A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  On nearing the surface my body protested with salvos of vomit and diarrhoea, but otherwise I thought my ordeal was over. I felt okay, but my optimism was short-lived as we headed full-speed for a hospital. With the boat pounding through the waves, my airways started swelling, and that kept worsening until I was barely getting enough air to stay alive. I maintained an icy calm, as I’d learned to do during the severest asthma attacks of my youth. On arrival at the hospital, still able to walk although hardly breathing at all, I clenched an oxygen mask to my face and lost all memory of the rest of that day. When I awoke the following morning I had a large metal breathing pipe down my throat and was coughing out of control. It hurt like hell, even though the hospital had, I learnt, bumped up my painkiller as high as they could without putting me into an induced coma. Mary told me I was in an intensive care ward. It appeared that half my epiglottis was missing.

  The following day a specialist told me my throat had been badly burned and that I would probably have problems eating, breathing, and perhaps talking. Modern rebreathers had long been considered safe, but now it seemed that Rich’s paradox, as he called it, had come true: the longer it seems safe, the more dangerous it actually is.

  As the day unfolded there was no lack of ideas about how my troubles might be rectified. One was to insert a tube into my stomach and leave it there until I could eat normally. Another was to remove the breathing pipe from my throat and insert a plastic gadget directly into my windpipe so I could breathe through my neck. The latter was promptly done, bringing memories of Katie’s babyhood flooding back in harsh reality, and it worked for me just as it had for her all those years ago. The plastic gadget was taken out shortly before I left the hospital a week later. By holding a finger over the hole in my neck, I could speak, albeit with a voice that made old Satchmo sound like a soprano. No matter, I made a complete recovery, voice and all, with only a little scar on my neck as a souvenir.

  I’m glad my epiglottis was okay and I didn’t need that stomach portal. Pouring a glass of red straight into my stomach while sitting on my swing chair at Rivendell would surely have ruined the bouquet.

  Diving in tropical countries brings particular hazards, especially when working and living with indigenous people. This is an aspect of my life I’ve always treasured, but it also means continual exposure to a wide array of diseases, the majority of which are easily caught. I seem to have become resistant to most of them, which is fortunate because I’m also resistant to seeing doctors, but I’ve no resistance to malaria, a big problem in the central Indo-Pacific tropics. I’ve had it four times, each episode very different from every other. The first time, I had ordinary malaria and just put up with it. The second time it was the potentially fatal cerebral malaria, which I treated by climbing into a bath full of ice whenever my temperature went sky-high.

  The third time was many years later. I’d been writing a book at home, and in the mornings I would feel ill and freezing cold, despite it being midsummer. I’d mutter about seeing a doctor but in the afternoons I’d feel fine and forget about it. This went on for over a week, until Mary pointed out that I could give whatever it was to our kids if I didn’t do something about it.

  My doctor agreed with me that it wasn’t malaria, but she had no better idea what it might be.

  If one must get a tropical bug, Townsville is an excellent place to do so because half the Australian army is based there, and all their doctors specialise in tropical diseases. ‘It’s malaria,’ said the army.

  I was bundled into hospital and three days later it was all cleared up, thanks to a new antibiotic. Then, just before I left the hospital, another doctor turned up and wanted a blood sample.

  ‘No need,’ I said cheerily, ‘all cured.’

  ‘I’m not here to cure you, mate,’ he said, ‘I want your blood for teaching – it’s a bloody zoo.’

  The fourth time I got malaria wasn’t so bad for me, but it might have been for Australia. I had been feeling off-colour during a trip to America, and the flight back home was particularly tedious. The plan was for me to join Mary and our kids in Cairns and head north into the rainforest. At the airport, we considered going back to Townsville, a few hours’ drive away, but on we went. I hadn’t visited a malarial region for well over a year, so it seemed extremely unlikely that that was the problem. By the time we reached Cooktown I was in bad shape, so we stopped by the hospital. It was a Sunday evening but two nurses came in to see me.

  ‘Take some aspirin, love, and you’ll be fine,’ said one. The other looked dubious, so a blood sample it was.

  I was a little surprised when the manager of the caravan park where we spent that night came around soon after dawn and said I had to go back to the hospital, urgently. The hospital put me in touch with the infectious diseases unit in Brisbane, who gave me the happy news that it was malaria again.

  ‘Soak yourself with mosquito repellent and get back to Townsville as quickly as you can,’ they commanded.

  We duly went, after which I was on the state news, day after day, identified as ‘the Townsville man’. Despite my being reasonably conscientious with repellent, mosquitoes had bitten me, hung around for the fortnight, then bitten thirteen other people, giving them my malaria. That’s how the life cycle works.

  ‘I’m feeling really bad about this,’ I lamented after yet another long discussion with the infectious diseases unit about exactly where I had walked in the Daintree before reaching Cooktown.

  ‘Well, don’t be,’ the guy said. ‘It’s twelve years since we had a case like yours – it’s been fun.’

  Fortunately, all those who got infected from me were from the south (belated apologies to you all), where there were no Anopheles mosquitoes, so there was no chance of it spreading further. But if the authorities hadn’t acted so quickly, I could have started an epidemic in north Queensland.

  There’s no medical examination I’ve ever heard of that allows someone who’s suffered serious asthma to go diving. Luckily for me, diving medicals hadn’t been invented when I started out, and by the time they became fashionable – always the first step to becoming compulsory – puffers had also been invented. Several colleagues have had a similar history of asthma, and like me have had to fudge their diving medical. I’m an expert at doing that. I have talked about this issue with two medical specialists, and find their explanations – that the water and air mixture divers regularly inhale can trigger asthma – unbelievable. There’s more than one trigger for asthma, with exercise and air pollution – the latter the cause in my case – being the most common. Air from a compressor that doesn’t have a clean carbon filter gives me a headache, but not asthma. I’ve never had the slightest hint of asthma while at sea, and I wonder how many careers have ended for what, from the evidence I’ve seen, is likely to be a fallacy. Many experienced divers and the occasional instructor know exactly what I’m on about.

  There’s no shortage of animals on coral reefs that sting and bite, and I’ve been stung by most and bitten by many at one time or another. In the minds of most people sharks head the danger list, but I have only been seriously attacked by sharks once – in thousands of hours in their company. I love having sharks around: they’re sleek, graceful, and exude the essence of primordial power. Yet, after a few obvious precautions are taken, they’re far less of a hazard for scuba divers on reefs than dogs are for joggers on suburban streets. It’s one of the great tragedies of our age that they have been so mindlessly slaughtered – just to make soup.

  I’m struck by the good fortune I’ve had, diving in so many fabulous places and seeing so many things that others probably never will. I’ve helped photographers try to capture sights for others to enjoy, but how can anyone film a huge school of fish as they form a silver cylinder, slowly revolving, with one’s self in the centre? After a few minutes the cylinder stops and it’s you who’s revolving, because there’s nothing other than fish to see and the brain does a correction. There is no up, except the direction of air bubbles, an
d no down, except what the depth gauge says, until the bottom suddenly comes into view. That’s gut-wrenching; for a moment the brain rebels, refusing to believe the bottom is fixed, then the fish resume revolving, and you’re once again stationary.

  Hardest of all to convey is the feeling of wilderness, of being completely alone in spectacularly beautiful places. I sometimes envy the early explorer-naturalists, with so much awaiting their discovery. But then they didn’t have scuba.

  Views from my coffin

  Living at Rivendell with my family has been at the core of my existence. My ‘little boy’ now towers over me (and beats me at chess without trying). Eviie and Martin are both preparing for a future entrenched in the world of Nature, choosing career paths that are about giving, not taking. Rivendell has changed over their lifetimes, and over Mary’s and Katie’s, but it has kept the same ambience. Full of books and surrounded by trees and wildlife, it remains a place conducive to thinking – a perfect environment for the likes of me – but it also keeps prompting me to worry about my family’s future, and that of our planet. I’m not unduly pessimistic but I cannot ignore reality, and that reality weighs heavily on me. I imagine that anybody who believed they could foresee the horrors of the last world war would have been in a similar predicament. I envy those who are free of such burdens.

  At times of change – and clearly there have been plenty of them for me – I like to sit on my coffin, so to speak, and look back; it gives perspective. When doing this in times past I used to see myself as someone who’d meandered by chance from one career path to another, not someone who followed any sort of purposeful direction. Now I see the opposite. I was a naturalist as a child and have remained a naturalist ever since, earning my living by observing, reading and thinking, ultimately trying to make sense of it all in ever larger contexts.

  I have propped my ladder against many walls but I’ve never climbed any of them. I have been immensely lucky. Other than my expression of interest in the post-doc at James Cook, I’ve never applied for a job, or a promotion. I’ve only ever had one master – the knowledge I sought, in whatever guise that came in – and I’ve never advanced my career if that advancement seriously compromised my independence.

  I’m quite certain that my love of the natural world stems from the freedom I had as a child to be alone in places that interested me. I love the tropics, where I’ve lived for most of my life, and my affinity with coral reefs tops all. But my fascination with marine life started at Long Reef, at the age of six. Nobody taught me about that marine life. Everything I learned, even if from a book, was for me a personal discovery, stemming from curiosity and becoming hardwired somewhere in my head.

  My connection to the sandstone country of Sydney’s Ku-ring-gai Chase – the bushland I so enjoyed with Jinka – still goes deep after fifty years. I loved pondering its spiders, beetles, lizards, frogs, ancient banksias and ants’ nests then, and I still do now. To this day I find it hard to walk past a rotten log or a patch of swamp without wanting to take a closer look. Maybe I’ll find a strange flatworm, another sort of moth or gecko, or perhaps a weird fungus. Of course, any seashore draws me, just as it always has.

  Looking back on my work with corals, one interval stands out in importance above all others, and that’s the two years I spent as a post-doc at James Cook University. It was important because I had nobody telling me what to do, think or say, nor any pressure to get anywhere. I had the opportunity to travel and was free to think for myself. And while I couldn’t rationalise then what I saw and thought about during those years, I can now. What I found was that the fundamental realities of Nature were to be discovered in the real world and not in books, laboratories, museums or, later, with computers. It can be too easy for modern technology to blind us to its failings if we don’t spend time absorbing the realities of Nature for ourselves. Context is everything, and the real world must be experienced rather than just analysed with tools. Young scientists need to be encouraged to take the time to soak up Nature’s realities, and to think. Only then can they meaningfully integrate technological approaches.

  I always took that time, be it with dragonflies or corals. What I saw with corals was how they changed from one place on a reef to another, how species differed when they occurred together, and how all of this changed with geography. I realised that corals must have a great capacity for dispersal. We take such matters for granted now, but when I first turned to corals they were barely considered by anybody, and so just about all concepts of biogeography and aspects of evolution that it underpins were on untrustworthy grounds. To work on these fundamental questions I didn’t need a research grant or to get anybody’s permission or to make reports, I just needed to go diving and then think about what I’d seen, often as not for a decade or more.

  Didn’t all this make my job the best in the world? I was regularly told so. Certainly it was off the scale by modern standards, which makes me feel desperately sorry for today’s students, who have little independence. They are plunged into a rat race that stifles real advances. Many still do well, but often don’t reach their true potential.

  There’s no way the likes of me would thrive in today’s funding-fixated, ResearchGate-scoring, occupational health and safety-obsessed, time-tracked, committee-controlled, paper-counting, regulation-saturated, supervised academia – the world of bean-counters. If I had been confronted with all that I would not have set about creating a global coral taxonomy and biogeography, would not have been able to produce big-picture syntheses, and would not have had the time to do the thinking that revealed fundamentals like reticulate evolution.

  Most professionals today, be they in the sciences, arts, education, even sport, work within a cage of bureaucracy that controls most aspects of their working life. A few creative souls succeed but most don’t. When I look at the résumé of a scientist, as I’ve needed to do every few weeks, I’m nearly always presented with a list of degrees, employment positions, awards, grants, collaborations, plenary talks, committee memberships, and so on – and on. Then I read about the field this person is in and what they’re doing in it, and finally there’s usually a long list of publications. All well and good and all part of today’s ways and means, but often as not I’m left with an unanswered question: what has the person actually achieved? This prompts me to ask: how different would the world be if this person’s work didn’t exist? These questions would be easily answered by some, but uncomfortable for those whose PhD work was their only significant discovery.

  The moments in my career I have valued most were when I discovered a new species or found out something previously unknown. About half of all corals were effectively unknown entities when I first came across them and most of these didn’t even have a meaningful name. Sometimes I found an old name for them, sometimes I gave them a new one, and sometimes I set them aside for further study. This is not stamp collecting, it’s creating new knowledge in the belief that it will be put to good use one day, by many people.

  Today, most scientists fortunate enough to be paid for their work have the same problem that Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen had: they must run flat out just to stay where they are, to service the many needs of the cage they’re in. Academics grumble about their teaching load and the amount of supervision they must do; and research scientists complain about the long and complicated grant applications they must write (and others they must review), the papers they must ‘get out’ (and others they must review); and everybody resents the amount of time consumed by administrative chores, committees and meetings. Some are happy with this situation, for if the needs of their cage are met they can spend their whole careers in it, maybe getting promotion and tenure; that makes for a comfortable and honourable career even if little is actually achieved. For the motivated academic or scientist who needs time and headspace to think, something needs to change. It’s not enough to point to sabbatical leave, that fleeting opportunity when they can escape from their cage to do what they should have been able to do in it.
This is a system that selects for mediocrity, leaving others longing for the freedom they need to get on with what matters.

  These sorts of issues have been around a long time, but it’s only in the past decade or so that they’ve really come to dominate the careers of creative people, including those keen to do something to help rectify the damage humanity has inflicted on our planet. I resigned my job before the bureaucratic cage could trap me. Not everyone has had that luxury.

  It was the impending demise of coral reefs that turned me into a media tart. I felt I had little choice in this and now, more than a decade on, I have no regrets. Science has done its part in identifying the path of destruction humanity is on; the job now is to get this message out to the wider world, by any means possible.

  In November 2014 Sir David Attenborough and his retinue of ten filmmakers met for dinner at Rivendell, before the start of a documentary series about the Great Barrier Reef, screened worldwide in 2016. I had not seen Sir David, by then aged eighty-eight, since my talk at the Royal Society five years earlier. Once again I was much taken by his gentle, modest nature – my whole family was – and I loved hearing some of his recollections about people I remembered from the earliest days of television. Even so I was astonished to find out that he had filmed the life of Raine Island six years before I was there in 1973. So much for my belief that we had rediscovered the place. A week after that dinner I joined the team on Heron Island, where Sir David interviewed me on all manner of subjects. It helps to be relaxed at such times and I was; his interest in what I had to say and his disarming self-effacement made me so.

  During 2016, with most of the world’s reefs undergoing massive damage from coral bleaching, I was interviewed sixty-one times, chiefly about the Great Barrier Reef and probably to little or no effect in most cases. There were some exceptions, though. A talented film producer invited me to participate in a documentary about mass bleaching, primarily aimed at young people. The film, Chasing Coral, was launched at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017 to resounding acclaim and was awarded the viewer’s choice prize. Further awards soon followed. Chasing Coral has the potential to change the hearts and minds of millions of viewers.