Leaving Sydney – in February 1963 – felt like being released from prison. Good, but not all good, for I might have worn a label: ‘Damaged Goods’. I knew virtually no physics and no chemistry. I was unsure how a slide rule worked, hadn’t a clue what calculus meant, and was doubtful about the difference between a cosine and a street sign. My spelling was atrocious and my grammar worse. On top of that, I could not play any sort of sport, and worse still, I was withdrawn and lacking in most teenage social skills.
The train journey from Sydney took about eight hours, the track being steep in places. All freshers, as we were called, were met at Armidale railway station and bussed to one of the university’s five residences. Mine was Wright College, an assemblage of slightly dilapidated wooden dormitories with a new brick office and dining complex in the middle. My room was on the upper floor of the farthest dormitory. On arrival, I looked up at the stairs in dismay.
How am I ever going to get my suitcase up that? I can’t ask for help on my first day.
Surprisingly, I reached the halfway landing still breathing easily and so continued to the top, and that evening I walked half a mile or so to Booloominbah, the Victorian mansion that was once the home of the university’s founder and first chancellor, P.A. Wright, and which had ever since been the administrative hub of the university. On entering the massive front doors, there was P.A.’s portrait, his gentle, weather-beaten face smiling out on his world. With a great deal of foresight, I might have said, ‘Hello P.A., I’m a guy called Charlie who will thank your university for the rest of his life, although right now I have no idea what I’m doing here. But more importantly, your daughter Judith is about to be one of the people who save the Great Barrier Reef from mining and oil drilling. A real heroine. Well might you smile.’
In reality all I was thinking was that I was walking around with ease; my asthma had completely disappeared. After five years of that debilitating illness, the freedom I felt beggared belief. My life – the scholarship and now this – had done a complete U-turn. I had been reborn.
Even so, there was a pressing question facing me: what should I study? I decided on psychology in order to find out who I was, why I’d got my scholarship, and to fill in the rest with whatever sciences were on offer. That choice was a problem for the university since psychology was in the arts faculty. Nevertheless, the psychology department welcomed me with open arms, not as a regular student, but as a lab rat. They too wanted to know how a chronic underachiever had been given the rarest scholarship in the land. And so it was agreed – I could do all the psychology I wanted in return for participating in ‘tests’. These tests, mostly interviews, continued for eight years, on and off, and probably ended up in someone’s PhD thesis. As agreed, I never asked what they revealed, but I suspect most of it was just more unanswered questions. There was much investigation of my relationship with my parents, especially my mother, but chiefly the interviews were about my feelings of deep connection with Nature.
I never did discover why I got the scholarship, but I did find out that I was not an apprentice Einstein. Still, I never failed another exam, not even in chemistry, which in any case was based on the periodic table and quantum mechanics and not remotely like the drivel old Loco Lathum had dished out. In fact I thoroughly enjoyed chemistry and gained a solid grounding in it.
Sometimes I felt bitter about what I had missed out on at school – maths certainly, but a complete absence of music headed the list. I knew classical music existed but had never heard a single note of it. We had a radio in the kitchen that Mum listened to but it was always tuned to 2GB, a commercial station not strong on classical music. We also had a wind-up record-player for 78s, which I loved listening to – mostly wartime songs, Irish folksongs and Negro spirituals that Dad occasionally bought. Barker had two honky-tonk pianos that stood in small cubicles on the school’s main concourse, but heaven help any boy who attempted anything more sophisticated than ‘Chopsticks’ – he would have been branded a pansy and persecuted no end. On my first day at Wright College I heard someone playing a Bach Brandenburg concerto on their record player and I was absolutely transfixed; I had never heard anything so beautiful in my life. I stood riveted, and then quickly went on to discover something about myself that hitherto had been completely hidden – I profoundly loved classical music. It became a part of my being, almost as much as Nature has always been, sinking ever deeper into me, to the core of who I am. Any time I was alone, or when a lecture was boring, I would play a Beethoven symphony, or listen to some opera or maybe a piano sonata. In my head.
A couple of years on, full of enthusiasm and newly acquired knowledge, I gave music appreciation classes at my college – fortunately, as I later discovered, in the absence of any musicians. What a farce; thank god I had enough sense to steer clear of giving sex appreciation classes.
During my first year at Wright I built a record-player, consisting of two large speaker boxes, each with four speakers, including a 12-inch woofer. The rest of the machine was a Telefunken player and a Playmaster 4 amplifier that had come, valves and all, in kit form. With a staggering 30 watts per channel it was the most powerful record-player at Wright, and seemingly the whole university as it was constantly being borrowed for parties. That was okay by me as it meant I could borrow records everywhere in return, and soon I had an excellent mental road map around the colleges of who had what music. Not party music of course, classical.
‘Charlie, will you turn that bloody racket down,’ a voice would come through the wall, or floor or door. Not everybody liked Mozart.
‘Sorry, Rob.’
It wasn’t until twenty-seven years later that I bought a new record-player. No one could understand why I put up with such a dreadful old machine. I suppose I’d just got used to it.
Even today I sometimes have to pull over to the side of the road when driving, so captivated am I by music on the radio. It makes me oblivious to all else, an accident waiting to happen.
On my first day at Wright College I met Ric How, who had a room opposite mine. Against all odds we became very close friends, and remained so all through our years at university and on into married life. Ric had more of nature’s handouts than just about anybody I knew, and unsurprisingly had been head prefect of his school. He was an ace football player and bright into the bargain. We made an odd pair, Ric and I, with him seeming to turn the head of every girl we passed, and me being afraid that one might look at me.
After the movie Alfie came to town my name at Wright became Chalfie for a while, Alfie being a character who had spectacular successes with women. This might sound sarcastic or malicious but it never was. Names were friendly fire, usually subtle, even clever, if at times a trifle uncouth.
None of us worked hard, except when exams threatened. There was just too much else to do. I spent a lot of time eating enormous meals and jogging. With my asthma gone, I revelled in my newfound freedom, jogging for miles every day. As winners of special scholarships go, I didn’t make much headway with the more intellectual side of university life. I joined the chess club, not such a good idea as most of its members were academics rather than students, but I only lost one game and, strangely, that annoyed me. I’m a good loser, having had so much practice at school, but chess was one thing I seemed to be good at, at least by the standard of those days. My sort of chess was not the cerebral sort, it was basically pattern recognition, which involved little thinking, just quick comprehension and not making a mistake. I lost that one game because of a mistake – infuriating.
I still had time to spend in the bush, loading my canvas and steel H-frame with whatever food I could scrounge from the college dining hall and then hitching a ride to nowhere in particular. As befitted my age I seldom gave safety a second thought: I never told anyone where I was headed, which wasn’t sensible given that my favourite places were off the New England escarpment in very rugged countryside. I missed Jinka on these outings, but even if he’d been with me he would have been too old to cope wi
th that terrain. Unless completely lost, which I was a couple of times, I only stayed out a night or two, sometimes spending much of it in pouring rain, protected only by my father’s army wind-jacket and a tiny nylon pocket tent. I always tried to find a quiet place beside a creek to camp and light a fire, if I could. I’d relax, sit with a log for a backrest, and let my mind drift into emptiness. When I came to I’d play some music in my head, perhaps watch an ant drag its dinner to its nest. Music, Nature, and the sound of a creek are an intoxicating mixture, almost to be feared as a drug of addiction.
Darkness comes stealthily in that part of the world. The creek would trickle on but the water would stop sparkling, turn a translucent grey and then get swallowed by the night. I would be enveloped by the dark, except for the friendly glow of my fire. Something might startle me by crashing behind me, but then all would be still except for the monotonous mantra of frogs, the occasional rustle of leaves, and the creek. Drops of rain might make my fire hiss in defiance. I’d scramble to my tent, getting in as my fire was wiped out, and then nothing could be seen. Perhaps I would accidentally touch the tent top, making it leak on my head. I would pull up my wind-jacket. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Just absolute solitude. I might brush a bush cockroach from my face, being careful not to hurt it, then fall into a deep dreamless sleep, enshrouded by peace and without a care in the world.
I wasn’t always alone in the bush. Sometimes Ric came with me, and I enjoyed his company when we headed off in search of the brush-tailed possums he was studying and the gliding possums I was supposed to be studying. Ric had a favourite field site in the Dorrigo National Park, on a rugged escarpment whose V-shaped valleys were steep and whose trees were among the tallest in the country. I will never forget a time when we were heading for our base camp, a deserted logger’s hut, and heard the unmistakable sound of a timber jinker start up. Not just any timber jinker but one I immediately recognised, having taken it out for a short spin along a rough track, the driver yelling instructions at me. It was an ancient Leyland, designed to replace bullock teams, with a massive engine and two gearboxes end to end, giving it thirty forward gears. The old monster was slow, but with railway sleepers for a bumper bar, was almost unstoppable. From deep in our valley, Ric and I stood listening to the engine revving and roaring as the driver double-declutched down the gears before tackling a steep climb. A little further on we listened to him go up through the gears as the track levelled off and he picked up speed. But only briefly; soon he was going back down the gears again in preparation for a steep descent. After him we went, only to find ourselves getting deeper and deeper into an ever steeper valley and increasingly impenetrable bush. Next a chainsaw started up, rumm, rumm, ruuuum, followed by the clop clop clop of a bushman driving a wedge, before the timber jinker resumed, heading deeper still into the valley. We came to within a few yards of the lyrebird, for that’s what it was; we’d had no idea they were such skilled mimics. I could almost tell what gear it was in.
Of the many adventures during my undergraduate years there’s one I could have done without. I joined the mountaineering club, which had trips to wild and rugged places that suited me perfectly, especially when I became lean and fit with a good power-to-weight ratio. I wasn’t an expert climber by any means but I did love a challenge. The equipment we had was primitive by today’s standards, but it sufficed for moderately serious climbs.
One cold blustery afternoon I climbed Dangar Falls, a near- vertical face about 700 feet high. After heavy rain the falls thunder down, a spectacular sight, but during the dry there’s just a jagged, black, intimidating wall of rock. It was a climb unlike anything I’d attempted before. When I looked up from the bottom I regretted my decision to tackle it. Twice on the face, my arms and legs shaking with exertion or fear or both, I thought I should go back down, but that looked harder than continuing up. I was on a safety rope, belayed from above by a newcomer to our club who was anchored to a tree. Fortunately, I had given him my father’s much loved, indestructible army wind jacket to put on over his woollen jumper, for just as I swung myself over the final ledge with a cry of victory, I slipped. I only remember revolving over and over, hitting rocks and thinking my back would break from the force of the safety rope. I reached the bottom of the falls with a hell of a thump, after bouncing off rocks most of the way.
I regained consciousness in a haze of pain and concussion, then saw the others racing down a track to the bottom of the falls to reach me. Immensely relieved to find me still in one piece, they were full of praise for my belay partner, who’d acted with great speed and courage to break my fall. In the process the safety rope had burnt through my father’s wind jacket, then his own pullover, and started scoring his back. In a state of shock, I insisted I was fine and could walk out unaided, but when most of my memory of the fall came back several hours later I couldn’t recall if I’d thanked my protector for saving my life. We agreed to keep quiet about the incident in case the university closed the mountaineering club down.
One summer holiday in 1967, at the end of my fourth (honours) year, I spent three glorious weeks camping on Hinchinbrook Island, in northern Queensland. There were ten of us, all men of course, including my two closest friends, Rick Smyth, by then studying dentistry in Sydney, and Ric How.
Today the island has a major resort, and permits are required even for a day visit, but no one lived on Hinchinbrook then. In fact were it not for the occasional distant fishing boat far out to sea, we could imagine that we were the only people on Earth. The nights were a world apart. With no city lights and no dust in the air, the heavens sparkled with a brilliance I’d never seen before. Working out star constellations without a guidebook became a nightly challenge, and most nights after dusk satellites passed overhead, tiny specks like fast-moving stars doing what, we could hardly guess. Peace and quiet surrounded us. Peace in a timeless place.
We camped at Zoe Bay and climbed the island’s highest mountain, 3670 feet, the second-highest in Queensland. I led the climbing, taking a rope up and tying it to trees in case the others needed it. It wasn’t a difficult scramble but I kept moving to the left, where the scrub seemed thinnest, so it was my fault that we found ourselves on the wrong – steepest – side of the mountain as dark descended. There was nothing for it but to spend a precarious night on the mountainside, on platforms made of whatever scrub branches we could weave together. My platform collapsed in the night and at dawn I found myself about 5 yards down the slope without having woken. We reached the top that morning but were enclosed in fog. Some of our number, fed up with my bushwalking enthusiasm, went back down (by the route we should have come up) but a few of us stayed the next night, hoping for a view the following day.
As dusk settled, large white-tailed native rats turned up. They had no fear of us whatsoever and wanted to fight us for our dinner. We gave them bits of what we had, but that didn’t satisfy them so they bit holes in our li-los in the night. No matter, next morning we were rewarded with a spectacular view of the whole of Hinchinbrook, the Palm Islands, and a hundred miles of coast. I never dreamt that one day I would visit all we saw many times, eventually coming to know most of the wildlife that lived there.
We had paid a fisherman to take us over and pick us up two weeks later, weather permitting. The weather was perfect, but a third week passed before he turned up, unconcerned – a genuine laidback north-Queenslander. I was getting a little worried we’d be stuck there until we starved, but we got by with what we had or could catch.
Apart from a couple of big trips to Central Australia with the university’s Exploration Society, some of my best student days were spent travelling on my own to one beautiful part of the country after another. After my first year I did a mind-blowing trip to Heron Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef, hitchhiking up and back and staying at the research station there, a delightfully dilapidated building used mainly for teaching. I don’t doubt that this place weaves its magic on all who go there; it certainly did on me.
It was the most captivating place I’d ever laid eyes on, its reefs bursting with life I’d never imagined. I wanted to live there forever. Above all, I wanted to learn to scuba dive.
I still wonder about one incident that occurred there. I met two French underwater photographers who wanted to film manta rays and I knew just where to find them: a flat sandy place, about 80 feet deep in the channel between Heron Island and Wistari Reef, where two mantas kept swimming in endless circles, or figures-of-eight. All the divers needed to do was get to the right place and wait for the mantas to come to them. Off we went, me snorkelling on the surface and the photographers following on scuba, and sure enough, along came the mantas. I wanted to see one of these magnificent creatures close up myself, so judging my time carefully, down I went. It was thrilling; one of the mantas, about ten feet across, brushed right over the top of me. Then I begged a breath of air from one of the photographers so I could stay down a little longer. He should have known better than to give it to someone who’d never used scuba, as free divers hold their breath as long as they can, and expanding air on ascent is dangerous. But I must have breathed out unknowingly.
At Wright, there was a culture of being men in a man’s college. Unhappily, the sum of my undergraduate social life with women was getting to know some of Ric’s female friends during casual outings to football matches and the like. The one exception was the compulsory annual college ball, to which I asked the same lovely but safe girl every year. Poor Chris, I hope she found someone interesting to talk to; it surely wasn’t me.
I spent a lot of time and money drinking in pubs, as most students did. No women were allowed in a front bar in those days, so our behaviour was awful, worse than I’m going to admit to here. All Armidale’s pubs were in easy reach of our college because there was only one road between the university and town and most drivers picked up students. Coming back to college in a student’s car after ten o’clock closing was sometimes an interesting experience, but the police were tolerant and if there was an accident, being drunk was always a good excuse. One evening a mate and I hitched a ride at closing time by jumping onto the bonnet of the first car to pass, which happened to be a police car. The two of us spent the night in the police watch house. We sang bawdy songs until the sergeant threatened to take our sleeping mats away.
A Life Underwater Page 5