“It’s not about more, it’s about better”: How Australia’s Lady Elliot Island fixed itself for the future

Snorkeling through the warm, clear water off Lady Elliot Island, I notice a dark figure in the corner of my mask. Moments later, a gigantic black manta ray appears in all its glory, gliding majestically beneath me. It rolls on an angle, with its mouth wide, taking in the plankton that floats around us. Another careens towards me from the opposite direction. Then I notice another, flanking me. 

I can vaguely make out the sound of people on a nearby boat calling at my companions and I to turn around, as they can see a ray splashing along the surface behind us. We move in circles and discover we’re surrounded; floating through the middle of a manta ray feeding frenzy. As if that wasn’t enough, I can hear the high-pitched sound of a whale song in the distance. I catch myself giggling at the absurdity of it all. 

Just eight kilometers from the continental shelf, the waters off Lady Elliot Island are abundant with nutrient-rich plankton, making it one of the best places in Australia to see manta rays. If you’re lucky you may even spot ‘Inspector Clouseau’ (a pink manta ray that frequents the island) or ‘Taurus,’ the world’s oldest-known manta ray, which celebrated its 40th birthday last year.

Around 250 kilograms (551 pounds) of food waste is composted each day on Lady Elliot Island, along with the cardboard boxes it’s delivered in.

Beyond the rays, there is no shortage of underwater wonders here. A designated (and highly-protected) ‘Green Zone’—a floating eco-district created by local government to promote sustainability and revitalization—these waters are home to, among other critters, schools of vibrant blue-green chromis that flicker in the sunlight, colorful swarthy parrotfish and electric-blue starfish. On the other side of the island, you’ll find hundreds of octopuses, green sea turtles and leopard sea cucumbers. Treading carefully through the knee-deep water during a guided reef walk (walking around the reef—not on the reef) the next day, we spot a tiny clownfish, no bigger than the size of a fingernail, wiggling its tail frantically. Just like Nemo. 

It’s easy to see why Peter Gash, the co-owner of Lady Elliot Island Eco-Resort (the only accommodation on the tiny, 42-hectare island) fell in love with the place during a sailing holiday with friends in the early 1980s. But back then, it was a different story above the water. “At the time, it was a barren windswept rock,” Gash says. “The island had been mined for guano—or bird poop—in the 1860s.” Over the course of a decade, Japanese, Chinese and Malayan workers removed all topsoil and most vegetation, leaving just a few Pisonia trees behind. The Queensland government exacerbated the problem when it placed goats on the island to provide a source of food for shipwrecked sailors, thereby preventing new growth.

When Gash visited nearby Lady Musgrave Island, which hadn’t been mined and was the epitome of a tropical paradise later on the same holiday, he had an idea. “I started to think about legacy,” he says. “I realized I might be able to do something to put Lady Elliot Island back together, and that it could be a fantastic platform to educate people how to do things better and prove we can live with a minimum footprint and still enjoy the comforts of the 21st century.”

Building on the work of aviator and conservationist Don Adams, who began planting shrubs and seedlings from the mainland and other islands in the Bunker group in the late 1960s and established the resort in 1985, Gash and his family set about revegetating the island. More than 10,000 trees have been planted since they took over custodianship in 2005. “We’ve planted trees pretty much everywhere except where the airstrip is,” Gash says.

On the resort’s ecology and revegetation tour, I visit the island’s nursery, where we see seedlings of casuarinas (also known as She-oaks—chosen because they handle wind and salt water well), pandanus, octopus bush, native mulberry shrubs, and sandpaper fig. “Do not use the leaves as toilet paper,” our guide Pieter warns. We also hear how the island began to appear above sea level around 3,500 years ago, when ocean currents deposited sand and other sediments on the reef and how it was mined for fertilizer—then known as ‘white gold’—for agriculture and gunpowder.

It’s one of several educational tours that guests can join throughout their stay, meeting in front of the blackboard where daily activities are posted outside the Reef Education Centre. On the historical tour, we see the original A-frame accommodation that was once the island’s social hub with ‘Don’s Donga’ still engraved in timber above the door, and step inside the island’s otherwise locked lighthouse. 

“What are we here for? Are we here for a good time, or do we want to make a difference?”

- Peter Gash

But it’s on the behind-the-scenes tour that we gain the greatest appreciation of how Gash has achieved his dream. We peek inside the pump room beside the dive shop, where water from the ocean is filtered to remove salt and minerals to make drinking water. Shane from the maintenance team, who leads the tour, also points out the SOURCE Hydropanels, which extract drinking water out of sunlight and air, and explains how the 150-guest resort produces its own electricity with the help of 900 solar panels (with a backup diesel generator for long periods of cloudy weather). 

Waste is another key focus for Gash and his team. As Lady Elliot Island is 80 kilometers from the mainland, there is no weekly garbage truck. Instead, a supply barge comes from Gladstone every three months, with some rubbish taken away by the light planes that also ferry guests back and forth between the island and Hervey Bay, Bundaberg, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

Glass is crushed and converted to sand, while aluminum cans are returned to the mainland for recycling. Around 250 kilograms (551 pounds) of food waste is composted each day via an on-site Composting Apparatus, known as OSCA, along with the cardboard boxes it’s delivered in. The Resort was also the first on the Great Barrier Reef to ban single-use plastic water bottles in 2012, so guests either bring their own reusable bottles or can buy one made from stainless steel or recycled plastic from the resort’s gift shop. And you won’t find a plastic straw here, either.

When Gash first visited, sea birds were a rare sight. Now, as we sit on the beach sipping prosecco at sunset, thousands of black (white-capped) noddies stream across the sky, often complemented by breaching humpback whales. Red-tailed tropicbirds, which can only be found on just a handful of islands on Australia’s East Coast, can also be seen nesting under the trees just meters from the beachfront units. During summer, Wedge-tailed shearwaters—that have a call that sounds like a crying baby—are known to keep guests awake at night.

With all its conservation successes, it’s little wonder the resort has picked up a swag of gongs, including the Steve Irwin Award for Ecotourism and the Banksia Foundation’s Sustainable Tourism Award. Gash, who also owns aircraft service Seair Pacific, was also awarded the Marie Watson-Blake Award for Outstanding Contribution by an Individual at the 2014 Queensland Tourism Awards, and an Order of Australia Medal in 2020 for his contribution to eco-tourism and aviation. Gash and his team have been exploring and funding research into electric airplanes for the last eight years.

“It’s not about more, it’s about better,” said Gash when asked about growth plans for his resort in 2022. While many tourism operations are concerned with growing visitor numbers and in turn increasing their bottom line, Gash and Lady Elliot Island Eco-Resort are happy to do things a little differently. There are no plans to increase the size of the accommodations or increase visitor numbers. “We don’t inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children,” says Gash. “What are we here for? Are we here for a good time, or do we want to make a difference?”