Josh Woodward review of Iain McCalman, John Büsst: Bohemian Artist and Saviour of Reef and Rainforest

(Sydney: NewSouth, 2024), 272 pp., PB $36.99, ISBN 9781761170096

Iain McCalman’s John Büsst: Bohemian Artist and Saviour of Reef and Rainforest traces the rise of the Great Barrier Reef from a site of remote isolation to one of national aesthetic and environmental importance. McCalman chronicles the reef’s journey through the lens of an artist-turned-activist who made the coastal lands ashore the reef his home. McCalman’s intuition for storytelling and eye for curious historical detail combine to give us a new and welcome perspective on the history of conservation and environmental consciousness as they relate to the Great Barrier Reef and tropical North Queensland.

Born in Bendigo in 1909 to a family made rich by the gold boom, John Büsst gets his education at Melbourne’s elite Wesley College. There he bonds over a common interest in nature with Harold Holt, who becomes a lifelong friend and vital character in the book’s later preservation narrative. In 1930, Büsst and his sister Phyll eschew the materialism and social rigidity of their family position. Both withdraw from the University of Melbourne to pursue a bohemian life in Melbourne’s licentious and intellectually exciting Meldrumite art scene. Early chapters reveal the lives, loves and affairs of central characters of Melbourne’s 1930s art world, led by charismatic artists Colin Calahan and Justus Jorgensen. McCalman offers a gripping account of a city on the cusp of social and intellectual transformation. The romance and allure of the period, we learn, is perhaps not all that it seems.

McCalman describes Calahan and Jorgensen as intoxicating, subversive intellectuals whose personas were irresistible to those young artists, including the Büssts, clustered around them in raucous inner-city taverns and dimly lit art studios. It is in these chapters that McCalman locates the notorious 1930 murder of bohemian artist Molly Dean as a paradigm shift in Melbourne’s creative history: ‘Coinciding with the Depression, the brutal killing of this beautiful, talented, free-thinking young woman seemed to symbolise the end of the innocent age of jazz and flappers’ (p. 33). On either side of Dean’s death, McCalman gives a subtle impression of Calahan and Jorgensen as cult-like figures. Calahan is undone by his adulteries and exiles himself to England. Jorgensen encourages the Meldrumites to accompany him to the Montsalvat artists’ colony at Eltham, on Melbourne’s rural hinterland. There, Jorgensen represents ‘himself as a type of secular preacher’ (p. 37) and tends to dominate his subordinates. McCalman highlights his ‘arrogant insistence that without his control the Montsalvat workers would perish in the outside world’ (p. 57).

Not immune to his own minor scandals, adulteries and court appearances, Büsst invests his time and creative energy under Jorgensen into experimental building design. For much of the 1930s, John was consumed with construction and experimental mudbrick building—a skill he would later hone self-erecting homes at Bedarra Island and Bingil Bay. Perhaps disillusioned with Jorgensen’s capricious oversight of the Montsalvat artists’ colony, John and Phyll make a Gaugin-inspired escape to the islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

The Büssts’ relocation to, and life on, Bedarra Island comprises the middle section of the biography. McCalman gives a portrait of John as an artist as he forms an instinctive connection to the land on which he lives and builds. A greater basis of primary source information allows McCalman to undertake a closer character study of Büsst than in the earlier chapters. Büsst is as an introspective and generous man, seemingly unfazed by the adversity of island life and further interpersonal disputes of yet another dysfunctional artists’ colony. After the passing of his father, Büsst and his sister gain a generous annual income that will later allow them to buy and sell large swathes of land. The Büssts’ stipend does not go unnoticed by Bedarra artist Noel Wood, who establishes on the island a radical artists’ colony dedicated to the ‘rejection of modern life’ where ‘wealth had no meaning’. In spite of his anti-materialist creed, Wood appears happy for ‘wealthy John Büsst’ to ‘foot most of the main costs until the colony became self-supporting’ (p. 71). McCalman’s profile gives a sympathetic impression of Büsst here. Rather than becoming embittered by disagreements or exploitation, Büsst throws himself into building. Island conditions pose immense physical challenges, but Büsst perseveres even when tropical ulcers lacerate his hands and feet. We get the sense that Büsst is a man driven by an uncompromising vision. ‘Despite his slight frame photographs show John’s rippling tennis-player muscles which enabled him to mix, handle and eventually lay these massive bricks’ (p. 81). McCalman’s description of Büsst’s achievements in manual labour reveals a man that was never destined to follow his father into the world of business. Considering the life of comfort Büsst refused, his ability to find solace in the rewards of physical adversity reminded me of the adage of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘there is no real wealth but the labor of man’.

At a social event organised by the Holts, and possibly through their ‘deliberate matchmaking’ (p. 99), Büsst meets and marries Alison Shaw Fitchett, who relocates to Bedarra. John and Alison are visited there at various intervals by their matchmakers, Harry and Zara Holt. The Holts fall in love with the tropical idyll. A handful of passages on John and Harry’s relationship reveal Holt to be an endearing if not flawed man. McCalman entertainingly details Holt’s flippant attitude towards water safety. Holt, we learn, would insist John transport him ‘by boat to ever more distant outer reefs where he could swim among sharks, barracuda, groupers and stingrays’ (p. 90). No number of sharks could deter Holt from swimming further and further into the reef. A mutual appreciation for the sublime setting of the tropical north brought both men closer, even if Holt’s love for the region had a dimension of adrenaline seeking not shared by the more contemplative Büsst.

As important as Büsst’s relationship with the politically ascendant Holt are those he begins to form with budding scientists, ecologists and divers. This eclectic mix of characters give Büsst his tuition in the delicate ecosystems that connect island and land, reef and rainforest, water and coral. A fervid interest in ecology grants Büsst an ability to articulate the importance of the reef to countless committees, courts and officials. McCalman shows us how Büsst’s life experience informed, and perhaps made inevitable, his aptitude as a powerful communicator of the indispensability of environmental phenomena:

He’d lived on Bedarra for seventeen years overlooking a fringing coral reef directly in front of his house and he’d observed it under all weather conditions, including a cyclone. Above all, he’d learnt that all coral reefs consisted of both live and dead corals and that even when coral reefs were pulverised by cyclones their skeletons and seabeds continued to harbour life. (p. 150)

The third and fourth sections of McCalman’s biography deal with Büsst’s environmental campaigning and eventual involvement with the ‘Save the Reef’ movement. Büsst applied himself to the conservation effort with the same motivation and drive that he had used to construct homesteads by hand. McCalman presents the Büsst of the 1960s as a determined letter writer and political campaigner whose efforts cost him dearly in health and marriage: ‘John’s relentless commitment to saving the Reef … probably made him a dull companion’ (p. 213). Indeed, Büsst’s marriage appears to have played second fiddle to the relationships that served his activism. His longstanding relationship with, and therefore access to, Harold Holt, who he ceaselessly petitions for Commonwealth protection of sections of the reef and tracts of land and marine areas around the Innisfail coast, remains a persistent theme of this biography.

Büsst’s opponents in his fight to save the reef were hardly insignificant. First, he contends with the Australian Army, seeking to prevent them from weapons testing and war gaming in the lowland rainforests. For his dogged opposition someone in the army terms him ‘the Bingle Bay bastard’—an insult that John adopted and flaunted with pride (p. 139). He later battles the developmentalist instincts of the avaricious Queensland government, which had an eye on the reef for oil and gas exploration. These encounters bring him into contact with the activist poet Judith Wright and a coterie of politicians, scientists and academics, whose efforts were indispensable in the eventual protection of the reef in 1975.

Centring environmental campaigners in conservation efforts risks overstating the influence of a selection of individuals in favour of more complicated explanations of the wider social and political contexts of environmental movements. As Rohan Lloyd, Maxine Newlands and Theresa Petray have pointed out, the Save the Reef campaign was more complex than a ‘David vs. Goliath’ battle between a ‘rag-tag group of activists’ and the ‘collective might of the oil industry’, and, in fact, enjoyed widespread public support in the late 1960s.¹ McCalman navigates this issue skilfully. Through the genre of biography, he repositions Büsst, somewhat overlooked in the historical record, as a central figure in making the reef a site of national attention.

Whether or not Büsst deserves the ‘saviour’ epithet bestowed on him in the book’s title will be for each reader to decide. In his recent revisionist critique of the 1960s ‘Save the Reef’ campaign, Rohan Lloyd characterises Büsst as a:

rare amalgam of the Reef’s history of settler engagement: he knew the science, the politics and the politicians, and was one of the few people who had faith in their collective engagement.²

McCalman’s revelation is to bring Büsst’s role centre stage, explaining how, over a lifetime, he developed the qualities that made him indispensable to a historic environmental movement of Australia’s recent past. It is an important, personal addition to Great Barrier Reef historiography.

1. 1 Rohan Lloyd, Maxine Newlands and Theresa Petray, ‘Coral Battleground? Re-examining the “Save the Reef” Campaign in 1960s Australia’, Environmental Sociology 3, no. 1 (2017): 54, doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2016.1259604. See also Rohan Lloyd, Saving the Reef: The Human Story behind One of Australia’s Greatest Environmental Treasures (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2022).

2. 2 Lloyd, Saving the Reef, 66.