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

by Iain McCalman

  The cyclone blew for a manic half hour, lapsed briefly, then resumed with a last burst of violence before disappearing. The next day Ted learned that the nearby town of Innisfail had been wrecked and fifteen lives lost. Even closer to home, his friend John Kenney, Superintendent of the Mission Beach Aboriginal Settlement, had been killed while trying to rescue his daughter, who was actually already dead, a spear of broken timber driven through her heart. At least three Aborigines had been drowned and some two hundred others were missing.

  Surveying Dunk Island itself, Ted saw a scene of carnage, “a leafless wilderness” that aroused images of the Somme: “The shrub-embroidered strand is now forlorn, its vegetation, uprooted and down-beaten, naked roots exposed to critical view. Not a shrub has escaped, and broken and shattered limbs of tough trees appeal for sympathy.” He couldn’t help using words like “fouled” and “soiled” to describe his lost paradise. Dunk had been ravaged by a “great, bullying” nature that he’d previously described with metaphors of purity and innocence.40

  Every tree was uprooted or “maimed and disfigured.” The streams were “foul-tasting” and “blocked with decaying vegetation”; the islet in the bay, once dotted with scarlet umbrella trees and golden-brown orchids, was now a bare rock. Ted and Bertha’s grand avenue of coconut palms had been tossed fifty yards away, and a consequent tidal wave had strewn the garden area with mounds of sand, coral, and shells that extended one hundred yards beyond the strand. Their new motorboat had been torn from its trolley and pulverized. Worst of all, thousands of birds had been killed: as if mown down by machine guns, their corpses lay among a sea of rotting fruit and debris. Ted wrote despairingly to his Ararat relatives that his and Bertha’s life at Dunk was over. Both being in their sixties, the task of starting again seemed impossible.

  As usual, it was Bertha who rallied Ted’s spirits. Calling him over to some smashed fruit trees, she pointed to fresh buds and leaf shoots. “So let’s get the clocks going again,” she said briskly. Within a week they’d decided to stay. Mainland friends rallied around with gifts, labor, and promises of money. Bertha reminded Ted, too, about his pontifications in Confessions about nature’s resilience. Encouraged, he began to see signs of hope and renewal. The sun, able to penetrate into new-made forest clearings, was germinating bird-carried seeds to create a fresh Elysium: “instead of permanently destroying vegetation, the big wind will have to its credit denser and more beautiful growths; instead of grassy glades, an almost impenetrable entanglement; palms will sprawl over lofty trees; huge vines, with stems as thick as a man’s thigh and bearing pods a yard long, will spread a network over all; and instead of the forest’s comparatively dry surface will be maintained a moist, sweet-smelling soil, and steamy conditions and half-lights.”41

  One day Bertha called Ted’s attention to the most redemptive sign of all—the return of a pair of sunbirds, without which “the Isle would have lost no little of its glitter.”42

  As in the past, though, Ted experienced a type of delayed shock. Bertha noticed that he was oscillating between bouts of feverish elation and manic overwork. Recognizing the signs of an impending nervous collapse, she ordered him to take a week’s rest in the Townsville hospital. This, combined with the news that a friend had offered them a fixed income in exchange for a half-share of their land, brought Ted back to relative normality.

  In the longer term, though, he never recovered from the combined effects of the war and the cyclone. They seemed to instill in him a sense of disquiet as profound as that of many veterans returning to a world they no longer understood. Among the sources of Ted’s postwar malaise, one irritant proved especially galling, because he himself was to blame. The fame of his beachcomber books and articles brought a tide of inquiries from romantic-minded Australians, Europeans, Britons, and Americans who wanted “to go a-Dunking.” Most he rejected, but some turned up anyway. And a few had war records or personal disabilities that touched his susceptible heart. He and Bertha accommodated several struggling families on the island during the early 1920s, though the couple invariably found the experience testing. Other visitors, like the Governor of Queensland, were too grand to turn down, or, like the cartographers and scientists from the survey ship Fantome, were engaged in work too important to refuse.

  Most troubling were all the new entrepreneurs and tourists who seemed to be invading the Reef region: vacationers in cars, steamers, and yachts; pearlers, trochus-shell collectors, and trepang fishermen in praus, luggers, and ketches; and gun-happy Italian sugar workers or soldier-settlers who wanted to open up new stretches of the coastland. Ted didn’t actually oppose the development of northern Queensland; as the author of two tourist guides extolling the scenic, climatic, and economic attractions of the Reef, he could hardly complain. But he was infuriated when these new people came as plunderers and killers. Some collected “bird skins,” dugong oil, and turtle meat for money; many killed pigeons and starlings for sport; and all collected corals and shells indiscriminately.43

  Ted compared Dunk Island birdlife in 1921 to his census of 1905. The results were shocking: every species of bird of prey had vanished, as had fruit pigeons, oystercatchers, plovers, and egrets. All other bird species, except the brown-winged tern, showed a substantial decrease in numbers. True, the cyclone was partly to blame, but it was nutmeg pigeons and metallic starlings—the species most attractive to sportsmen—that had suffered the most.44

  Ted was convinced that the Queensland government bodies responsible for wildlife protection were turning a blind eye to this destruction. They issued shooting licenses promiscuously, and refused to restrict shooting seasons for birds. Ted wrote searing newspaper denunciations of “selfish collectors” and the “traffic in wild birds,” but the final straw was receiving a government poster advertising a new Animals and Bird Act of 1921 that made no mention of Dunk Island or the rest of the Family group as bird sanctuaries. One cavalier pen stroke by a Brisbane bureaucrat had excised twenty years of work toward Ted’s “grand objective.” He wrote a furious letter resigning his cherished position of ranger, a gesture that the department didn’t bother to acknowledge.

  Some consolation came from his association with a few like-minded men and women who were equally committed to the preservation of Dunk Island’s bird and marine life. Alec Chisholm, an influential naturalist, conservationist, and journalist, became a close friend to both Ted and Bertha, fighting in the popular press for many of the beachcomber’s causes. (Bertha, for her part, seems not to have considered herself a beachcomber, being more conservative than Ted; she went along with him in a spirit of spousal tolerance.) In September 1922 Chisholm reported triumphantly in the Daily Mail that, thanks to Ted’s passionate advocacy, the government had finally agreed to the complete protection of nutmeg pigeons.45

  The glow of this vindication had no time to fade before Ted suddenly succumbed to peritonitis, dying peacefully in the night of June 2, 1923, at the age of seventy-one. Bertha, isolated by storms, had to stay with his body for three nights before managing to attract the notice of a passing steamer. The captain and sailors came ashore, built a rough coffin of ship’s timber, and laid the beachcomber to rest in the island he so loved. Later Bertha built a cairn over his grave; she eventually joined her “dear laddie” there in August 1933.

  Ted Banfield left many legacies, including the collection of late writings published by Alec Chisholm in 1925 under the title Last Leaves from Dunk Island, to favorable reviews from all around the world. Yet perhaps his greatest legacy was the propagation of a new, more respectable version of the island paradise myth, devoid of fantasies about Polynesian maidens. The idea of the island paradise had until now been associated primarily with the South Seas, and Ted’s beachcomber paradise helped put an end to lingering assumptions that the Barrier Reef was full of violent, primitive headhunters.

  Ted was responsible for the idea that the Reef in fact contains multiple island paradises. His books, which were far more widely read than William Saville-K
ent’s expensive work, generated a spate of would-be Crusoes, and in the long run added to interest in the possibility of Reef tourist expeditions and resorts. It was a legacy that Maurice Yonge and his young biologists would consolidate and extend.

  Given Ted’s desire for Dunk to become a wildlife sanctuary, its transformation into a resort is ironic. Still, we can imagine him smiling grimly to learn of the latest act of Nemesis, in 2011, when Cyclone Yasi all but blew the Dunk Island resort away.

  PART THREE

  Wonder

  9

  OBSESSION

  The Quest to Prove the Origins of the Reef

  PEOPLE WHO KNEW American zoologist Alex Agassiz described him as a kindly, gentle, and eminently rational man, yet he spent much of the latter part of his life engaged in what appears to have been an obsessive, expensive, and quixotic quest to visit and analyze all the coral reefs of the world. His epic series of Pacific and Indian ocean voyages began on April 16, 1896, with an expedition to the greatest reef of all.

  Agassiz was already sixty-one when he embarked on the small chartered steamer the Croydon from Brisbane. One of his assistants on that trip, Alfred Mayor, recorded that during the next twenty-five years, Agassiz would “wander further and see more coral reefs than has any man of science of the present or past.”1

  Alex Agassiz’s aim was ambitious: he wanted to discredit Charles Darwin’s famous theory of the origin of coral reefs, and where better to start than Australia. His Croydon expedition marks yet another change in the perception of the Great Barrier Reef, which, having experienced varied shades of fame and infamy, was catapulted by Agassiz’s quest to global scientific prominence. The Reef became a centerpiece in a fierce debate among the world’s leading geologists, marine scientists, and oceanographers—a debate that was as important internationally as it was in Australia.

  Why, though, should an aging and reclusive expert on starfish like Agassiz choose this moment to mount such an obsessive mission to the other side of the globe? It was equally odd for Charles Darwin’s theory of coral reefs to be generating such heated debate so long after its first drafting. After all, this had been Darwin’s juvenile scientific achievement, scribbled sixty years earlier when voyaging around the world as a young gentleman’s companion on the HMS Beagle. He confessed that the theory had been an act of pure deduction, having come to him when he was scrambling up the Andes Mountains in Chile, before he’d ever seen a coral reef. Coral fossils within the Andes rock strata suggested to Darwin that this vast mountain chain had been elevated gradually from the ocean floor by volcanic action over aeons of time.

  But what goes up can also go down: perhaps, thought Darwin, a corresponding subsidence had taken place on the bed of the Pacific and Indian oceans? This would explain a mystery long puzzling to navigators and naturalists: how these tiny coral “insects,” known to live only in shallow, light-filled waters, had built vast ramparts that rose up from the dark depths of the oceans.

  If, speculated Darwin, coral reefs grew in a ring pattern around the shallow fringes of volcanic pinnacles in the sea, and if these rocky islets were to subside at a pace that matched the reefs’ upward growth, they would create thick walls of dead coral with a living crust on top. Over many centuries this process would leave behind circular atolls surrounding shallow lagoons, or barrier reefs separated from the mainland by lagoon-like channels.

  Charles Darwin’s few hasty observations in the Pacific and Indian oceans seemed to confirm the theory, which was then strengthened over many years by the closer investigations of James Dwight Dana, a former Pacific voyager who became an eminent Yale geologist. Since then few scientists had challenged this simple and elegant hypothesis; it was one that Darwin, in his autobiography of 1876, regarded as “well established.”2

  * * *

  Alexander Agassiz was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1835, the year that Darwin first drafted his reef-subsidence theory. His father, Louis Agassiz, migrated from Switzerland to America in 1846, where he quickly became a Harvard professor of zoology who dazzled everyone he met, scientists, literati, and glitterati alike. His European charm, dramatic lecturing style, and romantic personality helped make him the first American scientist to stride the global stage since Benjamin Franklin.

  But Louis still believed that natural species were God’s thoughts ordered in a beautiful “Plan of Creation,” and following the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 it was inevitable that he would clash with Darwin and his supporters. A decade on, Louis Agassiz’s increasingly strident and ineffectual attempts to snuff out Darwin’s theory of evolution had cost him much scientific respect.

  Most of his son Alex’s troubled early childhood was spent either at boarding school or living with his artistic mother Cecile in Freiburg, Germany. She had taken her children there when she could no longer stand living with her narcissistic, work-obsessed husband. After a few years she died of tuberculosis. This forced Alex, at the age of thirteen, to join Louis and his new stepmother, Liz Cary, in Boston. Fortunately, Alex doted on them both. Alfred Mayor later claimed that the son’s “reverence for his father was almost a religion with him.”3

  On graduating from Harvard in engineering, zoology, and natural history, Alex spent most of the 1860s trying to control his father’s feckless spending of the budget of Harvard’s new Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). Deeply sensitive under a reserved exterior, Alex also had to undergo the anguish of witnessing his father’s successive scientific humiliations at the hands of Darwin and his prominent Harvard supporters, professors Asa Gray and James Dana. On top of this, Louis’s high-handed manner alienated a bright group of students, who seceded from the museum with much scandal after accusing him of plagiarizing their work.4

  Alex Agassiz was no cipher, however. Louis’s opposite in personality, this shy, meticulous boy was determined to make his own way in life. Having fallen deeply in love with one of his students, the independent-minded Anna Russell, he married her in 1860. The devoted couple had three children in quick succession and forged a close-knit circle of half a dozen wealthy Boston relatives and friends. Six years later Alex surprised everyone by deciding to rescue a struggling Michigan copper mine, which he miraculously turned into one of the largest and most prosperous in America, making him a millionaire.

  Continuing at the same time to exercise his passion for marine biology, Alex employed methods that were as thorough as his father’s were cavalier. During the 1860s and ’70s he produced an impressive list of publications on the taxonomy and embryology of echinoderms (the phylum which includes starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and others), all of which displayed a rigorous empirical approach to evidence. Privately he also admitted to a “general” acceptance of his father’s bête noire, Darwinian evolution. On a trip to England in 1869 Alex even took the trouble to meet and impress both Darwin and his disciple, Thomas Huxley.5

  But in mid-December 1873 Alex Agassiz’s world collapsed. “The thunderbolts of God fall heavily upon us,” wrote his best friend and brother-in-law, Theo Lyman. The first shock was when Louis Agassiz died suddenly on December 14, after suffering a massive stroke. A few nights later Alex’s beloved wife, Anna, exhausted from tending to her father-in-law, was diagnosed with pneumonia. Aged only thirty-three, she died at midnight on the twenty-second and was buried on Christmas Eve. “Alex stood at the brink [of the grave],” Lyman recorded, “… with the tears rolling down his face, till I whispered to him to go.”6

  All life washed out of Alex; he couldn’t even comfort his distraught sons. “I am utterly unable to get reconciled to an existence which is well-nigh intolerable,” he confessed to the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Six months later, while trying to cover his father’s teaching obligations, he broke down “and cried without control; and seemed like a man who’d lost much blood.”7

  As months and then years passed, the grip of this depression showed no sign of lessening. Frenetic work and a series of overseas trips offered some distraction, but Al
ex’s close friends, with whom he was often melancholy and withdrawn, noticed permanent changes in his personality. He became gruff, surly, and prone to explosive bouts of anger with his students and employees. His young assistant Alfred Mayor commented that Agassiz “raised a wall between himself and the unsympathetic world … he held himself far and aloof.”8

  In late 1876, still as fragile as ever, Alex accepted an invitation to visit Britain to help the celebrated Scottish marine scientist John Murray sort through some of the thousands of specimens of animals, plants, and seafloor deposits collected on the HMS Challenger’s three-year oceanographic expedition around the world. The meeting started awkwardly: Alex silenced Murray’s opening commiserations about Anna with the blurted cry, “I cannot bear it.” Yet working alongside Murray he grew animated for the first time in years, as he learned of the expedition’s startling results. These included the discovery of teeming life in the supposedly barren oceanic depths, and the mapping of vast gullies, canyons, and mountain peaks on the seabed.9