The camera doesn’t lie – looking back over three years of observations

Out on A Swim

‘Out on a swim’ is a coral reef blog that tells the stories of the characters who live under the waves and what has caught my eye when ‘out on a swim’ in the lagoons of Norfolk Island. It is also a record of the difficulties Norfolk Island’s reef faces, like many others around the world, as a result of the poor water quality that has been allowed to flow onto it.

This page shows the most recent blog posts. For the complete catalogue, visit the ‘Out on a swim index’ page.

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Day 1 – March focus on Norfolk Island’s reef

Introduction

I have been photographing Norfolk Island’s reef for more than three years. Before I began this project I had no idea what I was looking at, how to use my camera, or even any idea where this I was heading as I began to take photos. All I knew is I wanted to record what was happening because, to my eyes and having returned to the island after a long absence, the reef didn’t look as good as I remembered.

Don’t get me wrong, it still looked good. But something wasn’t right and I didn’t know what that was.

I quickly realised that the reef is often overlooked in favour of our terrestrial wildlife and ecosystems. I wanted to show people what an amazing place it is.

I wondered what would be the best way to interpret the reef for the casual observer – in the spare time I had outside my full-time work and with limited resources. So that became my task: to find out and show people our awesome marine environment right on our doorstep. In the process I created this website, and the blog posts began.

Along the way I discovered that my hunch about the reef not looking as good as it had before was correct. I became aware of the problems facing Norfolk Island’s reef – in common with many reefs worldwide – and aware that my grandson would in all likelihood be unable to enjoy what I had shown his mother when she was growing up on Norfolk Island.

In short, and unintentionally, I became an advocate for the reef.

Fast forward to the end of February 2023 when I was sorting and cataloguing my latest batch of images. I realised that looking back over my observations I had a unique library of some 80,000 images recording what has been happening in our bays. But my memory goes back much further than that – long before I had a camera to take with me on my swims – to 1996 when I first began swimming almost every day in Norfolk Island’s beautiful coral-reefed lagoons.

Renowned coral reef researcher Professor Callum Roberts from the University of Exeter in the UK often talks about a phenomenon called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’:

This tendency renders each new generation blind to past losses, setting their personal baseline of normality by what they first find. Reef Life, An Underwater Memoir

With his words in mind, I thought I’d spend March featuring one post a day highlighting the reef and lagoonal ecosystems. There are so many wonderful things to see that it would be a travesty to dwell purely on the problems. Having said that, if we don’t wake up and do something fast, we will lose this wonderful habitat.

You can go back through the stories on this blog to find some wonderful stories about the reef and its inhabitants; but if you want further background reading specifically about the issues we face, these earlier blog posts are a good place to start:

Two montipora coral colonies, side by side, exhibiting the brown and blue colour morphs

A close up of the two montipora colour morphs

To start my March focus on Norfolk Island’s reef, I thought I would begin with one of our most common coral families – the genus montipora.

Montipora coral

For 1 March I have picked a very simple brown coral – a plate coral from the genus montipora. I love this photo at the top of this post for the shapes described by the edges of the plates. These white edges are where there is new growth but the symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) have not yet been taken up by the new coral polyps. It is the zooxanthellae that give the coral its colour.

To grow and breed every living thing needs energy, which they get by burning food. Corals get much of their food, and therefore energy, from the zooxanthellae, which provide the coral with food they have created by the process known as photosynthesis. In return, the coral polyps provide the zooxanthellae with a protected environment and the nutrients they need to be able to carry out this process.

A colony of montipora with obvious signs of white syndrome (26.02.23)

In the photo (top of the page) you can see that this is a really healthy colony; however, montipora have been very prone to white syndrome in our bays due to the ongoing issues with poor #waterquality; consequently, colonies free from disease like this one are getting harder to find.

In the images (above) you can see the two colour morphs that we have in our lagoons: brown and blue. The blue colour intensifies in winter as the montipora releases some of its symbiotic algae.

The image, right, is of a different colony of montipora with recent signs of white syndrome. The white patches of dead tissue tend to spread, sometimes quite rapidly over the course of a month. The dead tissue will then gradually become a home for algae to settle and grow. All the fish that once lived on and around the coral plates will have to move elsewhere. Sadly, this situation is occuring repeatedly across Norfolk Island’s lagoons.

July 24, 2026

From ridge to reef: unpicking the Waterway and Wetland Strategy

Norfolk Island’s draft Waterway and Wetland Strategy will guide work for the next ten years. I support its intent, but it needs to be clear, practical and measurable – joining the dots from ridge to reef so we know whether public money is improving water quality and helping the reef.

June 28, 2026

The red seaweed behind low-methane beef

A small red seaweed on Norfolk’s reef has become part of a much bigger story. Asparagopsis taxiformis can look like a delicate red feather duster or, at another stage of its life cycle, like a tiny cottony pom-pom. It is beautiful, easily overlooked, and now being used in the cattle industry to help reduce methane emissions. This post looks at the reef oddity behind the low-methane beef story – and why repeated local observation can be more useful than it first appears.

June 20, 2026

From coral scar to aatuti farm

Aatuti are bold little algae farmers, but how does one of their farms begin? Over the past year, I have been following several coral patches as small white scars became algal footholds, then larger defended patches. I still cannot say what caused the first wounds, but the photo sequences show something fascinating: on a reef where algae is already gaining ground, even tiny changes on the coral surface can become part of a much bigger story.

June 15, 2026

Norfolk’s water quality – when action is reported as outcome

A recent Australian Government media release presents investment, monitoring and catchment works as progress on Norfolk Island’s water quality. Some of that work is useful, and some of it was badly needed. But activity is not the same as proven improvement. This post looks at Kingston sewerage, wetlands, cattle, acid sulfate soils, groundwater and reef health, and asks whether Emily Bay and Slaughter Bay are actually being better protected.

June 14, 2026

How surgeonfishes got their name

Surgeonfish are named for the sharp little scalpels near their tails, but on Norfolk’s reef their more useful work happens at the other end. Pencil surgeonfish, bluespine unicornfish and their relatives help browse algae across the reef – a small daily job that becomes very valuable on an algae-rich lagoon reef like ours.

May 28, 2026

A shrimp storm

While setting my research cams last week, I swam into what looked like an underwater snowstorm. It appeared to be the aftermath of a mass moulting event, with large numbers of tiny, translucent shrimp-like exoskeletons drifting together near the surface.

Kingston dredging: what happens when a reef does not fit the framework

This correspondence with DCCEEW is about more than one dredging proposal. It is about what happens when an ecologically distinctive place is assessed through standard tools that do not always make its most important values easy to see. I am publishing it here because that is something we need to be aware of, both on Norfolk Island and more broadly in Australia.

May 24, 2026

Kingston dredging: the project advances, the questions remain

Kingston dredging is edging closer, and the paper trail is growing. This post brings together earlier correspondence with the Department and the latest media release so readers can see what has been asked, what has been answered, and what still remains unclear about the project, its rationale, and the protections proposed for the reef.

May 17, 2026

The lime-green coral in Slaughter Bay – a 40-year paper trail

Green Mountain – the name I give this coral in my database – is a coral I’ve photographed for years as I swim past. Then I found its backstory in the Norfolk Island National Parks archives: a rough map, reused paper, a note in the margin – ‘still thriving’. That’s how baselines begin.