Mention of the Great Barrier Reef may not immediately conjure immensity, majesty and deep ecological significance. For those who do not live right alongside it, the reef's image has

been shaped by advertising imagery: memorable tourism slogans over the years include "Get wrecked!" which vaguely echoes a history of maritime disaster in its blunt promise of sun,

surf, sex and stupefying quantities of alcohol. Google the Great Barrier Reef and third up, after our environment minister's go to, Wikipedia, and a government marine park site

apparently intended to bore readers to death, is the official tourism site. A real-life Ken sits in a brightly coloured hammock grinning at his Barbie, and a click panel invites you to

for the king. He made landfall at Botany Bay, then proceeded north. All was going swimmingly until the Endeavour hit, literally, the reef. The crash precipitated a 16-hour ordeal that saved

the ship but left Cook and his men stranded for nearly three months on the shores of a luxurious-looking but surprisingly food-free land. If they hadn't come upon a colony of fat

turtles they would have starved. As it was, they infuriated the locals, who not only – and reasonably – considered the food source to be theirs, but may well have been honouring an annual

hunt-free period ceremonially set aside for the sea turtles to replenish. This was Europeans' first encounter with one of the natural wonders of the world: a 2,600km chain of hundreds

of islands and thousands of individual reefs, built by tiny marine invertebrates and home to a ravishingly colour-saturated underwater world teeming with life. Cook had no idea what he had

encountered: it would take generations for the sheer scale of the reef to become apparent. "[So] many historians inadvertently treat this phase of Cook's first voyage of

exploration to the southern hemisphere as if the Great Barrier Reef we know today already existed somewhere in the back of his mind," writes Iain McCalman. He is a wonderful

storyteller, his narratives propelled by lyrical writing, as anyone who has read his racy Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro and magisterial Darwin's Armada will know. The pace is

maintained here, by dividing The Reef into 12 separate stories, starting with Cook (it's remarkable how many geographical features still carry the names Cook gave them) and Matthew

Flinders' marathon circumnavigation of the continent, including his competitive remapping of Cook's observations. McCalman writes about European shipwreck survivors and the

Indigenous clans they encountered. He documents a US scientist's obsession with proving Darwin's theory of coral reef formation wrong, reigniting the evolution controversy of the

1860s. And he ends with the life story of Charlie Veron, the marine scientist who frightened a hushed audience at the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society in London in 2009 with a powerful

warning that the Great Barrier Reef is dying. Climate change, melting polar ice caps and changes in the carbon cycles are resulting in seawater acidification, which causes mass extinction

of coral reefs. This is already in a phase scientists call "commitment" – meaning "unstoppable inevitability", McCalman writes. The coral reefs are the canary in the

coalmine for planetary health, and they are dying. "It's real, day in, day out, and I work on this, day in, day out," Vernon told the assembled scientists. "It's

like seeing a house on fire in slow motion." McCalman's tone shifts from the boy's own adventure, scientific excitement and scamming of early encounters, to dizzying

disaster-epic suspense. But never for a moment does his literary skill falter. His detailed explanation of marine science is a model of translation for the layman. And his respect for

Indigenous people is a model of intercultural translation. He carefully names language groups and clans, giving a glimpse of what existed before white people dispossessed the original

owners. He describes the Indigenous view of events without exoticising the individuals he talks to. Nostalgia permeates the book, for ancestral lands lost and for what we all might be losing

now.