A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  Something else had been waiting for me on my return: a package full of police documents from my father. He had found out that the teenager who was driving the car that killed my mother had only been charged with a misdemeanour. With a little digging, Dad had discovered that nobody in New South Wales had ever been charged for drunk driving leading to a fatality. Why not? Such accidents were happening every few weeks. With further digging, and help from some co-operative police, he’d found out that the going price for getting charges dropped was $18 000. This affected Dad badly. He was not so concerned that Mum’s killer had got off – he was just a kid who’d been very silly – but he was furious at the thought that thousands of Australians of his generation had given their lives for their country in war only to have that country governed by corrupt officials. They, Dad said, were making a fortune out of road deaths.

  In his strange way, Dad had been a crusader for justice as long as I could remember; now he was on a warpath. As the months rolled by, he repeatedly phoned me to talk about his latest accusations, many of which came from confidential files held at police headquarters in North Sydney. He’d been able to photocopy, even ‘borrow’, hundreds of files because straight cops would leave the key to the filing room on a counter and turn their backs when he arrived. He also received anonymous tipoffs. But even with these files, some of Dad’s assertions seemed to me to be over the top. Was the then Premier of New South Wales, Robert Askin, really in on this? Was it really masterminded by the police commissioner himself? Dad would write what he called ‘brochures’, giving details of one case after another, and post them to everybody he could think of, from the Queen down. He was trying to get himself sued for libel – the only hope he had of getting his allegations into court. He was threatened repeatedly but never sued, evidence perhaps that he was on the right track but possibly that he was universally regarded as some sort of crank. One day he accused a high-ranking judge of being involved in millions of dollars’ worth of police corruption. I found that unbelievable. I begged him to see a psychiatrist, and much to my surprise he did. The psychiatrist found nothing wrong with him. On he went; it was a complete obsession.

  We moved into Rivendell in the winter of 1976, after the shell of our hideaway was finished. No electricity meant no running water, so we bathed in the river and cooked on a camp stove by lantern light. It was cold for the tropics, so we went to bed early to keep warm, listening to the wind in the trees, the croaking of frogs in the river, the guttural arguments of possums, and the mournful cry of stone curlews in the distance. Come dawn we would hear the splashing of cormorants as they fished in the river, the call of kookaburras and the chatter of parrots.

  I found a secluded place down by the river – dark, enclosed by trees, peaceful. I would go there and sit on a tree root and not think about anything, at one with the river and with myself. A little later I’d emerge refreshed and renewed. It was a special place; it still is.

  It was Kirsty who named our house Rivendell, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: ‘A perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ It was an idyllic life as far as we were concerned, although the list of jobs to be done was dreadfully long, especially the building of a driveway that would still be a driveway when the wet season arrived, and the clearing of chinee apple and lantana so that we could see the river from the house, not just hear it. Then there was a lot to do in the house itself, because we’d run out of money to pay our builder. Nevertheless, the first job I actually did was build Noni a treehouse. About 30 metres from our house there was a big eucalypt leaning out over a bend in the river, its branches affording a good view in both directions, and there was deep water beneath. I made a ladder, a platform and a little hut. When it was finished, Noni christened it Gum Leaf and insisted on sleeping in it alone the first night.

  Being somewhat isolated at Rivendell, Noni often had to look to herself for company and entertainment. She became quite a daydreamer and frequently had her nose in a book, switched off from all else. Memories of my own childhood flooded back, especially when her interests and hobbies became entangled in her daydreams. Rivendell, books, and spending a lot of time in her own private world combined to turn her into another naturalist in the family. She was always lost in the delights of her own discoveries and this developed into a thirst for knowledge on all manner of subjects. Perhaps Kirsty and I influenced her a bit, but mostly her interests came from within, just as they had with me. We had long discussions about one subject after another – her subjects, not mine or her school’s. We’d talk on until I found myself telling her things she hadn’t asked about, and saw that she wasn’t listening. How well I understood that.

  Noni’s love of animals followed her interest in Nature. Rivendell was the perfect place for a dog, so we bought a little puppy, a German shepherd-cross. He promptly moved into Noni’s bedroom, and would have slept in her bed given half a chance. She also assembled an assortment of birds: geese, ducks by the dozen, and later a large turkey who could demolish an entire chilli bush in one go. She kept goldfish in her bedroom and frogs, tortoises, snakes and all sorts of caterpillars in Gum Leaf or around the house. One special pet was a children’s python called Mundingburra, the Aboriginal name for her school. Seeing her with all these animals had me reliving my own childhood.

  With our encouragement Noni began to tinker with the piano, and then she started lessons. This was of course very much Kirsty’s domain, but I decided to motivate Noni with a race: which of us could learn the quicker? At first it was no contest; I picked up her pieces much faster than she, and so became a bit concerned that our little contest might discourage her. That worry didn’t last long; I started to plateau out and she didn’t. Within a year, awards started rolling in, then her teacher decided to enter her in the under-eight solo piano division of the 1977 Townsville Junior Eisteddfod. Her Beethoven sonatina was a nailbiting performance for Kirsty and me, but Noni was completely relaxed about it and she won. There was no stopping her after that. She needed neither encouragement nor reminders to practise, rather the opposite – we often had to nag her to stop playing and come to dinner while it was hot, or to get ready for bed.

  There was always music in the house, either live from Noni or Kirsty or from my old stereo, still going. It was a good life.

  Examining a gecko with Noni in Gum Leaf, her treehouse, 1976.

  Monographs and bureaucracy

  By this time I was installed in the steel shed at Pallarenda, where Len had been working for almost a year. He had erected rows of large particle-board shelves held up by concrete blocks, and a long bench perched atop of a string of 44-gallon drums. It didn’t look too good but it was functional. We had thousands of coral specimens, all cleaned in tubs of chlorine bleach of the kind used in swimming pools, most of which had been collected during trips to the Palm Islands. We had established a makeshift camping area on Orpheus Island, at the northern end of the Palms, and later kept scuba tanks and a compressor in a shed there.

  I started writing the first volume of the monograph series called Scleractinia of Eastern Australia in the steel shed. It had no insulation, let alone air conditioning, and was oppressively hot all summer. Len and I would be stripped to the waist, pouring with sweat, and I had to rest my writing hand on blotting paper lest sweat smudged my script. I eventually gave up and wrote the whole monograph series, and everything else I ever published, at Rivendell.

  It was the AIMS council that decided my monographs would be a joint production between AIMS and James Cook University. I was never consulted about this, nor presumably was Michel Pichon, a Frenchman newly arrived from Madagascar, who was made a co-author. Michel contributed an account of Psammocora, an obscure genus of corals I knew little about. This helped fill the first volume of the series, which even so remained precariously slim. But I had to go ahead and produce it quickly as AIMS was anxious to have its first major publication on show.
>
  The basic thrust of that first volume was my original notion that corals vary their growth form with environment, something that can only be studied by divers. The implication was that the taxonomy of museum workers of old was wrong, an idea that John Wells was starting to agree with. Not surprisingly, when this was published there were many objections. Some came from European palaeontologists funded by the petroleum industry, coral reefs being good indicators of underlying oil deposits. Pat Mather, still apparently outraged at my original appointment, wrote a furious letter to the Minister for Science saying that this was what happened when novices dabbled in taxonomy.

  Don’t trouble yourself too much, Pat, the coin will drop sooner or later.

  Red Gilmartin dismissed all this with a wave of his hand, but called in a couple of extra reviewers ‘just for appearances’. John Wells wrote that he found the volume ‘refreshingly original’; David Stoddart said that it was ‘returning coral taxonomy to the reality of the reef’. I don’t know what Michel Pichon thought of these goings-on; I doubt that this was how things were done in France.

  Maya Wijsman-Best, a Dutch coral taxonomist who had recently completed her PhD in New Caledonia, enthusiastically agreed to work with me on volume two, which would cover the next group of corals, her specialty. Maya proved to be a kindred spirit and accompanied me on several field trips. She also helped with the historical side of things, linking in the old monographs and formal taxonomic protocol. It was a good partnership and I was sorry when it ended. This volume, published in 1977, was a relatively unhurried affair and attracted good reviews, probably due to the range of corals it covered, which were less contentious because most didn’t have elaborate growth forms.

  This was also about the time that AIMS moved from Pallarenda to its new headquarters in remote bushland about forty minutes’ drive south of Townsville. A lasting tribute to bureaucratic know-how, the choice of this site has to be one of the dumbest decisions in the history of Australian science, for it meant the entire staff had to spend over an hour driving to and from work every day, for no reason whatsoever. Furthermore, it ensured that AIMS was isolated from both the city and the university.

  Many years later, when I was given the task of producing a history of the first twenty-five years of AIMS, I was determined to find out how this crazy decision had come about. It was all because three members of the council had hired a helicopter and thought the site, with its long beachfront, looked beautiful. And so it does, especially for those with helicopters. It’s rather less attractive for those who must drive there and back every day.

  My laboratory at AIMS: the shed at Cape Pallarenda, AIMS’s original site.

  To his great credit, Max Day visited AIMS from time to time to see how it was getting on, and even after his hundredth birthday in 2015, he remained interested in the people he knew from those early times. I used to take him around the labs on these visits and so heard much about the aspirations of the institute’s founders, some of which seem rather quaint in retrospect: the top scientists would receive a higher salary than the director; no staff would be permitted to hold grants from external sources; the primary commitment of the institute would be to providing the science for the future management and conservation of the Great Barrier Reef. The first of these never happened, the second lasted three years, but the last was reality for about twenty.

  Money was virtually unlimited during those years, something I found intimidating because it meant that there was no excuse for any scientist not to achieve their wildest dreams. Nevertheless, it wasn’t all rosy at the beginning because of an ongoing war between the scientists and the administration, with the council occasionally butting in with a left-fielder. Several of the original scientists were Americans who loved the Australian way of doing things, except when it came to being told no by a bureaucrat. They stayed for a few years, got sick of it and went home. I was just glad to have my job, and soon learned how the games were played.

  ‘Hey Charlie,’ said George Melville one afternoon after a council meeting, ‘listen to this.’

  I knew he had been recording council meetings, supposedly to help him draft the minutes. He took his tape recorder from his desk drawer and knew precisely the right place to go to.

  ‘I’m concerned,’ I heard the chairman say, ‘that a few of the scientists seem to be just doing ordinary work. What’s Veron doing? We do cutting-edge science here, not his sort of thing. I think his work should be reviewed.’

  Six months later I was walking past George’s office again when he called me in. Out came the tape recorder.

  ‘We need two or three more scientists on staff like Veron,’ the chairman said, ‘people who are getting recognised. We should give him a promotion to set an example. Make a note of that, George.’

  I didn’t exactly have a meteoric rise at AIMS. In fact I stayed on the bottom rung, the lowliest of the scientists, longer than any other scientist in the institute’s history. No matter, I had a good job if I could put up with George – and I found that easier than most. Then I went from the bottom rung to the top in eight years, which is also a record.

  Despite the good intentions of the founders of AIMS, some bad ideas followed. One was that scientists should be grouped into programs and not treated as individuals. That was not good in my view because it tended to demean the individuals concerned, but more importantly, I always copped the job of leading a reef research group, and that covered about half the institute’s scientists. At first, being a program leader meant little more than signing leave application forms, a problem I solved by signing a pile of them and leaving them on the reception desk in the institute’s lobby for anybody to fill in. The next job wasn’t so easy; I had to approve (what a repugnant word that is) applications for promotion. My natural inclination was to just approve them all, especially if they fitted somebody else’s guidelines, but this didn’t go down at all well with the administration, who wanted promotions to be their prerogative anyway. So, drawing a little inspiration from the CSIRO, I typed up a personal performance evaluation form, which staff needed to fill out before being considered for promotion.

  I hadn’t foreshadowed where this would go in the hands of the administration, for within a couple of years a performance evaluation was a compulsory annual event for everybody, which meant that everybody had to have a ‘supervisor’. Then everybody had to have a ‘next-level supervisor’. All very hierarchical. It meant that a supervisor could report on everybody they supervised, and vice versa. This quickly became the weapon of choice for staff to bludgeon each other.

  Still, life at AIMS was seldom without interesting interludes. One morning, Robyn Williams, presenter of the popular radio program The Science Show, walked into my office. He’d intended to interview me about my work but now had to hurry to catch a plane; the interview would have to wait. But in the half-hour he had, would I talk about something – anything – interesting? He placed his tape recorder on my desk and switched it on.

  I talked about something I did indeed find interesting: how people had once lived under the reefs of the Great Barrier Reef. It was, I thought, a fascinating subject, for when Aboriginal people first came to Australia the last ice age was in full swing and the sea level was far below where it is today. The whole of the Great Barrier Reef was high and dry and people would have hunted on it for thousands of years, and presumably used the limestone caves under the reefs for shelter.

  I was delighted when my talk was broadcast on The Science Show a few weeks later. AIMS’s newly appointed director (this was in the days after Red) was not. He had just returned from Canberra, where he had been talking up the institute to politicians, and when he heard the broadcast he assumed that I’d spun some wild, April-fool-type yarn. I was summoned to his office

  The director looked up at me and just started swearing. Something about me making AIMS the laughing stock of the nation. When I shrugged that off he turned scarlet and demanded I clear my desk and get the hell out of the place.
/>   Sacked again? This was getting monotonous.

  But when other members of the council were asked for their agreement to sack me, one of them said he thought my talk was ‘really interesting’, and that it was good to see an AIMS scientist ‘thinking outside the envelope’. This guy was a geologist and would have known about sea level changes, if not the history of Aboriginal people. That afternoon a piece of the director’s notepaper arrived in my pigeonhole with ‘Sorry Charlie’ scribbled on it.

  My file remained with George, who presumably was enjoying the whole affair, until the next council meeting. Shortly after that I was promoted, so I sent the director a note saying how good it was to see that AIMS had luminaries on the council who knew something about science . . .

  But it all went downhill again a few weeks later when the governor-general, Sir Zelman Cowen, visited AIMS. The director and his status-conscious wife were in a great tizz over this – we were all told to dress neatly and then casually stand at strategic places around the institute as the official party made their tour. When the G-G and his wife came to my lab I was gleefully waiting. He stopped, looked at me and said, ‘Charlie Veron – you work here?’

  ‘Sure do, Big Z,’ I said.

  Sir Zelman had been vice-chancellor of the University of New England when I was there. He’d had possums in his roof, which Ric and I were asked to catch. Later I got to know his family a little. Big Z was our nickname for him, which I think he liked.

  I left the director and his wife, both aghast at my insolence, guessing about that one.

  The Reef expeditions