CHAPTER 10
The Campaign Begins

THAT VERY DAY CHELLIE BEGAN to attack the rubbish.

There was just so much of it.

But first of all she gathered a posy of seaweeds – brown, golden, pink, white, crimson, green – and took it down to the water’s edge, letting it float away back to the depths where it had come from.

‘Goodbye, Caretta,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll never forget you.’

The tide which had taken Caretta always brought in all sorts of natural objects. Usually Chellie loved to discover seaweed in all its varieties, coconuts, mangrove pencils, hoop pine fronds, driftwood, shells, sponges, coral, feathers, even the occasional dead seabird or fish among the flotsam.

But now she was determined to deal with the jetsam, the human rubbish which also came in with the tide.

That afternoon Chellie filled five big garbage bags.

There were take-away food boxes, spoons, forks and plastic cups, cigarette lighters – and soggy cigarette butts. Yuk! Poisonous for turtles as well as people. Drink cans, ring pulls, corks and bottle stoppers with nasty sharp metal catches. Drinking straws galore. Sweets wrappers of shiny cellophane and foil, tempting to turtles. Toothbrushes too. At least some people on boats cleaned their teeth, Chellie thought.

They must have had parties on their pleasure craft, because Chellie found limp balloons, which looked deceptively like colourful reef fish, but were lethal to sea creatures. Ribbons from presents too, pretty on a parcel but terrible for turtles. There were broken sunglasses and goggles; an occasional cap or hat; and thongs, dozens and dozens of them. Different sizes and colours, some broken, some quite new. Sandals too. And shoes. Even fishermen’s rubber boots. Enough footwear for a centipede.

Chellie decided to separate the trash into different sorts. A bag for footwear, another for take-away containers, and one for stufflike cans, wrappers, ribbon, rubber gloves and toothbrushes. The most dangerous things – rope, twine, netting, fishing line, rubber straps and those plastic binding strips – would need stronger bags. The ropes were so heavy they simply burst the garbage bags. The plastic bags and sheeting, all sand-caked, also needed a sturdier bag. So did the eels of black rubber hose and sections of polythene pipe.

Bottles were a major item. There were scores and scores of them. Lids too – a confetti of lids of all colours. And glass bottles. Chellie examined each glass bottle she found in case it contained a message. But none did. The message was the bottles themselves.

She lugged the bags up onto the sandbank. No use leaving them where the sea could reach them and release their deadly contents again. But this was just one afternoon’s work. What was she going to do with all this stuff?

She’d have to discuss it with Dad. And this was only the beginning. Heaps of rubbish had accumulated over years, not only on Turtle Beach, but on all the other seven beaches too. Chellie remembered what Dad had said: one for each day of the week, and one over. She would have to organise a calendar. A beach a day. Every week. Because the sea was not going to stop spewing up the garbage. And people were not going to stop throwing rubbish off their boats.

Or were they?

Could she start a campaign to encourage boaties to be more careful, more caring, more aware of the harm they were causing, more aware of the turtles they were killing by dumping their junk overboard?

As she trudged home, Chellie wondered what she could do. Write some letters maybe to the fishermen’s cooperatives, to the cruising yacht clubs?

Dad was sympathetic. ‘You’re right, Chellie. First we have to deal with the rubbish already on the island. We’ve got to corral it so it doesn’t escape again. Let’s build some pens – we can use that wire netting from the old chook yard. And the chook feed bags will be just the thing for collecting the heavy stuff. Garbage bags weren’t designed for that.’

‘I thought I could write some letters, too,’ Chellie said.

Dad nodded. ‘Good idea. We can find some addresses on the web. These organisations have newsletters. They might publish your emails.’

Chellie and Dad built a row of rubbish pens, each a metre high and a metre square, on a flat stretch of sandbank above Turtle Beach. Chellie pulled out some chicken pellet bags from the shed. She took down the calendar and wrote the name of a beach on each day of the week. Then she and Dad had a session on the computer, finding addresses to which Chellie could write.

‘Go to it,’ Dad urged. Chellie needed no urging. Her fingers began to fly over the keyboard.

Dear Fishing Boat Crews,

I live with my Mum and Dad on an island off the Queensland coast. Our island has eight beaches where turtles nest. This week, one of the mother turtles died because she was choked by fishing line. She was a loggerhead and loggerheads are an ENDANGERED species. The problem is that they feed on jellyfish, and often mistake fishing line and plastic bags and bottles for food. But of course these things KILL them.

So PLEASE PLEASE be careful not to throw such things off your boats into the sea. I’ve read that even whales die from swallowing plastic, and we don’t want to lose any more whales, do we?

The sea doesn’t want to be a garbage dump either, so it washes as much junk as it can onto the beaches. You ought to see the rubbish on our island. Since the beautiful loggerhead died, I have started to pick it up so that it doesn’t get back into the water. Today I filled up five big garbage bags with rope and twine and netting and fishing line, and those horrible lures with barbs, and plastic, and plastic bags and bottles. Even POISON bottles!

But even after I’ve cleaned up the beach we still have a problem: what do we do with all the junk on our island? Our island isn’t a garbage tip. We use all our kitchen scraps for compost in the garden, and buy our stores in recyclable containers. SO PLEASE PLEASE DON’T THROW YOUR STUFF INTO THE SEA.

PLEASE THINK OF THE TURTLES. The loggerheads are ENDANGERED and the green turtles are VULNERABLE. Turtles have been living in the sea for over 1 MILLION YEARS! But only seven species have survived. PLEASE don’t let plastic and fishing gear be the death of them too.

(Signed) Chelonia Green (which means Green turtle)

PS. My real name is Michelle Braddon. Mum and Dad call me Chellie. I do school with Distance Education.

Dad and Mum read the letter.

‘That’s great!’ Dad exclaimed.

Mum was pleased too. ‘Shows you’re a good student in the School of Distance Education.’

‘You’re such a good teacher, Mum.’ Chellie hugged her. ‘I can use the same letter for the boaties, can’t I? I’ll put in about the balloons and the ribbon to them too.’

‘Go for it,’ Dad said. ‘And I hope they publish them in their newsletters.’