Industry Influencers: Peter Gash

Meet the man who has two main passions in life — aviation and conservation — and has somehow been recognised with the Order of Australia Medal for both. Aero Circus tries to figure out exactly how that works.

Lady Elliot Island can be found at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It’s 52nm north-east of Queensland’s Bundaberg airport and was built around 1500BC — not by the Romans or Egyptians, but by a bunch of very industrious marine invertebrates called coral.

The island has a dark history of environmental terrorism. For 10 years from 1863, workers dutifully removed about a metre of topsoil from the 100-acre island (along with almost all the vegetation) and shipped it back to the mainland and beyond. The attraction of this topsoil was its rich content of bird poo, used for making fertiliser and gunpowder.