REEF AROUND THE EDGES
The history of its marine wonderland sheds light on Australia’s dark past,
I T is the strangest stuff, coral — a minute organism that, helped by its attendant algae, feeds itself and multiplies to form vast seascapes of inconceivable richness and beauty. Of these marine wonderlands, none is richer than the Great Barrier Reef, strung along 2 250km of Australia’s Queensland coast. Its story, as told by the Australian historian Iain McCalman, is one of epic uniqueness.
It took time for the reef to be appreciated by Western eyes and minds. To Captain Cook, its first explorer, it was primarily an enormous and baffling obstacle to his mission to make sense of the Australian land mass. It frustrated and maddened him and his crew at every turn, because once they got between it and the mainland, they couldn’t get out again. He called it a labyrinth, and his view softened only when the starving crew of the Endeavour discovered the delights of feasting on its abundant population of ponderous green turtles.
The cartographer Matthew Flinders was the first — in McCalman’s words — “to infer its unified existence and to conceive of it as a whole”. But his exploration, like Cook’s, was bedevilled by the reef’s tides, surging currents, mudbanks and shoals, with the misery compounded by disease and exhaustion. Flinders’s ship went irredeemably rotten and his bad
Over time it is the beauty of the reef that comes to dominate McCalman’s story
luck worsened when, on his way back to England, he dropped in on Mauritius and was imprisoned for six years by the French.
Both Cook and Flinders respected the profound relationship between the reef and the Aboriginal people of its islands and coastal fringe. But opinion back home demanded a different version of the native: a bloodthirsty, cannibal savage. In 1836, an Englishwoman, Eliza Fraser, spent several weeks with a group of Aborigines after being shipwrecked at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. Her undoubtedly harrowing experiences were subsequently embroidered by an unscrupulous London hack, John Curtis, and combined with other shipwreck tales into a mendacious farrago of forced sex, torture and flesh-eating that gave the public exactly what it wanted.
McCalman shows how this notion of the cruelty and primitiveness of the Aborigines survived as a crucial strand in Australian self-awareness long after Curtis and his fantasies had been forgotten. According to the historian, the myth was still in currency 150 years later in the work of two of Australia’s most revered artists, the painter Sidney Nolan and the novelist Patrick White.
Other castaways lived for years with the Aboriginal people, and formed deep and potent bonds with them. One was a Scottish woman, Barbara Thomson, who stayed with the Kauraregs of the northern reef and provided extraordinary insights into their social life. In general, castaways found it troubling to return to live among Europeans who were both hostile to the Aborigines and intent on dispossessing them.
Over time it is the beauty of the reef that comes to dominate McCalman’s story. Among those who fell under its spell was William Kent, who as a boy very likely helped his sister Constance murder their half-brother in the case solved by the famous Mr Whicher. Another was a Cambridge don, Maurice Yonge, who spent a year studying the coral and was the first to understand how it grew, even if he overlooked its simultaneous dying.
In the ’60s, a courageous campaign saved the reef from being plundered for oil and gas by cronies of the infamous premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, tellingly described by McCalman as having “the hide of a rhinoceros and the mindset of a hyena”.
The final section of the book is devoted to the amazing life and obsessive investigations of the marine biologist Charlie Veron, dubbed by McCalman the “Darwin of the coral”. It was Veron who brought news that the reef was dying, not from direct human exploitation but from the fatal dislocation of the symbiosis between coral polyps and their supportive algae, caused by rising sea temperatures.
Iain McCalman is no light-tripping prose stylist, but he is a solid writer and his material is as meaty as the turtle flesh devoured by Captain Cook and his men. At the end he offers the possibility that the reef may yet develop a way to adapt to the changing ocean environment before its extinction is sealed. We should all share his hope. —