Beautiful one day: Assessing the World Heritage aesthetic values of the Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is an iconic Australian place. While its aesthetic qualities are hardly in dispute, neither the World Heritage Listing nor previous research offered an adequate framework for the definition and management of its aesthetic values. This article discusses the first part of a project designed to address this need in relation to the Outstanding Universal Value of the Reef. The article first examines the assessment of aesthetic values in ‘natural’ landscapes through the World Heritage system, and then moves on to shape an approach for the Great Barrier Reef. The Reef is not a single entity but experienced as many places through distinct lenses, from being immersed underwater and intimately connecting with marine life, to flying above and witnessing the panorama of patterns of reefs, water and islands. By using experiential lenses to frame our investigation of the aesthetic values and to identify their attributes we avoided a focus on well-known geographic locations and the privileging of visual qualities, and maintained a conceptual focus on the Reef as a whole. The outcomes of the project demonstrate that a rigorous approach to defining aesthetic values and their attributes in large ‘natural’ landscapes is possible and necessary for the management of these values independently of other scientific values. This is of particular relevance for the World Heritage system where the identification and evaluation of aesthetic values continues to be dominated by the rhetorical language of visual description and limited to the attributes of ‘natural’ values.