We decided to make a survey of the marine life there and use it as evidence to have the place declared a marine park. This was a groundbreaking idea as there were no marine parks in Australia at the time – not even for the Great Barrier Reef – or anywhere else as far as we knew. The survey didn’t quite work out, although the idea of a marine park did, twenty years later. None of us had studied marine life other than as part of general zoology, but undaunted we each adopted a group of organisms to survey. I was most interested in the corals but they were Ric’s job. I took on worms, memories of my childhood collections coming back. Despite our attempt to devise some rules, our diving practices weren’t the best, to put it mildly, and Ric kept getting headaches. So I took over corals from him and that’s how my lifelong interest in them was born.
We did some great diving and some rather dangerous diving at the Solitaries, and looking back it’s a wonder we all lived through it. Sometimes we got John Rotar, a newly acquired friend, to take us out on his big boat, a hulk he had rebuilt after it was wrecked on the Coffs Harbour breakwater, and when we did we brought newcomers along for the trip. We camped at John’s place or on a beach at Coffs, where we’d spend the night around a fire swigging wine. (Diving does indeed cure a hangover, in case you’re wondering.)
On one such trip I took a novice for her first dive. We were at Split Solitary Island, which was literally split in half by a chasm that extended deep underwater. We swam through the split easily enough, but on our return I turned into another chasm by mistake. This became progressively narrower while the wave surge became increasingly stronger. My companion, being smaller than me, went deep, where the crevice fortunately widened. I didn’t know this, so I had no option but to follow down after her in the hope I could somehow grab a fin and drag her back. I became jammed between the barnacle-encrusted walls of the crevice and ended up taking off my tank to try to go deeper, but only got further stuck. In a state of growing alarm, I battled my way straight up to the surface, scrambled over some rocks where the two halves of the island met, and dived down the other side, hoping to get to her that way. And there she was, happily swimming on without a care in the world. My legs were covered in bleeding scratches and my old wetsuit top was in tatters. I’ll admit the episode gave me quite a fright.
As we had no money we scrounged our equipment as best we could, and when there was none to scrounge we improvised or did without. I made my own depth gauge out of a piece of glass tubing, closed at one end and marked with notches where a bubble, responding to the doubling water pressure, was supposed to show depths of roughly 30 and 60 feet. Hardly a substitute for the diving computer I use today, but it wasn’t as if I took it too seriously. We didn’t have watches, or contents gauges on our tanks, so I would stay on the bottom until I could feel my tank running out, then start for the surface, perhaps fifty feet above, drawing in the last breaths of air as I went.
On one particular dive the sea was calm when I went down but when I came back up, lugging a heavy bag of corals, a sou’easter had arrived and the water had turned rough. I had no snorkel, nor any sort of buoyancy vest. The problem lay in getting a breath of air while struggling with the bag. The collection was important to me and I refused to let it go, rough sea or no. After a few breaths of more water than air I decided that drastic measures were called for. There was nothing for it but to sacrifice my weight belt, an ordinary leather-and-buckle type borrowed from my jeans and threaded through blocks of lead. I then discovered that the buckle had moved behind me and I was unable to undo it with one hand. Waves pushed me under again and again.
I’m not letting go of this bag, no matter what.
Struggling to the surface once more I glimpsed our boat anchored some distance away and waved as best I could. The bastards just waved back. Then I heard a voice casually ask, ‘Can I carry something for you, Charlie?’ It was Terry Done, one of our club members, and he took the bag just as I felt that the waves were closing over me for good. I was exhausted.
On another trip one of the elderly professors of zoology, John Le Gay Brereton, wanted to come with us. I was still thinking that our borrowing of the departmental boat was a secret, but he’d found out about it somehow. No matter.
The waves close to Arrawarra Headland were usually hazardous to negotiate in our boat, especially with a full load of divers and gear, so our practice was for me to drive the boat while the others swam out beyond the breakers before climbing on board. If a wave looked threatening I’d make a U-turn and a quick run back towards the shore to try again. This time, with the professor in the bow, the boat was sluggish to turn. Up we went, side-on to the wave, before crashing over, upside down. The professor, now under the boat, had to be rescued and dragged ashore, coughing and spluttering. It took all day to get the outboard going again, by which time the wind had come up and the sea had turned nasty. We returned to Armidale empty-handed.
I thought John would have a fit about what we were doing and the way we did it, but much to our delight, when we delivered him home he announced that he hadn’t enjoyed himself so much in years. John had been a pilot during the war and afterwards owned his own plane. He was very unlike the other zoology professors.
One of my last trips to the Solitary Islands at that time was a much worse near-disaster. I took three divers to one of the outer islands – an 11-mile journey – and was returning to Arrawarra to collect the rest when another sou’easter hit. The sea got very rough; there was no way I’d be able to negotiate the worsening weather and collect my buddies. Worse still, they wouldn’t be able to get up the steep cliffs of the island, they’d be stuck in the water. Back at Arrawarra, I heard that a surf carnival due to be held just south of the headland had been cancelled because of the conditions, but a Mr Hamilton, builder of HamiltonJet boats, who had intended to demonstrate his surf rescue boat at the carnival, was unfazed when I told him about my divers.
‘Hop aboard and hang on,’ he yelled.
By now the wind was a screaming gale, but off we went, straight into the face of a ten-foot breaker, me astride the boat’s roaring V8 engine and clinging on for dear life. I thought my end had come. We crashed through the first enormous wave, shooting high into the air and coming down with a bone-crunching slam right in front of another 10-footer. Then Hamilton – was he completely mad? – turned his boat side on and we disappeared into the curl of the break, the boat almost overturning before he flipped it out as if it were a surfboard. Demonstration over, he charged off to rescue the beleaguered divers, leaping from wave to wave at horrific speed. We returned relatively slowly, at a mere 20 knots or so, with three cold and weary divers aboard. Of course they were happy to be rescued but I, fit though I was, could hardly straighten my back for a fortnight.
In May 2016, nearly fifty years on, I made a nostalgic return visit to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Solitary Islands Marine Park and to do some diving. After checking out the corals at the beginning of each dive I spent a little time just swimming around, enjoying the memories that came flooding back. Nothing had changed, the corals were just as I remembered them, except for the number of species I now recognised – more than double those we originally recorded. I saw where we’d made mistakes, but couldn’t help thinking that our records weren’t too bad for that first attempt so long ago.
John Rotar’s ‘big boat’ at the Solitary Islands.
At the Solitary Islands in 1971. From left: Terry Done, Len Zell, Ric How.
Serendipity
The University of New England’s zoology department in the late 1960s was pretty decadent, but as it turned out this suited me just fine. With many of the teaching staff more interested in golf or the daily newspaper than giving lectures, I could teach one course after another on their behalf, and thus, over the next few years, taught almost every course the department offered. I loved every facet of zoology.
‘Charlie,’ a professor or lecturer might say at morning tea, ‘I’m particularly busy next term and wonder if y
ou’d mind taking my second-year invertebrate anatomy for me?’ Or cell biology, or embryology, or vertebrate anatomy, or whatever.
‘I’d love to,’ I would always say with genuine enthusiasm, knowing full well that the professor would be off holidaying. Yet again.
I found teaching new and different courses a real joy, never giving the same lecture twice. I especially enjoyed teaching mature-age students, for they were always more committed than raw school leavers, particularly the Catholic priests and nuns who did courses during university holidays. I cracked a lot of jokes and so connected well with most of them, many of whom weren’t much older than me. Sometimes I gave lectures in the morning outside under a tree – ‘Don’t take notes, just listen’ – while lab work, which usually involved dissections, was inside during the afternoons.
It was a condition of my job that I enrol for a PhD, not a hardship at all except for the need to find one interesting topic out of so many options. Then, early one cold and misty morning I was out jogging when I noticed that some dragonflies, which were normally bright blue, were a dark grey colour. I watched them over several more mornings and saw that as the early fog lifted they went through some interesting behaviour, orientating themselves at right angles to the rising sun, even when flying. At that time they were all grey, but as the sunlight increased they started turning blue.
I mentioned this in passing to Professor O’Farrell’s secretary, Mrs Slade, an ancient old thing who fiercely guarded her lord and master’s office.
‘You must tell the professor about this’, she commanded. ‘He’ll be most interested.’
Professor O’Farrell (O’Barrell to his back) was a man of vast bulk and domineering personality who generally terrorised the entire staff. He had never supervised a student in his life, but when he heard about what I’d seen he announced that this would be my PhD project, and that he would supervise it personally. I had severe doubts about this, especially the supervision bit – I knew I was unsupervisable. I referred the matter to Mrs Slade, who after a moment’s deliberation whispered that the professor kept most of the department’s research budget for himself but had no idea what to spend it on. That did it; I became an entomologist then and there.
I did most of my field work at Uralla Lagoon, not far from Armidale, a place I’d enjoyed for years because it was full of birdlife and all manner of aquatic creatures. At first light I recorded the behaviour of the dragonflies and measured their temperature with a thermistor I’d made from gold wire that was thinner than a spider’s web. I then secured a perspex chamber inside an aquarium full of water so it could be both temperature- and light-controlled, and photographed changes in the colour of the dragonflies in the chamber with a timelapse movie camera, bought on the professor’s tab of course. I found the nerve ganglia that controlled the colour change and used the university’s new electron microscope, a complex monster of a machine that few people bothered mastering, to reveal anatomical details of the colour-changing cells. Then, with the help of a biochemistry student I knew, we – well, mostly he, to be honest – identified the colour-changing granules involved.
All this, as it turned out, was just for starters. I could change the colour of a dragonfly’s eyes, or abdomen, or tiny pieces of its integument (skin) with different combinations of light, temperature and ganglion extract. Imagine if you can a dragonfly with one eye brown and the other blue, and body segments of different colours, then have all these parts change colour in unison, or independently, with changes of heat, light or ganglion extract. It was a fabulous project: I could have an idea one day and an exciting result the next. I found out how and why dragonfly eyes adapt to all manner of experimental variables – heat and light, transplanted ganglia and then neurosecretions. It was all great fun, but it took me more than a year to find the common ground that connected the behaviour and temperature of dragonflies in the field with the many kinds of experiments I did with them in the lab. In effect, I had four separate angles to the project, no single one of which could be linked to any of the others, or make a thesis on its own.
Meanwhile on the home front, Kirsty and I were living in a little old house on the northern side of Armidale which, we later discovered, was the original country homestead of the area. It was homely and welcoming, if rather run-down. By then Kirsty was in the final year of her arts degree and our life together was turning into one long, never to be forgotten honeymoon. And it was about to get a lot better.
Fiona, or Noni as she was always called, was born on 29 April 1970. I’d always loved the company of children, but a new baby was something way beyond my experience. None of my friends or family had babies at that time; in fact I don’t think I’d ever had anything to do with one until then. I wanted none of the ways of my father, to whom babies were a woman’s business; I was determined to be an equal parent with Kirsty in all ways possible.
The sister at the Armidale Hospital maternity ward was adamantly against me being present at the birth, but I won that battle with the aid of the attending doctor and so helped with the delivery. Noni was my baby as well, right from the beginning. She was beautiful, with none of the wrinkles newborns usually have, and it was soon apparent that she was easy to look after. I wove a cane basket to carry her in, and if we went to a friend’s place we could leave the basket anywhere – Noni slept through anything. When she grew too big for the basket, I cut a hole in one end for her feet. No doubt I’m not the first father to have pondered how weird it is for a little baby to become so important so quickly.
In May that same year, Jinka died, aged sixteen. Jan had written to me that he was failing, saying she was going to have him put down. She couldn’t bring herself to phone to tell me, she wrote, and her letter arrived too late. No matter what, I would have driven straight to Sydney to be with him on his last journey.
Noni’s birth and Jinka’s death both happened during a time when my PhD work consisted of four parts that I couldn’t connect. It was very discouraging, but then Kirsty found an interesting advertisement in a newspaper. It called for expressions of interest in post-doc work on corals at James Cook University in Townsville. The only condition, apart from having a PhD, was that it had to be based on field work using scuba. It wasn’t stated at the time, but this requirement came from moves to save the Great Barrier Reef from both oil drilling and the ravages of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, threats that had made headlines in one news bulletin after another. Also unknown to me then was a demand that an Australian rather than a foreigner be on hand when a coral expert was required to be a witness at government inquiries about The Reef. Nor did I know that the newly formed James Cook University had proposed building a research institute for the Great Barrier Reef.
Although I still knew little about corals, I wrote a brief note expressing interest, vaguely wondering if a post-doc couldn’t be turned into a pre-doc. Or maybe a not-a-doc-at-all sort of doc . . . As it turned out, despite the position being readvertised three times, mine was the only expression of interest the university received. It seems that scuba diving at that time was still a thrillseeker’s sport, not to be taken seriously by a scholar.
Dragonflies are one of Nature’s great triumphs, dating back more than 200 million years.
With Noni filling our lives with endless love, fun and interest, Kirsty and I were keen to have another baby. Ruari was born on 26 August 1971. My mother, who had become close friends with Kirsty and absolutely smitten with Noni, came up to help out. I remember bursting in the front door of our little house shouting, ‘It’s a boy!’ He looked just like me, at least I thought so. I was a bit concerned when he was put into a humidicrib ‘for observation’, before I left the hospital, but he looked perfect nonetheless, just as Noni had.
However, he wasn’t perfect; his birth had been normal but he was a little blue around the mouth. The following morning, I arrived at the hospital as dawn was breaking and was shocked to see that he had an oxygen mask on. I just looked at him, desperate to give him a hug an
d tell him he was okay. Kirsty was in tears. Later that day he was flown by air ambulance to Sydney’s Prince of Wales children’s hospital and there he died, two days later.
Ruari’s death left me simply bewildered, and feelings of self-pity flooded over me. How could this have happened to such a perfect baby? To our baby? It was my job to look after Kirsty, who was devastated, but it was Noni who did that best. She was always cheerful, full of life and fun and chatter. It was hard to stay grieving when she was with us. Life with Noni was good; we just had to get on with it.
As time moved on I wrote my thesis, all the components of my project having come together to make a single beautiful story. Professor O’Farrell didn’t have the faintest idea what I was doing, but someone, probably Mrs Slade, must have told him that I’d discovered something, because he summoned me to his office one afternoon – he always spent the mornings in his bath – and demanded that I go to Canberra to give a paper at the Fourteenth International Congress of Entomology. This was not at all to my liking but I did as I was told. Everybody did what O’Farrell told them to. I took a train to Sydney, then another on to Canberra and there, armed with some colour slides and a page of notes, I umm’ed and err’ed my way through my first paper at a scientific meeting. It turned out to be quite a day: I won the prize for the best student presentation and was offered four post-docs on the spot. Then the editor of Journal of Insect Physiology asked me where I had published my work.
I hadn’t. I hadn’t even given the matter a moment’s thought.
‘Do you realise, young man, that if you don’t publish your work immediately someone will steal it from you?’
A Life Underwater Page 7