The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Read online

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  In memory of

  Kim McKenzie, filmmaker,

  naturalist, and friend

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue: A Country of the Mind

  PART I: Terror

  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

  PART II: Nurture

  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

  PART III: Wonder

  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

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Iain McCalman

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  A Country of the Mind

  THE 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.

  Most nights I also heard stories of spray-soaked outings in tinnies (small, unpainted metal motor boats used for recreation) to spear stingray, green turtle, and dugong, or to catch barramundi, Spanish mackerel, and trevally. They assumed that these fish and animals were theirs to eat or sell, yet they also expressed a strong connection to them as fellow creatures and a genuine concern for their species’ survival. Under existing Queensland and federal legislation in Australia, “limited traditional rights” to marine resources are recognized. In some park zones Aborigines can be issued with permits to hunt dugong and turtle under restricted conditions, though the practice has attracted strong criticism from some environmental quarters.4

  Critical of Cook’s legacy as an imperial invader, each of the three elders had decided to join our voyage to draw attention to their people’s struggle to secure land and sea rights. As long as anyone at Yarrabah could remember, Rico told me, the clans living around Mission Bay had used Green Island as a seasonal base for fishing and hunting, yet the community had just lost a legal case claiming long-term association with the cay and its waters because a European farmer once held a lease there during the nineteenth century. Such was Australian law. Now, Rico said, that same law protects Green Island’s fancy tourist resort.

  On deck, in the slow, early-morning hours of anchor watch, the three men told stories of how their families and clans had been scattered by the frontier expansion that began in the Reef region in the 1850s and which has continued ever since—successive waves of European settlements, institutions, and policies that also wrested children from parents “for their own good.” Behind the men’s stoicism I glimpsed endless sequences of fracture and migration, of families and friends being shunted between missions, foster homes, stations, townships, prisons, and reserves.

  On August 31 the replica Endeavour anchored off modern-day Cooktown, where Cook and his crew had come ashore to repair the ship’s coral-impaled hull. While our botanists were being filmed foraging for plants, we historians were allowed ashore to meet with local Aboriginal representatives. Bob Paterson introduced us to his famous relative, the MP and Hope Vale elder Eric Deeral, who was accompanied by his daughter Erica.

  Eric described how the sight of our Endeavour replica in the mouth of the river had overpowered him. He’d felt a direct frisson of empathy with his ancestors across the centuries, picturing them standing on the grassy knoll and watching the strange spectacle of the three-masted bark. He and his clan group, the Gamay Warra, are part of the black cockatoo totem, and a subset of the Guugu Yimithirr people. To support their claim to the surrounding district of Cooktown, Eric had assembled a set of portfolios placing local oral traditions and topographical investigations alongside research done on Western lines, thereby creating an empirically based record of the long-term presence of this tribe and its clans in the area. In 1997 the Guugu Yimithirr of Hope Vale were among the first Aboriginal people to be given legal ownership of their lands under the Native Title Act 1993 that followed the pathbreaking Mabo case of 1992, which for the first time gave Australian Indigenous peoples the legal right to own their traditional lands, provided they could prove continuous occupation by their clan or linguisitic group.5

  Eric and Erica admitted that it was thanks in part to Cook’s journals that their claim had succeeded. Eric’s understanding of the history of Cook’s visit was nuanced and realistic; he did not gloss over the tragedies that many of his people see as its consequence, but he himself no longer felt any anger. After all, he said, grinning broadly, Cook was now helping to repair some of the damage he’d begun.

  * * *

  The Reef presented yet another face to me on September 4 when we anchored off Lizard Island, 150 miles north of Cairns. We’d again prevailed on the BBC organizers to allow us a few hours to visit this crucial site of Cook’s original voyage, and after being taken ashore at 6:30 a.m. three of us set off under the guidance of Debbie, a young scientist from the island’s marine research station. Debbie invited us to follow her up a steep rocky peak known as Cook’s Look.

  Apart from a clump of palm trees that had been planted around the resort, Lizard Island managed to resist the stereotyped South Sea images I’d started out with. From a distance, streaked by early-morning mist, it looked bleak and forbidding; close to, it was dry and brown. We clambered over jagged tourmaline outcrops and pushed past gums that had been stunted and twisted by the southeast trade winds and then scorched by bushfires. In between them grew ragged-edged paperbark trees and kapok bushes covered in yellow flowers. Debbie found some tiny green bush passion fruit that we devoured, reveling in the scent and flavor. Clumps of tussock grass brushed at our ankles and two species of doves tried to drown out each other’s calls.

  That walk proved to be life-changing in two ways: I found the island’s land and seascapes achingly beautiful, falling in love with what I now realize is a distinctively northern Reef aesthetic, and I had my first intimation of the threats to the Reef’s survival. I’d read a few newspaper stories about stresses to corals around the world, but never taken them too seriously.

  Debbie was proud of the efforts of the research station to preserve the pristine character of the local reefs, but had to admit that even with this much care the corals were showing alarming signs of degradation. She doubted their capacity to resist impending forces of destr
uction that I only later came to understand. What I did gather from the somber tone in her voice was that she and her scientific colleagues at Lizard Island believed the entire Reef system to be under threat of extinction.

  When we reached the summit I stared northward to the horizon, where Cook and Banks had first seen the monstrous “ledge” of reefs that threatened to entrap them permanently. The thin, creamy line in the water now looked to me more fragile than fearsome.

  We walked in sober silence down the hill to wait for the longboat. I took a quick farewell swim. Gliding over the multicolored bommies—stand-alone towers of coral—I watched tiny pink-and-blue shell fragments pulsing on the sand with the movement of the waves. Goggle-eyed parrot fish flicked out of reach between clumps of emerald seaweed. Suddenly all of this—even the faux Hawaiian resort around the corner—seemed inexpressibly precious.

  * * *

  Since that voyage nearly a dozen years ago I’ve visited the Reef many times, and as I got to know its seascapes and stories better I fell deeper under its spell. The Great Barrier Reef, as I learned, was built by human minds as well as by coral polyps. To adapt what Robert Macfarlane says in his wonderful book Mountains of the Mind, coral reefs are contingencies of geology and biology, “products of human perception … imagined into existence down the centuries.” Now that we’re in the Age of the Anthropocene, where humans have for the first time begun to influence geological change, this “collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans” has surely never been more important.6

  This book is a story of encounters between Reef peoples and places, ideas, and environments, over more than two centuries, beginning with James Cook’s bewildered voyage through a coral maze and ending with the searing mission of reef scientist John “Charlie” Veron to goad us to act over the impending death of the Reef. It explores how the Reef has been seen variously, and sometimes simultaneously, as a labyrinth of terror, a nurturing heartland, a scientific challenge, and a fragile global wonder. Yet I don’t pretend to offer a comprehensive survey of its modern history. Being drawn instinctively to human stories, I’ve chosen to write a series of biographical narratives—of around twenty extraordinary individuals, men and women, who’ve shaped our ideas and attitudes to the greatest marine environment this planet has ever seen.