Explore a marine wonderland with this Daydream believer
A living reef at the reopened Daydream Island Resort allows marine biologist Johnny Gaskell to show off his “family” of underwater creatures while educating tourists about the Great Barrier Reef.
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They stream past, a line-up of the Whitsundays’ finest, and Johnny Gaskell rattles off introductions like a patriarch at a family gathering. “That’s an emperor angelfish, one of the most colourful fish we’ve got here, those are fusiliers, the schooling fish you commonly see around big bommies and that’s Todd, a gold spot cod,” he says. “We’ve got three of them, the other two are Rod and Mod.”
He watches as they swim away, replaced in the window of the underwater observatory by damsel fish, honeycomb cod, a coral trout called Steve and, gliding grandly into view, stingrays known as Discus and LouAnn.
Most of these marine animals were here in Daydream Island’s Living Reef attraction when Cyclone Debbie raged through. The category four storm battered and swamped the resort in March 2017 with a force so great, it ripped mermaid statues off granite boulders and catapulted them into the sea. While the mermaids are gone, the fish swim on, their habitat made even better as part of a two-year, $100 million revamp by the resort’s new owners, Shanghai-based China Capital Investment Group.
Gaskell, 37, has stuck around, too. The marine biologist, who has worked at the resort for five years, couldn’t pass up the chance of staying on during the rebuild to oversee the creation of improved digs for his charges. There’s now a giant bommie for them to move around, better viewing zones for tourists and the highlight, a four-metre-deep lagoon filled with water pumped from the sea and linked to the new underwater observatory.
“The coral trout has been here for about eight years and he just loves the depth,” says Gaskell, the Living Reef manager. “Before, he had 80 centimetres, now he’s got four metres. That’s the most exciting thing, seeing these animals exhibit their natural behaviours because of the depth.
“I’m not saying it was bad before but it was very shallow and we’ve made sure the animals in here can have the best possible life and welfare.”
He points out a clown, or anemone, fish – Nemo to kids – poking its head out from near its host anemone. A giant trevally moseys past. He’s thrilled when a school of silvery herring flashes by. “People look at herring and go, ‘Oh yeah, just little fish’, but it’s an important part of the balance, and having all of the different types of animals is part of the conservation-based experience.
“This,” he says of the Living Reef that weaves around the central buildings of the resort, “is a representation of the Whitsundays. These animals are ambassadors for the animals in the wild.”
THE LIFE AQUATIC
Lovers’ Cove, the coral-covered beach on the northeastern side of Daydream, is where Gaskell likes to go at the end of the day to unwind. Right now, midmorning, it’s home to a solo sunbaking wallaroo. It dozes in the breeze, unfazed, as Gaskell positions some chairs to look out at the turquoise water and distant islands.
He settles into a chair and sighs. “It really soothes the soul.” When he answered the 2014 advertisement for the job at Daydream, then owned by flamboyant millionaire Vaughan Bullivant, Gaskell had only been to the Whitsundays for a weekend. When he got the job, he figured he’d stay a year. Now, he can’t see himself leaving.
“As soon as I got here and started snorkelling around and saw how diverse the coral was, the colours, I never looked back,” says Gaskell, now an ambassador for Tourism and Events Queensland.
Gaskell’s passion for all things aquatic began when he was a boy in landlocked Bendigo, central Victoria. From the age of seven, he’d wander down to local creeks and rivers to scoop up mosquito larvae and mudeyes, the larvae of dragonflies. He was obsessed by the invertebrates’ movement in the water. “I used to put them in jars and watch them forever, probably an almost unhealthy amount of time,” he says, laughing. “Sometimes one would eat another and I’d think, ‘That was a cool interaction’.”
Gaskell enrolled to study marine and freshwater science at Deakin University’s Warrnambool campus on Victoria’s southern coast but after learning to scuba dive and with the ocean on his doorstep, he transferred to marine biology the next year. “I realised, hang on, what I love about the rivers and lakes, there is so much more in the ocean.”
After working at Melbourne Aquarium as an education officer and aquarist, he moved to Western Australia to take tourists diving with whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef. That’s where he got his divemaster ticket but it’s free diving he really loves.
“I much prefer the single breath, the slow descent down to see an animal; it doesn’t freak everything out as much as the bubbles that come from [scuba] diving. My breath hold is not great but if I don’t have a camera, I get around two minutes.”
Gaskell carries a camera often, though. He’s been taking underwater photos for 20 years, producing two books. Two years ago, he put his work on Instagram. It took off. He now has 16,000 followers from around the globe who revel in his ability to take them to the vibrant world of the Great Barrier Reef.
There has been much interest in his documentation of five blue holes on the reef, two of which were previously undescribed. He found them by spending hours on Google Maps.
“After Cyclone Debbie, I’ve just been on Google Maps every day, marking off where I think coral would be and where coral would have been damaged. And I was like, ‘Coral would definitely be in there but why is it so circular?’ Perfect circles, 200 metres across.”
He’s been to all five. “They’re amazing. One of them’s 200km pretty much straight out [from Daydream]. The corals in them aren’t unusual but the formations are really unique. When you go down a bit, it’s completely stagnant. The only thing moving are the little animals; it’s so still, so these corals have grown without any influence from water movement and they’ve been able to twist and grow in these weird formations.”
Reefs have become a fascination. Corals are an invertebrate after all, and “from that little creek kid all the way to now, it’s still the invertebrates that get me the most”.
If he’s diving and there’s a majestic Maori wrasse to the left, and to the right, a tiny whip coral shrimp living on a whip coral, it’s the little critter he’ll zero in on. “Sorry, Wrassey, I know you’re amazing but I will always go to the whip coral,” says Gaskell.
He says his passion for corals has intensified since Cyclone Debbie. “It was so devastating seeing some of the spots after the cyclone, some areas were good, some weren’t.” A slab of Daydream’s fringing reef was hit.
Gaskell says the corals close to the coast are particularly fragile due in part to their proximity to farm nutrient and sediment run-off. Lovers’ Cove and the northern side (where the three mermaids were installed) was badly hit, and the southeastern part had some damage. But, says Gaskell buoyantly, it is growing back.
He’s dived 150 Whitsunday sites in the two years since Debbie and says there are plenty of vibrant reefs in the Whitsundays. “The ones that were only partially damaged are recovering well and we’ve had some cold summers, with cloud cover, which helps. We’ve witnessed coral spawns since Debbie, which we know [are] repopulating these areas.”
Gaskell says while cyclones, the crown-of-thorn starfish and run-off all pose dangers to coral, the biggest enemy by far is the warming of the oceans.
“That’s not damage it can recover from, it actually kills corals,” says Gaskell. “Luckily, in the Whitsundays, the ocean temperatures are below the top temperature threshold coral can handle so we see isolated bleaching but generally it’s OK.”
Action is vital, he says. “Reducing carbon emissions should be number one.”
With comic timing, the wallaroo rolls over and releases his own emissions. “Buddy!” says Gaskell, and we leave the flatulent marsupial to its solitude.
DAYDREAM TURNS TO NIGHTMARE
Weeks after Debbie tore through Daydream, Gaskell went for a dive near where the mermaids had been. The visibility was poor. “[Suddenly], this giant face came out at me,” recalls Gaskell. It was one of the mermaids; its grey, stone visage resembling that of a dead person. “It was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen.”
It was a sad but metaphorically rich end for the mermaids – the other two are lost at sea – that were so optimistically stuck on to specially positioned rocks in Bullivant’s crazy-brave tilt at making Daydream Island into a money-spinner.
Island resorts are notoriously difficult to make work and ever since Daydream’s inception in 1933, a range of owners has floundered in the tumultuous seas of island investment.
After Bullivant bought it for $12.5 million in 1999 from Village Roadshow (which owned it for a short, money-draining period following a major $120 million reconstruction by the Jennings Group), he spent more than $80 million adding his quirky style. Bullivant tried to sell it for $65 million in 2012, finally accepting $30 million three years later from China Capital Investment Group.
At first, the Chinese planned to spend $50 million on the refurbishment. Then came Debbie. The price doubled.
Gaskell wanders about his revamped domain, pointing out guttering designed to withstand torrential rain and shade sails over the animals in the lagoon. The “bones” of the resort are largely the same – the reception, pools and rooms remain where they were, although room balconies have been extended – but it’s all refitted and refreshed, with white plantation-style shutters a recurring theme. Ginger’s Hut and the Fish Bowl at the southern end of the island have not been redeveloped, although there are plans to reopen the chapel and cinema.
One of Gaskell’s favourite spots in the main resort area is Infinity, the Asian fusion restaurant with wall-to-wall glass on the upper floor of the waterfront wing where the beauty spa used to be. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?” he says, drinking in the sparkling 300 degree view of ocean and islands.
He’s set himself a mission to dive all 74 Whitsunday islands. He has about 20 to go. He’ll most likely dive some of them with his girlfriend, Kristie Lawrence, 31, who cares for sharks and rays at the Melbourne Zoo but is expecting to move to Daydream soon.
Both of them love the wild seas, the unexpected, the ebb and flow of aquatic life. Swimming with giant manta rays is one of their favourite things. “It’s a real challenge to swim with one because they’re quite timid and one flip of their wings and they’re gone,” says Gaskell, who says he often finds them at a special spot at the less touristy Double Cone Island. “But if you slowly ease into their situation, make them feel comfortable, and it allows you to be with them, it’s one of the big inspiring moments.”
Gaskell understands, however, that many people are not as comfortable as he is in the open water. That, he says, is one reason Daydream’s Living Reef is so valuable, with it now offering visitors the chance to snorkel in its man-made lagoon. “Those who are a bit scared to get in the ocean will be able to come for a swim with the same animals and enjoy,” he says, “to see how important these ecosystems are and feel some sort of compassion towards the animal. And that goes towards inspiring people to protect the ocean.”
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