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| The ocean waters on the western and southern coasts of Victoria's basalt plain support many species that are found nowhere else on the planet. |
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| Digital composite by Csaba Szamosy for Imagine The Future Inc, 1996, from photographs by Steve Frlan and Brian Gilkes. |
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| Seals in Port Phillip Bay. These sea mammals were reduced to almost extinction during the nineteenth century, but are now increasing in numbers. |
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| Photo by Steve Frlan. |
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The lava flows of Victoria's basalt plain in south-eastern Australia meet both the crashing waves of the Great Southern Ocean and the more protected waters of Port Phillip Bay.
This convergence of land and sea is marked by dark basalt boulders that are characteristically stained with lichen the colour of magma.
Up to 95 per cent of the species that inhabit these marine ecosystems are found nowhere else on earth. They include towering forests of kelp, vast fields of sea grass, and coral reefs as colourful and ecologically diverse as those found in tropical waters. More species of seaweed grow in the southern end of Port Phillip Bay than can be found in the entire Japanese archipelago.
Like all other natural systems in Victoria, the bays and oceans have suffered significant modification over the last two hundred years of European settlement. Port Phillip Bay is clearly contaminated with unnatural levels of nutrients and suspended solids; industrial chemicals; oil; heavy metals; pathogens, including faecal bacteria and viruses; plastic and other litter; and introduced pests from ballast water that are causing increasing concern. It still supports a diverse range of apparently healthy organisms, however, and continues to give the three million people who live around its shores considerable physical and spiritual sustenance.
Local initiatives to rehabilitate damaged coastal ecosystems, with local, state and federal government support, have significantly improved the quality of water entering Port Phillip Bay in recent years, and therefore the health of the bay itself. One of the key indicators of the success of these initiatives is the return of young snapper to the river estuaries after an absence of many years, and the increasing number of sightings of dolphins and seals in the busy port of Melbourne, and further upstream in the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers.
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| Fan coral at the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. |
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| Photo by Steve Frlan. |
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What are your stories about Port Phillip Bay and the Great Southern Ocean, and the marine communities they support?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay.
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