Australia protects more ocean than any nation on Earth. A blue heart, beating at the centre of a living planet.
The currents are the connecting thread. They move heat, nutrients and life between every marine park in the country, and on into every ocean beyond it.
It begins on Mer Island, eight hundred kilometres offshore at the top of the mighty East Australian Current, where Elder Ron Day tells of the giant who made the reef and gave his people everything, and of the signs that the giant now weeps. His question becomes the film’s: what are you going to do for the giant?
The current carries us to Lord Howe Island, where the shearwaters are coming home fewer and sicker, and the scientists who have spent their lives with these birds find the cause they were dreading.
It runs further south, warmer than it has ever been, into Tasmania, where a fish that walks instead of swimming, is down to its last hundred, and cannot escape the heat. Scientists and the community band together around the survivors. This is the last chance anyone gets.
Then out into the Coral Sea, on a Meriam-guided expedition to reefs their ancestors fished three generations ago, in search of something almost nobody believes is still out there.
And west, into currents arriving from the Indian Ocean, and north to East Arnhem Land, where it becomes clear that Australia is at the mercy of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is at the mercy of us.
We need the ocean. Now the ocean needs us.
