Art, Shark, and Barracudas, too.
By David King
The first thing we saw after our back-roll entry from the boat was a grey reef shark gliding by below us. Big enough to be called majestic, and regally uninterested in us.
By the time I’d pulled myself together, switched on the camera and was ready to shoot, His or Her Grey Majesty was disappearing into the blue distance.
We were just starting our freediving adventure at the Museum of Underwater Art on the John Brewer Reef, nearly 40 nautical miles from Townsville, North Queensland.
The reef was named after a troop ship sailing from Sydney to India in 1842. In 1988 it became home to the five-star, seven-storey Four Seasons Barrier Reef floating hotel which closed after only 12 months. The hotel was sold and ended up in North Korea where it’s now known as Hotel Haegumgang.
It had taken two hours to reach the reef on the Yongala Dive boat, crashing through swell at around 25 - 30 knots with spray arcing over the gunwales as we rocked and rolled with the punches of the sea.
Finally, our skipper cut the thundering twin outboards and we drifted to the white and yellow mooring buoys which mark the Museum Of Underwater Art site.
Out here, you can no longer see land in any direction, yet a light surf sometimes breaks over the top of the reef which comes to within inches of the surface and curves around to create a natural underwater lagoon.
Hard and soft corals slope away to a sandy seabed which starts at around five metres and drops away to 17 metres with underwater visibility usually in the range of 10 to 15 metres.
Freediving nirvana!
Andrea and I were the only freedivers in a complement of Scuba divers and snorkellers, and – having been acknowledged as ‘seasoned divers’ by the Yongala Dive crew – were free to do our own thing.
And it was a ‘thing’ that was going to take some doing.
Created in 2020 by Jason deCaires Taylor, a British sculptor, marine environmentalist, diver and photographer, the Museum of Underwater Art consists of 33 sculptures and the Coral Greenhouse.
The Greenhouse is a 12 metre long, 6 metre wide skeletal structure which sits on the seabed at a depth of 16 metres with its criss-cross top rising to around 12 metres - depths requiring decent freediving ability and plenty of stamina to do repeat dives.
The Greenhouse is also an underwater laboratory with salinity testers, PH testers, and dissolved oxygen testers monitoring the environment, and an underwater camera tracking the growth and health of coral.
Outside the Greenhouse are clusters of ‘floating trees’ – sculptures based on local terrestrial species such as eucalyptus, monstera vines and umbrella palms. The tops of these floating trees are also around 12 metres below the surface.
More easily dived - and even viewed from the surface by snorkellers - are the Ocean Sentinels, eight statues cast in hybrid form (a synthesis between human and natural marine form) of renowned Australians whose work in the fields of marine science and conservation has been highly-commended and influential to our understanding of reef protection.
They are made from a high-grade low-carbon Earth-friendly concrete reinforced with marine stainless steel and lie at depths ranging from 5 to 8 metres.
We started diving the surreal sculpture of Dr Charles Maurice Yonge, an internationally-renowned marine zoologist who led the 1923 Great Barrier reef expedition, then moved to the nearby sculptures of Professor John ‘Charlie’ Veron, who has dedicated his life to charting the world’s coral reefs, and Professor Peter Harrison, who pioneered a world-first technique dubbed ‘coral IVF’.
Coral Researcher
The other Ocean Sentinels were clustered in a different area and we didn’t get to see them.
All of the Ocean Sentinels are intended to be - and are being - colonised by corals, sponges, and hydroids, and will eventually look nothing at all like human figures. Indeed, the sculptures of Dr Yonge and Professor Harrison bear hardly any resemblance to the human form at all.
These sculptures were modelled on local students, names unknown.
Sculpture of Professor Peter Harrison
being lowered onto the seabed by straps.
After about 40 minutes of diving and filming three Ocean Sentinels we headed for deeper water to examine the floating trees.
But the temperature was dropping and we were getting cold in our old 3mm steamer wetsuits so after a couple of dives on the floating monstera vines at 12m, we headed back to the boat to change into our open cell freediving wetsuits.
By the time we got back in, visibility had dropped from more than 15m to little under 12m and we could only just discern the shape of the Coral Greenhouse below us with a huge school of fish swirling about in one spot. Only later, after we had left the water, did we learn they were barracuda.
A few more dives from 12 to 15 metres, taking turns to film each other hanging outside one of the entrances or drifting along the outside of the structure, and Andrea declared herself exhausted and the dive was over.
Overall, we had dived just under half of the Museum of Underwater Art. But we wouldn’t do more than that in a museum or art gallery on land in one visit. Rushing through exhibits to say we’ve “done” something isn’t our style. We get fascinated by a few exhibits and spend our time with them, then return another day to view other exhibits.
And one thing about the Great Barrier Reef - it can throw all kinds of conditions at you.
You may start out with beautiful, sunny weather and calm water with wonderful underwater visibility. But it can change dramatically in a very short time. The sky goes grey, the wind comes up, the visibility and temperature drop and you might as well be diving Victorian waters on a bad day.
People are often surprised when they encounter this, believing the “beautiful one day, perfect the next” tourist brochure spiels.
Well, it can be beautiful one day and perfect the next. But not always. We learned this from going out to the Reef to Scuba and freedive back in the 90’s, and we weren’t surprised when the visibility and temperature dropped and our trip back to Townsville was another two hours of ‘rock and rolling to the punches of the sea’.
It was an exhausted and bedraggled but exhilarated group of divers and snorkellers who dragged themselves off the boat at the Townsville Coast Guard pier that afternoon.
The Museum of Underwater Art is well worth a visit, and we’ll most certainly be going back to dive what we missed.
DJK
Photos courtesy of Museum of Underwater Art,
Jason deCaires Taylor,
and
Old'n'Bold Freediving Adventures.
For more information on the Museum of Underwater Art, visit
To learn how you can help to preserve the Great Barrier Reef (even if you live a long way away from it) go to
https://www.moua.com.au/protect#what-can-i-do
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