Authors: Iain McCalman
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change
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In memory of
Kim McKenzie, filmmaker,
naturalist, and friend
CONTENTS
Prologue: A Country of the Mind
1.
Labyrinth: Captain Cook’s Entrapment
2.
Barrier: Matthew Flinders’s Dilemma
3.
Cage: Eliza Fraser’s Hack Writer
4.
Bastion: Joseph Jukes’s Epiphanies
5.
Hearth: Barbara Thompson, the Ghost Maiden
6.
Heartlands: The Lost Lives of Karkynjib and Anco
7.
Refuge: William Kent Escapes His Past
8.
Paradise: Ted Banfield’s Island Retreat
9.
Obsession: The Quest to Prove the Origins of the Reef
10.
Symbiosis: Cambridge Dons on a Coral Cay
11.
War: A Poet, a Forester, and an Artist Join Forces
12.
Extinction: Charlie Veron, Darwin of the Coral
Epilogue: A Country of the Heart
PROLOGUE
A Country of the Mind
T
HE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 25, 2001,
is the closest I’ve come to fulfilling the dreams of my boyhood, when I would lie in bed looking up at the mosquito net and imagine I was Captain Hornblower, sailing a square-rigger to exotic places. And now here I am, sitting on a small beach of scuffed white sand that curves to meet the vast Pacific Ocean. Tamed by the shoulders of the Great Barrier Reef just over the horizon, it kicks up little white breakers that streak toward shore. In the distance bobs a three-masted bark, the HMS
Endeavour
—a replica, admittedly, but real enough for me.
I’m taking part in a reenactment of James Cook’s eighteenth-century voyage through the Reef, which is being filmed as a television series called
The Ship
for the BBC and the Discovery Channel. I can see the pinnace and the longboat crawling over the shallow green bay, each boat supervised by one of the dozen professional “officers” who will lead forty-six volunteer sailors. One officer stands swaying slightly in the prow of the longboat, calling out the rhythm to volunteers pulling awkwardly on the heavy oars. She and the pinnace officer are overseeing their attempts to row out to the ship in batches.
I have to wait on shore for several hours because I’m in the last scheduled batch of putative sailors—part of a special group of “expert” advisers comprising historians, literary scholars, astronomers, botanists, and Indigenous guides. We’ve been assigned to the mizzenmast, the least lofty of the three masts. We’re generally older and more sedentary than the other volunteers—all of them lithe and lissome young adventurers from Britain and the United States—so this will presumably be the least testing of the ship’s watches.
I don’t mind waiting for the last boat. I sit with my back to a palm tree, half shaded from the fierce sun, chatting excitedly to a few old friends. Now and then I take a slurp of tangy milk from a green coconut that Rico Noble, one of our Aboriginal guides, has given me after kindly lopping off the top with a machete. I’m mentally reenacting another favorite boyhood scene, from R. M. Ballantyne’s
The Coral Island
, in which Peterkin, after drinking from a coconut, “stopped, and, drawing a long breath, exclaimed: ‘Nectar! Perfect nectar!’”
1
True, we’re not yet on a coral island, though I can see one shimmering on the horizon, behind our ship. It is Green Island, complete with fringing reef and lagoon—the first purely coral island to be recognized by Cook and his aristocrat associate, Joseph Banks, in 1770. I can’t see any coral from here, but this lovely palm-fringed spot at Mission Bay in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, just outside Cairns, could easily be the site where our fictional precursors, Jack, Ralph, and Peterkin, were so providentially marooned.
That was the last moment of unalloyed pleasure I experienced for the next two weeks.
My first shock was of outraged pride. Scrambling from the longboat onto the deck, I learned that neither the historians nor the Aboriginal advisers were to share the privileges of some of the other “experts.” We would work as full-time able seamen—to be freed from sail handling only when needed to provide a semblance of historical authority for the television agenda.
Though used to the lowly status of historians within the university world, I’d not expected such attitudes on what was, after all, a
historical
reenactment. The captain, Chris Blake, a genuine grizzled seaman with forty years of square-rigger experience, proved more sympathetic than our TV masters. He found us a small space at the rear of the ship, normally reserved for spare sail bags, and he granted us leave, in the odd intervals between sail handling, to study our own voyage journals and charts, and to ponder all aspects of discovery and encounter.
Simulating the life of an able seaman on a converted coal bark gave me no time to brood. My annoyance soon turned to terror. Like most tourists, I’d vaguely thought of the Reef as a specific place—perhaps an island resort, a beach, or a section of coral seen while snorkeling. Instead we found ourselves dwarfed by a vast country of sea, reef, and coast.
The Great Barrier Reef is so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who’ve seen its full length from outer space. Gigantism pervades its statistics. Roughly half the size of Texas, it encloses some 215,000 square miles of coastland, sea, and coral. It extends for about 1,430 miles along Australia’s east coast, and encompasses around three thousand individual reefs and a thousand islands. So vast is it, in fact, that it’s only since the 1970s, with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority,
2
that a size has been more or less agreed upon. Prior to that, explorers and navigators gave varying figures for its length.
Having to tack our way through such an intricate maze forced us into continual sail changes. I struggled to endure what Cook’s veteran salts had taken for granted: working 112 different ropes, hauling myself upside down over the futtock shrouds, balancing over the yardarm to control a thrashing sail while the deck swayed 131 feet below. I ground my teeth on hardtack biscuit that even the reef sharks wouldn’t eat, retched on salt pork, and forced down bowel-churning sauerkraut as an antiscorbutic. At night I lay in a hammock a foot wide with a stranger’s butt hovering inches from my nose, while the forecastle resonated to the snores of a human bat colony. Along with the sleep deprivation and lack of privacy, my squeamish modern sensibility also had to contend with the shame of public toilets and the petty indignities of naval discipline.
Everything I liked Cook’s crew had hated, and vice versa. They’d been haunted by the thought of a coral “labyrinth” and by the terror of drowning, and they fretted about being marooned in a savage wilderness with no signs of cultivation—their signifier of civilization. I, by contrast, longed to jump off the ship and swim in the silky waters around us, to visit the casuarina-fringed cays (small sandy islands) and forested “high islands” sliding past the gunwales, and to bronze my white body in a tropical sun. So irrevocably had the fearful connotations of “wilderness” changed since the eighteenth century that where Banks and Cook saw a cruel and capricious seascape, I saw a paradise.
The Coral Island
, published nearly a century after Cook’s Reef voyage, and similar romantic books had instilled in me the idea that beautiful wild places would heal all my discontents.
From my three Aboriginal messmates, however, I began to learn of another, less benign side of the Reef. Rico Noble, an ex-boxer with a shy smile, and Bob Paterson, wiry and serious, both lived in the Yarrabah community from where our voyage had started. Though young they were regarded as elders: custodians of the Gurrgiya Gunggandji and Gurugulu Gunggandji clans respectively. Bruce Gibson, burly, self-confident, and articulate, was head of the Injinoo Land Trust farther north on Cape York Peninsula. He, too, was an elder, of the Guarang Guarang clan, and was keen to develop an ecotourism business for his people.
As a member of the mizzenmast watch, I spent a great deal of time in the company of these three, and they laughingly nicknamed me “the old fella.” Overhearing my complaints of tiredness one evening, Bruce advised me to stop cramming myself into a hammock and join them on thin mats rolled out on the timber floor. From then on I slept more comfortably, rolling with the rhythm of the ship. I had the additional pleasure of listening to their soft conversation each night.
Like so many Australian Aborigines, Rico and Bob—in particular—were nostalgic for their original homelands, located elsewhere on the Reef. Being separated from their country in this way was unbearably sad. Their ancestors and families had been forced out of these heartlands—the geographical, cultural, and spiritual places of origin that had once defined their identities. As the great Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner long ago explained: “Particular pieces of territory, each a homeland, formed part of a set of constants without which no affiliation of any person to any other person, no link in the whole network of relationships, no part of the complex structure of social groups any longer had all its co-ordinates.” Losing one’s country, he said, could induce “a kind of vertigo in living.”
3
Rico’s and Bob’s clans had lost their jurisdiction over stretches of sea as well as coast: they had always treated beach, sea, and reef as inseparable elements that flowed into and over one another. “Country” denoted for them not just a particular geographical environment known and cared for in every detail, but a cultural space alive with stories, myths, and memories. It furnished food, drink, and shelter, as well as every sort of sustenance for the mind and spirit. Even so, they spoke about these animated places not in tones of hushed reverence, but with an easy intimacy, as if talking about old personal friends.