Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  Because it consists of some 3,000 separate reefs and over 600 islands some people insist that it is not a single entity and therefore cannot accurately be termed the largest living thing on earth. That seems to me a little like saying that Los Angeles is not a city because it consists of lots of separate buildings. It hardly matters. It is fabulous. And it is all thanks to trillions of little coral polyps working with a dedicated and microscopic diligence over 18 million years, each adding a grain or two of thickness before expiring in a self-created silicate tomb. Hard not to be impressed.

  As the ship began to make the sort of slowing-down noises that suggested imminent arrival, I went out on deck to join Allan. I had expected that we would be arriving at some kind of sandy atoll, possibly with a beach bar with a thatched roof, but in fact there was nothing but open sea all around, and a long ruff of gently breaking water, which I presumed indicated the sunken and unseen reef. In the middle of this scene sat an immense aluminium pontoon, two storeys high and big enough to accommodate 400 day trippers. It brought to mind, if vaguely, an oil platform. This was to be our home for the next several hours. When the boat had docked, we all filed happily off. A loudspeaker outlined our many options. We could loll in the sun in deckchairs, or descend to an underwater viewing chamber, or grab snorkels and flippers for a swim, or board a semisubmersible ship for a tour of the reef in comfort.

  We went first on the semisubmersible, a vessel in which thirty or forty people at a time could crowd into a viewing chamber below the waterline. Well, it was wonderful. No matter how much you read about the special nature of the Barrier Reef, nothing really prepares you for the sight of it. The pilot took us into a shimmery world of steep coral canyons and razor-edged defiles, fabulously colourful and teeming with schools of fish of incredible variety and size – butterfly fish, damselfish, angelfish, parrotfish, the gorgeously colourful harlequin tuskfish, tubular pipefish. We saw giant clams and sea slugs and starfish, small forests of waving anemones and the pleasingly large and dopey potato cod. It was, as I had expected, precisely like being at a public aquarium, except of course that this was entirely wild and natural. I was amazed, no doubt foolishly, by what a difference this made. As I looked out a great turtle swam past, just a couple of yards from the window and quite indifferent to us. Then, furtively poking about on the bottom, was a reef shark – only a couple of feet long but capable of giving you a jolly good nip. It wasn’t just the darting fish and other creatures, but the way the light filtered down from above, and the shape and texture and incredible variety of the coral itself. I was captivated beyond description.

  Back on the pontoon, Allan insisted we go at once for a swim. At one side of the pontoon metal steps led into the water. At the top of the steps were large bins containing flippers, snorkels and masks. We kitted up and plopped in. I had assumed that we would be in a few feet of water, so I was taken aback – I am putting this mildly – to discover that I was perhaps sixty feet above the bottom. I had never been in water this deep before and it was unexpectedly unnerving – as unnerving as finding myself floating sixty feet in the air above solid ground. This panicky assessment took place over the course of perhaps three seconds, then my mask and snorkel filled with water and I started choking. Gasping peevishly, I dumped the water out and tried again, but almost immediately the mask filled again. I repeated the exercise two or three times more, but with the same result.

  Allan, meanwhile, was shooting about like Darryl Hannah in Splash. ‘For God’s sake, Bryson, what are you doing?’ he said. ‘You’re three feet from the pontoon and you’re drowning.’

  ‘I am drowning.’ I caught a roll of wave full in the face and came out of it sputtering. ‘I’m a son of the soil,’ I gasped. ‘This is not my milieu.’

  He clucked and disappeared. I dipped my head lightly under to see him shooting off like a torpedo in the direction of a colourful Maori wrasse – an angelfish the size of a sofa cushion – and was consumed once more with a bubbly dismay at all the clear, unimagined depth beneath me. There were big things down there, too – fish half as big as me and far more in their element than I was. Then my mask filled and I was sputtering again. Then another small rolling wave smacked me in the face. I must confess that I liked this even less – quite a good deal less – than I had expected to, and I hadn’t expected to like it much.

  Interestingly, I later learned that this is quite a common reaction among inexperienced ocean swimmers. They get in the water, discover that they are way out of their comfort zone, quietly panic and faint (a Japanese speciality, apparently) or have a heart attack (a fat person speciality). Now here’s where the second interesting aspect comes in. Because snorkellers lie on the water with their arms and legs spread and their faces just under the surface – that is, in the posture known as the dead man’s float – it isn’t actually possible (or so I am told) to tell which people are snorkelling and which are dead. It’s only when the whistle blows and everyone gets out except for one oddly inert and devoted soul that they know there will be one less for tea.

  Fortunately, as you will have deduced from the existence of this book, I escaped this unhappy fate and managed to haul myself back on to the pontoon. I took a seat on a deckchair in the mild sunshine and towelled off with Allan’s shirt. Then I pulled out the newspaper files Alan Howe had given me on the American couple who had died out here. I had read them once before, but now that I could attach visible landmarks to the words I went through them again with particular interest.

  The story, insofar as the known events are concerned, is straightforward. In January 1998, Thomas and Eileen Lonergan, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who had recently completed a tour of duty as Peace Corps volunteers in the south Pacific, were holidaying in Australia before returning home when they went for a day’s scuba diving on the reef with a company called Outer Edge. At the end of the afternoon, they failed to return to the dive boat at the time directed. Their absence was not noted and the boat left without them. Two and a half days passed before anyone reported them missing. No trace of them was ever found.

  Why the Lonergans didn’t return to the dive boat and what became of them when they realized they had been stranded are necessarily matters of conjecture.

  From where I sat I could see the scuba-diving boat, which a passing crew member informed me was about three nautical miles away. (A nautical mile is about a hundred yards longer than a land mile.) It looked awfully small and distant, but the Lonergans, who were experienced divers and at home in the water, should have found the swim no terrible hardship. Conditions were perfect. The sea was calm, the water temperature was 29° C (84° F) and they had on wetsuits. In addition to the pontoon, they had the somewhat easier option of swimming to St Crispin Reef, just 1.2 nautical miles away, where there were some exposed coral outcrops onto which they could clamber to await rescue. The problem, as Alan Howe had so rightly recalled, was that to reach either of these refuges meant crossing a deep-water trench known to be a haunt of large pelagics – which is to say toothy sharks and the occasional blundering grouper.

  From this point the mystery deepened. A few days after their disappearance, the Lonergans’ flotation jackets washed up undamaged on a mainland beach. Why two people stranded at sea would take off their flotation devices would appear to be an unanswerable question. Moreover, the absence of damage to the flotation jackets suggested that they had not been attacked by sharks. Puzzlement grew further when police examined the belongings they had left behind at the backpackers’ hostel in Cairns where they had been staying. There it became clear that the polite young American couple weren’t as happy as they appeared to be. Eileen Lonergan had recorded in her diary that her husband had been depressed and had said he wanted ‘to end it all’ on a scuba-diving trip. (Whoa!) He had suggested that he would take her with him. (Double whoa!)

  There was obviously more to this than met the eye.

  Allan emerged at last, looking invigorated and holding in his stomach in a manner that recalled Jeff Chandl
er in some of his later films, chattering with tedious gusto about what a brilliant experience it had been and what an egregious wimp I was. He slipped on his shirt and fell into the chair beside me, looking very happy. Then he sat up and patted himself extravagantly.

  ‘This shirt’s wet,’ he announced.

  ‘Is it?’ I said, frowning with concern.

  ‘It’s wringing wet.’

  I touched it lightly. ‘Why, yes it is,’ I agreed.

  They were losing people all over the place in Queensland these days, it appeared. The papers the next day were full of reports of an inquest that had been convened to examine the disappearance of a young British backpacker named Daniel Nute on the Cape Tribulation promontory almost two years earlier. Nute had set off alone on a six-hour hike to a place called Mount Sorrow and had dutifully filled out the safety forms bush hikers are asked to complete to help searchers in the event that they fail to return. Unfortunately, no one from the national park staff collected or checked the safety sheets that day. In fact, it turned out that the national park staff seldom collected or checked the safety sheets. So when Nute failed to return no one noticed and no alarm call went out. Even more puzzling was that although Nute had left a tent pitched on the grounds of a backpackers’ lodge in Daintree, the staff at the lodge did not notify the authorities that he was missing for twenty-three days. An employee at the lodge told the inquest that it was ‘common for people to abandon their tents and leave without telling management’.

  But of course.

  The upshot was that by the time a search was organized almost a month had passed. Nute’s body has never been found.

  All this took on a certain relevance the next morning when Allan and I drove into Cairns to run a couple of errands. Something in the window of a sportswear shop caught his eye so we went in. While he was off trying on items of clothing, I chatted pleasantly with the two middle-aged ladies who worked there. I mentioned for no reason – just making conversation really – that Cairns had been much in the news lately.

  ‘Oh?’ said one of the ladies, a little coolly.

  ‘You know, the Lonergan case and the Chinese boat people and this poor kid who went missing at Daintree.’

  ‘Oh, all that,’ said the lady with a dismissive air. ‘They always blow these things out of proportion down south.’

  Her colleague nodded vigorously. ‘Whenever there’s a chance to make Queensland look bad, they leap on it. It was just the same with the cyclone. I was in Sydney that week visiting my sister and, do you know, they had pages of articles about it.’

  ‘Well, it was a big story,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But they wouldn’t have covered it like that if it had been in Western Australia.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No. They do it to discourage people from coming up here, you see.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘Oh yes. They don’t want visitors to leave Sydney. They want to keep them down there. So they take any story that makes Queensland look, you know, dangerous or backward and they twist the facts about to frighten people.’

  They both nodded in the sincerest agreement.

  ‘It was the same with that young couple out on the reef. It’s quite evident that it was suicide, but they blew it all out of proportion—’

  ‘All out of proportion,’ seconded her friend.

  ‘—so that they could make it look like it wasn’t safe to go out on the reef.’

  ‘And the boy at Daintree?’ I ventured.

  ‘They don’t know that he’s dead at all,’ she said in the tone of one who has unimpeachable sources.

  ‘But he’s been missing for two years.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s been sighted all over the Cape York peninsula.’

  ‘All over,’ agreed her friend.

  ‘I’m sorry, are you saying the papers falsely reported his death to make Queensland look dangerous?’

  ‘I’m just saying that all the facts aren’t in.’ She nodded primly and crossed her arms. Her partner did likewise.

  And I thought: madder than cut snakes.

  As it happened, we were heading to Daintree ourselves. It was as far north as you could get on a paved road in this part of Australia, so we decided to go and have a look. By mid-morning all traces of rain had abated and the sun began to come out – tentatively at first, but then with sumptuous gusto. Queensland was transformed. Suddenly we were in Hawaii – tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From time to time we drove through sunny canefields, overlooked by the steep, blue eminence of the Great Dividing Range.

  At Daintree we parked and got out to have a look around. We walked down to the edge of the Daintree River, where both the road and Beryl Wruck came to their respective abrupt terminations. We couldn’t see any sign of crocodiles. Then we got back in the car and drove off down a winding side road that leads to a ferry across the Daintree to Cape Tribulation. The ferry had been shut for a week by the rains, so there wasn’t much point in going down there, but I wanted to see the cape at least from across the river, and there was the off chance that we might glimpse a crocodile. To our surprise, the ferry was operating. We had been assured in Daintree that it was still shut.

  ‘Reopened yesterday,’ said the ferryman, a man of few words.

  So we took the ferry across and set off on the twenty-mile drive to Cape Tribulation through Daintree National Park. The road wound up and through a mountainous and intensely beautiful rainforest. We had at last made it into the wet tropics, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

  The Daintree forest is a remnant of a time when the world was a single land mass, the whole covered in steamy growth. As time passed, continents split up and drifted off to the far corners of the globe, but the Daintree, through some tectonic fluke, escaped the more dramatic transformations of climate and orientation that spurred ecological change elsewhere. In consequence, there are plants out there – whole families of plants – that survived as nowhere else. In 1972, scientists began to appreciate just how ancient and exceptional Australia’s northern rainforest is when some cattle mysteriously sickened and died after grazing in the jungle’s lower slopes. The cows, it turned out, had been poisoned by the seeds of a tree called Idiospermum australianse. What was unexpected about this was that Idiospermum was thought to have vanished from the earth 100 million years ago. In fact, it was doing very well in the Daintree, as were eleven other members of its family, a primitive outpost of botany called the angiosperms, from which all flowering plants are descended. That’s the kind of place Daintree National Park is – dark, dense, seeming to belong to some remote epoch. It’s a landscape in which it wouldn’t entirely surprise you to see pterosaurs gliding through the trees or velociraptors sprinting across the road ahead.

  In fact, there is quite a lot of odd life out there. This is one of the few remaining areas where you can hope to see cassowaries. They look much like emus except that they have a bony growth on their head called a casque and the infamous murderous claw on each foot. They attack by jumping up and striking out with both feet together. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen very often. The last fatal attack was in 1926, when a cassowary charged a sixteen-year-old boy who had been taunting it and sliced open his jugular as it bounded across him. The reason attacks are so few is that cassowaries are exceedingly reclusive and now, alas, very few in number. No more than a thousand of them survive. The Daintree is also one of the last homes of the celebrated tree kangaroo – which, as its name suggests, is a kangaroo that lives in trees – but it is even shyer than the cassowary and almost never seen. So dense is the jungle, and so remote from the centres of academia, that much of it remains unstudied. The first scientific study of cassowaries, for instance, was begun only about a decade ago.

  At length the road ended at a sunny clearing in the jungle with, incongruously, a takeaway food stand and a phone booth. Tucked aw
ay in the extravagant foliage was a campground, and beside it an arrowed sign pointed the way to the beach. This led to a boardwalk through mangroves. Little creatures plinked unseen into the swampy water as we approached. After a few minutes we emerged onto the beach. It was remarkably beautiful – a great sweep of soft white sand strewn with driftwood, palm fronds and other natural clutter, standing before a very bright blue bay. Ahead of us loomed a towering headland cloaked in green.

  The spot was sunnily pristine, exactly as it must have appeared to James Cook when he first laid eyes on it more than two centuries ago. He called it Cape Tribulation because it was here that the Endeavour disastrously lodged on coral some twelve miles off the coast. Severely holed, it was in imminent danger of sinking, but Cook had with him a seaman who had once been in similar straits on a ship that had been saved by an unusual process known as fothering – in effect bandaging its underside by running a sail beneath it and pulling it tight to cover the hole. It was a desperate and improbable measure, but miraculously it worked.

  Cook nursed the ship to shore a few miles around the headland from where we were now. The crew spent seven weeks making repairs before sailing off to England and glory. Had the Endeavour sunk, and Cook failed to get home, history would of course have been very different. Australia would very likely have become French – an eerie thought, to say the least – and Britain would have had to adjust its colonial ambitions accordingly. No part of the world would have escaped the effects. Melbourne might now stand on African plains. Sydney could be the capital of the Royal Colony of California. Who can possibly say? What is certain is that the global balance of power would have changed in ways beyond imagining. On the other hand, we would almost certainly have been spared Home and Away, so it’s not as if it would have been an unmitigated disaster.