My field trips up and down the Great Barrier Reef blur together because I did so many between 1973 and 1980 and they reached into every corner. In those years money flowed freely, allowing me to study The Reef in its entirety. I’m probably the only person who’s ever had such opportunities.
Long trips, scheduled at the right time of year to places I particularly needed to study, and with the right team of helpers aboard, took a lot of planning, and couldn’t tolerate delays because of the timing of the monsoons. I also had the relentless demands of the monographs. I never had to cancel a trip because of illness or injury, but a couple of times that prospect came too close for comfort.
One day, three weeks before my fifth trip to the far northern Great Barrier Reef, I swerved to miss a wallaby while riding my motorbike home from work and came off at high speed. The bike was a wreck, one side of my helmet was sheared off, and my left collarbone was poking through my blood-soaked jacket. A colleague took me to hospital, where I was strapped up but not, I thought, the way I should have been. So I went to a bone specialist, who did a better job and told me to keep my collarbone strapped for two months.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m off on a month-long diving trip and we’re leaving in three weeks.’
‘Mate, you’re not going diving anywhere in three weeks. Forget it.’
‘Charlie, you’re not going diving,’ said the personnel officer at AIMS, clearly thinking of liabilities, a fledgling concept at that time. But the diving officer, an adventurous type who understood the scientific value of the trip, sided with me, no doubt because he was me.
It was a good trip, made possible because I had an old ‘long johns’ wetsuit that could be hitched over my undamaged shoulder while leaving the other shoulder free. There was no problem getting into the water – I just jumped – but getting out was another matter. I managed to slowly pull myself up on the leg of an outboard motor and then climb painfully into a zodiac.
The bone specialist occasionally treated other people from AIMS, always asking if they knew the idiot who went diving with a smashed collarbone. I admit this particular bone remains a little unusual, especially as I broke it again years later while showing my daughter how to do handstands, but the collection from that trip, with a dozen new species, sure made it worthwhile.
Another diving trip was memorable not for being painful, just dangerous. It was to the southern Great Barrier Reef, so different from the north it feels like it’s in a faraway country. The Reef is much wider and the water deeper. Cays are strewn throughout the central region and high, or continental, islands are scattered along the coast. I have only been to the outer reefs of the far south a couple of times, and this particular trip was the maiden voyage of the Hero, the homemade steel boat of Cocky Watkins, a seaman of a bygone era when there was a living to be made from plundering wrecks and catching whatever happened to be around.
I wanted to go to the Pompey Complex, 200 kilometres from the coast. This has the biggest tidal range of eastern Australia, which, given the mass of reefs the tide surges through, makes it one of the most dangerous places for boats imaginable. We arrived in the dead of night, in a howling gale and thundering rain. Most of our company were seasick beyond caring.
‘Fuck this place – haven’t got a bloody clue where we are!’ Cocky yelled at me over the noise of the wind and waves as his boat spiralled around in a network of currents we both knew could reach 8 knots, and which made his echo-sounder jump from 90 metres to near zero in a second.
There being no satellite navigation in those days, just the same old scarily inaccurate charts, we anchored taking pot luck, and Cocky went to bed muttering that there was nothing else he could do. I had no idea what else might be done either, but I spent the night in the wheelhouse, in the dark except for the ghostly glow of the boat’s console lights. Outside it was pitch-black and the noise of the gale thrashing the wheelhouse drowned out even the monotonous chugging of the boat’s generator. The compass kept swinging wildly and the boat kept lurching this way and that. Dawn brought a scary sight, for by then the tide was out and we were almost enclosed by reefs. These formed such a barrier – 100 kilometres long – to the ebbing tide that the sea level was visibly higher to the west than the east.
The Pompey Complex remains imprinted on the minds of all who venture there: dangerous and exciting, with caves, caverns and cliff faces amid boiling currents twisting and turning down a network of deltaic channels that thread their way through masses of reefs of every shape and kind. All very fascinating and with a geological history that has yet to be told.
A wall of reef, Pompey Complex.
Reefs like the Pompey Complex aside, the more diving I did, the more carefree I was, and ultimately I just watched out for sea snakes. Collecting corals often means hammering away with a chisel, and that inevitably stirs up a cloud of sediment and makes a great deal of noise. If a snake should come along to investigate – and they tend to be curious – it would likely be whacked in the face by my fins. Such treatment will make any snake angry, and unbeknown to me they often started attacking me. I once saw a photo of myself hammering away oblivious to four furious snakes on me. They can’t bite through a wetsuit, but even so, they are horribly venomous, much more so than land snakes.
Once, on a trip to the Swain Reefs of the southern Great Barrier Reef, Len and I were swimming over a wide expanse of sand about 15 metres down when we both stopped to watch a snake gracefully swim up to the surface for a breath. When it started down it saw my bubbles and headed straight for me. It’s easy to fin snakes off, so I began swimming gradually upwards in a wide spiral, but the snake kept trying to get at me through the turbulence of my fins and I started getting tired. After about fifteen minutes of this it saw Len’s bubbles, left me and went straight for him. Len did as I’d done, until, on the surface and exhausted, he grabbed the snake and flung it into our boat, where it could wait until we chucked it back. I sometimes read in books that sea snakes are not aggressive: that’s mostly true, but not for divers working underwater and creating a lot of disturbance, especially in snakes’ mating season.
As for sharks, they may well be dangerous in some places, but in all my time diving on reefs, keeping close company with thousands of them, including tigers, bull sharks and hammerheads, I’ve only been convincingly attacked once. We were at Tijou Reef again, doing a transect of the reef flat using a long measuring tape. We’d chosen a place where, according to our aerial photograph, there was a large lagoon within the reef flat. Our job could be done on snorkel as it was all shallow, except for the lagoon.
We reached the lagoon late in the afternoon, and as we had a scuba tank with us, I decided to go down the edge to take a look. It was surprisingly deep. I reached a depth of about 15 metres when two sharks turned up. They weren’t particularly big, 3 metres or so, and would have been of no interest except that they started working themselves into a frenzy, zipping around at terrific speed, arching their backs and making sudden turns. They were clearly thinking about having me for dinner. I was able to fend them off with a heavy chunk of dead coral and by backing myself into a crevice in the reef.
When I reached the top of the reef, having been protected all the way by the crevice, the sharks attacked repeatedly, one crashing into me, open-mouthed, with such force that I was winded. The water surface was about 3 metres above the reef, so picking my time as best I could, I swam upwards as fast as I dared – going up fast being potentially lethal for divers – but when I surfaced there was no boat. I yelled out, then fled back to my crevice.
I hadn’t seen the boat, a tinny, because it was between me and the setting sun, but fortunately my buddies had been watching the sharks. Almost immediately the boat appeared above me, and again I surfaced as fast as I dared, and vaulted over the tinny’s side with my weight belt and tank on, a feat I have never remotely been able to repeat. My friends had been thinking that being chased by sharks was a joke – we’d been diving with them for weeks – until I pulled off my wetsuit.
Parts of my chest were already turning blue.
The following morning, five of us, all on scuba, me at the back, returned to the edge of the lagoon to take another look. Sharks came barrelling in. I took one blurred photo before clearing out – it had seventeen grey reef sharks in it.
Years later I overheard a conversation at lunch about the leg of an outboard being attacked by sharks. Where did that happen? Tijou Reef lagoon. There’s something weird about that place: a shark nightclub, perhaps?
By 1977, after working up and down the Great Barrier Reef for four years, I had developed a yearning to go further afield, especially south to see how coral diversity dropped off at higher latitudes. Lord Howe Island, about the same latitude as the Solitary Islands but 600 kilometres from the coast, has the southernmost coral reef in the world. I also knew that it was considered to be one of the most beautiful places in all Australia.
‘Where’s that?’ Red asked when I sought his approval to mount an expedition there. My job was to work on the Great Barrier Reef, not elsewhere.
‘Right at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, more or less,’ I said, aware that Red’s Australian geography wasn’t the best.
In January the island’s schoolroom would be empty, so I arranged to borrow it. This way our team, plus Kirsty, Noni and a friend of Noni’s, had a place to stay for nothing. We spent a glorious month on the island, diving and working on the corals from a zodiac we brought over. I’d been spending too much time travelling and writing monographs; this was a trip to be enjoyed. And we did. The divers spent most of the day out on the water, then we’d all go for long walks, watching tropicbirds, terns and shearwaters doing their last fishing for the day, and twice seeing the little flightless woodhen endemic to the island, and at one time facing extinction. The island, listed as World Heritage only a year after the Great Barrier Reef, was like no other I’d ever seen, hosting a unique, subtropical mountain forest whose plants were akin to New Caledonia’s as much as to Australia’s, and with a geological history to match.
Not surprisingly, the coral communities of the island were also unlike any others. Except for a single species only found in temperate waters, all were immigrants from the Great Barrier Reef, as were the corals of the Solitary Islands, but the species mix was very different. I believe the corals probably came and went from the island at frequent intervals, geologically speaking, coming in on the warm, south-flowing East Australian Current from the Great Barrier Reef, and being wiped out by the cold, east-flowing Antarctic Circumpolar Current from southern Australia, should that make an incursion north of its usual path. This would explain why several species only had one or a few colonies on Lord Howe, not enough to be a self-sustaining population.
We found colonies of one such rarity, each brightly coloured with individual patterns. I photographed them all but collected only one specimen, fearing that the species might be on the verge of extinction. I called it Acanthastrea lordhowensis, not the best of names, because I later found it in many other countries, and in some it was common. Being so beautifully colourful and easy to culture, it has become one of the most prized species for reef aquaria, with thousands of colonies now to be found throughout Europe and America.
My month on Lord Howe also led to a discovery of a different sort. A week after I arrived, the local paper (a page or two of foolscap printed with a Gestetner machine) included an article about our team. Shortly afterwards, I was filling scuba tanks on the beach when a middle-aged man approached. I’d just watched him and his buddies row ashore after a day’s fishing. ‘Are you Dr Veron?’ he asked. And when I said yes, ‘Any relationship to Donald Veron?’
‘He’s my father.’
‘You know, everything your father says is true – the whole lot. But I doubt it will get him anywhere,’ he added. He turned to walk back down the beach.
‘And who are you?’ I asked, somewhat taken aback.
‘I’m Justice Kirby, chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission.’
Perhaps Dad’s not nuts after all. He’ll be interested in this.
But he shrugged it off when I told him. My father knew what he was doing and why. Along with many others, he went on to play a part in driving the then police commissioner, Frederick Hanson, out of his job, revealing the corruption that brought down the Askin government. Hanson later suicided. I still have a tea chest full of documents from this long and bitter battle; they make quite a story.
The following year, 1978, AIMS commissioned its first oceangoing research vessel, which was to be named after Sir Henry Basten, the first AIMS chairman. However, Sir Henry declined the honour and so it was called the Lady Basten, after his wife, a name more suited to a ferry than a research vessel. No matter, I was asked to be in charge of its shakedown cruise, one that needed to go well because there’d be a maritime inspector aboard who had to approve all operations involving safety at sea. With a free hand to take her where I wanted, I chose a zigzag track across the Coral Sea to the Chesterfield Islands, near New Caledonia. We would be at sea for about a month.
This turned out to be the sort of trip I love. There are not many reefs or islands in the Coral Sea but each is very different from the others, and we never knew what to expect. Most of this sea is now a marine reserve, nearly a million square kilometres in area, but when we went there almost nothing was known about it. It was fabulous wilderness; there were no other boats, just one extraordinary place after another: thickly forested cays, grassy cays like Raine Island, and sometimes just reefs without cays, each unique and swarming with life. I’d love to have had the time to make a study of the corals of each island and reef, something I still need to do.
The Chesterfields proved to be a great discovery, the most pristine reefs I’d ever seen and ever will see. They were swarming with fish of every size and description, so much so that I had to constantly shoo them away when photographing corals. On one very memorable occasion I dived from the back of the Lady Basten, did my work, and was using the last of my air to collect a species of algae a colleague wanted when I heard the thump of a grouper, a common warning sound they make with their tail. I looked up to see the back of a Queensland grouper slowly rise from behind a nearby knoll of reef. It turned and came slowly towards me.
I had never heard of a grouper big enough to swallow a human, but this one had a head almost the width of a whale shark’s and a body the size of a car. I would have scrambled for cover in the coral if I’d had any air left, but as I hadn’t I took off my tank, thinking it might like to swallow that first. I had seen that groupers catch their dinner by suddenly opening their mouth and sucking their prey in, and this one could clearly swallow both me and my tank in a single gulp. The fish ignored the tank and moved right up against me, at one stage its huge eye almost touching my mask. I didn’t have far to go before reaching the safety of the Basten, but just then that felt like a very long journey. When I reached the surface the grouper was still right beside me, but then it turned and swam slowly back down. Maybe it had just wanted me out of its territory? I was only too happy to oblige.
All this had been witnessed by several people on the Basten, and a member of the crew was able to get his camera in time to take a blurred shot; the grouper was well over twice as long as me, more than 3 metres. I know of no record of such a fish, although there have been unconfirmed reports of exceptionally big Queensland groupers.
Of course a lot of people think this is just my Fish That Got Away story.
Lord Howe Island lagoon, the southernmost coral reef in the world.
Acanthastrea lordhowensis at the Solitary Islands.
Inge of Orpheus
A decade ago, James Cook University’s Orpheus Island Research Station was not as upmarket as the Heron or Lizard island stations, but now it’s a place to be proud of. I’m proud of it too. Here’s why:
I first had a good look at Orpheus from the wheelhouse of the James Kirby in 1973, on the first day of the Stoddart expedition. We reached the southern
end of the Palm Islands about six hours out of Townsville, with most of our company so seasick they were already thinking the expedition wasn’t such a good idea. So I stayed in the wheelhouse with Davie Duncan while he told me about the history of each of the islands we passed. The main island, Great Palm, was an Aboriginal reserve with a horrific history of violence and alcohol abuse. Another island had a leper colony run by an ancient Canadian nun – I’d had no idea Australia still had leprosy.
Davie had been fishing around the Palms for most of his life and knew every detail of all the coastlines. So, just to make a point, he brought the Kirby close to the western side of Orpheus Island, one of the northernmost of the Palm group. With a rocky peninsula straight ahead I wondered what he was up to, until we came to within a stone’s throw of the rocks and the beautiful white beach of Orpheus’s Pioneer Bay opened abeam of us.
‘They reckon a mad red-headed Austrian woman lives there,’ said Davie. ‘Hangs the red light out for fishermen, so they say.’
I swept Davie’s binoculars along the lonely beach but saw no naked nymph frolicking in the waves. However, it did occur to me that this place might make a good base for diving trips. Davie thought so too, but then we both forgot about it.
The following year I took two boatloads of students there. We camped on another island and went diving on the west coast of Orpheus from a tinny and an inflatable, both old wrecks. We’d arranged to meet in the middle of the island for lunch, but a storm came barrelling in. I was in the old inflatable with two others, battling to keep it going in thundering rain, and spent an anxious hour searching for the tinny. Then, through a break in the downpour, we spied it high on the beach of Pioneer Bay.
We went ashore. There were no students we could see, only the remains of an overturned dory, and a sandy path disappearing into the scrub. Up the path we went.
‘Hello,’ came a greeting in a cheerful, heavily accented female voice. ‘I suppose you vant der crust also? How many crusts can one loaf have? Can you tell me dat?’
A Life Underwater Page 15