Low Isles
Coral cay with a working lighthouse, once home to a pioneering year-long reef expedition.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Low Isles, a tiny coral cay off Cairns, follows Maurice and Mattie Yonge, a young Cambridge scientist and his wife who arrived in nineteen twenty-eight to spend a full year living beside the reef. It traces the world before scuba gear, when a wooden lighthouse and its keeper's family were the island's only company, and a question about coral life that had gone unanswered since Darwin's day. Listen for how much of their improvised laboratory work still echoes in reef science done today.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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