The Best Australian Essays 2014 (35 page)

A couple of months ago, fifteen of Qais's friends paid a smuggler at Sarai Shahzada and left for Indonesia. Among them was Qais's next door neighbor, a driver for a member of parliament, who decided to flee after receiving three letters from the Taliban threatening to kill him. Qais told me he was waiting to hear whether his friends were successful – in which case, he would go as well.

‘And if they're not?' I asked. ‘If they're sent to Papua New Guinea or the Republic of Nauru?'

Qais thought for a moment and then admitted he would probably go anyway. In fact, he had already taken out the necessary loans to pay the smuggler. ‘At least there you have a chance,' he said. ‘At least there is a possibility.'

I felt obligated to tell him he was wrong. ‘You won't get to Australia,' I said.

Qais didn't seem to hear. The words simply didn't register. ‘Australia, Europe, America,' he said. ‘They're not like here. You have a chance.'

The New York Times Magazine

A Natural Wonder in Peril

Tim Flannery

Australia's Great Barrier Reef stretches for around 1430 miles along the continent's north-east coast, encompassing an area roughly half the size of Texas. Those who have dived into its pristine reaches know firsthand that it is one of Earth's natural wonders – a coral world of exceptional beauty and diversity. Yet as Iain McCalman's ‘passionate history' of the reef makes clear, it is also a stage on which dreams, ambitions, and great human tragedies have been played out. He tells his story by chronicling lives that, either inadvertently or intentionally, have shaped our perception of the coralline labyrinth.

Just who discovered the reef is a matter of conjecture. Certainly Captain James Cook encountered it in 1770 as he charted Australia's east coast in His Majesty's bark
Endeavour.
But did he recognise the formation as a whole? The reef forms a kind of funnel that narrows northward. In its southern reaches it is so wide-mouthed that Cook failed to notice it. Only as he approached the latitude of present-day Cooktown did he realise that he had become ensnared in a coral maze.

Close to midnight on the night of 10 June,
Endeavour
struck bottom, then stuck fast. In the darkness Cook and his crew were about as far from home and help as anyone could be. The great navigator understood that even if the vessel could be hauled free, it would likely sink. He foresaw that sailors would scrabble for seats in the longboat, but believed that those who succeeded could expect a far grislier death at the hands of ‘the most rude and uncivilized' people on earth than those who surrendered to the sea.

Still, there was no choice but to risk all. Waiting for a high tide, Cook had the vessel hauled free – and later found that a piece of coral the size of a fist had stuck in the hull, partially stopping the flow of water and allowing the ship to reach the Endeavour River, where it was careened and repaired.

Around six weeks later, after several anxious days threading the labyrinth, the repaired
Endeavour
finally reached the open sea. Then Cook did an astonishing thing – he ordered the vessel turned around, so he could find a way back in and continue his coastal survey. At four a.m. on 16 August, the reef was again making itself known. The sound of a great surf ‘foaming to a vast height' filled every ear.

Waves that had gained strength by traveling the breadth of the Pacific were rearing up, then dashing themselves before the serrated coral ramparts. With no ground for an anchor and not a puff of wind, the ship lay helpless as the incoming tide carried it ever closer to what Cook knew was ‘the very jaws of distruction'. Amid waves ‘mountains high', Joseph Banks, the expedition's gentleman naturalist, later recalled, ‘a speedy death was all we had to hope for'.

For two hours in the predawn gloom the desperate crew rowed for their lives as they attempted to tow
Endeavour
clear, but the tide was unrelenting. Then, at first light, a few slight puffs of wind were felt. Cook would live to find his passage and complete his chart. But at what cost in mortal peril?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Captain Matthew Flinders continued charting where Cook had left off. Remembered as the man who gave both Australia and the Great Barrier Reef their names, he was also the first European to show an appreciation of the reef's beauty. Peering through clear water near the Northumberland Islands, he recorded seeing

For all the reef's beauty, Flinders ‘could not long forget with what destruction it was pregnant'.

*

The safe passages surveyed by Cook and Flinders had, by the mid-nineteenth century, become popular shipping routes. Yet every soul passing though that beauteous landscape surely experienced moments of terror. The realisation that corals were living organisms ‘which lurk and even
grow'
was particularly unsettling. Shipping channels charted as clear as little as thirty years previously could thus sometimes prove to be bristling with dangers.

The fate awaiting travellers, if the shudder and groan of coral upon hull ever was heard, was there for all to read in the newspapers and penny dreadfuls of the day. They lingered particularly upon the fates of those who reached shore, and few held such morbid fascination to the Victorian public as the white women cast away among cannibals.

When the trading brig
Stirling Castle,
bound from Sydney to Singapore, struck a reef and sank 200 miles off Australia's north-east coast in 1836, the captain's wife was among a handful who gained a seat in the longboat. Eliza Fraser reached shore on Great Sandy Isle (soon renamed Fraser Island after her), where she lived for six weeks among the Badtjala Aboriginal people, before being rescued by a convict.

The newspapers of the day could not get enough of her story, and Fraser herself proved to be an able self-promoter. When she arrived in London in 1837, she visited a Mr Kelly, the city's lord mayor, who was also a small-time publisher. Realising that he had a potential bestseller on his hands, he turned to John Curtis, a journalist at
The Times,
to write up Fraser's story.

McCalman tells us that ‘all early nineteenth-century British newspapers relied to some degree on income procured by small-scale bribery or blackmail'. So it was that Kelly paid Curtis to pen ‘a sparkling, real-life newspaper melodrama of cannibalism, imprisonment, murder, torture, and sexual violation'. The book that followed,
SHIPWRECK of the STIRLING CASTLE … the Dreadful Sufferings of the Crew … THE CRUEL MURDER OF CAPTAIN FRASER BY THE SAVAGES and … the Horrible Barbarity of the Cannibals Inflicted upon THE CAPTAIN'S WIDOW Whose Unparalleled Sufferings Are Stated by Herself…
, set, in a moment, European attitudes toward the native peoples of the Great Barrier Reef region. Much of the tale was wild exaggeration, yet the beliefs it fostered made massacre, displacement, rape and murder of the natives seem more justified.

Just how sensational Curtis's book is becomes evident from reading other shipwreck narratives. When the 313-ton bark
Charles Eaton,
India-bound out of Sydney, was wrecked in 1834 in the Torres Strait, most of the crew were massacred. But two boys, sixteen-year-old John Ireland and three-year-old William D'Oyley, narrowly escaped and were rescued by the people of Boydang Island. The fate of the
Charles Eaton
remained unknown until late 1836, when news arrived in England just in time for John Curtis to include it in his book. But even he found it hard to turn the boys' rescuers into monsters – it was clear from their testimony that the lads were genuinely fond of their adoptive parents.

Ignoring such inconveniences, Curtis took it upon himself to recommend how the Europeans might deal with the reef natives. ‘Exterminate the whole of the inhabitants' was one option, though he admitted that he preferred subjugation and conversion to Christianity. Yet driven by Curtis's hyperbole, frequently extermination was the result.

It is a strange fact of Australian history that the most informative of the shipwreck sagas remained all but unknown until the late twentieth century. One of these concerns Barbara Thompson. She was just thirteen in 1844 when she ran away to sea with her lover, William Thompson, captain of the cutter
America
. Shipwrecked on Madjii Reef in the Torres Strait, she was rescued by three Aboriginal boys and adopted when a couple recognised – by certain features of her chin and eyes – that she was their daughter Giom, who had recently drowned. The pale wraith from the sea was thus the returned Giom –
marki naroka
, a ghost maiden.

Giom, who lived among the islands for five years, soon adapted to life there. She forgot her English and much of her past life, and seems to have taken the charismatic young man Boroto as her lover – marriage with
marki naroka
being prohibited among the Kaurareg people – and it is thought she bore him the child Outsie, meaning ‘muddy water'.

What we know about Thompson's life is owed to the unique talents and dedication of Oswald Brierly, the thirty-one-year-old artist aboard HMS
Rattlesnake,
which ‘rescued' Thompson. His commitment to learning the local dialects and to living among the Kaurareg during the
Rattlesnake's
extended stay in the Torres Strait gave him unique insights into the culture. Like Thompson, he too was adopted into a clan.

Brierly's journal and glorious sketches – which unaccountably remained unpublished for over a century – reveal a deep fascination with the Kaurareg and their technology. Again and again he drew and painted the outrigger canoe
Kyee Mareeni –
Big Shadow – owned by the senior man Manu. ‘I had,' he writes, ‘long admired but never till now seen anything that realized so much the idea of beauty.' And just as he dwelt upon details of the outrigger's construction, so did he dwell on the subtleties of character – including minutely observed details of their physical appearance, personalities, and idiosyncrasies – of his islander friends.

Why did Brierly's masterpiece of ethnography remain unpublished until 1979? It could have done so much to rectify the gross caricature of the peoples of the reef region as cannibals and sadistic murderers. But perhaps that was the point: as told by Brierly, Thompson's story failed to reinforce the stereotype.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, accounts of shipwreck among native cultures descended from hyperbole into grand farce. Henri Louis Grin (alias Louis de Rougemont) was a Swiss sailor who claims to have been shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef and to have lived with the Aborigines for years. His account – serialised in
Wide World Magazine –
became an instant sensation and was followed by a bestselling book. Scandalously,
The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont
and its serialised predecessor were entirely invented. Even the fact that Grin ended his days in a circus sideshow as ‘The Greatest Liar on Earth' did little to puncture his fame. Decades before, Samuel Clemens had written, ‘Australian history … does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.' Especially in the case of Grin, these words were prescient.

Grin embroidered his fantasy with two of the most extraordinary shipwreck survival stories ever written. James Morrill was twenty-two when in 1846 the
Peruvian,
a Dundee-based merchantman carrying timber from Sydney to China, foundered near present-day Townsville, while Narcisse Pellettier was just fourteen in 1858 when the French merchantman
Saint-Paul
came to grief off Cape Direction, on Cape York. Both were adopted by Aboriginal clans and integrated easily into tribal life.

Each castaway lived with his adopted family for seventeen years, and both left stories packed with insights into a now vanished way of life. Morrill's adventures were recounted in a brief pamphlet published shortly after his ‘rescue', while Pelletier's biography appeared in French in 1876. Yet for McCalman their real significance lies in how, Grin's borrowings aside, they were ignored by the Australian public. It was not until 2006 that Morrill's account was first republished, and then in America, while Pelletier's appeared for the first time in English only in 2009. One possible explanation is that, as it went about dispossessing its native peoples, colonial Australia needed the fiction of tribal barbarism as a balm for its guilt.

*

By the end of the nineteenth century the native tribes of the reef area had been largely subdued or exterminated, and a growing sea snail and pearl shell industry was established. Accordingly, governments sought experts to advise on managing the reef's bounty. The most illustrious of those recruited was William Saville-Kent, today regarded as the founding father of Australian reef science.

Saville-Kent's childhood was not easy. When William was three, his harsh and promiscuous father began siring a second brood with the live-in governess, in the family home. William's mother, ailing and perhaps despairing, died thereafter, leaving William and his siblings isolated and emotionally crushed. William had one ally – his sister Constance, who like him was congenitally syphilitic courtesy of their father. At the ages of eleven and twelve respectively, William and Constance absconded from their unhappy home, but were forcibly returned. The press covered their story, and it seems possible that Charles Dickens adapted it in his last and unfinished work,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

In 1860, a few years after their forced return, the body of William and Constance's three-year-old half-brother Francis was discovered dumped in an outhouse. The child had been savagely stabbed and all but beheaded. Suspicion fell upon the runaways and although Inspector Whicher of Scotland Yard, who led the inquiry, could not obtain a conviction, he was convinced of the children's guilt. He never lost interest in the case, and five years later Constance confessed that she was the sole murderer. William had embarked on a career in science and was due to inherit money from his mother's estate. Only by absolving him and refusing a plea of insanity – which might cast doubts on William's mental state and thus threaten his inheritance – could Constance protect her brother's interests. The cost was heavy indeed – the death sentence for a teenage girl, later commuted to twenty years in prison.

Rendered sterile by his inherited syphilis, and with a difficult and withdrawn personality, William chose life in a remote colonial outpost. In 1888 the Queensland government asked him to join a surveying expedition of Australia's north, and concurred with his suggestion that they appoint him commissioner of North Australian fisheries.

It was not just fisheries but the reef in its entirety that interested William Saville-Kent. A keen amateur photographer, he set about documenting its beauty and diversity. His book
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities
was published in 1893.
The Scotsman
hailed it as the ‘first authority on its subject', while
Nature
– already on its way to being the world's foremost science journal – commended its photographs, which allowed the public to see for the first time, it said, the wonders of the reef for themselves. At last, admiration began to replace fear of the great coral labyrinth.