William Saville-Kent’s unpatented pearl-cultivation method was one of two great secrets he carried to his grave when he died suddenly, on October 11, 1908, near Bournemouth, of a blocked bowel. Mary Ann sold all his books, papers, collections, and menagerie the following year. When read by others, his notes on culturing artificial pearls proved unintelligible.
Still, someone cared enough to decorate William’s gravestone with a symbol that he would surely have valued above any other—a collection of Great Barrier Reef corals. It would be nice to think that Constance put them there, but she never returned to Britain. As Ruth Emilie Kaye, she became an esteemed nursing sister and matron, and in her hundredth year received a letter of congratulation from the Queen, before dying on April 10, 1944 in Strathfield, Sydney.
Having worked in typhoid tents, a leper hospital, and a reformatory school for girls, Constance can surely be said to have redeemed herself. If the Reef could speak, perhaps it would say the same of her brother William.
8
PARADISE
Ted Banfield’s Island Retreat
IN 1908 READERS IN THE WESTERN WORLD were introduced to another publishing sensation from Australia, in the form of a new version of an old myth. The Confessions of a Beachcomber, written by E. J. Banfield, told the story of two modern-day Robinson Crusoes who’d abandoned civilization to live on a small tropical island within the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Dunk Island, named by Captain Cook after an Admiralty dignitary of the day, was one of the Family group of islands and islets around 110 miles north of Townsville and two miles from the mainland coast.1
Edmund James (Ted) Banfield, a Townsville journalist of forty-four, and his wife, Bertha, a music teacher aged thirty-six, first visited the deserted island of three and a half square miles in mid-September 1896, while hunting for a site on which to build a getaway cabin. Like many Reef islands close to shore, Dunk had once been part of the mainland, and it was mountainous, wooded, and picturesque. Though it lacked the swaying coconut palms emblematic of the South Seas, it featured a fringing coral reef, a white sandy beach, and tall cliffs covered in trees and plants. A few hundred yards inland grew a forest of vine-entangled bloodwoods, Moreton Bay ash, swamp mahoganies, “Gin-gees,” and native figs. Varieties of acacia, pandanus, and flowering hibiscus shrubs edged the strand, and green webs of native cabbage scrabbled down the beach.2
No sooner had the Banfields landed on the crescent bay at the northern end of the island than a canoe appeared, paddled by an Aboriginal man called Tom, one of Dunk’s few living original inhabitants. Tom, who had been born on the island and belonged to the now scattered and fragmented Bandjin and Djiru clans, had somehow learned of the Banfields’ intended visit and come over from the mainland with his mother-in-law, wife Nellie, and their nursing infant. To this tall, burly man with ribbons of scarification across his chest, this island was Coonanglebah, his lifelong estate, clan hunting ground, and Dreaming place. He knew its legends and habitat in microscopic detail, though he couldn’t lay claim to a square inch of it, and he conducted Ted proudly on a tour of the island’s main attractions, including its priceless freshwater streams.
Tom of Coonanglebah (Dunk Island), c. 1898 (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)
Entranced, Ted stood on a long, sheltered plateau above the strand and ritually fired a rifle bullet into a bloodwood tree to mark the spot where they would one day build a house. Clouds of colored butterflies hovered over the beach, inspiring him to name the bay Brammo, after the poetic word for butterfly used by Palm Island Aborigines. Overhead, the trees shivered with colonies of white nutmeg pigeons and metallic starlings. This single visit was enough, Ted later claimed, to force an immediate and “revolutionary change” in the couple’s outlook and future plans.3
Almost exactly a year later they returned to the island for a six-month trial stay, which, though it extended into years, was initially less than idyllic. During the intervening months they’d acquired a lease from the Queensland government for 128 acres of the best land, but Ted’s mental and physical health had disintegrated. Small and slender at the best of times, his weight had plunged to an alarming 116 pounds and he needed chloroform to sleep at night. Diagnosed with the wasting disease phthisis by his Townsville doctor, he’d been given between three and six months to live. This stark sentence precipitated his and Bertha’s decision to retreat to the island.4
When the Banfields landed at Brammo Bay on September 28, 1897, their new servant Tom had to carry Ted from the boat to a blanket that had been specially laid down above the tideline. “Ready to faint from weariness and sickness,” he lay there longing to be home among the comforts of Townsville, while Tom and a hired workman lugged all the provisions, tools, and materials up to the plateau where the couple hoped to build a hut.
The following morning, Ted later claimed, he awoke to “a perfect combination of invigorating elements. The cloudless sky, the clean air, the shining sea, the green folded slopes of Tam o’ Shanter point opposite, the cleanliness of the sand, the sweet odors of the eucalypts and the dew-laden grass, the luminous purple of the islands to the southeast; the range of mountains to the west and northwest, and our own fair tract—awaiting and inviting … Physic was never so eagerly swallowed nor wrought a speedier or surer cure.”5
Despite this miraculous regeneration, forging a new way of life took a little longer. Ted and Bertha initially slept in tents and ate Tom’s daily supplies of fresh fish, pigeon, and scrub fowl under the nearby bloodwood tree. Though still “in a frail physical state,” Ted helped his two workers clear an area of scrub, bolt together the cedar home, and begin work on a kitchen and veranda extension.6
They felled a bloodwood and a bean tree, inched the logs to the site with a crowbar, and sawed them into rough planks. For foundations they mixed local stone with sand and tar. They scrounged posts and ridgepoles from the jibboom and masts of two wrecked ships that had drifted up onto the beach. The roof was made from cheap corrugated iron, the floor surfaced with beaten clay. And Ted, despite his “blistered and bleeding hands, aching muscles, and stiff joints,” molded an assortment of twisted jungle timbers into crazy but effective furniture. The overall result, he claimed, was a tropical counterpart of the log cabin that his guru, the American nature writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, had built on the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts around fifty years earlier.7
Ted boasted that the shack offered no violation to “the genius of the Isle.” It was “a little shambling structure of rough slabs,” deliberately “unobtrusive” and “hidden in a wilderness of leaves.” He and Bertha shared the interior with a multitude of geckos, spiders, grubs, and swooping bats, who treated it as a type of cave: “the low walls, unaspiring roof, and sheltering veranda [are] so contrived as to create, not tickling, fidgety drafts but smooth currents … [that] flush each room so sweetly and softly that no perceptible difference between the air under the roof and of the forest is at any time perceptible.”8
To match the hut, Ted began evolving a lifestyle like Thoreau’s, albeit a tropical version. On an island in the Great Barrier Reef, he said, “the career of the Beachcomber” offered “the closest possible ‘return to Nature.’” All year round Dunk provided “the tonic of the sea and the Majesty [of] the Sun,” which made for one of the most benign and equable climates on the globe. Influenza and all the other debilitating physical and mental sicknesses of the city, he claimed, were unknown. The odd bout of malaria troubled the couple less than the common cold. Clothes were hardly needed in any season—Ted wore only shorts and a large hat to shade his beaky nose and cowboy-style mustache. Bronzed and barefooted, he soon acquired the lean, muscular physique of a sailor. His weight climbed to 142 pounds, and he found he could labor in the sun all morning and swim in the clear warm waters of Brammo Bay all afternoon.
He felt that his entire sensorium had been revitalized. Scents of flowers, shrubs, birds, and marine creatures beguiled his nose. His ears became attuned to “t
he hum of bees and beetles, the fluty plaint of a painted pigeon far in the gloom, the furtive scamper of scrub fowl among leaves made tender by decay, the splash of startled fish in the shadows.” As a beachcomber, he’d cast off civilization’s discontents.9
At the time when Ted was using it, the term “beachcomber” was generally a pejorative one. It had originated in, or at least become widely applied to, the South Seas, by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, and it described feckless, opportunist, hobolike characters who foraged for goods washed up from shipwrecks and lived off the sale of them. Ted’s use of the term was partly ironic, and partly a reshaping to denote an altogether different type of person, one who relied on the provisions of nature to live a simple but ethical, aesthetic, and sensual life.
Ted, like Thoreau, now saw the townsman’s pursuits as “devoid of purpose, insipid, [and] dismally unsatisfactory.” By shucking off “the poisonous years of the past” and the “artificial emotions of the town,” he and Bertha had attained a genuine “independence.” Unfettered by mortgages, they could live comfortably on around $250 a year. No gourmet’s feast surpassed the pleasure of eating fresh fish followed by homegrown pawpaws and golden mangoes. Ditching all schedules, they could “dally luxuriously with time” and “loll in the shade of scented trees, or thread the sunless mazes of the jungle … or bask on the sand.” “The Beachcomber … is an individual whose wants are few—who is content, who has no treasure to guard, whose rights there is none to dispute; who is his own magistrate, postman, architect, carpenter, painter, boat-builder, boatman, tinker, goatherd, gardener, woodcutter, water-carrier and general labourer.”10
Ted felt he exploited nobody. His daily bounty was thrown up on the sand, a tantalizing lottery generated by the chance actions of tides and currents. Today it might be a cedar log, tomorrow a weathered ship’s figurehead; someday, perhaps, the prize of a black or pink pearl lying inside the flesh of a goldlip or blacklip oyster. Living on an “Isle of Dreams,” the beachcomber was rich beyond imagination:
All is lovable—from crescentric sandpit—coaxing and consenting to the virile moods of the sea, harmonious with wind-shaken casuarinas, tinkling with the cries of excitable tern—to the stolid gray walls and blocks of granite which have for unrecorded centuries shouldered off the white surges of the Pacific. The flounces of mangroves, the sparse, grassy epaulettes on the shoulders of the hills, the fragrant forest, the dim jungle, the piled up rocks, the caves where the rare swiftlet hatches out her young in gloom and silence … all are mine to gloat over.11
He’d gained humankind’s most precious state: “freedom—freedom beyond the dreams of most men in its comprehensiveness and exactitude.”12
* * *
The Banfields lived in their simple shack from 1897 to 1903, but the realities of their life during this period bore little resemblance to Ted’s later depiction of it. He’d fled to Dunk Island less as a rebel against commerce than as one of its failures, in the hope that the place might offer a fresh stab at business success. A child of the Australian frontier, Ted longed to match his father’s pioneering achievements by helping to build a new commercial civilization on the Reef.
Jabez Walter Banfield, a sober, God-fearing Liverpool printer, had migrated to Australia in October 1852 to try his luck panning for gold along the Ovens River in northeast Victoria. Providing services for booming gold towns proved a better bet than chasing alluvial seams, so he set up a newspaper in the Victorian gold camp of Ararat and summoned his family in England to join him. After that, he’d risen with the town to become its leading burgher—a press proprietor, Justice of the Peace, magistrate, asylum patron, and celebrated local thespian.13
Ted, born in 1852, didn’t see his father until the age of two, but he instantly worshipped this domineering pressman. The boy strained to emulate his father’s talents and tastes, but with little success. Ted, small and intense with a puny frame, had a slightly palsied hand, and a watering right eye from a bicycle accident. All this confirmed Jabez’s opinion that his son was “something of a lame duck.” Moreover, he seemed neurotic and impractical, a talker and dreamer. By contrast, Jabez identified with his capable, self-confident eldest son, Harry, whom he anointed to take over the newspaper. Overshadowed and often miserable, Ted blamed himself for his father’s contempt, seeking escape and consolation in solitary bush walks and the nature philosophy of Thoreau.14
Determined to prove himself in his father’s trade, he moved in 1882 at the age of thirty to the Reef port of Townsville, where he helped an entrepreneur, Dodd Clarke, start a newspaper. Over the next decade Ted’s decision seemed vindicated, as he chalked up a string of civic and business triumphs in the vein of his father. He’d arrived in Townsville on the crest of a boom; the port was a service center for the northern goldfields and also the site of an expanding sugar industry. A trio of ambitious local businessmen was pushing to establish Townsville as the capital of a separate northern state, free from the interference of Brisbane. Robert Philp, a shipping and retail magnate; Thomas Hollis Hopkins, a merchant; and Thankful Willmett, a publisher, were quick to recruit the impressionable new journalist to their cause.15
With their help, Ted was able to fund a trip to England in 1884 to consult a specialist about his deteriorating vision. The subsequent trauma of having to lose his infected right eye in an operation was offset by meeting Bertha Golding, the daughter of Liverpool family friends. Bertha’s own affliction of partial deafness gave the couple an instant bond, but Ted also fell in love with her musical talent, good humor, and sharp common sense. They were married in Townsville in August 1886, and she won Jabez’s approval when the couple eventually visited Ararat. Flushed with hubris after taking over the editorship of the Townsville Daily Bulletin from his sick boss in 1889, Ted started writing boastful letters to his father, airily offering him advice on mining investments provided by magnate friends.16
The following year saw Ted’s bravura crumble. Dodd Clarke suddenly decided to resume his editorial position, relegating Ted to a humiliating downgrading. Further loss of face followed when he had to admit to Jabez that he’d lost his and Bertha’s combined savings on his mining speculations, and this at a time when his wife’s worsening deafness meant she had to stop giving music lessons. Ted’s depression deepened as the north Australia separatist cause fragmented in the face of opposition by British investors, as well as rivalry from the nearby sugar port of Mackay, and white trade-union hostility to the use of indentured Islander labor in the sugar industry. Infuriated, Ted published pro-separation harangues in the paper that were so extreme Dodd Clarke eventually had to intervene. Friends grew worried at Ted’s emotional brittleness.17
Ted would later claim that his breakdown and flight to Dunk Island in 1897 was fueled by a hatred of commercial civilization, but this wasn’t what he told family and friends at the time. His letters to Jabez and Harry represented the move as a shrewd investment in low-cost virgin land, ideally suited to the growing and sale of tropical fruits and other fresh produce. Cheap black labor, fertile soil, and a climate of high rainfall and steady sun would underpin production, while the weekly steamer visits to the island would enable distribution to markets on the nearby mainland.18
* * *
The plan proved easier to explain than to execute. For a start, the couple’s early life on Dunk was not as easy or healthy as Ted would later make out. His daily diary entries from January 7, 1898, show that the onset of the rainy season brought him and Bertha repeated and disabling doses of malaria and dengue fever. Bertha was additionally prostrated with bouts of internal pain that only ceased after she underwent an operation and three months’ recuperation in the Townsville hospital. There were also money worries. Before launching their proposed enterprise, they’d had to convert their landholding of 128 acres to freehold. This had to be financed. So, after only two years on the island, Ted resumed writing paid pieces for local newspapers.19
More than anything, Ted’s diaries reveal the couple’s depen
dence on the labor and skills of a succession of male and female Aboriginal workers: Tom, Nellie, Jinny, Mickie, Jenny, Toby, Sambo, Willie, Charlie, and others. Almost every day Tom or Mickie delivered fresh food from the sea, harpooning rockfish, shark, dugong, turtle, parrot fish, and much more. Ted seems to have been an indifferent fisherman himself and a worse sailor. Mostly he delegated the skippering of his boat to Tom, Toby, or Sambo, who picked up weekly supplies from the steamer and collected urgent items from the mainland ports of Cardwell, Bicton, Geraldton, and Townsville. While attempting to show off his sailing skills to Bertha in September 1899, Ted managed to capsize their boat in a sudden gust. Unable to swim, she was too traumatized ever to sail with him again. While sailing solo later that year he capsized once more, making so lethargic an attempt to avoid drowning that Bertha worried that he nursed a latent death wish.20
Most of their Aboriginal workers’ tasks were physically grueling. They cleared and fired dense scrub, hacked down jungle, hoed and planted an array of vegetables and tropical fruit seeds, and then weeded, harvested, packed, and transported the products for sale on the mainland. They erected fences against snakes and eagles, and built hen and duck houses; they collected fowl eggs, oysters, crabs, and crayfish to add to the island’s exports, and bottled and sold the abundant supplies of honey generated by Ted’s dozen hives of Italian bees. The daily duties of the “gins,” as Ted called the women, were no lighter: Nellie, Jinny, and Jenny had to weed, hoe, collect shellfish, and chop firewood, as well as cook and clean. As Ted’s energies grew, he also supervised a flurry of ambitious developments: the building of a boatshed at the back of Brammo Bay beach and a suspension bridge over the gully, the laying of timber rails for a boat trolley, the installation of a storage tank and pump, and the planting of dual lines of coconut trees leading up to their hut.21
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 19