Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  Since that time other stromatolite beds of similar or greater venerability have been found elsewhere, both in Australia and further afield. Meanwhile, however, in the warm, shallow waters of Shark Bay, on a lonely stretch of the Western Australian coast, scientists found something no less extraordinary, and even more unexpected. They found a community of living stromatolites – colonies of lichen-like formations that quietly but perfectly replicate the conditions that existed on earth when life was in its infancy. It was this that I was on my way to see.

  * * *

  It’s about an eight-hour drive from Perth north to Shark Bay. In early afternoon, near a place called Dongara, the road curved down towards the sea and I began at last to get glimpses of blue ocean. This section of Western Australia is called the Batavia Coast, which, as it happens, was something else I was interested to look into. At Geraldton, the only town worthy of the name (certainly the only place with more than one set of traffic lights) for 600 miles, I stopped for coffee and parked by chance outside a small maritime museum in the town centre. I hesitated by the door, torn between the need to keep moving and a curiosity to see what was in there, then impulsively stepped in, and how glad I was I did, for the museum was devoted in large part to the little-known story of the ship that gave the coast its name – a forgotten merchant vessel called the Batavia, which blundered onto Australian shores in 1629 and in so doing set in motion one of the more bizarre and unlikely episodes in the annals of maritime affairs. Most Australian histories give it no more than a footnote (Manning Clark does not mention it at all), which is a little surprising because it was the first sojourn by Europeans on Australian soil, and it remains the greatest slaughter of white people in Australian history. But I get ahead of myself.

  In 1629, when our story begins, Dutch mariners had only recently discovered that the swiftest way to the East Indies from Europe was not to make a beeline across the Indian Ocean after rounding Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but to drop down to the fortieth parallel – the famous Roaring Forties – and let those lively winds convey you eastward. The approach worked well so long, of course, as you managed not to crash into Australia. Alas, this was the fate that befell Captain Francisco Pelsaert, two hours before dawn in early June 1629, when the Batavia ran aground on some sandy impediments called the Abrolhos Islands off Australia’s west coast. Almost at once the ship began to break up.

  Many of the 360 people aboard drowned in the confusion, but 200 or so managed to struggle ashore. As the sun came up, they found themselves on a desolate sandbar with a few salvaged provisions and exceedingly dim prospects. They were 1,500 miles from Batavia (now Jakarta). Pelsaert ruminated for a while, then announced that he would take a party of men in a longboat and try to row to Batavia – a faint hope but their only one.

  He left in charge a man named Jeronimus Cornelisz. What happened next is not entirely certain, but it appears that Cornelisz was both a madman and a religious fanatic – always a dangerous combination. What is certain is that over the next few days he and a few faithful followers slaughtered the bulk of the survivors – 125 men, women and children in all. The few they spared became their slaves – the women to cook and provide sexual favours, the men to fish and toil – except for a small group who escaped to another sandbar a couple of hundred yards away across a difficult channel. There they made such weapons as they could fashion from shells and driftwood, and built a fort to stave off the attacks that Cornelisz and his men occasionally flung at them.

  Pelsaert, unaware of the turmoil he had left behind and with quite a lot on his mind already – he had, after all, wrecked a brand new ship, the pride of the Dutch merchant fleet – rowed on to the Timor Sea and miraculously reached Batavia. There his dumbfounded superiors listened to his tale, gave him another ship and ordered him to return at once for survivors.

  Five months after all his troubles started, Pelsaert arrived back at the Abrolhos Islands. There, the ever-blundering captain, finding the survivors engaged in a civil war, came within a whisker of supporting the wrong side and losing his ship to the crazed Cornelisz and his desperate band. Eventually, however, he managed to sort out what had happened and to introduce order and justice to the murderous little sandbar. Cornelisz and six henchmen were swiftly hanged. Most of the others were whipped or keelhauled and clapped in chains to be taken back to Batavia for further corrective treatment. But for reasons unknown, Pelsaert decided to go to the considerable trouble of having two of the miscreants – a marine named Wouter Looes and a cabin boy named Jan Pelgrom – rowed to the mainland and marooned there.

  On 16 November 1629, they were set down at a place called Red Bluff Beach. What became of the two Dutchmen after that no one knows, but two things are certain. They were the remotest Europeans in the world and the first white Australians.

  Red Bluff Beach, I learned from the helpful museum staff, is at a place called Kalbarri, a couple of hours further up the coast, and since it was on the way to Shark Bay I decided to stop there for the night. Kalbarri lies about forty miles down a side road off the North West Coastal Highway, across a green plain covered to every horizon in heathery scrub. It was getting on for evening when I arrived – too late to go looking for the Dutchmen’s landing place – so I got a room in a motel near the beach and contented myself with a stroll around the town. Kalbarri was an appealing little place. It dates only from 1952, when some fishermen discovered that the waters offshore teemed with lobster. Until the mid-1970s, when the road in from the North West Coastal Highway was paved, it was essentially cut off from the outside world except by sea. Today fishing remains at the heart of community life, but it has also grown into a small resort. The two seem to coexist very well.

  The setting could hardly be bettered. It stands on a big bay, sheltered by long white sandbars. I walked to the front through warm end-of-day sunshine. The Abrolhos Islands were sixty kilometres out to sea – well out of sight of the mainland – but I could clearly see, only a couple of miles down the coast, the headland called Red Bluff, where the two mutineers were marooned.

  As I strolled along the front, two things caught my notice – that a few hundred yards out in the bay a boat, half sunk, was being towed very slowly into the harbour through a narrow channel between the sandbars, and that crowds of people were gathering to have a look. The biggest cluster of onlookers was on the jetty at what appeared to be the commercial side of the harbour about a mile away. Here on the resort side of the harbour there were lots of people, too – sitting on the bonnets of cars parked along the beach, gazing from the balconies of seafront homes and apartment houses, coming out of shops and pubs to stand and watch. About it all, there was a strange, almost eerie silence.

  I asked a man sitting on a car bonnet what was going on. ‘Oh, it’s a fishing boat that got holed on a reef last night,’ he explained. The accident had happened at two thirty in the morning, far out to sea, and for a time it looked as if the boat might be in serious peril. To add to the tension, the skipper had his seven-year-old son with him – evidently taken out with him as a treat. Three other local fishing boats had gone out to rescue them. I looked at my watch. They’d have been at it for sixteen hours by now. I remarked on this to my informant and he gave a small smile, as if in apology. ‘It’s been a long day for the town,’ he said. ‘We’ve been on a bit of a knife-edge. Still, it seems to have turned out all right.’

  Kalbarri has a year-round population of 1,500, and I would guess that two-thirds of the town was there. As the boat came through the sandbars and its safety seemed assured at last, people from all sides of the harbour clapped warmly, as if welcoming home the winner of a regatta, and called encouragement. I thought that was wonderful – that a whole town would turn out to watch a stricken local fishing boat brought in. If I handed out fivers, I’m sure I couldn’t find a thousand people to watch me limp into port after a night of peril. I decided I liked Kalbarri very much.

  In the morning, I rose early and drove the couple of miles along the coast
to Red Bluff Beach where I had been told I would find a cairn marking the spot where the two naughty Dutchmen had been left to their lonely fate. It was a dramatic spot – a very large rock platform bashed by waves, which threw spray everywhere. Leading off to one side was a long duney beach marked at intervals with signs saying: ‘Caution – Dangerous Rips’. The ocean was a bright turquoise, and the long beach was being pounded by a fury of big waves.

  I had a good hunt around the area but couldn’t find the cairn anywhere, and there was no one out at this hour to ask except for a couple way down the beach exercising a bouncy dog. It hardly mattered. Whoever built the cairn had to have done so long after the fact and was almost certainly guessing. So I just enjoyed the sunshine and sea-freshened air, and realized with a touch of surprise that the idea of being stranded here wasn’t entirely without appeal. It was a lovely spot. The sea was lavishly fruitful and the hills behind abounded in materials for building. Looes and Pelgrom – again for mysterious reasons – were quite generously endowed by Pelsaert. They were left with a small boat, some food and water, a few tools and some trinkets with which to trade with the natives, if any could be found. There were certainly far worse places in the world to see out your days – not least a fetid and malarial dungeon in Batavia, which was their alternative fate. Assuming cordial relations with the natives, you could make quite a nice life for yourself here.

  I was quite taken with the notion – not least because it was so patently a real possibility here. The coastline of Western Australia north from Perth is astoundingly beautiful and almost entirely untouched by development. Beyond Kalbarri there is not a single town for some 200 miles to Carnarvon, and just one side road to the sea – the one I was heading for at Shark Bay. Beyond Carnarvon, it’s much the same for another 1,800 miles to Darwin – just a coastline of undisturbed splendour dotted at distant intervals with small communities. Altogether, Western Australia has some 7,800 miles of coastline and only about three dozen coastal communities, even including those along the south-western peninsula from which I had just come.

  That is, of course, why it took so long to discover the stromatolites at Shark Bay. Though they are there on the edge of an accessible shell beach, for any fool to see, they weren’t noticed by anyone until 1954, and not identified by science for another decade. But then with almost 23,000 miles of Australian coastline to investigate, it takes time to get to it all.

  From Kalbarri it was forty miles back to the North West Coastal Highway – there is still just the one road in and out – and then another hundred or so miles on to Shark Bay. In two and a half hours I passed just three other cars and a solitary barrelling road train. At one point I saw a couple of mysterious dots in the road far ahead. It turned out to be two workmen, digging a hole in the middle of the highway and protected from either direction by a single orange plastic cone placed in the centre of the road about five feet from where they worked. This was, you understand, the main west coast highway. It was an arresting reminder of just how far from anywhere I was. This was about as far from the main population centres as you can get in Australia. By road from where I was now, it was over 4,000 kilometres to Sydney and nearer 5,000 to Brisbane. Even Alice Springs, the nearest town to the east, was 4,000 highway kilometres away, because of the way the roads ran. At length, in the middle of a featureless nowhere, I came to the turnoff for Shark Bay. I followed a newly paved side road for a few miles to another, unpaved side road, which passed through a marshy landscape for another mile or so. It ended at an old telegraph repeater station at a place called Hamelin Pool – a complex of white wooden buildings, one of which now announced itself as a museum, another as a café and gift shop.

  The car park had only two or three other cars in it, but as I stood reading an information board two coaches pulled up in convoy, wheezed to a pneumatic halt and almost at once began disembarking streams of passengers – all white-haired, camera-toting and blinking confusedly under the impossible glare of sun. They appeared to be from all over – America, Britain, Holland, Scandinavia. Having come this far, I didn’t wish to share the experience with a hundred twittering strangers, and I set off for the beach in a brisk stroll along a chalky track. It was amazingly hot. A breeze was running in from the sea, but it seemed only to bring more heat. After about half a mile the track brought me to a sumptuously sunny bay, flat calm and of the deepest aquamarine. At some distance across the water a long sandbar ran in a lazy curve out to sea. This, I gathered, was the Fauré Sill – a thirty-mile-long dune barrier that nearly encloses the bay and gives it its special character, namely warm, shallow, very saline waters of the sort that once prevailed across the planet when stromatolites were king.

  Nowhere in any direction was there a sign of human intrusion except directly ahead where a nifty wooden walkway zigzagged for 150 feet or so out into the bay over some low, dark, primeval-looking masses that didn’t quite break the water’s calm surface. I had found my living stromatolites. Eagerly I boarded the walkway and followed it out to the first cluster of shapes. The water was as transparent as glass and only three or four feet deep.

  Stromatolites are not easy to describe. They are of so primitive a nature that they don’t even adopt regular shapes in the way, say, crystals do. Stromatolites just, as it were, blob out. Nearer the shore they formed large, slightly undulant platforms – rather like very old asphalt. Further out they were arrayed as individual clumps that brought to mind very large cow-pats, or perhaps the dung of a particularly troubled elephant. Most books refer to them as club-shaped or cauliflower-shaped or even columnar. In fact, they are shapeless grey-black blobs, without character or lustre.

  It has to be immediately conceded that a stromatolite formation is not a handsome or striking sight. I can almost guarantee that your reaction upon seeing a bed of living stromatolites for the first time will be to say ‘Hmm’ in the vague, ruminative, cautiously favourable tone you would use if you were given a canapé that tasted better than it looked but not so good that you wanted another right away, or possibly ever. It is a sound that says: ‘Well, I’ll be.’

  So it’s not the sight of stromatolites that makes them exciting. It’s the idea of them – and in this respect they are peerless. Well, imagine it. You are looking at living rocks – quietly functioning replicas of the very first organic structures ever to appear on earth. You are experiencing the world as it was 3.5 billion years ago – more than three-quarters of the way back to the moment of terrestrial creation. Now if that is not an exciting thought, I don’t know what is. As the aforementioned palaeontologist Richard Fortey has put it: ‘This is truly time travelling, and if the world were attuned to its real wonders this sight would be as well-known as the pyramids of Giza.’ Quite right.

  Stromatolites are rather like corals in that all of their life is on the surface, and that most of what you are looking at is the dead mass of earlier generations. If you peer, you can sometimes see tiny bubbles of oxygen rising in streams from the formations. This is the stromatolite’s only trick and it isn’t much, but it is what made life as we know it possible. The bubbles are produced by primitive algae-like micro-organisms called cyanobacteria, which live on the surface of the rocks – about three billion of them to the square yard, to save you counting – each of them capturing a molecule of carbon dioxide and a tiny beat of energy from the sun and combining them to fuel its unimaginably modest ambitions to exist, to live. The byproduct of this very simple process is the faintest puff of oxygen. But get enough stromatolites respiring away over a long enough period and you can change the world. For two billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 per cent – enough to allow the development of other, more complex life forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.

  The chemical process involved in this makes the little cells very slightly sticky. Tiny motes of dust and other sediments cling to their surfaces and these slowly bind and accrete into the rocks
I was looking at now. The stromatolites thrive here not so much because the conditions are particularly amenable to them as because they are discouraging to other creatures. The reason stromatolites don’t exist elsewhere is that they would either be washed away by stronger tides or eaten. Here nothing else can survive the bitter salt waters, so there is nothing to graze the stromatolites away.

  That stromatolites gave rise to life on earth, then became a food themselves and were eaten out of existence has a certain irony, of course. Something not entirely unlike that happened to me now, for as I stood studying the crystalline waters the elderly day trippers could be heard coming down the track, and a few minutes later the spryer among them began to arrive on the boardwalk. A woman in a Miami Dolphins eyeshade took a position beside me, stared at the water for some moments, waved away a couple of flies, then regarded her husband and in a voice that would have drowned the clang of a steelworks said: ‘Are you telling me we just crossed a continent for this?’

  I was feeling charitably disposed, so I turned to her with an understanding smile and with all the gentleness and tact I could muster I endeavoured to ease her into a position of appreciation for this marvel that lay at our feet. I saluted her perceptiveness in recognizing that stromatolites were not much to behold, but explained how their diligent, infinitesimal chemical twitchings, over a span of unimaginable duration, made the world the green and lovely place it is. I pointed out too that at only two other places on earth have such living formations been found – one elsewhere in Australia, the other off a remote coral cay in the Bahamas, both much smaller and practically inaccessible – so that this was the only place in the world where visitors could with relative ease examine these singular creations in their full understated glory. So in fact, I concluded – and here I offered my warmest, most ingratiating smile – this really was worth crossing a continent for.