I'm on a journey around Australia.
A country the size of a continent.
This is a vast land, with extraordinary wildlife.
A rich, booming country on the edge of Asia.
It's not just cricket and kangaroos.
Thanks, ladies. You're welcome.
If you think you know Australia, think again.
On this leg of my journey,
I travel from Darwin, in Australia's far north, across to the remote
Cape York Peninsula and on to the Great Barrier Reef.
In the far north, I go out on patrol with a unique military force,
experts at surviving deep in the Australian bush.
Green ant tea.
Green ant tea, yeah. Two green ants' nests we put in that.
I have close encounters with some of
the deadliest creatures on the planet.
Is that enough to kill a human? 15 to 20 humans. No problems at all.
And I discover how Australia's booming industry
is threatening the world's greatest coral reef.
It's really like something from a sci-fi film.
# ♪
Wow! Oh, my goodness.
I'm starting this leg of my journey
in what locals call the top end of Australia.
This is the classic Aussie outback - remote, wild and beautiful.
Down there is Kakadu National Park.
It's one of the largest national parks in the world.
Kakadu is just one of thousands of national parks
and reserves in this vast country.
It's the size of Wales - a home to spectacular rocky plateaus,
four major river systems and huge flood plains.
Conservationist Ian Morris
has trained many of the rangers who protect the park.
He knows its 8,000 square miles as well as anyone.
Apart from being completely massive,
what is it about Kakadu that makes it special?
Here we've got a biodiversity hot spot.
We've got a place where there are lots and lots of unique animals all
living together, not found anywhere else in the world, just in Kakadu.
Just here. Endemics, yeah.
What's this over here, Ian? Is that a croc in the water?
Yes, that'll be a large male just cruising along.
It's coming into their breeding season now,
so the boy ones are getting a bit overloaded with testosterone.
Ooh, he's looking... He's heading for the boat.
We're in his territory, so he's coming to have a look at us. Uh!
It's probably a ten-foot on the old scale.
Ten foot? There's another one over here.
They are everywhere around us.
Flipping heck! You put yourself in crocodile soup today.
There are more than 100 types of reptile here
and countless other species.
That is an incredible bird.
The park is a twitcher's paradise, A haven for an endless
variety of birds, including visitors from overseas.
We're quite close,
we're very close to Southeast Asia and lots of these water birds
out here have got aunties and uncles up that way.
You do realise there are very strong connections between you,
the land here, and your Asian neighbours. Exactly.
Kakadu has long been a spectacular sanctuary,
but in recent years wildlife numbers here have been falling.
Ten years ago, there used to be a lot more life here.
There were goannas, which are whopping great monitor lizards,
there were quolls in the trees around here.
Quoll is a sort of marsupial, the size of a cat with a bushy tail
and a lovely pink nose,
and they have been wiped out by a strange, feral invader
and Ian's going to take me to try and find it.
Ian and I headed out of the park to hunt down the destructive creature.
Is this Graeme here?
This is Graeme, yes.
So, this is Ian's mate, Graeme, up ahead,
who's come to join us on this little mission.
You stop here? Yes, this will be fine.
Lights out? And then we wait until dark.
That's right.
The animal causing so many problems in Kakadu
and across much of Australia...
Just there. There you are.
That's him.
..is called the cane toad.
Well, mid-sized female in not great condition...
Watch it. .. can lay about 20,000 eggs.
I've got a thing about toads.
I'm not mad on them, I must admit.
Just looks like a harmless frog.
It does. Why is it so dangerous?
It is these glands here, which contain this toxin
which none of our native animals seem to be able to handle.
So, it's a poisonous toad?
Yeah, to our animals, it's deadly.
Native animals that feast on a cane toad rarely survive the meal.
See that? And that's it, that's the poison.
When the animals get it on their gums,
that's enough to cause them death in a fairly short while.
I mean, we've seen lots of big snakes, like king brown snakes
which are one of the biggest snakes up here,
die so quickly, the toad still stuck in their mouth.
Good lord. So they hadn't even swallowed it, just...
No. Hadn't even got it down. The toxin just is that quick.
Cane toads were introduced into eastern Australia
from the Americas in the 1930s, in the hope they'd eat beetles
that were destroying fields of sugar cane.
It was a catastrophic mistake.
The cane toads completely failed to eat the beetles and, instead,
they became a massive pest.
Just over 100 were introduced. There are now hundreds of millions.
See the little tadpoles here?
They are newly-metamorphosed toad tadpoles.
Oh, my goodness.
Yup. There's hundreds of them.
Even cane toad eggs and tadpoles contain enough poison to kill
fish and frogs that eat them.
A female toad can lay, on average, about 35,000 eggs.
It has been recorded up to about 50,000.
35,000?
So, what we're looking at here,
all these tadpoles are probably the product of one lady.
Oh, I'm really losing my voice,
or at least getting appropriately croaky, anyway.
Ian and Graeme are among thousands of volunteer conservationists
who have spent years hunting cane toads at night,
trying to stop the creatures from spreading across the country.
There's a big one.
Yes.
When they've gathered up as many as they can find,
they cull them as painlessly as possible, using carbon dioxide.
One of the really sad things about this is that there's
no real alternative to that.
For us, they're the frog from hell.
That's quite graphic. That's really how you see them.
That's the sort of threat they are.
They're more powerful than we are at the moment.
They're winning and we're losing
and we've got to turn that around, somehow.
Killing one species to protect another
is a last resort for any conservationist.
Here, experts believe it's the only option.
In recent decades, Australia's wildlife has been hammered.
Hundreds of native species have been pushed towards extinction,
thanks, in part, to poisonous cane toads
and other introduced creatures.
Despite the best efforts of volunteers like Ian and Graeme,
tackling toads by hand can only have a limited impact
on the millions who are still hopping their way across the country.
# ♪
The next morning, I left the outback.
I was on my way to the city of Darwin
and stopped first on Australia's northern coast.
This part of the country is closer to Indonesia's capital
than it is to Australia's.
In the past, that proximity to Asia has put northern Australia
on the front line, as I could see at this
World War Two coastal bunker.
Ooh.
This area feels cut off from the rest of Australia,
but Asia's not far away.
During the Second World War, Japanese war planes
attacked Darwin, dropping more bombs and sinking more ships than they
did at Pearl Harbour, which they'd attacked just a few weeks before.
And the remote top end of Australia is becoming
strategically vital again.
Robertson Barracks is home to Australia's first armoured regiment.
I met up with commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Scott Winter.
Colonel. Simon. Welcome to the home of Australia's armoured might.
Thank you very much, indeed. Welcome to Darwin.
The home of Australia's armoured might. That's quite a line.
Well, look, I think it's one we can live up to,
given that we are the best tank regiment in the Australian army.
We're the only tank regiment in the Australian army, as well.
No, look, we're fiercely proud of the service that we've conducted
up here and are very much at home here in the north.
Do you want to come and have a look around?
Let's go and have a look. Thank you.
What is this?
That's the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank,
so, that's been in service with the Australian army for about six years.
One of the unique things about the Abrams tank is it
doesn't have a normal engine in it.
It's got a helicopter engine in it.
Why does it have a helicopter engine?
Is that some sort of top secret part of it?
No. When they first made the tank, it was so big and so heavy that they
couldn't physically make a diesel engine big enough
to actually move it. My goodness.
Well, you certainly couldn't
mistake these tanks for belonging to anybody else other than the
Australian army, could you, really, with the kangaroo on the front?
Absolutely.
So a big part of the reason to be up here in Darwin is that this
is almost Australia's front line.
It's a fascinating area of the world, Asia.
It has its unstable, sort of, corners
and Australia plays a leading role, I guess, in providing stability.
But Australia is an Asian nation and it makes sense that, you know,
our capacity in the future is to be within the region.
I find it really interesting that you say
Australia is an Asian nation.
Growing up, I thought of Australia as being a, sort of, well,
it may sound terrible, but a European outpost.
Our forebears certainly saw themselves as part of the greater
Empire and, while many of us are still very proud
of our European roots,
there is a geographical reality to where Australia is.
We headed down to the training area
so that I could see what the tanks can do.
I think they're impressive when they're static, but it's not
until you really see that helicopter engine push
the 60 tonnes of steel around that you really get to appreciate it.
I feel a little bit like it could move anywhere, it could do
anything and there's nothing that's going to stop that, is there?
That just means it's working. Yeah. The ground shakes.
When you've got 60-odd tonnes moving at 70 kilometres an hour,
it has quite the unique presence.
70 kilometres an hour, that can be propelled at?
About 50 miles an hour.
It's designed to make the enemy stand up, back against the tree
and raise the white flag before you even fire a shot.
Well, it's working on me.
I mean, it's great fun.
As much as we're military professionals and we take an
enormous amount of pride in what we do, it's also extremely enjoyable.
It's classic big boys' toys.
I was about to accuse you of that, but you said it yourself.
As the world's focus shifts towards the Asia region,
the United States has recently announced it will be
shifting its military focus from the Middle East to Asia.
The US is also rekindling a long standing strategic friendship
with Australia and over the next few years
Robertson Barracks will become a home for up to
2,500 elite US Marines.
So this is where the US Marines will be living.
It's not bad, actually -
simple, plain, but they each get their own room.
This decision by the US government to shift its emphasis,
its military emphasis, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean
and Pacific, is really huge.
It's momentous, in fact.
It reflects, I suppose, a decision or an acceptance
by the Americans that this century is very likely to be Asia's century.
That's what people are calling it.
And also that America's military competition in the future
is very likely to come from the emerging Asian superpowers, particularly China.
So, we're loading up and we're going to head off on patrol.
This is NORFORCE, a long-range surveillance regiment
that works in some of the toughest terrain on the planet.
NORFORCE is said to have the largest area of operations of any
military unit in the world.
The Northern Territory is six times the size of the UK.
But with a population of just 230,000 people,
vast areas are uninhabited.
A unit of survival specialists,
these men are deployed to patrol Australia's front line with Asia.
They were on the look-out for anything suspicious,
from drug smugglers to boatloads of illegal immigrants.
This a good spot?
Not bad. What do you reckon, Woodsy?
Not too bad.
Lieutenant Noble-Harris was setting up an observation post.
So, there's pretty clear views out to sea,
so basically all your northern and western approaches can be
seen here, any sea traffic or air traffic going past can be observed.
We've still got a good line of sight through the foliage.
And you've got a huge area of operations, but I suppose you can
see anything that's passing through it and passing across there.
We're here looking out to make sure that nothing untoward happens
to Australia's coastline.
Anything we see, we'll report up.
To all intents and purposes, we're out in the middle of nowhere,
but that is where...
That is a gap which is often filled anywhere in the world by illegality.
There's people out there, you just never know.
You could be in the middle of nowhere, but you never know.
NORFORCE soldiers can survive in the outback for weeks at a time.
60% of the regiment are Aboriginal Australians,
many with an understanding of life in the bush that has been
passed down through generations.
Does it really feel like you're able to use
those 40,000 years of accumulated knowledge?
Yeah, yeah. I am using it to teach others, too.
Do you reckon you blokes could survive out here indefinitely?
Uh-huh.
I mean that's... As long as I was hanging around him.
(THEY LAUGH)
With their intimate knowledge of the land,
these soldiers can find nourishment in the unlikeliest of places.
As you can see, the green ant, it's...
I've got one on me here, look.
You can see the very green bum.
That green part there is edible, OK?
Are you just biting the bum of the snake?
It's an ant.
(THEY LAUGH)
What are you doing?
So, inside the nest there, we've got the eggs
and we've got all the other green ants there.
Right. Basically, there's a lot of citrus in the ant, so what we do,
we make a cup of tea, we'll boil that up.
You boil the ants' nest up for a cup of tea?
Yes, the ants, the whole show in there.
Is this a wind up?
No, no, serious.
Green ant tea.
Green ant tea, yeah. Two green ants' nests we put in there.
It's smoky and citrusy. It's pretty tasty.
Yeah.
The ants' nests were just a starter.
Wild magpie geese were on the menu for dinner.
After they were roasted over a camp fire, we tucked in.
Look at that.
Best bit, saved for you.
Best bit?
On my travels in this country, I've seen that white Australians
and Aboriginals often live completely separate lives,
but among the soldiers of NORFORCE, things seem different.
The moment you join the Australian Defence Force,
you wear these colours here and we're the one colour.
We just feel like real brothers.
Real brothers.
It doesn't matter whether you're Aboriginal, European, Asian,
we all stick together, fight together.
A couple of the guys are laid up doing their surveillance job.
The rest of the troop are just sleeping over there.
They've got a thicker skin than me, maybe.
Goodnight.
Morning.
That was a long, sweaty night.
And rainy as well, actually.
I didn't sleep too badly. I did all right, actually.
Anyway, I see everybody else is up, so I'd better get up.
Australia's coastline is now being monitored around the clock.
Several thousand people are caught trying to get into Australia
illegally every year.
I wanted to see where some of them are taken.
Now, so, there we go. Look. There is Darwin.
It's much bigger than I was expecting.
I thought it would be a sleepy, out-of-the-way town.
Half of the Northern Territory's population live in Darwin,
its capital city.
The rest of the state, like most of Australia, is sparsely populated.
Although so few people live in this country,
there's surprising hostility to migrants arriving illegally.
One of the biggest political issues in Australia at the moment
is asylum seekers and refugees.
And here, in Darwin, there are actually five detention centres
for people who've come here illegally.
In Australia, illegal migrants and refugees face mandatory,
indefinite detention while their cases are being considered.
It's one of the toughest immigration policies of any
democratic country in the world.
Hello. Hello. What's your name? Athari.
Athari. Yes.
Where did you come from, Athari? From Iraq.
From Iraq? Yes.
Hello. Hello. How are you? Yes.
Where are you from? Afghanistan.
Afghanistan? Yes. Iraq.
From Iraq? Iraq.
Iraq, Iran, Burma, Afghanistan.
I'd hoped we could film inside a detention centre.
We were told we could, but on terms that
would have allowed the immigration authorities
to delete and censor any of our footage.
So, instead, I stood outside this facility
where families and children are held,
and talked to detainees through the fence.
How long have you been in here?
Two months.
Kidnapped by them? Yeah.
Because you're Shia?
Yeah. The Taliban are Sunni? Yeah.
Most of these people have made perilous journeys
of thousands of miles across land and sea.
No doubt many of them wanted
to get into Australia for economic reasons.
They still have horrific stories.
Carl O'Connor is a lawyer who represents
many of the detainees
and campaigns against the government's policy on refugees.
(CHILDREN SHOUT)
What's different about how Australia treats asylum seekers
and refugees compared to other countries?
Other countries will process refugees in centres
such as this, but not for as long as it takes in Australia.
So, they might be in there for a couple of days in Europe before
they're moved into the community and they can get on with their life.
The government says its policy of mandatory detention, which can
last for months or years, helps to discourage potential refugees
from making the dangerous and often deadly journey from Asia by boat.
They say that if they let people live outside detention centres
while their claims are processed, as in many other countries,
refugees could simply disappear and live illegally,
but life inside a detention centre can be tough.
Unfortunately, in Darwin detention centres we've seen large
numbers of asylum seekers self-harm, we've seen some
asylum seekers sew their lips together as a form of protest.
Sew their lips together?
Tragically, yes. Tragically, yes.
It's not uncommon that men will sew their lips together.
It's really to indicate, "I have no voice, there is nothing I can do."
That's appalling. Do the children witness it?
The children aren't self- harming, as well, are they?
Only three weeks ago, a 17-year-old child in there slit his throat
and it was quite catastrophic, by all accounts.
There was a large amount of blood spilt,
so he not only went through that, but these kids here behind us,
they also witness these sort of incidents.
Thousands of adults
and children are being held in Australian immigration facilities.
Few countries have open borders, of course,
but human rights groups and local protesters claim Australia's
immigration policies breach the country's international obligations.
One of the biggest tragedies of the whole debate, furore,
in developed countries about asylum seekers and refugees,
when we think of people, as a mass,
as some sort of invading force, people find it frightening.
They worry about their jobs being taken,
their homes being taken, etc, etc.
But when you start meeting people and hearing their individual stories
and you realise you've got to be pretty desperate
to make the journey here.
Pretty determined, as well, but, ultimately, desperate.
Most Australians support tough controls on illegal immigration,
but like other wealthy countries Australia has, of course,
been happy to cherry-pick and allow in millions of legal economic
migrants to live in the country and boost the economy.
It was time for me to leave the Northern Territory.
I'd soon be visiting The Great Barrier Reef, to get up close
with some of Australia's most beautiful wildlife,
but first, I headed for Weipa,
on the isolated Cape York Peninsula.
So we've arrived, hired a car,
and we're in a very remote part of the country.
The Cape York Peninsula is about the size of England,
but has a population of less than 20,000.
This is the main town, the throbbing metropolis of Weipa.
I'd come to meet Dr Jamie Seymour.
Morning. Morning.
He's a scientist who studies some of the most lethal
creatures on the planet.
Jamie, it's looking stunning out here.
It's an amazing place, Weipa, but don't let the looks deceive you.
It's not the easiest place to get in and out of the water
and stay alive in, that's for sure.
Stay alive in?
Well... What have we got out here?
Take us through what is in the water here.
Well, if you work from the top end, there's saltwater crocodiles,
there's some of them four, four and a half metre crocodiles...
Right. ..so they're liable to kill you.
You've got sea snakes, you've got sharks,
and then you've got box jellyfish, the world's most
venomous animal and, literally, we can find all of those things within
probably two, three hundred metres of where we're standing.
So, not a place to take a dip?
No. You wouldn't get in the water here and swim out.
Something would probably get you before you got back to shore.
We haven't really said what we're here to do yet,
but the back of Jamie's tee shirt,
if you don't mind spinning round, gives you a hell of a clue.
Stinger Research Unit. Let's get out there.
All right. I feel a bit apprehensive after that warning.
You'll be fine. You'll be fine. Trust me.
I headed out with Jamie,
his colleague, Richard and boat skipper, Dave.
We were looking for jellyfish.
Many scientists believe that, because of our changing climate
and the over fishing of their predators,
global jellyfish numbers are increasing.
Some even worry they could become one of the dominant
life forms in our seas.
Jamie, what on earth are we, or rather, you, out here to do?
It's basically one of our major sampling sites,
where we come to chase box jellyfish.
This is one of the areas where we find THE greatest density of these things.
There is nothing on the planet, animal-wise,
that kills as quickly as these animals.
There is nothing that even comes close.
Jamie was planning to catch box jellyfish,
but first we had to find them.
Part of the reason they're so dangerous is that they're
so hard to spot.
There's lots of bait fish and things here that they'd be chasing.
What's that down there?
No, that's... That's just white sand. No, that's white sand.
There's one. Deep in the water.
Big one. Big one. See him, just down here?
Oh yeah, yeah. Just a slight change in the colour. Yep.
I mean, I would not have noticed that.
The most venomous creature on planet Earth?
Yep. And look how far it is from shore.
Why, it's only about 12 feet, isn't it?
Yep. That's the problem. We know what we're looking for.
I've just shown you one just there, and you went, "I didn't see that."
Now, you imagine if you'd just come to the water to go for a swim,
you blunder into that animal.
It's all over.
So, you're going to try and catch that one?
Yeah, we need to get kitted up first.
You can't get in the water until we get kitted up.
And is that creature enough to kill a human?
That animal, that size, 15 to 20 humans, no problems at all.
Could kill? Oh, absolutely. Without a shadow of a doubt.
In under two minutes.
Take it super-seriously.
Yeah. You screw up here, you only get one chance at it.
Oh, this sucks.
We put on thin wetsuits, as protection from the stingers.
Just jump in here? Yep.
Now, I want you, to stay between me and the shore.
OK. I'm happy with that.
So, swing in from here.
My God, it's just in front of me. There.
I wouldn't have even seen that.
Basically, what you're looking at is...
I'll just get him to the surface. Good God.
So, there you are. There it is. That's about half grown.
It looks completely harmless.
Now, if you have a look at the animal.
There you have, basically, a half-grown box jellyfish.
You can see it's still pulsing.
So, these are, basically, off here, you've got all the tentacles.
It feels like a, sort of, hard jelly.
Just feeling it, I mean, you don't whether it feels alive.
It doesn't even really feel particularly alive.
Squidgy. Yep. Quite squidgy.
Another one coming in behind it. Another coming in through here? Yes.
Box jellyfish can move at almost five miles an hour,
as fast as Olympic swimmers.
Two metres of tentacle contact is enough to kill an adult human
and even the tiniest sting can be agonising.
Seriously guys, it's getting to the stage where I want to get out of the water.
We need to get back in the boat, cos we've been here a bit too long
and they're worried that crocs are watching us all the time
and the window is, basically, sort of, 20-25 minutes before
a croc will come in and start to launch an attack,
which, as you can imagine, is quite a scary prospect.
All right, Rich, let's get out of here. OK.
Jamie has had several close shaves himself,
but he's hunting for box jellyfish
precisely because they are so dangerous.
He's convinced their venom will be enormously useful
for medical research.
The venom has so much potential
that drug companies are helping to fund his work.
You need to think of venom as a cocktail.
So there's a heap of things in there
and they all target different components. So we know, for example,
in box jellyfish venom, there's a component that attacks the heart.
But then there's another 20, 30, 40 different compounds
that we haven't even started to look at, that we know don't cause death,
but they're in the venom. What do they do?
They could be there to help the drug get into a certain area quicker,
So, if we're looking at that, for example,
it may make it go quicker to the heart.
So, it's really a matter of understanding what's going on.
So, by studying jellyfish venom, you can come up with new drugs
or a new way of treating people for ailments and problems
entirely unconnected with jellyfish.
The chances of finding a novel compound in here
that could save people's lives is enormous.
If there wasn't,
pharmaceutical companies would NOT be going down this track, trust me.
There's one, Simon.
Research into the composition of venoms
is already producing results.
Scientists recently discovered a compound in the venom
of an African snake that has potential as one of the world's
most powerful pain killers.
We want some tentacles from this guy, because that's where the venom is,
so we're going to take the bottom end off this.
So lift that underneath there, Rich.
So we put the animal back in the water.
You can still see that he's got the vast majority of his tentacles.
The tentacles have got the venom in it.
He'll regrow those in such a rate that he'll
regrow something between 1-2cm of tentacle in 24 hours.
Astonishing. Just take that top. That'll do. That'll do us.
I find it absolutely stunning that what you're doing here and now
could help to find new drugs,
new ways of treating some of the most intractable human ailments.
If, somewhere in the future. the work that I did
saved somebody's life... Made a difference.
Let's be honest, just saying those things, at the moment,
I can just feel all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
One day it will happen. I know it will happen.
It's just a matter of when.
I continued my journey across the remote Cape York Peninsula.
It's one of the least populated areas of Australia
and most of the people who do live here are Aboriginals.
I headed to the town of Aurukun.
After white settlers arrived in Australia,
the indigenous people suffered brutal treatment.
In some parts of the country, they were exterminated.
For decades, Australia treated its indigenous people appallingly.
There was abuse, almost apartheid.
Aboriginal communities now suffer
significantly lower life expectancy and higher unemployment than the
rest of Australia, and Aurukun is a town gripped by social problems.
I met up with Gina, who has first-hand experience
of the issues people here struggle with.
Gina, is this a community in crisis?
It's like a pressure cooker of social problems.
We still continue to endure very low socio-economic standards,
compared to that of the mainstream Australia -
no businesses, no jobs,
most of the people in the community are on welfare benefits. So, Centrelink.
Most people? Yes, the majority. Yes.
A lot of people are dying too young.
The average life expectancy here is still very, very low.
My mother died, she was 42. How did your mother die?
My mother was murdered by her partner at the time. I was 14 years old.
God, I'm so sorry.
That was alcohol-fuelled violence.
Blame for many of the problems affecting Aboriginal people today
can no longer all be pinned on the white establishment.
Many Aboriginal communities across the country have their own ingrained
problems with drug abuse, child abuse,
alcoholism and domestic violence.
And it can be shocking to discover just how many families are affected.
That car at the back is my sister's car.
She got her compensation money because she'd been stabbed
many, many times by her partner.
She actually got stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver by him
and she got compensation money.
She bought a vehicle and it was trashed, you know, after two weeks.
It's just really sad. Look at it.
This place is a classic example of what happens when people lose
their sense of purpose and meaning,
when they lose their role in life and become
welfare dependent and rely on sit-down money, as it's called here.
I've seen and I've felt, I think, that same sense of helplessness
and hopelessness in many other parts of the world,
but I've never felt it quite so strongly as I have in
any number of Aboriginal communities here in Australia.
Across Australia,
Aboriginal lands sit on top of huge deposits of minerals -
coal, copper and, here on the Cape York Peninsula,
the aluminium ore, bauxite.
A culture of welfare dependency in Aboriginal communities
has been fuelled by the fact that many receive royalty payments
from mining companies, to mine their land,
which have become little more than hand-outs or sit-down money.
But Gina wants to help end the dependence on these pay-outs.
We went to a mine owned by Rio Tinto,
a multi-billion pound mining giant, which hires bulldozers from Gina.
Over here is one of our dozers. It's called a D10 dozer.
When you say it's one of our dozers... Aurukun Earthmoving.
So this bulldozer is actually owned by the people of Aurukun?
Yes. That's why we're establishing businesses,
so that we can actually have economic participation
and economic participation means jobs for our people.
It means wealth creation.
For us it's not just about receiving royalties. We don't want to just
get sit-down money from the companies who mine our land.
This is our land and we want to be involved in any developments
that happen on our land.
What's your involvement in the company?
I played a role in establishing the business and I've been
a company director, managing director, for the last eight years.
Did you set the company up, then? Yes. 18, 19.
You were a teenager... Yes.
.. when you... How many of these do you own? Four.
We started out with one dozer and we went knocking
on Rio Tinto's door and said,
"Please, would you give us some work?"
And here we are today.
We've got a five-year contract that was just recently signed,
so it's a fantastic result for all of us. We're very happy.
Owning and renting out mining equipment
is the start of Gina's plans.
There are bauxite-rich deposits around her community at Aurukun.
Even though it's in a wilderness area,
it seems likely it'll be mined and Gina wants the people
of her community to be the ones who mine it.
We have spoken to the highest levels in government.
We have spoken to the Deputy Premier,
we have spoken to the Department of Infrastructure.
We want to be the owners of that resource.
We want to develop our own mine.
This is very exciting. Has this been done before?
Has an Aboriginal community in Australia
run their own mining operation?
Never. It's never happened.
We want to lift the bar. We'll be able to,
with our partners, of course,
we'll be able to show the world that this is how it should be done.
Aboriginal communities need strong, inspiring leaders, like Gina.
She's trying to get the people of Aurukun off welfare
and give them purpose and meaning again, through employment.
I'm on the move again
and I'm heading now to the airport, where I'm going to hop on a flight
which is going to take me to the east coast
and the Great Barrier Reef.
I headed to the city of Cairns,
a gateway to one of the greatest natural wonders on the planet.
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest natural structure on earth.
It extends for more than 1,500 miles
and is big enough to be seen from space.
Very excited about this. Trying to remain calm.
A chance to get onto The Great Barrier Reef is not one
you want to miss.
Hello there. Hey, welcome on board.
Are you Col? I'm Col, and pleased to have you in my work place.
Thanks, Col. Oh! Right there. I got it.
Col McKenzie represents tour operators
who take tourists out on the reef.
Nearly made it into the water! Yup.
He's also one of the people
responsible for keeping the reef at its best.
Col's kindly taking me out to see a beautiful bit of reef
and I get to snorkel on it.
The sheer diversity of the reef is jaw-dropping.
It's a home to more than 130 types of sharks and rays,
1,800 species of fish
and every type of coral and colour the mind can imagine.
But coral reefs aren't just pretty to look at.
They're vital to the health of our oceans.
Reefs occupy less than 1% of the Earth's surface,
but they support more than 25% of all marine life.
But of all the life down here,
there's one creature in particular that Col is concerned about.
It's a type of starfish that is literally eating the reef.
You can actually see an area that's just been eaten.
It's been eaten in the last 24 hours. It's a bright, white skeleton,
because all the animal has been dissolved and taken away.
It was easy to see the dead white coral skeleton
that Col was talking about.
The creature responsible for the damage is a spiky starfish
called the crown-of-thorns.
While we were down, we could see one crown-of-thorns
that Col pointed out to me. And it is a monster of a creature.
Really like something from a sci-fi film.
Crown-of-thorns starfish are native to the reef
and they naturally eat fast-growing coral
and help give slower-growing coral a chance to thrive.
But if they reach plague proportions,
they can destroy the reef, leaving nothing
but algae-covered coral skeletons.
And in recent years, that's exactly what's been happening
on large areas of The Great Barrier Reef.
They eat everything.
They eat all the hard coral, all the soft coral,
they eat the whole lot out. I've seen a reef go
from 55% live coral cover to 5% live coral cover
in less than six months. These things can really devastate a reef
and it's, unfortunately, human intervention that's caused it.
It's because of our farming and grazing practices.
It's because of the cities that are growing up along our coastline.
That's what's causing this problem.
Many scientists believe that increased use of fertilisers
in farming has led to more nitrogen and phosphorous being washed into
the seas off Australia's east coast.
They provide food for plankton which are, in turn,
the food of choice for crown-of-thorns larvae.
Crown-of-thorns plagues are linked directly to flood plumes
and to the water quality that's coming off our land.
So you get more baby starfish, more teenage starfish,
more adult starfish, etcetera, etcetera.
Three years after a flood plume,
we will have an outbreak of crown-of-thorns.
The Great Barrier Reef is in serious trouble.
A recent report revealed it's lost 50% of its coral cover
over the last 30 years.
Our changing climate is having a huge impact,
but so are crown-of-thorns. To protect the reef,
the starfish are being targeted by Col's team of divers.
I'm loving this Australian meal.
A proper Aussie barbecue.
There's basically ten kilos of steak, ten kilos of sausages.
Oh, no, look, that was unfair of me. I was going to say no veg.
Look at this. Pumpkin and tatties. Looks fantastic.
The crown-of-thorns aren't only dangerous to coral.
They can be tricky for a diver to deal with.
The problem with handling these creatures is that
those spines on them have a neurotoxin poison
and this is what protects the crown-of-thorns.
Of course they've got a neurotoxin. This is Australia.
Everything is venomous or poisonous.
Well, I know of a case where a diver doing crown-of-thorns work
in the coral reef around Japan only two months ago
died from a crown-of-thorns sting.
Really? They'll go through a 5ml wetsuit, no trouble whatsoever.
So the plan is we eat this fantastic meal, sleep,
and then tomorrow, we'll see what you're doing to tackle the starfish.
Absolutely. So far, you've seen some good sites
and some pretty bad sites. Now we'll show you how we protect it.
Beautiful little sharkies in the water.
I'm just cleaning my teeth and it's out here, down beneath us.
After breakfast, Col and I went out to see his dive team at work.
It wasn't long before the team found coral scars,
the tell-tale sign there were crown-of-thorns nearby.
The starfish typically feed at night.
During the day, they're often hidden away.
Really bizarre.
There were almost a dozen of them, these multi-armed feeding machines.
I'm going to go back down and see how they deal with them.
As with the cane toads I saw earlier on my trip, and other feral and
invasive creatures that are damaging the environment in Australia,
the crown-of-thorns are just doing what comes naturally to them.
But human actions have seen their numbers explode
and so conservationists have decided the only way of protecting
the Great Barrier Reef is to cull the crown-of-thorns.
Originally, researchers tried cutting the starfish in half,
but, remarkably, each part survived, doubling the numbers.
Injecting them with chemicals is a slow, laborious process
and Col's team are only protecting the parts of the reef
most visited by tourists.
The cynic in me wonders, I suppose, if tourists weren't coming
to these parts of the reef, whether there would be the incentive
and the pressure for you to proactively try and protect them.
High-value tourism and high tourism numbers give us
the financial clout to be able to invest in protecting the reef.
It's ironic, isn't it?
Everybody said, "Oh, tourism will be the death of places."
Here, it's actually contributing to the salvation of it.
Without tourism, we'd have no financial incentive to do a damn thing.
With all the different threats there are to coral reefs around the world,
what's your take on what the future is for The Great Barrier Reef?
If we don't get control of it, reef-wide, in the very
near future, we're going to lose an enormous amount of biodiversity.
Where we have a couple of hundred species of coral,
we could end up like the Caribbean or the Bahamas or off Florida,
where you can count the number of species on two hands.
So, see it while you can?
If people want to see the Reef in pristine condition,
they need to be out here right now and seeing it over the next five years.
The future of the Barrier Reef is going to be different to what we see right now.
Two million tourists visit the Great Barrier Reef every year.
Apart from anything else,
it's an economic resource that Australia can't afford to lose.
So, we're heading south from here,
down the magnificently-named Bruce Highway.
I'm sure there's a Sheila Street out there, as well.
This area is actually a bit of a Mecca for backpackers,
but, as you can see,
with all the camera equipment, we can't travel quite so lightly.
Let's get on the road.
There is a giant Wellington boot.
Got to stop and show you this.
So, as we head south, we pass through this town called Tully,
which... Well, it gets a bit wet here and so they put this boot here
to commemorate, I suppose, to celebrate, really,
just how wet it gets.
I have to say, the Australians do constantly, rather constantly,
go on about how it rains a little bit in Britain,
but never does it rain as much as it does here.
So, average rainfall -
I checked this. Thank you, internet -
average rainfall in the UK per year is about a metre. About a metre.
Here, in one year, almost eight metres of water fell.
And so, to celebrate that,
what better way than to put a giant Wellington boot in your town,
to let everybody know you are one of the wettest places in the world?
I continue driving down Australia's east coast,
along the seemingly-endless highway that runs parallel to the Reef.
500 miles south of Cairns,
I arrived at Hay Point, one of the largest coal ports in the world.
Almost 10% of the world's
sea-borne coal is exported from just this port.
It's astonishing, really.
It gives you a glimpse, I think, into the scale of Australia's
resources boom, which, in many ways, has been the biggest story
in this country over the last couple of decades.
In the vastness of this continent-sized country,
there are all manner of mines and quarries and seams
that churn out the raw materials that fuel the furnaces and feed
the resource-hungry economies of countries like China and India.
This is the final stage of the process.
The coal is being brought down through the nozzle over here
and loaded into the hold of this ship,
at the rate of up to two tons a second.
Out on the horizon over here, I can see any number of ships
just waiting to have their bellies filled.
Incredibly, before they can reach the open sea,
the huge ships are allowed to navigate their way
through The Great Barrier Reef.
Even this, one of the most fragile and threatened environments
on Earth, cannot stand in the way of the Australian resources boom.
Any collision in the maze of coral islands would be disastrous,
so the ships are guided by specialist reef pilots,
like Richard Tennant.
These ships have a draft of about 18 metres, when they sail.
It's a deep draft, so they haven't got very much water under the keel.
So, how far off the bottom is it?
The shallowest point would be about one metre off the bottom.
One metre off the bottom? So there are points when this ship,
loaded with 180,000 tons of coal is, what, that far off
the bottom of the sea bed?
Yes, but they're not going very fast in that instance.
They're only going about walking pace that close to the bottom.
They don't stop very easily, though, do they?
When they're going full sea speed, yeah, they take a long while to stop.
In fact, it would be quicker to turn it around than stop it.
The helicopter flies Richard more than 100 miles out to sea
and lands him on a moving ship.
His job is then to guide the ship's captain through the shallow
seas of the Reef and into the coal port, to pick up its cargo.
A wrong turn would be catastrophic.
In 2010, a ship called the Shen Neng tried to navigate its way
through the reef without a pilot. It ran aground,
carving a two-mile gash in the coral
and leaking three tons of toxic oil and chemicals into the water.
There we go. We're here.
Magnificent flying.
See you this afternoon, then. We wish you all the best of luck
with your piloting. Thanks. Hope it goes safely.
He's gone off to the bridge to pilot the ship
and we're going to take off
and watch, as it travels through the tight passage of the Reef.
In a ship this size, which takes hundreds of metres to turn,
there's no margin for error.
Australia's resource boom shows little sign of slowing down.
The government here is keen to open more mines and export yet more coal.
It's already one of the country's top export earners.
So, despite the fact it's a protected marine park,
the number of ships passing through The Great Barrier Reef
is expected to increase up to five-fold.
But Richard's ship is in safe hands.
As he headed to shore,
the chopper pilot offered to show me a little patch of paradise.
So, we've landed on a coral cay.
It's a tiny one.
Look, the bits of the helicopter are hanging off over the water.
It's covered in coral. Look at this.
So, the ship's made it through safely. It's continuing its journey.
I'm ending this part of my journey here.
On the next leg, I'll be travelling down Australia's
bustling and beautiful east coast, towards the bright lights of Sydney.