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# The island that was mined bare grew back
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/lady-elliot/
- Published: 2026-08-11T20:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T08:05:53.000Z
- Description: Fifty years ago Lady Elliot Island was a stripped coral cay. In June, the man who spent four decades replanting it was given a lifetime achievement award, and you can go and see what the fuss is about.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories

In the 1860s and 1870s, miners dug the guano off Lady Elliot Island until almost nothing grew there at all. What has happened since is one of the loveliest long games in Australian conservation. Custodian Peter Gash OAM first saw the bare little cay as a young pilot more than forty years ago, decided it could be a garden again, and has led its replanting ever since, first with his family and partners, then from 2018 with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation's Reef Islands Initiative, a seven year mission to bring the island's native forest home. Today the island sits inside a highly protected Green Zone at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, surrounded by about 1,200 species of marine life, with manta rays gliding past the jetty and turtles nesting where the diggers once worked. In June, Ecotourism Australia presented Peter with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Global Sustainable Tourism Summit on the Gold Coast, alongside its former chair Dr Claire Ellis.

The island's own summer update reads like a gardener's diary: the crested tern rookery, moved gently to the island's eastern side, now hosts two to three hundred birds each season, and eighty live in volunteers spent time on the island this year planting, weeding and watering the forest back into being. The part we love most is that you can simply go. Small planes hop across from Bundaberg, Hervey Bay, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, day trips exist, and the eco resort runs on the sun. Snorkel straight off the beach and you are swimming over the proof that a place people stripped bare can, with fifty years of patience, be handed back to the reef.

Our short take: island history and revegetation from **Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort** and the **Great Barrier Reef Foundation** Reef Islands Initiative. The award was reported by **Ecotourism Australia** from the 2026 Global Sustainable Tourism Summit. Names: **Peter Gash OAM**, custodian; **Amy Gash**; **Dr Claire Ellis**. Cover photograph: Underwater Earth, XL Catlin Seaview Survey, [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0?ref=earthtoseanews.com), via Wikimedia Commons.