Chelonia Green, Champion of Turtles

by Christobel Mattingley

  Chelonia

  Green

  Champion of Turtles

  Christobel Mattingley

  First published in 2008

  Copyright © Christobel Mattingley, 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Mattingley, Christobel, 1931–

  Chelonia green, champion of turtles

  ISBN: 978 174175 171 0 (pbk.)

  For children.

  Sea turtles--Queensland--Juvenile fiction.

  Wildlife rescue--Juvenile fiction.

  Conservation of natural resources –Juvenile fiction.

  A823.4

  Cover and text design by Zoe Sadokierski

  Set in 12/18pt pt Abode Garamond Pro by Midland Typesetters, Australia.

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com

  To Nina, Chris and

  Bethwynne

  With grateful memories of Miss Knox, my headmistress, who berated the whole school at assembly if she found so much as a piece of orange peel in the grounds

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 Chelonia Green

  Chapter 2 Beaches

  Chapter 3 The Turtles

  Chapter 4 Nesting

  Chapter 5 Hatching!

  Chapter 6 Caretta

  Chapter 7 The Challenge

  Chapter 8 Storm

  Chapter 9 Gone!

  Chapter 10 The Campaign Begins

  Chapter 11 So Much to Do

  Chapter 12 Hope by Helicopter

  Chapter 13 Tracks!

  Chapter 14 Help Arrives

  Chapter 15 ‘Best Two Days of My Life’

  Chapter 16 More Help

  Chapter 17 ‘Chelonia, You’re a Champion!’

  CHAPTER 1

  Chelonia Green

  CHELONIA GREEN WAS NOT HER real name. Although she wished it was. She had made it up herself.

  When her mother called, ‘Michelle, where are you?’ she often didn’t hear.

  When her mother called, ‘Michelle Braddon, where are you?’ she never heard.

  But when her father called, ‘Chellie, where are you?’ she always heard. And ran to meet him.

  It wasn’t that she did not love her mum as much as she loved her dad. But Mum was usually calling her to come and do her lessons. While Dad would probably say, ‘How about some beachcombing?’ Or if the tide was right, ‘Shall we go and see the turtles?’

  Even though Mum was a good teacher and made lessons interesting, why would you want to sit inside when you could wander along the beach with Dad, who knew so much about everything on the island? When you might find all sorts of treasures at high tide, and, best of all, see turtles at low tide in the big rock pool.

  Chellie could remember the very first time Dad had taken her to see the turtles, just after the family came to live on the island. Her little legs had been so short that Dad had carried her piggyback through the long grass down the sandhills. He had lifted her over the spiny trunks of fallen pandanus trees and swung her down over the edge of the sandbank. Onto the longest, widest, most beautiful beach Chellie had ever seen in her life.

  The sea was bluer than the sky. The foam was whiter than the clouds.

  ‘Look at all the white horses!’ Dad pointed to the flying spray streaming from the big green waves rolling towards them.

  Chellie smelled their saltiness and tasted it on her lips. She scampered along the beach beside Dad, who was heading towards a big outcrop of rocks. All jumbled together, the rocks were – dark as prunes, brown as raisins, golden as sultanas. They looked like a huge fruitcake, the sort she liked to help Mum mix. Dad picked Chellie up again and carried her over big rocks and drifts of smaller rocks, and put her down to run along the strips of buttery yellow sand in between. He carried her again over the last steep ridge and sat her on his shoulders to look down.

  There in the shimmering green water below lay four big oval shapes. Chellie thought they looked like a giant’s carving dishes. They were patterned in brownish green and had five handles. Suddenly the handles stirred, and the giant’s carving dishes began to move!

  Upward – backward, forward – downward went one pair of handles, while the other smaller handles stayed steady. The fifth handle poked up above the water and looked at Chellie with heavy-lidded eyes.

  Chellie pummelled Dad’s head in excitement. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Turtles,’ Dad said.

  ‘Turtles,’ Chellie repeated. ‘Turtles.’ What a lovely word. She rolled it around in her mouth. Turtles. Turtles. Turtles.

  ‘Green turtles. Chelonia is their scientific name.’

  Chellie loved the big words, like scientific, that Dad used. And she thought that Chelonia was the most beautiful word she had ever heard. She whispered it to herself. Chelonia. Chelonia. And green. Green was her favourite colour. She would be Chelonia Green.

  CHAPTER 2

  Beaches

  CHELLIE WAS OLDER NOW AND much bigger. Her legs were longer, stronger. She roamed the island from side to side, from end to end. She explored the bushy gullies where fruit bats hung in the trees like black umbrellas, furling and unfurling their wings. She climbed the hummocky hills to survey the sea and the surrounding islands, looking for whales in winter and spring. She circled the dam to watch the swallows skimming its brown surface, and the rainbow birds flashing down to drink.

  Best of all, Chellie loved the beaches. The island had eight – one for each day of the week and one to spare, Dad joked. Depending on the way the wind was blowing, Chellie decided which one to visit.

  The west beach was Home Beach, where Dad usually brought in the boat to unload stores. It was long and sloping, with deep soft sand the colour of caramel, and sticky too. The sand coated Chellie’s feet in glittering socks of shell grit. Home Beach was the best beach of all for shells. Twice a day the tide left a ripple of them at high-water mark, and Chellie wandered along looking for limpets, whelks, cockles, cowries and fragments of bright red coral.

  Around the rocky headland at South Beach the sand was different. Softer, finer, silky, silvery. It was Chellie’s favourite swimming place.

  Mum always said, ‘Don’t go out over your depth,’ and although Chellie sometimes wanted to, she never did. Chellie knew the glistening green water was home to many creatures, some of them much bigger than she was. She was lucky to share it with them. It was fun to pretend she was a fish darting, or a dolphin leaping, or a ray slowly flapping.

  The southwest beach was called Pine Beach because of the hoop pines which grew among its craggy cliffs. A lot of flotsam and jetsam washed up here, and Chellie liked fossicking in the drifts by the sandbanks. You never knew what you might find. />
  On the other side of the island, the sight of the long sweeping curve of Turtle Beach still made Chellie draw in her breath every time she breasted its sheltering sandhills. If an easterly were blowing, the sea would send in long slow rollers frilled with foam. Then Dad and Chellie would go body surfing.

  ‘Exhilarating!’ Dad would shout, with the foam clinging in a white curl to his wet hair.

  Turtle Point and the oyster-encrusted rocks beyond hugged a smaller beach. At low tide a pair of oystercatchers probed just above the water line with their long red bills, their reflections shining in the wet sand. Chellie wondered how they managed to break open the ridged, purple oyster shells, but the many empty white shells on the rocks proved they did.

  Beyond Oystercatcher Cove, it was time for rock-hopping. Dad had shown Chellie how to recognise the different sorts of rocks – sedimentary, metamorphic, igneous. Chellie repeated their names as she scrambled and clambered and jumped from outcrop to outcrop – over fallen slabs of cliff , past caves and blow holes, along thick seams of white and yellow quartz like neglected teeth.

  At last the long straight stretch of the northeast beach appeared beyond the rocks – white, dazzling white. It was the only white beach on the island. Chellie had never seen snow, but she was sure it couldn’t look any whiter than this sand. So she called it Snowy Beach.

  On again, more rocks to climb to the northernmost point of the island – a rugged headland jutting fiercely out into the sea. From the boat it looked like a crouching lion, so she called it Lion Head.

  Round the corner, past Lion Head, stretched another beach. The north beach. Not quite as white as Snowy Beach, but beautiful too, printed with the three-toed tracks of curlews like little arrows. When Chellie came across a curlew, it always gave her a start. Its sand-coloured plumage made it blend into the background, and it stood so still that it looked like a piece of driftwood.

  ‘Camouflage,’ Dad said. But Chellie could see its eyes watching her and would back away. After all, it was the curlews’ place more than hers. Curlew Beach.

  Yet another stretch of rocks, honeycombed and sculpted into the weirdest shapes by sea and wind, had to be crossed to reach the northwest beach. Here the reef was close inshore, and the beach disappeared at high tide. But orchids with little green and yellow flowers like butterflies, the only orchids on the island, clung in crevices in the cliff face. So it was Orchid Beach.

  Past another rocky point caressed by casuarinas, Chellie was back to where she had started. Home Beach.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Turtles

  CHELLIE DID HER LESSONS WITH the School of Distance Education. Each month when Dad went to the mainland to collect the stores, he picked up a fat package addressed to Michelle Braddon, c/o the Post Office. Chellie liked opening her mail and looking over all the material she would study with Mum through the next four weeks. She and Mum eagerly checked what her other teacher, Miss Howe, had written on the assignments they had sent in last time. When it was Good work, Michelle, or Well done, they were both pleased.

  ‘Let’s make a cake,’ Mum would say, and the maths lesson for the day would be weighing and measuring the ingredients, calculating quantities and cooking time. Chellie liked helping to make bread too. The smell of it baking as she did her worksheets was one of the best smells she knew.

  For a break she would help hang out the washing, pegging tea towels, pillowcases and knickers tight against the tugging wind. Or she weeded the carrots or picked the peas. When the chooks clucked triumphantly, Chellie would hurry out to hunt for their eggs among the tussocky grass and under the lime tree, before the crows could get them.

  Then it didn’t seem long before Mum announced, ‘Okay. School’s finished for today.’

  Chellie would be off at once – a sandwich in one pocket, an orange in the other. Off to visit the turtles if the tide was falling. Over the hummocky hills, through the wind-shorn bush, onto the sandhills, down to the beach. Running, laughing, somersaulting, skipping, splashing through the dancing waves, shouting to the turtles, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

  She was as nimble and sure-footed as the goats on the island across the water. She jumped easily from rock to rock, across the crevices and gulches and rock pools where crabs clicked and scuttled sideways out of sight. The grey heron flapped into the air at her coming, and the oystercatcher out on the point where the waves were breaking piped a shrill alarm.

  ‘Silly bird,’ Chellie chided. ‘You know I’ll never hurt you.’

  Lightly, she made her way up onto the ridge that overlooked the big pool where the turtles rested, wondering how many and which ones would be there. Sometimes there were seven, sometimes eight or nine or ten. Fourteen was the most she had ever seen. She was quiet now, as quiet as the turtles, squatting to count them. They were aware of her presence but did not move. Chellie was sure they knew her, knew that she was their friend.

  Each turtle seemed to have a favourite place: resting half out of the water on a shallow ledge, or floating in the sun in the middle of the pool, or sleeping in the shadow of an overhanging slab. Chellie pondered each elegantly patterned, curved carapace, and marvelled at the way the leathery mosaic on the flippers, neck and head matched the hard shell. The mottles all merged into the dimples and dapples of the water, so that even such a large creature became difficult to distinguish when it submerged.

  When one turtle stirred and began to swim, others followed. Chellie was rapt. Absorbed in watching their graceful movements, she did not feel the hard rock under her bottom, and totally forgot the sandwich in her pocket. All she knew was the slow rhythm of the turtle ballet.

  The three biggest were each over a metre long. ‘They could be more than sixty years old,’ Dad had told her. Chellie marvelled. Twice as old as Mum and Dad. As old as her gran.

  Dad called the biggest The Dowager. ‘She’s a matriarch and still laying eggs.’

  It was awesome. Chellie tried to imagine Gran having babies, but couldn’t.

  One turtle had a damaged shell. ‘Run over by a boat,’ Dad said sadly. Chellie called her Scarback. Another had a nick out of its shell, so became Nicky.

  Flip’s back left flipper was missing, and Flop’s back right flipper was gone. ‘Probably grabbed by a shark. Or chopped by a propeller,’ Dad surmised.

  Chellie shuddered.

  ‘Hard work for them when they have to cover their eggs. They use their front ones to dig the nest, but only their hind ones to backfill,’ Dad explained.

  Most of the turtles were females. Ladies-in-waiting was Dad’s name for them. Waiting for the time when they would lay their eggs.

  The males had much bigger tails and were more restless. Mostly they swam underwater, just popping their heads up from time to time to breathe. Sometimes it was not the male turtles that disturbed the peace of the pool. Other creatures lived there too. A fierce, long streak of a fish would dart out from under the seaweedy rock in the centre to chase the little fish, which flashed and skimmed in a glittering cloud. They would peel off into two smaller clouds to try to elude the predator pursuing them into the deep shadow.

  Chellie moved quietly around the main pool, pausing beside each turtle at the edge. Then she went to check the smaller pools beyond, where other turtles might be resting. Sometimes a loggerhead turtle was in the furthest outlying pool. It seemed to know it was not part of the green family and kept apart. It had a different pattern of scales on its reddish brown shell, and its head was much bigger and chunkier, with a mouth that could crunch shellfish, crabs, sea urchins and jellyfish.

  ‘Not like the greens. They’re vegetarians,’ Dad joked.

  ‘What’s its scientific name?’ Chellie had asked.

  ‘Caretta caretta,’ Dad replied.

  ‘Caretta,’ Chellie repeated. ‘I like that.’ So Caretta it was, and this turtle became Chellie’s favourite.

  When the tide turned and water began rising in the pools, swirling through the seaward channels, bubbling up through the
crevices, Chellie knew it was time to leave.

  ‘Goodbye, turtles,’ she whispered.

  If the tide was already rising when she reached the sandhills, she would settle in a little hollow out of the wind and gaze at Turtle Point disappearing under the waves. Chellie loved to think of the turtles moving out to feed, swimming free in the deep sea, which held no secrets for them.

  But there were secrets right where she sat. Many years ago, Aboriginal people had sat in this very same sheltered hollow, talking and laughing where now only the wind in the casuarinas sighed a slow lament. Chellie sifted through her fingers the fragments of purple shells from their feasts, imagining women gathering oysters from the rocks below, while children played on the beach.

  In her mind’s eye she could see men too, squatting here, patiently chipping implements out of stones from the shingle at the foot of the cliffs. She picked up spearheads, marvelling at the sharpness of the flaked blades, and discovered heavy hammers shaped to fit snugly in the hand. Perhaps the men had hunted turtles too, lighting a fire of driftwood on the beach to cook their catch. Surely they would have come in the nesting season, so that the women could gather turtle eggs.

  CHAPTER 4

  Nesting

  CHELLIE AND HER PARENTS WATCHED eagerly for nesting turtles. Chellie knew that turtles, like so many other creatures, are under threat of extinction because of changes in their habitat, both on land and at sea.

  ‘The turtles that nest on our island are lucky,’ Dad commented. ‘No foxes. No dogs or feral pigs to sniff out the nests and eat the eggs, the way they do on so many mainland beaches. No foreshore developments encroaching on the coast, and no lights to confuse the turtles.’

  Chellie giggled at the thought of their island’s foreshore developments: a sandy track for the tractor to pull the boat out of the water and two little solar lamps, which Dad always removed at the beginning of the nesting season. He didn’t replace the lamps until months later, after the last hatchlings had emerged. But Chellie knew that there were plenty of other risks facing the baby turtles. Before they even reached the water, predatory crabs and sea birds waited. And in the sea beyond, hungry fish hunted these bite-sized snacks.