The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

by Iain McCalman

  Ted’s sweeping formal avenue and his flagstaff for commemorating ceremonial occasions suggests he’d begun to think of himself as the viceroy of an island empire. And as with imperialists everywhere, this aspiration led to the commissioning of grander premises and an expansion of his territorial domain. In January 1900 he decided to replace the hut with a professionally built bungalow. Six months later, he and Bertha gained approval to extend their landholding to 320 acres. Some of the money for all this came from a small legacy received on Jabez’s death in December 1899—news that caused Ted to grieve that he’d now never be able to justify his move to his father. Perhaps the grandiose, fin de siècle plans for Dunk Island were his attempt to silence this most insistent of ghosts.22

  In any case, Jabez’s legacy was too modest to finance all of Ted’s ambitious plans, so he increased his newspaper work by writing regular leaders for the Cairns Argus and other papers. In February 1901 he confirmed his recidivism by agreeing to take over editorial duties on the Townsville Evening Star for six months. It seemed a portentous decision: Ted was resuming the kind of work that had caused his breakdown, and to do it he and Bertha were returning to civilization. Backsliding to their former life after only four years on Dunk Island, the couple appeared to have come full circle.

  In the end they had a nine-month absence from Dunk, and when they returned in November 1901 it was to a crisis. Most of Ted’s bees had perished, shrinking the honey supply to nothing—and honey was their most lucrative export. The culprits proved to be two species of island birds: the Australian bee-eater and the white-rumped wood swallow.

  The honey or the birds: Which had to go? This dilemma tested Ted’s deepest values, because his love of birds was fundamental. After wrestling with his conscience, he decided that a profitable honey business couldn’t justify the slaughter of such lovely creatures, which were after all only following their natural instincts. Discussion of the issue with Bertha led to a full-scale “review” of their philosophy of life and to the articulation of a new “grand objective.” They would give up honey production and other forms of commerce to turn Dunk into a bird sanctuary, where all but raptors would be protected—the hunting of the latter being a sentimental exception that Ted soon abandoned in practice.

  Although it was the honey crisis that triggered this change, other forces had been pushing in the same direction. One was Ted’s reaction to rejoining the urban rat race for nine months. Although Bertha had enjoyed her respite from mosquitoes and loneliness, she realized that being away from Dunk had crystalized Ted’s love of island life. Somewhat surprisingly, though, returning to full-time journalism had helped him recover his muse. Belting out political leaders for the local newspaper was as tedious as ever, but he’d found new delight in writing Dunk Island nature pieces.

  Once their house was finished in 1903, reading and writing began to occupy a growing chunk of Ted’s daily routine. As well as returning to his boyhood love of the romantic naturalism of Gilbert White’s Selborne and Thoreau’s Walden, he began studying works of marine and ornithological science. These included The Great Barrier Reef by William Saville-Kent, which Ted praised highly. He also began corresponding with several Queensland scientists who shared his floral and zoological interests.23

  Giving up the commercial production of foodstuffs meant that Ted could spend more time exploring the island and its surrounds, which he did under the guidance of Tom, Mickie, Willie, and others. Ted began this education with many of the typical frontier prejudices of his day. He thought that Aborigines were a doomed Stone Age race, a childlike people incapable of rational thought, discipline, or morality, who treated the island as a larder for mindless consumption. But gradually Tom and Mickie, in particular, instilled in him a different kind of understanding and appreciation of Dunk’s marine, plant, and bird life. They taught him Aboriginal maritime, fishing, and bush skills, and they revealed to him marvelous hidden places and histories.24

  It was Tom who led him to each of what became Ted’s most sacred nature sites. The first was a hidden cavern near Brammo Bay that had been caused by a meteor fall, and which Tom called Coobee Cotanyou, or Falling Star Hole. A friend of Ted’s, the writer and naturalist Charles Barrett, described it lyrically as “a cave whose mouth is overhung by ferns and jungle vines, and the lintel green with moss, a filter for water that falls upon rocks tufted with orchids the colour of dull gold.”25

  Barrett was even more impressed by a similar grotto on nearby Bedarra Island. It was hidden ten yards above the watermark on the weather side of the island, and named by Ted the Cave of Swiftlets. Within it hung more than fifty nests of gray-rumped swiftlets, each glued to the rocks with bird saliva and containing a “pearly white egg.” These rare little birds, first seen by Jock MacGillivray of the Rattlesnake, had remained virtually unknown to whites for sixty-one years, until Tom brought their cavern to light.26

  And only Tom knew the whereabouts of two legendary rock-art galleries on Dunk, which had long been lost within the island’s mountainous and overgrown rain forest, even to other Aborigines. Ted had little understanding of art, and his descriptions of the red and brown ochre rock paintings were laced with condescension, yet he was moved to write: “Here is the sheer beginning, the spontaneous germ of art.”27

  In time Ted grew, almost despite himself, to venerate Tom and Mickie. Here were men who could swim huge distances without fear of sharks, who could sail the crankiest of craft in any sea, who could spear fish and turtle with preternatural speed and accuracy. They could improvise traps and nets capable of snaring fish of all sizes and speeds. They could spot tiny objects at a distance and with a clarity that exceeded the range of binoculars. Like the Kaurareg, they could catch a two-hundred-pound bull turtle using a remora suckerfish that clamped onto the creature’s shell. They knew the art of stunning fish by crushing an array of “wild dynamite” plants, in a process so recondite it proved to Ted that “the Australian aboriginal has to his credit as a chemist the results of successful original research, and … he is also a herbalist from whom it is no condescension to learn.” There was a note of awe in his praise:28

  Mickie’s bush craft, his knowledge of the habits of birds and insects and the ways of fish, is enviable. Signs and sounds quite indeterminate to “white fellas” are full of meaning to him … The scratching of a scrub fowl among decayed leaves is heard in the jungle at an extraordinary distance, and a splash or ripple far out on the edge of the reef tells him that a shark or kingfish is driving the mullet into the lagoon, where he may easily spear them. He can tell to a quarter of an hour when the fish will leave off biting … and knows when the giant crabs will be “walking about” in the mangroves. He is trustworthy and obliging, and ready to impart all the lore he possesses, an expert boomerang thrower, a dead shot with a nulla-nulla, and an eater of everything that comes in his way except “pigee-pigee” [nutmeg pigeon].29

  Mourning Tom’s premature death by spearing in a mainland melee in 1911, Ted allowed his admiration to spill over into open affection. This broad-chested, big-limbed, coarse-handed warrior had been as gentle and funny as he was brave, as tender as he was tough, as learned as he was skilled. “Among his mental accomplishments was a specific title for each plant and tree,” Ted wrote. “His almanac was floral. By the flowering of trees and shrubs so he noted the time of the year, and he knew many stars by name and could tell when such and such a one would be visible.”

  Penning an impromptu epitaph for Tom, Ted summoned his highest words of praise: “he [was] an Australian by the purest lineage and birth—one whose physique was an example of the class that tropical Queensland is capable of producing, a man of brains, a student of Nature who had stored his mind with first-hand knowledge unprinted and now unprintable…”30

  Above all, it was his Aboriginal friends who led Ted to develop one of the foundational beliefs of his distinctive beachcomber philosophy: that individuals must develop “a sense of fellowship with animated and inanimate things” within th
eir country. Such knowledge must draw on the complete spiritual, material, emotional, sensual, and intellectual composition of one’s being. Dunk Island was not just a habitat or environment, it was a fusion of nature and culture: a heartland, a Dreaming. When Ted wrote of his duty “to exhaustively comprehend” his island, he was referring to the Aboriginal way of comprehending—a way of learning that any true naturalist should follow:

  If you would read the months off-hand by the flowering of trees and shrubs and the coming and going of birds; if the inhalation of scents is to convey photographic details of scenes whence they originate; if you would explore miles of sunless jungle by ways unstable as water; if you would have the sites of camps of past generations of blacks reveal the arts and occupations of the race, its dietary scale and the pastimes of its children; if you desire to have exact first-hand knowledge, to revel in the rich delights of new experiences …31

  If you really wanted to learn all these things, Ted concluded, then you must put yourself under the tutelage of an Aboriginal like Tom or Mickie.

  Yet surprisingly, the catalyst that triggered Ted’s transformation into a fully fledged author came from outside the island. On October 10, 1904, the weekly steamer disgorged a tubby, scruffy, red-faced Englishman of fifty-two who’d invited himself by letter for a two-week visit. Notwithstanding his eccentric appearance, Walter Strickland proved to be one of the most compelling individuals Ted would ever meet.

  He was thrilled to learn the man’s aristocratic lineage. Though Strickland dressed like a hobo, he was the son of a Yorkshire landed baronet and due to inherit his father’s title, castle, and wealth. On top of this he’d accumulated impeccable literary and scientific credentials. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was fluent in several languages, had a string of publications to his name, and was well versed in natural history. Strickland’s fascination with the corals, marine creatures, and bird life of the island equaled Ted’s. Impervious to hardship, the Englishman spent each day scrabbling over reefs, peering into rock pools, and quizzing Ted on his knowledge of bird nesting and migration patterns. He also pressed Ted to make a systematic census of all the bird species on Dunk Island, an undertaking which eventually produced a tally of 128 species, not counting a dozen or so that Ted was unable to identify.32

  A passionate conservationist, Strickland urged Ted to lobby the Queensland government to have Dunk and other islands in the Family group designated as bird sanctuaries. Ted admired the man’s militant stance on the need to prevent the slaughter of Torres Strait pigeons, a species vulnerable to extinction. Thanks to Strickland’s goading, Ted applied for official recognition as ranger of the Dunk and Family islands sanctuaries, a status that was granted in June 1905.33

  Ted was also fascinated by Strickland’s maverick values. Here was a man who’d rejected his aristocratic father’s ambitions, repudiated the luxuries of a patrician heritage, traveled rough in countries like Indonesia, India, and China, and steeped himself in Oriental literature and Sufi philosophy. He also relished attacking the sacred cows of the British monarchy and empire, and of Christianity. Ted, as a conservative and imperialist, didn’t share such outlandish views—and Bertha found them repellent—but he was pleased to be treated as a fellow rebel against social conformity.

  Even more flattering was Strickland’s genuine admiration of Ted’s nature journalism. A respected author himself, the Englishman urged Ted to gather together his occasional Dunk Island pieces into a book, and he suggested a perfect title, The Confessions of a Beachcomber. The lure of becoming an international author rather than a mere local journalist captured Ted’s imagination, and held it for the rest of his life.

  Soon after departing, Strickland kept his promise to assist the book’s publication and in 1906/7 Ted’s manuscript was accepted by the London publishing firm T. Fisher Unwin, specialists in naturalist and travel works. Even so, the publisher’s demand for a subsidy of 150 pounds would have been well beyond Ted’s means had Strickland not loaned him the money. After months of frenetic writing and revision, the book eventually appeared in London on September 17, 1908, and in New York the following year.

  Almost immediately, Ted began to receive a stream of heady reviews that compared him to famous literary figures like Robert Louis Stevenson and Thoreau. Ted Banfield, Dunk Island beachcomber, had joined their number. But though feted in its day, Ted’s writing wasn’t always good. The down-to-earth Bertha advised him to be less flowery, sensing that his mimicry of the styles of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Lamb didn’t always suit the subject matter or the times. Still, when the different strands of his muse did come together he produced nature writing of genuine brilliance. At his best when describing the beauties and wonders of Dunk’s fringing reefs and marine life, he combined the imaginative power of a romantic poet with the forensic insight of a scientist and the holistic understanding of an Aborigine.

  Addressing his readers as intimate friends, he invited them to join him on his rowboat to see what the fringing reefs of Brammo Bay had looked like before a cyclone in 1903: “To see the coral garden to advantage you must pass over it—not through it. Drifting idly in a boat on a calm clear day, when the tips of the tallest shrubs are submerged but a foot or so, and all the delicate filaments, which are invisible or lie flat and flaccid when the tide is out, are waving, twisting and twining, then the spectacle is at its best.”34

  Ted drew attention to the tiny, seemingly humdrum marine creatures that had built this complex spectacle: “Apart from the bulk and fantastic shapes of coral structures, there is the beauty of the living polyps. That which when dry may have the superficial appearance of stone plentifully pitted—a heavy dull mass—blossoms with wondrous gaiety as the revivifying water covers it … Here is a buff-coloured block roughly in the shape of a mushroom with a flat top, irregular edges, and a bulbous stalk. Rich brown alga hangs from its edges in frills and flounces. Little cones stud its surface, each of which is the home of a living, star-like flower, a flower which has the power of displaying and withdrawing itself, and of waving its fringed rays.”35

  At this point it may be useful to note that coral polyps belong to the phylum Cnidaria, which includes jellyfish. Polyps as a whole are carnivorous, multicellular animals with a two-layered body plan and a mouth surrounded by fine tentacles, while coral polyps are a small, soft-bodied form with a cylindrical trunk. The term “coral polyp” has been used by scientists since the mid-eighteenth century, a result of the work of Jean-André Peyssonnel and John Ellis.

  Keen to arouse a sense of aesthetic wonder in his readers, Ted nevertheless disdained any associated sentimentality, presenting himself as a naturalist committed to Darwin’s great law of the survival of species by natural selection.

  A coral reef is gorged with a population of varied elements viciously disposed towards each other. It is one of Nature’s most cruel battlefields, for it is the brood of the sea that “plots mutual slaughter, hungering to live.” Molluscs are murderers and the most shameless of cannibals. No creature at all conspicuous is safe, unless it is agile and alert, or of horrific aspect, or endowed with giant’s strength, or is encased in armour … The whole field is strewn with the relics of perpetual conflict, resolving and being resolved into original elements. We talk of the strenuous life of men in cities. Go to a coral reef and see what the struggle for existence really means. The very bulwarks of limestone are honeycombed by tunnelling shells.36

  Yet in mitigation of this “perpetual war of species,” he cited the numerous instances of “commensal” behavior on the Reef, such as when a pinna mollusc gives lodgings to a mantis shrimp and a miniature eel in exchange for food and cleaning services.

  Even symbiotic allies like these could not, however, protect the mollusc from the parrot fish, simultaneously one of Brammo’s most exquisite creatures and most ruthless predators. As a naturalist, Ted wrote that this fish belonged to the scaroid family, possessed a beaklike mouth, a row of pharyngeal interior teeth for grinding hard shell, and
a gizzard “composed of an intensely tough material, lined with membrane resembling shark’s skin.” As a romantic, he described it as the “jewel of the sea,” having iridescent scales “of slightly elongated hexagons, generally blue outlined with pink, sometimes golden-yellow combined with green; and the colours flash and change with indescribable radiance.” And as a disciple of the “natives of the island,” he recorded that the fish’s flesh was edible, though not particularly flavorsome, and that it was known by the euphonious name of “Oo-ril-ee.”37

  * * *

  The two books that followed the bestselling Confessions—My Tropic Isle in 1911, and Tropic Days in 1918—completed a beachcomber trilogy. My Tropic Isle matched its celebrated predecessor, both in quality and international success. Ted met his readers’ wishes for greater personal details of his joyous beachcomber life, and his publisher’s requests for more of his vivid descriptions of marine life. Tropic Days, however, faltered: he tried to combat his exhaustion of subject matter by including fictional and quasi-fictional pieces that were hackneyed in comparison with his real-life nature writings.

  There was also a deeper, mental problem. From the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ted had begun to lose confidence in his literary creation of the insouciant beachcomber. It was not that the war initially brought many changes to Ted’s life; in fact, that was precisely the problem. When so many others were enduring sacrifice and suffering, Ted felt guilty about living in an escapist paradise. An ardent patriot, easily enraged by newspaper reports of German atrocities, he was also genuinely depressed by the black-rimmed lists of Australian casualties. Letters to family confidants like his sister Eliza hinted at a fear that he and Bertha would somehow be made to pay for their carefree island life.38

  Nemesis, as he was later to think of it, arrived with two monster storms. The first reached Mackay to the south on January 21, 1918, the second hit Dunk Island and the surrounding region on Sunday, March 10. As with all imagined apocalypses, Ted later recalled strange portents: a change in the quality of heat, from moist steam bath to scorching furnace; flocks of disordered frigate birds wheeling aimlessly in the sky; and “Wan Tam snakes congregating around the poultry yard.” Then, between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., “with a conglomeration of terrifying sounds varying from falsetto shrieks to thunderous roars, the center of the cyclone seemed to bore down on the very vitals of the island.” Ted, Bertha, and an Aboriginal family from the settlement at Mission Beach dashed from room to room as the bungalow’s tin roof peeled off, wheeling away into the dark, until only Ted’s study remained intact. The little group of refugees crouched on the floor while trees splintered around them and the contents of the house swirled, as if “crazy with palsy.”39