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As the South Australian government insists beaches and seafood are generally safe from what has become the country’s largest mass marine mortality event, the mental health toll is growing. By Toni Hassan.
‘Swimming in a graveyard’: SA’s algal bloom disaster spreads
Anna began swimming in the ocean, all year round, in her 60s.
“I started two and a half years ago for mental health. I was scared at first. If I didn’t swim in the ocean, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
We met at a protest at Seacliff Beach, south of her usual swimming patch between the jetties at Grange and Henley beaches in Adelaide. The distinct “off” smell from discoloured surf was not far away.
Anna stopped her ocean swims in the middle of the year when the algal bloom became impossible to ignore. It now stretches from the long, narrow lagoon known as the Coorong, all the way west to the Spencer Gulf and the Eyre Peninsula.
“I used to swim most days and I’m now in a pool, which isn’t the same. Swimming in the ocean gives you a sense of freedom. It’s liberating. It’s healing.”
While Adelaide coastal councils have put up signs at beaches saying they are safe for swimmers, Anna isn’t taking the risk.
“I think you can swim if you don’t have issues like asthma. Two people in my ocean swimming group are still swimming. They haven’t had anything.
“The issue I have is I feel like I’m swimming in a graveyard.”
Anna has seen scores of fish and rays dead on the shore, and dead or near death in the sea.
“I can’t get myself in there because I know that they’re suffering.”
Experts are afflicted too. Dr Craig Styan confessed to a suspected case of “eco-anxiety” at a federal Senate inquiry this month.
“I suspect most people on this panel who know and love and work in the marine environment are feeling kind of devastated by what we’ve seen, and maybe by what we’re imagining, too,” said Styan, who is state president of the Australian Marine Sciences Association. “We need to remember that we haven’t really measured what’s happening yet.”
His colleague, Dr Georgina Wood, offered some optimism about the “incredible response, not just from scientists and government but from the community, really starting to care very deeply about and understand what is in our waters”.
Citizen scientists have used their mobile phones to record and upload tens of thousands of observations, representing more than 500 species.
The bloom was first detected west of the Coorong near the mouth of Gulf St Vincent in March. It then spread into the gulf and past Adelaide, where it had been expected to disperse as winter set in. Instead, it thrived in the shallow and isolated gulf through the cooler months, and also in the slightly deeper Spencer Gulf encompassing South Australia’s seafood capital of Port Lincoln to the west.
Of the many thousands of planktonic algal species, just a few per cent have the capacity to form harmful blooms. This one, in the Karenia family, produces toxic compounds. It depletes oxygen so creatures that depend on it suffocate.
Asked what caused the upswelling in algae, Styan said the short answer was that scientists didn’t know enough. A majority point to human drivers.
Among the main theories are contamination from flooding, and warmer seas. The Murray–Darling Basin floods of 2022–23 pushed huge amounts of soil and nutrients into the Murray River, which flows into the sea at the Adelaide end of the Coorong. Meanwhile, sea temperatures in South Australia have climbed to record highs.
The foam created by the bloom houses brevetoxin, an irritant and poison previously rare in Australia. It can set off asthma and kill fish but is not normally poisonous to humans unless they eat contaminated shellfish.
The Malinauskas Labor government says it has no plans to close beaches. The coordinator of the algal bloom response in South Australia’s Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Chris Beattie, said the state encourages beachgoers to check conditions.
“For many hazards, we don’t shut down public places. Rather, we provide advice and guidance as to the risk. Pollen count is a good example of that,” he said. “If you are getting respiratory symptoms or itchy eyes, SA Health’s advice is to move away from the beach and wash off.”
SA Health’s principal water quality adviser, Dr David Cunliffe, told the inquiry the best advice about the foam was to “avoid it”. Asthmatics should have their medication on hand. He said seafood was safe, with the caveat that food preparers should discard the intestines and other internal organs “because, if there is toxin, that’s where it will be”.
The government began closing oyster farms in May. It has since allowed some to reopen.
With some operators commencing layoffs, Seafood Industry South Australia has called for “a small, sector-specific, JobKeeper-style program” to retain staff.
Kyri Toumazos, head of the South Australian Northern Zone Rock Lobster Fishermen’s Association, told the inquiry the industry is ready to embrace changes to protect fish stocks so that “South Australia is prepared for any future events”.
There’s also a notable shift in how commercial fishers are talking about the environment. Bart Butson told a public forum in Hove, attended by The Saturday Paper, “It’s emotional. It’s horrible. Going out fishing, I never realised how much I love the environment until it was sick.”
The bloom will eventually dissipate. Right now, there’s next to nothing that can be done to eradicate it.
South Australia’s algal bloom is in part of what is known as the Great Southern Reef, an 8000-kilometre horseshoe of interconnected temperate reefs, kelp forests and seagrass beds that extends from northern New South Wales to Victoria and all the way along the south of the continent to Tasmania, South Australia and southern Western Australia.
A Flinders University professor focused on marine ecosystems, Charlie Huveneers, told the Senate inquiry that Australia’s conservation efforts have been patchy, adding to the vulnerability of temperate reefs.
“Currently, there is a disproportionate focus on tropical systems, with a substantial amount having already been invested in the Great Barrier Reef, for example. Yet monitoring in our southern waters is largely ad hoc and fragmented.”
The co-founder of the Great Southern Reef Foundation, Stefan Andrews, told a hearing it was home to about 70 per cent of the species found nowhere else on Earth.
He said the foundation wrote to then environment minister Tanya Plibersek in 2023, warning that marine heatwaves were likely to hit the Great Southern Reef and asking for biodiversity monitoring to get a baseline for understanding the impacts.
He said when a response came, it was about investment in restoration.
“Restoration is great, but it is better to not have to restore degraded ecosystems in the first place,” he told the Senate committee. “It’s definitely not addressing the core need of a coordinated monitoring system right across the Great Southern Reef.” That program would cost $40 million over 10 years.
In June, the South Australian and Commonwealth governments announced a $28 million algal bloom support package that included grants to fisheries and aquaculture businesses, financial counselling, mental health support, beach cleaning, an early detection system of coastal monitors, and a laboratory upgrade that would allow shellfish to be tested locally – instead of in New Zealand in a process that had been taking up to a week.
The executive director of the government-run South Australian Research and Development Institute, Mike Steer, said a similar algal bloom in Russia some years ago dispersed more quickly. The Russian bloom wasn’t in semi-enclosed gulfs like South Australia’s, where it appears to “pulsate”, creating greater resilience.
Climate author and professor of public ethics Clive Hamilton says such disasters will become more commonplace in a rapidly warming climate. “We’re going to have to get used to the kind of shocking algal bloom we’ve seen off South Australia,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about ocean heatwaves, though we can minimise chemical run-off.”
This sentiment is echoed in the government’s National Adaptation Plan unveiled this month, which says changes are locked in for centuries, as oceans “keep warming, rising, acidifying, and losing oxygen”.
For Ngarrindjeri Elder Mark Koolmatrie, the damage from this disaster alone is inestimable.
“Economically, as a tour owner, I can put a figure on that,” he told the inquiry. “But we cannot put a figure on the emotional toll this has taken on our people. We can’t go to the beaches, we can’t take our families there, we can’t be healed by the waters.
“People tell me, ‘Oh, it’ll be gone in maybe two or three years’ time’, but how long is that toll going to last after that two- or three-year period? We have a spiritual connection to something like a stingray, which is a big part of our kondoli, the Whale Dreaming story.
“How long can resilience last? How long can our people last with loss?”
The Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee is expected to produce a report with recommendations in late October.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 27, 2025 as "‘Swimming in a graveyard’".
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