Let’s take a quick 48-year stroll through the Great Barrier Reef’s wonderful history of endangerment, destruction and doom.

The great Great Barrier Reef panic began during a long-forgotten Queensland election campaign and has barely let up since. Our journey towards ever-predicted doom begins in 1969:

The Great Barrier Reef was mentioned frequently throughout last month's Queensland election campaign. The ALP Opposition worked strenuously to convince voters that the reef was in danger.

1970

Ron and I swam over several miles of reef. Everywhere was the same. The coral was dead and, although it had not been dead for long, it looked deserted. Already the marine inhabitants were leaving the ruins of their once-beautiful home.

1971

The great Clive James, in his recent brilliant Australian piece:

A more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent climatic apocalypse might be taken as August 3, 1971, when The Sydney Morning Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months. After six months the reef had not died, but it has been going to die almost as soon as that ever since, making it a strangely durable emblem for all those who have wedded themselves to the notion of climate catastrophe.

Read on.

1972

Three or four major threats to the Reef have occurred in the past decade.

1974

The Government would create a marine park on the Great Barrier Reef to protect it from oil drilling, the Prime Minister, Mr Whitlam, said in a statement issued in Canberra yesterday.

1978

Unfortunately, threats to the reef, like oil drilling and foreign fishing, exist right now.

1979

The Barrier Reef is receiving inadequate protection from a variety of undesirable activities. Foreign fishermen and professional aquarium fish collectors are two management problems.

1979

Oil poses a twofold threat to the Great Barrier Reef.

1980

Human activities might inadvertently be creating a scenario for the gradual destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, a Senate committee was warned yesterday.

1981

It is our responsibility, to ourselves and to the rest of the world, to see that it exists today and tomorrow, as it has for eons. I do not think any of us want the day to come when we have to say to our children, ‘Once upon a time there was a Great Barrier Reef.'

media_camera The Great Barrier Reef has been dying for Cate Blanchett’s entire life

1984

Marine life in the Great Barrier Reef is being threatened by chemicals carried south by wind from the northern hemisphere, according to two Latrobe University researchers.

1988

The Great Barrier Reef is in danger of being destroyed by crown of thorns starfish.

1989

The Great Barrier Reef faces a new threat from an increase in nutrients in the ocean.

1993

The Great Barrier Reef was vulnerable to an oil disaster like the one off Scotland's Shetland Islands, the Australian Democrats warned yesterday.

1994

The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef ecosystem, is also under threat.

1995

A group of big-name marine scientists will launch a public campaign next week to raise money for research into what they say are urgent threats to Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

2003

2016

The Great Barrier Reef ‘dies at 25 million years old after succumbing to coral bleaching’, scientists declare

2017

The Great Barrier Reef is dying.

2017

Great Barrier Reef is damaged beyond repair and can no longer be saved, say scientists

Which brings us bang up to date. I’m no Nostradamus, but I confidently predict future Great Barrier Reef death stories until everyone presently reading this is dead themselves.