Western science by thousands of years.

The Strong Peoples – Strong Country framework is an Indigenous heritage and cultural wellbeing framework connecting the health of the Reef and its catchment to the quality of life enjoyed by Traditional Owners. It provides a Traditional Owner-led approach for systematic monitoring of the condition of the Reef and its catchments as an Indigenous heritage asset. It reflects the Traditional Owner worldview that their quality of life is connected inseparably to, and underpinned by, their Land and Sea Country.

This framework, now embedded within the Reef 2050 Integrated Monitoring and Reporting Program, embodies a principle that has taken formal governance structures a long time to absorb: the health of the reef and the wellbeing of its Traditional Owners are not separate problems to be managed in parallel. They are one problem, inseparable at the root.

A PERMANENT RECORD FOR A LIVING RELATIONSHIP.

The Great Barrier Reef has accumulated many layers of formal identity over the past half-century — the Marine Park boundary, the World Heritage Area designation, the Reef 2050 governance architecture. Each of these is important. None of them is the oldest or deepest layer. That layer belongs to the more than 70 Traditional Owner groups whose Sea Country spans the reef’s full 2,300-kilometre length and whose custodial relationship with it predates every other structure by tens of thousands of years.

The project of permanently anchoring Queensland’s civic and natural identity onto an onchain layer — of which greatbarrierreef.queensland is the namespace that names this system’s permanent civic address for the reef — is an exercise in thinking about what permanence actually means for a place of this significance. The reef is not only the ecological entity described by marine biologists, nor only the economic asset catalogued by tourism economists, nor only the governance challenge addressed by marine park authorities. It is a cultural landscape of ancient and active meaning. Any permanent address for the Great Barrier Reef that fails to carry the weight of that custodial history is an address for an abstraction, not for the place itself.

Tropical coral reefs and associated islands, such as those within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, have been social-ecological systems for millennia, and ongoing management efforts must acknowledge the role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in shaping these ecosystems to ensure effective management into the future. That statement, from peer-reviewed scholarship published in 2024, is as clear as any policy document could be. The reef has always been, simultaneously, a natural system and a cultural system. Managing it as though these two dimensions can be separated — treating the ecology as the “real” problem and the cultural dimension as an added consideration — has produced decades of incomplete governance.

It is time to improve the approach to how Sea Country is governed and managed — to be more inclusive, holistic and coordinated. By building on what we already know and through partnerships that empower First Nations peoples. By helping to invest in future generations to come so they too can continue telling stories of how they care for their Sea Country. Those words, from the Reef Traditional Owners’ own collective platform, describe an aspiration that is at once ancient and urgent. The stories have been maintained across 10,000 years of a shifting coastline and two centuries of colonial disruption. The obligation to ensure they continue to be told — and that the governance structures of the reef reflect the authority of those who hold them — is not a matter of cultural courtesy. It is a condition of the reef’s survival.

As this project builds a permanent civic record of Queensland’s defining places and systems, greatbarrierreef.queensland names not only the ecological structure of the world’s largest coral system but the full depth of a place that has been cared for, named, mapped in song, and defended in law by its First Nations custodians since long before any other form of record existed. That depth is the foundation on which everything else rests.