The Best Australian Essays 2014 (36 page)

In later life Saville-Kent turned to commerce. He claimed to have discovered the secret of culturing spherical pearls, and in 1906 formed a pearl-culturing company. An assistant asserted that he actually succeeded in culturing perfect pearls, but when the pioneering biologist died of a blocked bowel in 1908, his notes on pearl culture proved unintelligible.

If Saville-Kent opened the door to public appreciation of the reef, it was the journalist E.J. Banfield who introduced it to the masses. He was forty-four, disillusioned, and in ill health when he visited Dunk Island, near Townsville, in 1896. Having read Thoreau's
Walden,
he fantasised about living beside the fringing reef with its white sandy beach and rainforest-covered peaks. With the help of a family of Aborigines, who held traditional title to the island, he and his wife Bertha built a house and garden there, and began exploring the wonderland that surrounded them.

Banfield's account of his island paradise, published as
The Confessions of a Beachcomber
in 1908, was an instant hit. It was the perfect panacea for the city-bound office worker, and was followed by two wildly popular sequels. Visitors flocked to the reef and among them were scientists bent on trying to understand the origins of the vast structure.

*

Coral reefs are based on large collections of very small sedentary marine animals that take the form of polyps – they resemble sea anemones, having columnar bodies, with a mouth surrounded by tentacles. Since they can only grow in sunlit waters, how are we to account for the coral atolls rising abruptly from the sunless depths? A crucial insight was provided by Charles Darwin, who launched his scientific career with a paper speculating that coral reefs and atolls were built upon slowly subsiding volcanic foundations. As the coastlines and mountaintops sank, the growth of the coral, with living animals building on skeletons, was sufficient to fill in the space that was opened up, and so the distinctive ‘barriers' and O-shaped atolls were formed.

In 1896 Alex Agassiz – son of the renowned Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, who was among the most prominent resisters of Darwin's evolutionary theory – embarked on a cruise of the Great Barrier Reef aimed at disproving Darwin's theory of coral reef formation. As a result of a damning review of his father Louis's scientific research by Darwin, Alex bore a deep sense of grievance. He was joined in his anti-Darwinian crusade by many, including the Duke of Argyll and a trio of eloquent English bishops, who believed that if they could refute Darwin's theory of coral reef formation, his ideas on evolution might well vanish too.

Alex Agassiz's expedition was a flop, coming up with nothing conclusive to demolish Darwin's theory. It took the technology of the atomic age to settle the dispute. In the 1950s American scientists prepared to detonate a hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok Atoll. They drilled deep into the reef, penetrating 4629 feet through fossil coral, and finally reached volcanic rock. Darwin's subsidence theory was proved.

A young student of Alex Agassiz, Alfred Mayor, was destined to have greater impact. He discovered that corals were exquisitely sensitive to changes in water temperature, speculating in 1914 that ‘those forms which are sensitive to high temperature are correspondingly affected by … the influence of CO
₂
'. Around eighty years later, as climate change began to have an effect, his prescience became clear: he had identified the mechanisms of reef destruction.

The 1920s saw a systematic scientific effort aimed at understanding the Great Barrier Reef, when what became known as the Cambridge expedition settled at the Low Isles in the Torres Strait to conduct its research. In a series of reports published between 1930 and 1968, its scientists slowly unlocked the reef's innermost secrets. Their most important discoveries concerned the extent of cooperation that prevails between species in the coralline mass. From the algae that live in the bodies of the coral polyps to the glass eels that inhabit the anuses of sea cucumbers, it is symbiosis that permits the reef to survive.

This new scientific appreciation did not expunge a more base view. In a study published in 1925, J. Stanley Gardiner, head of Britain's fisheries department, stated that the reef was ‘a great nuisance to navigation … because it … destroys 70,000 to 80,000 square miles of most admirable trawling ground'. This functionalist attitude came to the fore again in 1968. The Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was – according to McCalman – a man with ‘the hide of a rhinoceros and the mind-set of a hyena'. He was determined to mine the reef for fertiliser and drill it for oil and gas. All that stood in his way was a grassroots environmental movement led by a poet, a forester, and an artist. The poet was Judith Wright, one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Nonetheless their task seemed impossible.

The Queensland premier used every opportunity to brand the protesters as ‘a lunatic fringe', ‘nitwits', ‘cranks' and ‘rat-bags'. Were it not for the 1967
Torrey Canyon
disaster, spilling crude oil off the coast of Cornwall, and an oil spill off Santa Barbara in 1969, Bjelke-Petersen might well have had his way. As it was, in 1975, a left-leaning federal government acted to protect the reef by instituting the
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act.

*

Despite such protections, today the reef has never been in greater peril. A vast new coal port is being planned for Abbot Point, on the Queensland coast. It involves dredging 5 million tons of mud, to be dumped within the reef. The coal reserves of Queensland's Galilee Basin will pass through Abbot Point, increasing the global seaborne coal trade by a third. With conservative state and federal governments determined to exploit the mineral, only its low price (currently around US$68 per ton) and a handful of protesters stand in the way.

Despite a ban on drilling for oil, fossil fuels have made a devastating stealth attack on the reef. The first intimations came in the 1970s, when areas of coral turned white, then died. Coral bleaching – as the phenomenon is known – occurs when underwater heat waves act to put stress on the coral polyps, causing them to eject the algae living in their tissues and so turning them white. Without algal partners they cannot grow the bony skeleton that forms the reef, and over weeks the coral polyps slowly starve and die, leaving a white skeleton. Even without bleaching, the rise in ocean acidity caused by CO
₂
dissolving into seawater will prevent the corals from laying down their bony skeletons. So it is that heat and acid, derived from burning fossil fuels, kills the reef.

The reef's current champion, Dr Charlie Vernon, saw his first bleached coral – a four-inch-square patch – off Palm Island in the early 1980s. Now, he says, it's ‘horrible to see … corals that are four, five, six hundred years old … die' from the heat. For the reef, Vernon says, catastrophic global warming has already arrived.

William Saville-Kent's photographic record provides a poignant historic benchmark of the reef's decline. Because he was always careful to keep some landmark in the background, the locations of his photographs can still be traced. We see that what a century ago was a delightful coral garden is today a scene of utter devastation. The full extent of damage inflicted on the reef became evident in 2012, when a study revealed that fully half of the Great Barrier Reef has already been killed. Not all the damage has been inflicted by acid and heat, yet as the years go by these emerge as the overwhelming threats.

If the rate at which humanity is currently burning fossil fuels continues, the world will be around 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100 than it was in 1800. Can the reef adapt? A recent study shows that if the Great Barrier Reef were to keep pace with a 7.2-degree rise in temperature, its complex ecosystems would need to migrate southward at the rate of twenty-four miles per year. Yet corals seem unable to migrate at rates greater than six miles per year. So, it appears, climate change will simply outpace the reef. Even if we slow the rate of change, the damage will be monumental. Scientists foresee that ‘the majority of existing coral reef ecosystems are likely to disappear if average global temperature rises much above 1.5°C above the preindustrial values'.

Australians say they love their reef, yet today their actions show that they love easy money more. As an earlier generation struggled to save the coralline wonderland, Judith Wright said of her people:

Today the fate of one of the most magnificent ecosystems of our planet lies in the hands of some of the most technologically advanced and affluent people who have ever existed. We shall soon know whether they value their natural heritage sufficiently to avert a great coral apocalypse.

New York Review of Books

The Island Seen and Felt: Some Thoughts about Landscape

Tim Winton

I grew up on the world's largest island. This bald fact slips from consciousness so easily I'm obliged to remind myself now and again. But in an age when a culture looks first to politics and ideology to examine itself, perhaps my forgetting something so basic should come as no surprise. After all, our minds are often elsewhere. The material facts of life, the organic and concrete forces that shape us, are overlooked as if they're irrelevant or even mildly embarrassing. Our creaturely existence is registered, measured, discussed and represented in increasingly abstract terms. Perhaps this helps explain how someone like me, who should know better, can forget he's an islander. Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea, Australia the economic enterprise. Undoubtedly the nation and its projects have shaped my education and my prospects, but the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations is substantial and the evidence of this continues to surprise me, even in middle age. The island continent has not simply been background to my life and work. To my life it's been pivotal. To my work it's been a central, vital concern, a source of agitation and inspiration. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family. Like many Australians I feel this tectonic grind most keenly when abroad.

The first time I left the island I was twenty-eight. I say left the island because ‘going' abroad doesn't really cut it. Here you can jump in a cab and get a train from King's Cross station and in the time it takes to see a Terrence Malick movie you're abroad. But you may not be quite as overseas as I was. Living in Europe in the 1980s I made the mistake of thinking that what separated me from the natives of this exotic hemisphere was just a matter of language and history, as if I really was the mongrel European transplant of my formal education. Such was the blinkered narrative of my schooling. By the'70s Australians had moved on from being children of empire. We were now, more or less, our own show out there in the Asia-Pacific. And we'd long ago rejected the notion of being branch office Brits. In fact we were militantly un-British. And yet I was still taught by bourgeois Marxists in university English Departments that I was, essentially, whether I liked it or not, a European. Which strikes me as a very sloppy way of reminding a native that he's not an Aborigine. Anyway, the moment I stepped off a plane at Charles de Gaulle I knew I was no European. I was just pink-skinned. Worse, I was of fragmentary pigmentation. The austral sun has, as you can see, confused even my whiteness. Yes, I did happen to speak English. My own brand of English, apparently. And no brand of French anyone had heard in history before or since. But I was
not
English and I was
not
a European.

Until that first mortifying day in Paris, I'd never given my own geography sufficient credit. And neither, of course, had those good folk who taught me. They were educated in the narrow trenches of their own disciplines; they taught only what they knew. Being indoor folk of the inner-city enclave they knew very little about the natural sciences, about ecology, about geography. Theirs was an abstract world before it was a physical, spatial reality. The physical, sensual world was as much a mystery to them as it is to the evangelical fundamentalist.

So there I was in France at twenty-eight. Trying desperately to fit in. Unsettled by gaps of language and history, of course. But even more rattled by my responses to the physical world in this new hemisphere. The cities and villages of the so-called Old World were enchanting. But outside them I felt that all my sensory wiring was scrambled. When I had expected to ‘appreciate' the monuments of Europe and ‘love' its natural environment, the reality was entirely the reverse. The immense beauty of ancient European buildings and streetscapes had an immediate and visceral impact – I was swooning. And yet in the natural world, where I am generally most comfortable, I was hesitant, diffident, even sniffy. For while I was duly impressed by what I saw of the natural environment, I could never quite connect emotionally. Being from a flat, dry continent I had actually looked forward to the prospect of soaring Alps and thundering rivers, lush valleys and fertile plains, and yet when I actually beheld them I was puzzled by how muted my responses were. A Eurocentric education had prepared me for a sense of recognition that I simply did not feel, and this was bewildering. The paintings and poems about these epic and apparently sublime landscapes still moved me, so I couldn't understand the queer feeling of impatience that crept up when I saw them in real time and space. To someone from an austere, sun-bleached land scape they often looked – how can I say this? – cute. Yes, they were pretty, even saccharine. Like something off a biscuit tin.

In the first instance I struggled with scale. In Europe the dimensions of physical space seemed compressed. The looming vertical presence of mountains cut me off from the distant horizon. This was a kind of spatial curtailment I hadn't lived with before. Think about it, even a city of skyscrapers is more porous than a snow-capped mountain range. You can see through London, even Sao Paulo; they're visually ventilated. But Alps form a solid, visual and conceptual barrier. For a Western Australian, whose default setting is in diametric opposition, and for whom open space is the impinging force, the effect is claustrophobic.

The second form of enclosure that weighed upon me was more obvious. European landscapes were humanised. Even the wildest – looking places were modified, including many of those seemingly implacable mountains, because around every second bend was a tunnel, a funicular, a chairlift or a resort. Above the snowline there was usually a circling helicopter. Down in the valleys and along the impossibly fertile plains, nature was only visible through the overlaid embroidery of the people who'd brought it to heel. In Ireland, France and England it seemed to me that every field and hedge was named, apportioned, owned, subsidised, accounted for. It was a landscape of almost unrelieved captivity and domestication. If they weren't fully inhabited or exploited, most open spaces were modified, so there were no real forests, only woods. Even conservation reserves were more akin to sculpted parks than wilderness. In fact there were few truly wild places left. Even the northern sky felt inhabited. At my lowest moments the European sky looked occluded, like the surface of a ruined eye.

On a bright day in Wales or the Netherlands, the light struck me as blue or slatey. As if someone in the heavens had stopped pedalling. I'd never experienced light deprivation before. I couldn't understand the gruesome moods I was subject to. (But it was a late insight into Ibsen and Kierkegaard. Those grim buggers. You can blame some of it on bad light, the rest on a diet of pork and cabbage.) I woke up one June morning in the Irish Midlands thinking I'd left the bedside light on and realised, after a few seconds' confusion that the sun was tilting in through the narrow stone window, lukewarm and unannounced like an in-law. And it wasn't only light deprivation that left me feeling sapped. I think I was instinctively, unconsciously searching for distances that were unavailable. I was calibrated differently to a European. This difference was not really linguistic or historical. The distinction was geographical; that is, corporeal.

In a seedy cinema on the rue du Temple, watching Disney's
Peter Pan
with my three-year-old son, I found that although we were all gazing at the same screen in the flickering dark, he and I were seeing a different film to the rest of the audience. What seemed fantastical and exotic to those bourgeois Parisian kids and their nannies just looked like home to me. I knew secret coves and hidey holes like those of the Lost Boys. The world of rocky islands, boats and obscuring bush was very much like my own. Only the cold, lonely nursery up in the Darling attic was exotic or fantastical. The wild opportunity of Neverland with its physical openness, lack of enclosure and freedom from adult surveillance was not so far from the ecosystem of my own boyhood. Watching it for perhaps the thirtieth time and seeing it anew, forsaking story altogether and just focusing impulsively, hungrily on the backdrop, I understood what a complete stranger I was in this hemisphere. And yet acknowledging my strangeness made those years abroad easier to digest and enjoy.

When I was born there was about a square kilometre for every person on the island continent. In global terms that's an immense amount of space. In the UK 256 people share that space. In London, 5200. In the half century since I was born Australia's population has doubled, but density is still exceptionally low. Despite a human history of perhaps 60,000 years, Australia is a place with more geography than architecture, where openness trumps enclosure. The continent has not been a lost and silent rock floating in austral seas all that time. It has not been and is not empty. For most of human history it has been walked and sung. It is hatched and laced with story, and yet there has always been more space between these cultural lines than settled perennial inhabitation. Occupation in many regions was either seasonal or notional, held in cultural skeins and webs of ritual. Because of vast distances and scarcity of permanent water, the non-human was always in the ascendant. Country may have been intimately
known
but culture rarely dominated physically, even where land was modified by fire. Culture proceeded from and deferred to country. From sheer necessity. Two centuries after European settlement and its rapid transformations, this is still a place where there is more landscape than culture.

I don't mean to imply that Australia has no culture or that its cultural life is inconsiderable. I seek only to acknowledge the fact that the continent's natural forms remain its most distinguishing features. Most Asian and European countries can be more easily defined in human terms. Mention of India, China, Italy, France or Germany will quickly bring to mind human acts and artefacts, but at first blush Australia connotes something non-human, because no post-invasion achievement, no city, nor towering monument can hold a candle to the grandeur of the land. This is not a romantic notion. Unless you think of mining as a romantic activity. And we have a few prominent citizens who do. Everything we do in our country is still overshadowed and underwritten by the seething tumult of nature. An opera house, an iron bridge, a tinsel-topped tower – these are creative marvels – but as structures they look pretty feeble against the landscape in which they stand. Think of the brooding mass and ever-changing face of Uluru. Will architects ever make stone live like this? I doubt it. Consider the bewildering scale and complexity of Purnululu, like a sculpted secret megacity. Australians are unlikely to ever build anything as beautiful and intricate. Few visitors to our shores arrive seeking the built glories of our culture. Generally they come for wildness, to experience space in a way that's unavailable, and, sadly, sometimes unimaginable in their homelands. I'm not much of a Romantic. Neither am I a self-hating utopian. I am in awe of the genius in humanity, and I love being in the great cities of the world. Some buildings feel like gifts, not impositions, but I am antipodean enough to wonder now and then whether architecture is, in the end, what you console yourself with once wild landscape has been subsumed.

I say this because space was my primary inheritance. I was formed by gaps, nurtured in the long pauses between people, part of a thin and porous human culture through which the land slanted in, seen or felt, at every angle: so, for each mechanical noise, five natural sounds; for every built structure a landform twice as large and twenty times as complex. And over it all, an impossibly open sky, dwarfing every thing, imposing a pitiless correction of human perspective.

On my island the heavens draw you out like a multidimensional horizon. In the south, which boils with gothic clouds, the sky's commotion can render you so feverish your thoughts are closer to music than language. At night in the desert the sky sucks at you, star-by-star, galaxy-by-galaxy. You feel as if you could fall out into it at any moment. It's terrifying, vertiginous. I have literally woken in a panic, digging my hands into the dirt either side of the swag to keep from pitching out into space. In Australia the sky is not the safe enclosing canopy it appears to be elsewhere. Standing alone on the Nullarbor or out on a saltpan the size of a small country, you feel a twinge of terror, even in daylight, because the sky seems to go on forever. It has dramatic depth and oceanic movement. So often the southern sky stops you in your tracks, derails your thoughts, unmoors you from what you were doing before it got you by the collar. No wonder Australian painters still insist on treating it as a worthy subject, despite the pressures to move on to something a little more ‘sophisticated'.

Sometimes it feels as if our continent is more about air than matter, more pause than movement, more space than time. The landscape is not yet humanised and this is what distinguishes it. For the moment Australia is still itself. It imprints itself upon the body, and the mind constantly struggles to catch up and make sense of it. This is why, despite the postmodern and nearly post-physical age we live and work in, Australian writers and painters continue to obsess about landscape. It's not simply that we are laggards. We are in a place where the material facts of life must still be contended with. There is more of it than us. This disparity and the physical details and peculiarities of the continent are strong and distinct enough to continue to amaze, trouble and inspire us. And we're still learning. The meeting of the human and non-human across our thin and ancient topsoil is a drama still in its early and vital stages. Elsewhere in the world this story is very often done and dusted already, with nature in stumbling retreat, but in Australia, where a small population negotiates with a larger, extant and dynamic natural environment, this drama is unresolved. Artists can no more ignore this drama than politicians.