John Busst

John Horatio Busst (1909–5 April 1971) was an artist and conservationist in Queensland, Australia. He is best known for leading a successful campaign to protect Queensland's Great Barrier Reef and its tropical rainforests from development, mining pressures and exploitation.^[1]

Early life

John Busst was born in 1909 in

Mission Beach, Bingil Bay, Dunk and Bedarra Islands remained relatively undeveloped during the first half of the twentieth century, due to their isolation and frequent destructive cyclones. These factors ensured that the area retained much of its outstanding natural beauty which, along with idyllic accounts from Queensland author Edmund James Banfield, attracted artists and naturalists to the area including John Busst and his sister Phyllis, who leased the south-eastern corner of Bedarra Island in 1940 and later purchased almost the whole island (apart from 15 acres (6ha) owned by artist Noel Wood).^[1] His artistic background and its associated philosophies influenced Busst's building practices; his first house (since demolished) on Bedarra Island being constructed with hand-made mud bricks.^[1]

After 1947 Busst subdivided his Bedarra Island land and sold 86 acres (34.8ha).^[3] Phyllis returned to Melbourne and John married Alison Shaw Fitchett who joined him on Bedarra in the early 1950s. In 1957 John and Alison Busst sold their home on Bedarra Island and moved to Bingil Bay on just less than 10 acres (4ha) which extended to the beach with views over the Coral Sea and Great Barrier Reef. They also acquired portion 19V to the north, a 154-acre (62.3ha) block that included extensive areas of tropical lowland rainforest and the rocky headland known as Ninney Point. In the late 1950s or early 1960s the Bussts erected a new residence on the site which they called Ninney Rise.^[1][4]

Ninney Rise

Busst designed their new home to be strong enough to withstand cyclones, and utilised locally sourced materials. He employed a local builder to erect the shell of the building using bricks from the Silkwood Brickworks, and then used bamboo, an exotic that had been planted in the district in the nineteenth century, to create decorative ceiling features, architraves and fittings throughout the residence and to make furniture. Patricia Clare, who visited the Busst's new home at Bingil Bay in the 1960s, later wrote:^[1][4]

"The white house stood on its own cliff, the rainforest behind it, and in front the satin shine of blue water stretching away to where the reefs of lime lay hidden. It was the traditional Australian country house, a core of rooms surrounded by wide verandahs, with a roof like a shady hat pulled down over the lot ... Busst had built it ... [as] a fortress, built of brick and reinforced concrete to outlast the cyclones which periodically smashed into this coast... [explaining] ... 'I am not interested in making anything that won't last for a thousand years.' We stepped off the verandah ... into a room with ceiling lined in a sort of bamboo parquetry."

Busst's artistic individualism and interest in the aesthetics of nature and in using nature in art and architecture gradually evolved into an awareness of the ecological reasons for conserving the natural world, and in the 1960s, to environmental activism.^[1]

Activism

Development

During the late 1950s and 1960s, Queensland's coastal environments were under threat from rapid development stimulated by a boom in resource exploitation. Busst observed large areas of rainforest being felled for sugar and banana cultivation and cattle, with subsequent wet season rain pouring topsoil out into the ocean. This resulted in pesticides, nutrients and phosphates being flushed out to sea and onto the Great Barrier Reef, which was also under pressure from

During these campaigns waged in the 1960s to conserve Queensland's Great Barrier Reef and its tropical rainforests, Busst's house at Bingil Bay, Ninney Rise, became a centre for the movement. It hosted a range of influential visitors, including: politicians such as Harold Holt; noteworthy scientists such as marine biologist Dr Don McMichael, Japanese ornithologist Dr Jiro Kikkawa, rainforest ecologists Len Webb and Geoff Tracey, and United States marine collector and littoral zoologist Eddie Hegerl and his dive team; numerous conservation workers; and author Judith Wright. Wright, the inaugural president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1962, was intimately involved in the activism and documented it in her book The Coral Battleground, which she dedicated to Busst.^[9] In a letter to Wisenet^[who?] in the 1990s Wright described Busst as "the man whose energy and devotion had first sparked off, and largely continued" the fight to save the reef.^[1][10]

Death

Busst died on 5 April 1971,^[2] as he prepared his evidence for the Royal Commission. Wright composed the words for a memorial plaque. Located on road reserve just below Ninney Point, close to the beach, approximately 200m north of their home Ninney Rise, the memorial comprises a small brass plaque attached to a natural rock formation, with the plaque facing the ocean. The inscription on the plaque reads:^[1]

IN MEMORY Of JOHN H BUSST DIED 5 - 4 - 1971 ARTIST AND LOVER OF BEAUTY WHO FOUGHT THAT MAN AND NATURE MIGHT SURVIVE

Legacy

Four years after Busst's death the Commonwealth took over management of the Great Barrier Reef with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act and the world's largest marine protected area.^[1]

The house Ninney Rise and the Busst Memorial were added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 6 August 2010.^[1]

References