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Oscar had never put his face in the ocean before.

He had paddled, and he had jumped waves, and he had let the water come up to his waist in what he considered a very daring way. But his face had always stayed dry. Up above. Looking down at the water and not the other way around.

"You just breathe through the tube," Dad said, holding up the snorkel. It looked ridiculous. Oscar said so.

"You'll forget about how it looks," Dad said, "the second you go under."

They were in the shallows of the Great Barrier Reef, in water so clear that Oscar could see the rippled sand three metres below and, further out, something dark and enormous and colourful that definitely wasn't sand at all.

"Ready?"

Oscar pulled on his mask. He looked down at the water through the glass. His own face stared back at him, goggle-eyed and cautious and a little bit worried.

He went under.

The whole world changed.

Oscar had imagined fish, because he had seen fish in aquariums — grey and silver, circling slowly behind glass. But this was nothing like an aquarium. This was loud and busy and everywhere at once.

A fish the colour of a sunset drifted past his nose. Then another, striped black and white like a tiny referee. A parrotfish — electric blue, with teeth that looked like they were made for crunching — turned and vanished into a curtain of coral.

The coral was the biggest shock of all. It wasn't grey. It wasn't one colour at all. It was orange and purple and yellow and pink and green, with fingers and fans and round blobs and tall towers, all of it swaying very slightly in the current like it was breathing.

Oscar had read somewhere that the Great Barrier Reef was the largest living structure on Earth — big enough to be seen from space. He had not really believed this. But now, floating above it with his face in the water and his heart hammering against his chest, he understood. Not because of the size. Because it was so alive.

He came up laughing, his mouth full of salt water, pulling off his mask.

"I saw a parrotfish," he said. "And about a million other ones. And the coral is REALLY colourful, did you know that? Like actually really colourful."

"Did you know," Dad said, treading water beside him, "that coral is actually made of tiny living animals? Millions and millions of them, all living together."

Oscar looked at the water. Then at Dad. Then at the water again.

"Everything down there is alive?"

"Every single bit of it."

Oscar put his mask back on. He went back under. He floated very still this time, watching the parrotfish crunch coral into sand, watching a sea turtle glide past like it owned the ocean, feeling the water move gently around him.

He came up much later, his legs tired, his face pink from the sun, wearing the biggest smile Dad had ever seen.

"That," said Oscar, "is the best thing I have ever done."

On the boat back to shore, Oscar sat in the bow with the wind in his face and tried to hold the whole reef in his head at once.

The parrotfish. The sea turtle. The purple coral. The fish the colour of a sunset. The way everything down there was connected to everything else, breathing together, busy and bright and alive in the warm Queensland water.

"Can we come back?" he asked.

"We can always come back," Dad said.

Oscar nodded. He looked at the ocean, which went all the way to the horizon and then, he supposed, kept going.

He thought about the turtle gliding slowly through the blue and wondered where it was heading, and whether, if you were a turtle, the Great Barrier Reef felt like home the way home felt like home.

He decided it probably did.

He decided he understood.

That night, in the hotel room with the ceiling fan turning slowly and the sound of the Coral Sea through the open window, Oscar did three things.

He drew a picture of the parrotfish. It was electric blue with an orange tail that he was quite proud of.

He made Dad look up how old the Great Barrier Reef was. They discovered it was over eight thousand years old in its current form, though the coral itself had been there for much, much longer. Oscar considered this very seriously for a moment.

And then, quietly, he decided something.

When he grew up, he was going to be the kind of person who looked after places like this one. The kind of person who knew what lived in them, and cared about it, and made sure other people cared too.

He fell asleep with the window still open and the sound of the ocean coming in, steady and ancient and alive, all through his dreams.

Tasmania felt like somewhere that hadn't been finished yet.

That was what Maya thought, standing at the edge of Dove Lake at six in the morning with frost on the buttongrass and the mountain reflected perfectly in the still dark water. Cradle Mountain rose above the lake in jagged dolerite columns — ancient, severe, indifferent to the cold — and Maya felt something she didn't quite have a word for. Not fear. Not excitement exactly. Something between the two, with wonder folded into it.

She had packed her own bag the night before: water, muesli bar, the small sketchbook she took everywhere, a beanie she almost didn't bring because she had thought it would look babyish and now was extremely glad she had.

"Ready?" said Mum.

Maya pulled the beanie down over her ears. She looked at the mountain. The mountain looked back.

"Ready," she said.

The track wound through pencil pine forest — a tree, Dad told her, that only grows in Tasmania and nowhere else in the world. Each one was ancient and twisted and covered in pale green lichen, their trunks gnarled into shapes that looked almost like reaching hands.

Halfway up, they stopped at a flat rock beside a tarn — a small mountain lake, so still it reflected the sky like a mirror. And there, on the bank of the tarn, something moved.

A wombat.

It was enormous and round and utterly untroubled by their presence. It grazed on the alpine grass with the focused dedication of an animal that had much better things to do than notice people. Its thick coat was the same grey-brown as the rock behind it.

Maya didn't breathe. She just watched.

The wombat lifted its heavy head, looked at her with small dark eyes, decided she was not interesting, and went back to eating.

"Cradle Mountain wombats have been waddling around up here for thousands of years," Mum said quietly. "Before Tasmania was even an island. Before the sea rose to cut it off from the mainland."

Maya stared at the wombat. The wombat chewed.

At the summit, the wind was sharp and clean and the whole of Tasmania spread below them — ancient forests and silver lakes and mountain ranges that went on and on until they dissolved into the distance.

Maya stood with her arms out and her face tilted to the sky and felt two things at exactly the same moment: impossibly small, and completely alive. She had read that Cradle Mountain was part of a World Heritage wilderness — one of the last great temperate wildernesses on Earth. Looking at it now, she understood that this meant something. Not just old. Not just big. But irreplaceable.

She got out her sketchbook and drew the lake and the mountain and the wombat, which she drew from memory, trying to get the heaviness of it right. She couldn't quite. But she tried, pressing hard on the page.

On the way down, they walked in silence mostly, and the silence was good. The kind that doesn't need filling.

That night in the lodge, Maya wrote three words in her sketchbook under the drawing of the wombat: protect this place.

She didn't know yet exactly how she would do it. But she knew she would. Some decisions feel less like decisions and more like something you simply discover is already true.