Ninney Rise and John Busst Memorial

The house on Ninney Rise was built by environmentalist John Busst around 1960. A member of the artistic community of Montsalvat in Victoria, he moved to Bedarra Island in 1940. In 1957, he built a new brick cyclone proof house, with a view to the Barrier Reef. He initiated the Committee for the Preservation of Tropical Rainforest, which lobbied the Federal Government to undertake the first vegetation survey of North Queensland rainforests in 1966. In 1967, he lodged an objection to the harvesting of coral for lime from a reputedly dead reef. So began his ongoing campaign to save the reef from damage by agriculturally generated pesticides, nutrients and phosphates, and in the 1970s from oil drilling. Ninney Rise was the centre of these early environmental campaigns. Busst died in 1971, during the Royal Commission into mining the Great Barrier Reef. Wife Alison Busst transferred the rainforest headland around Ninney Point to the state in 1984. Later owner Kate Tode renovated and extended the house, and bequeathed the remainder of Ninney Rise to the state in her will; now part of Clump Mountain National Park. A plaque honouring John Busst is located on a rock on the Bingil Bay Esplanade.