A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  It was then I remembered Davie’s comment of the year before. ‘Davie Duncan reckons some woman lives here,’ I whispered to Susie, one of the students.

  ‘Who?’ asked Susie.

  ‘Don’t know. He just said she’s an Austrian – some sort of hermit. Well, if she’s friendly, at least we’ll get out of the rain. I’m freezing.’

  The woman in question emerged from the door of a small house that looked as if it belonged in a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. Maybe a witch’s house?

  ‘You are very, very vet,’ she observed. ‘I sink you can’t get any vetter even if you stand in der rain all day. Take your clothes off. I have plenty of honey und bread but not de tiniest crust is left. Vy do you not tell me you vere coming? Den I bake lots of bread viz lots of crusts! You are velcome even if I don’t know you are coming. But dis bread I have just dis morning baked.

  ‘I know about you all,’ she went on, naming the three of us. ‘I am Inge, I get you towels, you look like drowned rats.’

  I struggled out of my wetsuit and my two companions did the same.

  ‘You live here all alone?’ I asked when Inge returned with some plates, a couple of towels, and a platter piled with rather mutilated loaves of bread. She was of medium height with a serene, gentle face that radiated goodwill and empathy.

  ‘Never! I am alvays Yellow und Mausie viz.’ She nodded towards two dogs. Yellow looked like a cross between a labrador and a dingo. He was obviously named after the colour of his very expressive eyes. If you don’t try to pat me, they said, I won’t bite you. We found instant understanding.

  So began my long friendship with Inge Moessler, one that was to become very important to us both. She wasn’t mad, nor did she hang out the red light, instead she was one of the most interesting people I have ever known. I came away from that first trip with my head spinning. Being a scientist with an uncompromising approach to anything supernatural, I had a hard time believing she was as clairvoyant as she appeared to be. No doubt it was living alone on an island that helped make her different from anybody else I’d ever met.

  It didn’t take me long to realise we had discovered a perfect base for field work. There was a level patch of ground where we could pitch a permanent tent, and an old shed where we could safely keep our scuba tanks, compressor, and other diving equipment.

  Over the following years, I returned to Pioneer Bay most months and so came to know Inge very well. After I was through with the day’s diving, she and I would usually sit on the overturned dory on the beach and sip wine as we watched the sun go down. Inge always did this; she said it was her way of going to church, a special place where she could feel particularly connected with Nature. I could see why. Between daylight and night, the beach, the headlands, the sea, the sky, and the distant sawtooth row of mountains of the mainland all change colour in unison so rapidly that it’s hard to absorb one panorama before it turns into another. It’s of no comfort to reassure yourself you’ll watch it again tomorrow, for tomorrow it will all be completely different. Sometimes the panorama is overwhelmingly red, the sea and sky the colour of blood and the mountains black. The next night, maybe there’ll be a silver sunset, with cold clouds almost devoid of colour. For me, most beautiful of all is the sunset through heavy, low, water-laden monsoon clouds. These go deep purple, higher clouds go pale pink, both are pierced by shafts of bright yellow light. The sea, in response, is silver, perhaps slashed with red while the mountains stay black. All a riotous display of nature gone berserk, as if painted by a heavenly maniac intent on proving that his genius is indeed infinite.

  At these times I learned a lot about Inge’s incredibly convoluted life, which was packed with highs and lows few could imagine: being banished from her aristocratic home when she gave birth to a daughter while still at school; surviving the horrors of wartime Germany; having an amalgam of husbands and lovers in Africa, Brazil and Europe; living under sheets of corrugated iron next to a Sydney rubbish dump; moving to Alice Springs with a roo shooter, before coming to Orpheus Island to find solitude.

  After the first glass of wine Inge would start chatting about this and that. Her accent made her stories hard to follow at times, especially as most would jump from one continent to another and get entangled with other stories. After a second glass, she’d often include snippets about her love affairs, of which she sometimes gave me intimate accounts. If she downed a third glass, she would usually have forgotten by morning that she’d told me anything.

  I discovered we had the same love of classical music, particularly lieder, and more importantly the same love of Nature. In her own way she was somewhat religious, with a personal deity much like the god of my childhood. It was intriguing to be with someone who communed with Nature as I had done all my life, and who used to effortlessly meditate in her younger days as I occasionally still did. Yet she was the very opposite of me when it came to thinking about the natural world. I always yearned to understand it, whereas she was content just to feel it. She had a bedroom with two walls missing so she could be part of the surrounding bush. A pair of small birds had a nest above her bed and had been coming back to the same nest for years: I knew they were sun birds and also a little of their nesting behaviour; Inge just loved being accepted by them. She always knew where they were and what they were doing. Her little python came and went as he pleased, as did dozens of other animals, including Lisle her hen, which laid an egg somewhere in her bedroom most days.

  As time went on, Inge came to know me as well as any person ever had, or at least she would know what I thought and why I thought it. She was the same age as my mother would have been, so in some vague sense we had a mother–son relationship, which helped me through the nightmare that lay ahead.

  By 1978 I had used Inge’s place as a base for diving dozens of times. I never thought of it as anything other than Inge’s place, which was foolish in hindsight as I should have realised that only a very rich person could own such a place. And so I was shocked when she told me that her lease, which was an oyster lease, had expired and that she had been ordered to leave the island within a year, removing her house and all other property when she did. I wrote to government departments of all sorts to try to get this changed, but without success – Inge was going to have to leave her island.

  Then one evening at sunset she murmured, ‘Dis is such a perfect place for students,’ and right then I decided to try to convince James Cook that it needed a marine station at Pioneer Bay.

  Within a month I had Cyril Burdon-Jones (no less) in a tinny (of all things) heading from the mainland to the island. After running aground several times, we finally got ashore and received a warm welcome from Inge, who then castigated me for not bothering to check a tide table; we had come when a spring tide was at its lowest. She had lunch ready for us, laid out on her wobbly trestle table under a big rainforest tree that grew in front of her house. The professor made a tour of inspection.

  ‘The buildings,’ he said, ‘are not of a nature one normally associates with universities. And the generator,’ he observed, ‘appears to be in need of the attention of an electrician, and perhaps of a mechanic also.’ Of the ‘toot’ – Inge’s gorgeous, falling-to-bits out-door dunny that afforded a commanding view of the surrounding rainforest – he offered no opinion at all.

  Inspection finished, we started lunch. Lisle the hen didn’t help by insisting on pacing up and down the trestle table where lobsters and coral trout were set out, but all things considered, the meal went off with fewer mishaps than normal for Pioneer Bay.

  Once back at the university the professor announced, not unexpectedly, that he didn’t think Pioneer Bay would make a suitable site for a marine station. ‘There are no proper facilities as would be required by a university. But,’ he added, ‘I did enjoy the trip, especially meeting Inge. She’s a very remarkable person.’

  Sarcastic old goat.

  But I was wrong: the professor and Inge had actually hit it off, as I was to see.

 
In the meantime I told Ken Back about Pioneer Bay. A keen yachtsman, he sailed over to check it out and not surprisingly fell in love with it. He realised it would make an excellent marine station for the university and immediately set about getting a new, long-term lease for Inge’s land. I promised to help on the condition that Inge would be allowed to live there.

  And that’s how the Orpheus Island Research Station came into being.

  Inge was given the unpaid job of manager of the station. Poor university – the administrator found her hard to take, so much so that I had to agree to be on a management committee so that the university could manage her. Me on a management committee! I had long ceased working for the university by then, but we managed well enough, until in 1986 her agreed tenure on the island expired, and this time she really did have to leave. The administrator rejoiced, the students protested, and Inge thought her life had ended.

  John Coll, a professor of chemistry at the university, and I bought Inge a little house on the bank of the Herbert River, just across the sea from her island. It was a rather ramshackle place on wooden stumps, but full of character and with a nice garden, which she could enjoy with her dogs. Of course she wasn’t happy there, it was nothing like her island.

  A couple of years on I was taking some students to the research station, which by then was well established, and stopped to see Inge on the way. It was her seventy-fifth birthday and we’d planned a celebration. She was in particularly good form, telling the students one mesmerising story after another, all in her heavy Austrian accent, difficult for those who didn’t know her as I did. Her stories were hard for the students to keep track of, especially as I frequently interjected with facetious comments, having heard the unabridged version of whatever she was on about many times before.

  ‘Charlie,’ one of the students blurted out, ‘why don’t you write all this down so we can follow it? Inge’s lived more lives than an alley cat.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said, ‘I’ll write a book and call it Inge the Alley Cat. Eh, Inge?’

  At such times, and there were plenty of them, Inge would just look at me with her calm grey eyes. You’ll keep, they would say.

  Next morning, while we were doing the washing-up, sure enough, she rounded on me, a big smile on her face. ‘So you are going to vite a book about me, are you?’ she said in her haughtiest voice. ‘And just vot vood you know about me?’

  Over the years I had, as is my nature, pieced Inge’s life story together, and it sure was an interesting one. Thus armed, I gave her the whole lot without mercy, including the juicy bits – especially the juicy bits. Inge just stared at me goggle-eyed. ‘I never told anyone dose tings!’ she stammered.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you I’m clairvoyant?’ said I. ‘But don’t worry, I can make up bits of fiction about the parts you’re really ashamed of.’

  ‘I am not ashamed of my life!’ she shouted at me, banging a frying pan down on the kitchen bench.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, continuing my game, still without a hint of mercy, ‘it should make interesting reading.’

  I had no intention of writing a book about Inge or anyone else, but I wanted to learn to touch-type and so it more or less started to write itself. After about a year, with much joy in anticipation, I printed it out for Inge to read, but disappointingly she didn’t explode; she just calmly corrected points of detail.

  A month later it all backfired. Inge’s daughter Ingrid, the child Inge had while still at school and whom she hadn’t seen in thirty years, came to visit her from France. Inge promptly sent Ingrid to Rivendell to see me and to read ‘her’ book. I told Ingrid it was only something I’d written for fun, and left her on the terrace to get on with it. A couple of hours later I went to see how she was doing and found her with tears streaming down her face.

  ‘Charlie, if you publish this it will break my father’s heart,’ Ingrid sobbed.

  The kindly man she had known as her father was Inge’s first husband, a paediatrician, by then very old and living where Inge had left him, in Ethiopia. Ingrid had just discovered that her biological father, in stark contrast, had been a Nazi war criminal of the worst kind. I was shocked at having caused so much grief.

  Many years later, Inge phoned me to say that her husband had died. ‘So now you can finish my book,’ she said.

  I pointed out that it had only existed on a thing called a floppy disk, which computers were no longer able to read.

  ‘No matter,’ she said cheerfully, ‘I still have dat copy you gave me – a little eaten by silverfish, but never mind. And I’ve fixed more of your mistakes. You never listen to me,’ she added.

  Inge had transformed her little house into a place she cared about. It was stuffed with knick-knacks, had vines on the walls and pot plants everywhere, big green frogs in the toilet, and all manner of birds coming and going through her ever-open windows: it was a place that Robinson Crusoe would have appreciated and she had come to call home. But her health had steadily deteriorated, her spine was falling apart. After many battles I installed her in a nursing home in Townsville, despite her insistence that she would kill herself by starvation. I saw her every day; she always wanted me to read her some more of her book, and she usually had me correct something or other. She was convinced that it would be made into an epic movie starring Meryl Streep. However, as threatened, she refused to eat anything.

  On 10 January 2003 I read her the last few pages of her book.

  ‘I sink you are right,’ she murmured.

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘About God. Dere is no God.’

  She fell asleep. Late that night the nursing home rang to tell me she had passed on.

  ‘Thank heaven for that,’ was all I could say. And I meant it. Watching someone suffer as much as she had was gut-wrenching.

  Inge and I were so different in many ways yet so very much the same in others. I could talk to her without words. We could listen to lieder or opera as if we were one and the same person, saying nothing because the music said it all for us both. She alone had the know-how to stop me being overtaken by the frenetic world of the day and reconnect me with Nature, reconnect me with who I really was.

  I still have her visitor’s book from Pioneer Bay. It’s crammed with jokes and anecdotes in the many languages she spoke. It also has words from grateful people she rescued from themselves, allowing them to find a new life and be free.

  Inge was published just after she died.13 Ken Back, John Coll, Terry Done and Issie Bennett added words about it on the back cover, but somehow I doubt that a copy ever reached Meryl Streep.

  We spread Inge’s ashes on the beach at Pioneer Bay. I then sat on the side of a dinghy and watched the water ripple over the coral. The tide came in and went out but I didn’t notice.

  Two daughters

  By 1977 Rivendell had been transformed from a new house into a comfortable home, its solitude and appearance evidence of a way of life utterly apart from town. By then we had electricity, so the kitchen and bathroom taps worked, courtesy of a pump that drew water from the river. We had cleared a lot of chinee apple and the grounds looked more like a secluded park than a patch of scrub. When we weren’t working we read books, talked or, best of all, listened to Noni getting on top of yet another piano piece.

  My own little patch of seclusion by the river continued to be very important to me. It fell into deep shadow before sunset, well ahead of the surrounding property, allowing the water to sparkle and the treetops to shine. Birds of all descriptions came from everywhere and the river’s surface constantly rippled from fish and turtles feeding, and the occasional snake daring to make a crossing. There were no foreign noises. After a day’s work, problems seemed to get left behind as soon as I entered and sat on my tree root, or perhaps a folding chair. I could sit there, soak it all up and let my mind drift into emptiness. Just for a while. Then I would resurface, calm and relaxed. I might then think about a trip or perhaps plan an article.

  In all, Rivendell was li
ving up to Tolkien’s description. Our former life in Townsville seemed a long way off; we felt we had started anew and so we decided to try, once again, for another child. This time Kirsty’s pregnancy went well, but it was not to be. The miscarriage came at short notice, so she wasn’t battered around like the first time. It was a setback for sure, but with the life we were leading she recovered quickly, mentally and physically. Noni, on the other hand, clearly felt it was her own personal loss.

  When Noni was eight I arranged to do some diving for a film crew who were making a documentary about reef research. The crew, Noni and I went out on the Lady Basten to Keeper Reef, about 75 kilometres from Townsville. Noni was very keen to try scuba diving and although I’d never heard of anybody so young using scuba I couldn’t see why she shouldn’t give it a go – she was a good swimmer and had a steady nerve. I gave her a crash diving course on the back deck, showing her how to clear her ears, how to get water out of her mask, how her regulator worked, and explaining gas pressure – why we should neither stay down too long nor come up too fast. She had a wonderful time; her only regrets were that there wasn’t time for a second dive and she didn’t see a shark.

  Noni did more diving at Orpheus Island. This time I borrowed a small tank for her to use, and from Inge’s boat we could dive down the edge of the reef, well beyond the beach. Noni was always keen on collecting things and would point out bits of coral for me. We went on several dives this way, and then she gave me the fright of my life – she vanished. For the first time ever I found myself fighting panic. She had no snorkel or life vest, we were near deep murky water and she would not know the way to go. She was totally dependent on me looking after her.

  I went for the surface; she wasn’t there. Battling to keep my head in some sort of working order I started to swim in what I hoped was a spiral out from where I’d last seen her. After what seemed an eternity, there she was, watching some fish and waiting for me to catch up. Relief flooded every part of my being. I had to clear my mask, not of seawater, but of tears. On the next dive we were connected by a float rope.