It’s been a while since I last thought about it, but you want to know about my Dream Holiday? It ambushed me while I was sorting through boxes in my father’s house after his death. There they were: the souvenirs of a life spent travelling. It was my boast, when younger, that I had been one and a half times round the world before I was three. Of course, I never remembered any of it. But I Dreamed: one day I would go diving on the Great Barrier Reef.

People laughed—adventure was for boys, not girls. The books that fed the Dream said the same thing. The great adventure stories by Willard Price had two boys collecting animals for their father’s company. Not girls.

During that Great Sort Out, I came across a diorama encased in resin: a true gem of the tourism industry. As I twisted it in my hands, delighting again in seeing the seahorse apparently swimming through purple coral, the Dream jumped out. Once upon a time, I had been going to collect my own diorama from the coral reefs.

In my earliest dreams, I would go coral diving among the brightly-coloured fish and bring up treasures from the depths, but later, as I grew more aware of the pressures on the natural world, I saw the damage and wanted to save it so others who came after me could see it too.

When my parents arrived at the Great Barrier Reef, after I was born in the late 60s, tourism was strong. Before then you imagine the women in their prim white dresses and sunbonnets, accompanied by men in their stiff Sunday suits picking up shells and coral from the reef at low tide. When my parents visited, it was day trips in glass-bottomed boats. Collecting the specimens for the souvenir diorama must have been done by professional divers, with the new aqualungs that had first appeared in the war. These days I wince, but back then I pictured them snapping off coral and ramming starfish into a collecting bucket.

The tourist divers rolling backwards off the boat arrived in the 70s—and that was when, with the help of images from our brand new colour television, I first had my dreams of diving the reef.