‘Charlie, I gather that you’re one of the main users of our computer, so I want you to form a computer users’ committee and report on what we should be doing with it,’ said John Bunt, the director.
I’m not forming any bloody committee.
‘Sure, John, love to. We’ve got one of those new electric ones, haven’t we?’
That was close. Doesn’t he know the computer is only used for playing chess?
About this time, I took my Commodore to AIMS for some driving lessons. The manager of the computer centre was aghast.
‘Well,’ he said, glaring at me, ‘if you want to go it alone, don’t come to us for help.’
So I didn’t. I took my computer back home and started entering species records onto a spreadsheet, which I could figure out myself. I called the file Coral Geographic and that was the start of what was to become a very big headache, for distributions depended on taxonomy, and coral taxonomy at that time had a long way to go. The one saving grace was that contour maps of species richness don’t need names, and so as I worked through the many complexities of my book Corals in Space and Time, I decided to bite the bullet and include a contour map of the global diversity of corals at species level, a much more complex undertaking than maps at generic level. This was beyond the capability of my computer, not to mention my ever-doubtful skill to use it, so I traded it in for an Apple and with Mary’s help (well, to be honest, she just did it) eventually produced a map generated by a mixture of a spatial data program and some numerical fiddles. This compilation clearly showed something I had long known but apparently nobody else had – it was the Indonesia-Philippines archipelago which had the world’s greatest diversity of coral, not the Great Barrier Reef.
This finding created a good deal of consternation among conservation agencies because the Great Barrier Reef, by then given World Heritage status and managed by a big Australian government agency, had long been assumed to offer permanent protection for the world’s centre of reef diversity. The reality, as shown by my map, was that few of the world’s mega-diverse reefs occurred within any well-managed marine park or had any legal protection. Worse, these reefs, which at the time I believed to be confined to the Indonesia-Philippines archipelago, were in a region where human population densities were high by most world standards, and so was the environmental impact of all these people. Such concerns soon precipitated one of the biggest information quests in the history of marine biology – to delineate the global centre of coral diversity, the boundary enclosing a region with at least five hundred species.
The name Coral Triangle came after a bottle or two of wine on the back deck of a yacht, which had been charted by Conservation International for a group of us to survey the corals and fish of Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea. In my experience, bottles of wine often have something to do with such developments.
The questions that naturally arose were: where exactly is the centre of coral diversity, and how distinctive is it? These were simple questions but they took a dozen expeditions, mostly run by American conservation agencies, to answer. I went on most of them, working with other field-going coral specialists as time and opportunity allowed. The shape of the Coral Triangle kept changing, especially when we extended it to the east to include northern and eastern Papua New Guinea. In the end that left only one major unknown – the Solomon Islands. To tackle this, the Nature Conservancy chartered the FeBrina from Papua New Guinea, an excellent boat that we joined in Honiara in 2004. For the first time in years I felt I was back at sea doing what I used to do on beautiful undamaged reefs.
I digress. When we’d finished delineating it, the Coral Triangle had an area of 5.7 million square kilometres, but it wasn’t actually a triangle at all; it really had no particular shape, but no matter, the name stuck.38
The political response to our findings was astonishingly prompt. In September 2007, twenty-one world leaders attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sydney recommended the establishment of the Coral Triangle Initiative, for the protection of coastal and marine life in the region. The move was endorsed by the Indonesian government and launched at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Bali, in December of that year. That was an extraordinary event, with the delegates a mix of politicians, conservationists and religious leaders from the seven countries in the Coral Triangle region. I was given a central role but was told I had ten minutes to say my bit and was advised to leave science out of it. Indeed, it does seem that prayers more than science carried the day. Afterwards (when to my relief, a little booze had been furtively broken out) I kept repeating that I had no funding to carry on with this work, and that the information which had led to the identification of the Coral Triangle had never been published, and couldn’t be other than on a website, there being so much of it. That brought another prompt reaction. The US State Department and some conservation organisations promised money for a website. Then the Global Financial Crisis hit: goodbye website. The mapping went on hold, but there was much else to do, especially in taxonomy.
It has been curious to watch the development of the Coral Triangle Initiative and the science that surrounds it. The Coral Triangle is now the subject of excellent books as well as television documentaries, and scientific articles about it number in the hundreds. Full marks to the conservation agencies that played such an essential role in this development, but after that job was done they turned to management rather than exploration. I waved farewell at that point and am content to have done so. Our very big website soon took back the reins and now the Coral Triangle includes another country, Brunei, much to the consternation of the Coral Triangle minders, I’m sure.
Sorting corals on the back deck of the FeBrina at the Solomon Islands.
The global diversity of corals computed from Coral Geographic (coralsoftheworld.org).
Big Pictures
A boy and a book
In 1998, with Katie principally living with Kirsty, and a friend offering to look after Eviie at Rivendell, Mary and I were able to organise a working holiday on Norfolk Island. From the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Norfolk Island had been a penal colony, among the worst of Britain’s notorious colonial prisons and a place from which suicide was the only escape. The history of that time is still everywhere to be seen, especially the old prison with its grand gates leading to hell: such a contrast with the peaceful natural beauty of the place.
Because of its isolation I knew that the corals there were likely to be a depauperate but interesting lot, and they were, forming communities with a species mix not found anywhere else. There was next to no reef, but with clear water and nothing to disturb them, the corals grew in profusion in a shallow bay protected from the waves that hammer most of the coast. I had already named a new species from the island, Goniopora norfolkensis, collected for me decades earlier. On this trip I took what time I had to work out what species were present, but it seemed that several more might be found with further work, something I still hope to do.
Mary could only snorkel with me, for a very welcome reason: she was pregnant. Our son Martin was born in June of that year, a beautiful baby boy born without problems. Could it be that I was leading a normal life? Kirsty was always happy for us, but of course I wondered how she must have felt with so much going smoothly for Mary when it hadn’t for her.
By the time Hermatypic Corals of Japan was published (1995), a single, broadly cohesive global taxonomy of corals was becoming reasonably well established. Most old species based on single specimens had been amalgamated, and many new ones had been discovered, mainly from the vast amount of field work my colleagues and I had undertaken. However, the amount of unpublished work we had completed after research in so many countries was getting out of hand. I felt there was little point in publishing accounts of the corals of each country; what was needed was a Corals of the World.
Scoping a book of this size turned out to be a discouraging business; the job just looked too big, too compli
cated, and needed too many photographs. There were plenty of publishers willing to take it on, but the price they’d have to sell it for would put it beyond the reach of most students, certainly those in developing countries. I didn’t want to write a book just for rich people, I wanted it to be for those who would use it.
At this gloomy point we got an unexpected helping hand from John Jackson, who’d organised my trip to Clipperton Atoll. John was the owner of Odyssey Publishing, a small company based in San Diego, and he used to come to Australia about once a year to catch up with his shell-collecting buddies in Perth. He always stopped off at Rivendell on the way home.
‘You know, Charlie, Mary could build this book,’ he said as I was taking him to the airport for his homeward journey.
‘Don’t think so, John. She’s never so much as made a postcard.’
‘No harm in asking.’
John didn’t know the first thing about computers, in fact I had only recently persuaded him to get one, but he did know a lot about people.
Mary, who was already working on the science, said she would think about it. Then she bought a copy of QuarkXPress, a publishing program which at that time was a beginner’s nightmare. A week later she was building page designs.
I managed to convince Russ Reichelt, then director of AIMS, that the project was doable. The AIMS council thought so too, and agreed to pay the printing cost – more than half a million dollars – on condition that sales recouped it. That cost made it one of the most expensive printing jobs in Australia’s history. Another condition was that AIMS’s logo be on the spine as ‘publisher’; it was a millennial celebration project that would impress Canberra and send an up-yours to the CSIRO, who were trying to gobble AIMS up. Building the book would be expensive but fortunately Mary and I had obtained a grant to build an electronic key to identify corals, and that had much the same content, especially photographs, as a book would have. Well, sort of.
Mary bought a new, high-end computer for the job, with a top-of-the-range hard drive – of 19 gigabytes. I had thousands of photos, taken during my travels, but these weren’t nearly enough. Many people offered to help, and did so generously. There being no digital cameras in those days, all the photos were 35-millimetre transparencies and all had to be scanned, corrected, and sometimes scanned again. In the end we had 70 gigabytes of photos, which had to be stored in a bank of hard drives and laboriously backed up on tape. Every hard drive eventually failed and had to be replaced, but the back-up process Mary strictly followed always came to the rescue. Today, photographers return from trips with thousands of digital photos, all checked and sorted. I used to return with rolls of Kodachrome, never quite knowing what was on them.
In late 1999 our small team – Mary and me, my assistant Laura Carolan and our can-do friend Gary Williams – finally popped the cork. The bottle had waited years for this moment, years of solid work that were hectic, often frustrating but always rewarding. It was a good team.
I took our book from Rivendell to the printer in Melbourne on our tape drive, still having no publisher for it. The coral bible, as it came to be called by others, was launched at the Ninth International Coral Reef Symposium in Bali amid a fair measure of applause.39 Later it attracted some awards, including the Darwin Medal at the following Coral Reef Symposium.40 Although the book was sold to students at not much more than the cost price, it recovered AIMS’s investment and went on to make a modest profit. That’s amazing considering I was its financial manager, and hadn’t even thought of such things as the cost of air-freighting a three-volume book that weighed 7.5 kilograms. John Jackson helped there, becoming our agent for most overseas sales.
The book went on to be a sellout, and would have been reprinted by a commercial publisher, but as I will relate, we had other plans: to replace it with a website of the same name. In the meantime, Mary and I followed it up with our long-planned electronic key to coral species called Coral ID. This was published on CD-ROM discs, now an outdated technology, but at the time it was much appreciated as it cost users little and enabled them to identify corals quickly and surely without having to trawl through endless printed pages. As with the book, this publication is now part of our Corals of the World website and is free to all users the world over, which was what we’d always wanted.
Paths of conscience
I had imagined, wrongly as it turned out, that publishing Corals of the World would be some sort of culmination of my work on coral taxonomy. It did serve to create a world view of corals, something I’d worked towards for a very long time, but I soon discovered that answering a lot of questions only begs the asking of a lot more questions. And so the book turned out to be more of a beginning than an end.
The new millennium was also the beginning of a different relationship with AIMS. It started out well enough, with the appointment of a new director, but after a couple of years I felt that my time was being wasted. I decided to quit the executive, the internal governing body of the institute, a job I’d been embroiled in for more than a decade. I remained a troublemaker of course, I had no choice: the staff had good reason to be concerned about the way the institute was being run, including the composition of the council, none of whom knew anything about marine science.
Perhaps in retaliation, but actually to my delight, the director announced at a summit staff meeting that Coral Geographic, my long-standing mapping program, would not be accepted as an AIMS project. Somebody, not me, had proposed it should be, but it was my personal hobby and had been for thirty years. According to the director, I had no projects at all. The timing was perfect, so chuckling to myself I walked out of the meeting, up to my office, and phoned Mary.
We had been pondering the possibility of an extended stay in France. Mary had seen a lot of Europe as a child but I had never left Australia until I joined AIMS. Eviie and Martin had both travelled a lot, but only as sightseers or to visit Mary’s family in England; now they were of an age where they could absorb the language and culture of another country. Wanting to avoid cities, we looked for a place to live where the kids could go to small rural schools and get immersed in all things French. Katie, too, would come for part of the time. She had taken a particular interest in French and was keen to practise it.
After much hunting, Mary found the perfect house for us: an ancient, rundown but incredibly picturesque olive mill in a remote mountain region in the south. The mill, made of thick stone walls with a gabled slate roof, was perched on the side of a steep mountain slope, with a broad river at its feet and small streams on either side. I calculated that I could be away from AIMS for a year and a half if I combined my long-service leave with half-time work. Just what that work was I never specified but I reasoned that the director would approve anything to be rid of me. He did. After placing Rivendell and all our animals in caring hands, we left for France in July 2003.
Mary’s French improved rapidly but I didn’t give myself much of a chance. Most days, after driving the kids to school, I would spend a little time trying to chat to a villager and then seclude myself within the thick stone walls of a room at the bottom of our olive mill. With its own fireplace it was a cosy retreat that I turned into a study, complete with a very large crate of literature. The reading and writing I planned to do was much more important than learning a language.
For more than a decade I’d been worrying about the future of coral reefs, knowing that they’re as vulnerable to climate change as anything on our planet. There were dozens of theories and counter-theories surrounding this subject. Points of view were bandied about, some in scientific journals but most in the popular media, where so-called sceptics were having a field day. What was the real truth? I wanted to work this out in detail, and eventually did.
My first job was to undertake a vast amount of reading in every field of science that seemed relevant. As the months went by I read far more than I ever had for any university degree. I can’t say I enjoyed doing this at first; it reminded me of my PhD, where I seemed to be going
ever deeper into a series of unconnected subjects. But gradually, like peeling the proverbial onion, I began to see what the cores of these subjects consisted of, how they were linked, and what this meant for the future.
On our return to Australia my head was full to bursting with climate change issues. Unlike in France, the media in Australia was still giving prime time to climate change sceptics, and now that I could evaluate their worth with certainty they made me angry. Foremost among the sceptics regularly appearing on television was a professor of geology from James Cook University, whom I’d known for decades. It was easy for me to debunk his views and I did so with careful precision, one after the other, when we met. To no avail. He was back on television at the next opportunity, wheeling out the same pseudo-science and undermining the efforts of so many scientists who knew their subject and were giving their time to help the public understand it. Nevertheless, the professor did me a good turn by showing me that I could no longer put my head in the sand. Throughout my time at AIMS, I had appeared in many science documentaries but had always avoided contentious public issues if I could. That now changed.
Before we’d left for France, the Howard government had issued instructions that Commonwealth agencies were to have nothing to do with climate change. When we returned, AIMS had another new director, who was not one to buck the system. He ordered me not to speak to the media about climate change, whereas I was determined to do so at any and every opportunity. I had much greater security than my colleagues, thanks to a council decision to make my tenure pretty much unbreakable, but I was unhappy that other senior scientists seemed to have done nothing to prevent bureaucrats taking over and running AIMS their way. That made a joke of my role as chief scientist, so I quit that in much the same style as I’d quit the executive a couple of years earlier. I also decided to leave AIMS altogether, but at a time of my choosing.
A Life Underwater Page 25