The Boy Behind the Curtain

by Tim Winton

  But the shadow falls wherever you are.

  I got a message one day from an old friend. We’d been estranged for some years. He shocked me by announcing he was in hospital and that he could see my roof from his room. The silver flash of corrugated iron was like something burning in his mind, he said, and he needed to see me. Would I come?

  It was only as I walked down the ward, feeling that ancient flutter of dread, that it dawned on me just how ill my friend must be. Even so, when I was allowed into his room I thought I’d made a mistake, like the time I bumbled into the burns wing. Sitting on the bed, staring out the window and dressed only in a nappy, was a tiny bald man. Wrong room. What a dunce I was. I’d half turned to leave when he called my name.

  I didn’t need to be told how close to death he was. He said what a provocation to conscience it was to be trapped here staring at my roof and how glad he now was that he’d been assigned this room. Before he grew too weak to continue, we made our peace and said our goodbyes. Afterwards I often looked up at that dreary building as the sun lit its windows and thought of strangers staring out in hope and regret as the rest of us went about our day oblivious. It was sobering to think of all the yearning that spilt down amidst the treetops and roof ridges, a shadow I’d never properly considered before.

  Such overspills of yearning came to mind the day I paced the halls of the Royal Women’s in Melbourne awaiting the birth of our first grandchild. The circumstances were novel but the building felt only too familiar. Even before we were presented with the prospect of complications, I was agitated. The air was all wrong – well, there was no air. The place gave me the creeps.

  This, I told my wife, is why we had our babies at home.

  Actually, she said, glancing at her phone, it was about more than just your phobias.

  She was right, of course, and I stalked off, chastened, determined to reprioritize my anxieties. For hours there was no news at all. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t eat, couldn’t relax, and going for a walk outside felt like a dereliction of duty. Every few seconds the lifts in the corridor chimed festively, and after a while that demonically chirpy sound drove me down to the end of the hall where I pressed my hands and face against the glass, staring out at the strange city below as if there might be relief down there. What a sight I must have been, with that hopeless imploring look I knew so well from the faces of others. Eventually my longsuffering wife relented and took me out to an astroturfed courtyard where the air was real and the open sky merciful. And that’s where he found us, our eldest son, the colicky boy we’d nursed in the hospital carpark all those nights a lifetime ago, holding his tiny squinting daughter in the sunshine.

  I still have to steel myself for a hospital visit. Sadly I need to do it now more often than ever. People have breakdowns, heart surgery, they get cancer or simply wear out. And they’re still having babies, God bless them. The wind bloweth where it listeth, as the old book says, and the shadow falls likewise.

  ‘Here,’ my father said one afternoon, pressing my palm against the egregious new lump in his grizzled chest. It was his new pacemaker. ‘They can do amazing things these days,’ he said.

  They can. And they do. In an earlier era he’d have been long dead. They brought him home next day. From that hospital.

  The Battle for Ningaloo Reef

  On 4 July 2003 the Premier of Western Australia, Dr Geoff Gallop, flew north of Perth to the tiny settlement of Coral Bay to announce his government’s rejection of a controversial resort proposal at nearby Maud’s Landing. Further, he said he would be pressing for World Heritage listing of the area. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘we have drawn a line in the sand and declared that we will not accept developments that threaten this precious and fragile coast.’ His unequivocal decision ended a bitter and very public battle over one of Australia’s most precious wild places.

  For the Coral Coast Marina Development it was the end of a business opportunity. But for the motley bunch of citizens who’d fought to stop it going ahead, the announcement promised a fresh start. Only the day before, Purnululu, otherwise known as the Bungle Bungles, had been added to the World Heritage register, and with Shark Bay already listed and Ningaloo Reef now mooted, it suddenly seemed that Western Australia, mostly known for being the nation’s quarry, might soon become a world leader in the preservation and management of fragile places. It’s a massive state, blessed with natural assets, and a new generation was pushing for a more prudent stewardship of all this bounty.

  While the premier stood on the beach with his trousers rolled up, a group of community organizers and volunteers huddled around a speakerphone in an office 1200 kilometres away, straining to hear the announcement. What they heard coming down the fluky line in Perth were words they often thought they’d never hear. And before the premier had even finished his announcement, phones started ringing all through the room. The fax machine began spitting paper. Within minutes wellwishers and news crews were jamming the corridor outside. It was pandemonium.

  I was one of the stunned campaigners in that stuffy room. And right then I was supposed to be preparing for a press conference but I couldn’t quite take the news in. Gallop’s decision and his language went much further than I’d dared hope for. He was using phrases I’d written myself in speeches and opinion pieces and repeated in public so long they’d begun to make me nauseous. I’d met Gallop a couple of times; he was someone I’d come to respect. But having been schooled by the past two or three years of advocacy, I was steeling myself for some dirty trick, the usual mealy-mouthed compromise that even a so-called conviction politician is forced to make. Now, with Gallop’s high excited voice piping from the speaker, I needed to see the decision on paper, on Department of Premier and Cabinet stationery, before I would believe it. And a few minutes later there it was, curling from the overheated fax machine, followed by something from the government website and more requests for interviews. Apparently it was real. I sat down with my comrades and tried to fashion a few words for the press conference.

  As part of the Save Ningaloo Reef campaign I’d often felt like a bit player in the low-budget movie The Castle, the story of hapless Darryl Kerrigan doing what he can to save his home from compulsory acquisition. Like the Kerrigans, those of us who went up against the big end of town to prevent the resort from being built were always outgunned. The difference was we knew it. Our hearts might have been in the right place, and our cause just, but the forces of money and influence were massed against us. We were a fart trying to fight a cyclone. As in that now classic Australian comedy, we too had our ideas men and women, our spurts of inspiration and some unexpected friends, but half the time it seemed to me that most of us were simply dreaming. Because the little people don’t win in real life – that stuff only ever happens in the movies. And yet it had happened to us.

  So how did we fall across the line?

  In 1987 the West Australian Labor government invited the Coral Coast Marina Development group to submit plans for a tourist development at the tiny beach settlement of Coral Bay. Brian Burke, the state’s premier at the time, is remembered for an administration with close ties to business and notoriously lax standards of governance. He was later found guilty of rorts and went to prison. During the WA Inc era, development deals could ‘progress’ very quickly, and with a government so obliging and eager, an invitation such as this must have looked attractive. But plans came and went, governments rose and fell in Burke’s wake, and the project seemed to go nowhere. In 2000 it resurfaced, a $200 million proposal for a 2000-bed resort at Maud’s Landing with a 240-boat marina, a golf course and 250 residential blocks. And that was just for starters. It was a classic white-shoe behemoth, a major imposition on the landscape and a danger to Australia’s longest fringing coral reef, the Ningaloo. At the time, coastal planning in the region was ad hoc; the implication seemed to be that they’d build the marina and see to planning and environmental issues later, and that was just how things were often done in Western Australia. Not e
xactly a handshake and a wink, but few defenders of the environment were under any illusions as to which way the wind usually blew out west.

  Unlike the larger and more famous Great Barrier Reef on the east coast, Ningaloo is very close to shore and therefore especially vulnerable. At many points you can wade out to it, flop onto your belly and be instantly amongst it. Home to endangered turtles, dugongs and three hundred species of coral, the 260-kilometre reef is known mostly for the whale sharks that visit it every year. These and all Ningaloo’s other natural wonders are the basis of a sustainable and well-run ecotourism industry, most of it concentrated at Exmouth, at the reef’s northern extremity. Between Exmouth and Coral Bay – about the same distance as from Sydney to Newcastle – there’s nothing but red ranges and empty white beaches. Along that stretch of coast you’d be hard-pressed to see a building, and the hinterland is a semi-arid mix of dunes, spini­fex and rugged gorges. Ningaloo’s isolation has helped it remain Australia’s healthiest coral reef.

  For these reasons, it is an irreplaceable piece of our natural heritage, but in 2000 few Australians really understood this, not even those in the west. The reef’s remoteness isn’t just a challenge to tourists – it’s a thirteen-hour drive from Perth if you go full bore and don’t stop along the way – but to scientists as well. But what researchers in the field were learning at the turn of the millennium was that the reef and its adjacent terrestrial wilderness were so rare and precious they needed much greater protection than they were being afforded, and the idea of digging a marina in the midst of all that was cause for alarm. The construction phase alone would be destructive enough to rule it out. The marina was designed to open onto Cardabia Passage, through which humpback whales, whale sharks, manta rays, dugongs and turtles enter the inner lagoons to seek refuge. Once they saw the mooted plans, architects and urban planners concurred with the marine scientists: any tourism benefits the resort and its marina brought would come at a drastically disproportionate cost to the very things that drew people to the region. By any measure it looked as if the proposal was a dud – wrong plan, wrong place – but any time these concerns were aired in Perth they were buried by the developer’s PR machine and the faithful barracking of the local media.

  The fight for Ningaloo turned out to be more than just a squabble over a tourist development: it was a battle of worldviews. In one corner, the lingering settler ethos, the colonial assumption that nature exists to be exploited – it has no intrinsic value, there will always be more. And on the opposing side, the idea that nature has value in its own right – it needs to be studied, nurtured and used with great care to increase its chances of enduring, because all its systems are finite. At the time of the campaign the old view was still respectable establishment thinking, and to the powerbrokers on St Georges Terrace the stuff defenders of the reef began to say was fanciful at best, seditious at worst.

  But there was a generational change afoot in Western Australia. While the issue of Ningaloo was barely a minor rumbling at the margins, a long and traumatic struggle over the future of the state’s old-growth native forests was reaching a climax. The Gallop government came to power on a platform of sustainable development and a policy of ending old-growth logging. Gallop seemed keen to distinguish himself from the quarry mentality and spiv ethics of previous administrations, but in a state so traditionally conservative, with a media culture still caught up in the provincial boosterism of the 1980s, there were real doubts his aspirations could come to much. As we were to discover, and as Gallop himself was to learn at his personal cost, the old frontier alliances are not to be challenged lightly.

  In late 2000, during the last days of Richard Court’s Liberal government, six people met to talk about the marina proposal. We were all from different backgrounds – a former fashion boutique owner, a hardened forest campaigner, a commerce graduate who’d served as an adviser to a Liberal member. I only knew a couple of them. Dave Hannan, a wildlife cinematographer from Queensland who’d just spent thousands of hours filming underwater at Ningaloo, pleaded with us to get word out to the public. He wrote a cheque for $1000 while we sat there. He wasn’t sure he had the funds to honour it, but the gesture was telling – and as it turned out the cheque was good.

  At that stage I’d been quietly involved with marine conservation for about six years. As a lifelong angler and spearfisher it seemed to me I represented the redneck wing of the movement. I’d had to learn to find common ground with corporate types, nervy scientists and dreadlocked vegans alike, and heartened by the camaraderie I found amidst all these disparate members, I was determined to bring new people to the movement, to broaden it even further. Our long-term objective was to see a responsible proportion of Australia’s waters protected as marine parks. A skirmish like the one at Ningaloo, promising all the divisive rhetoric and petty political rivalries that I hate, was not an attractive prospect. I was interested in the bigger picture. Besides, from what I could tell, this marina development at Maud’s Landing looked like a done deal.

  I really admired Dave Hannan’s films and I was moved by his passion for the reef, but I wondered if he realized what we were up against. The plan was to form a campaign and seek to strike a coalition of NGOs. But all the state’s environmental groups were preoccupied with fighting for forests and none of them had funds. They were throwing everything at woodchipping. So we’d have to find money of our own, people of our own. We’d be starting from nothing. The prospect was nightmarish. But I’d loved the reef since the day George King took me out to it ten years before and sent me over the side of his boat Nor-Don to see my first whale shark. After that encounter I was a victim for life. I signed up anyway.

  But how could we defend the place from such a distance? What did the locals of Coral Bay and Exmouth think about the issue? And given the odds, how could our campaign be anything more than a gesture? Maybe it was necessary to make it, but it felt like a doomed gesture all the same.

  We borrowed an office, sought the advice of seasoned campaigners, and began to attract an increasingly diverse team of helpers who wrote submissions, answered phones, inspired a little following. With the input of the Australian Marine Conservation Society and the imprimatur of the local Conservation Council, we formed alliances with the WWF, the Wilderness Society, and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. None of these organizations could spare us much cash but what they gave us served as seed money for the endless grind of fundraising, and their expertise was invaluable. Seven years into a book I couldn’t seem to finish, I fidgeted through many meetings, struggling with acronyms and talk of political players I’d never heard of. I was the wrong man for the job. I looked for ways out.

  Apart from being broke and inconsequential, our newborn outfit was truly up against the tyranny of distance. Nobody understands this like a sandgroper. The Australian media establishment lives in Sydney. Even the Perth news media is 1200 kilometres from Ningaloo. For most Australians, Western Australia was obscure enough. But Ningaloo? Ningaloo what? Because of its devoted diving clientele, the reef was better known in Europe. So there we were, with some serious cultural, financial, political and spatial gaps to contend with.

  On top of that, our enterprise got under way during a low moral ebb in our nation’s history. A federal election distorted by lies about asylum seekers throwing their children overboard. News that radio’s most powerful political personalities were taking ‘cash for comment’. And all this as the churches’ widespread culture of child rape was finally bubbling into view. There was a palpable disgust at what seemed like an endless parade of public officials and business leaders in collusion against the majority who had little or no access to influence. In canvassing support I was often confronted by how contemptuous young people were of civic leaders and politics in general. Across a spectrum of age and class, people told me there was absolutely no point trying to make a difference in society because nobody was listening, everything was corrupt, the fix was in. And in such an atmosphere of betrayal and dece
ption you could hardly blame people for feeling cynical and disaffected, but this nihilism and disengagement really worried me. A bumper sticker of the time read: IF WE STOP VOTING, WILL THEY ALL JUST GO AWAY?

  Luckily there were people out there angry or optimistic or just plain desperate enough to see things differently, and my time with Save Ningaloo exposed me to such a range of views and people that I still think of it as a significant part of my education. What the political comfort class and the pliant journos hovering around them see is a reality that conforms to their own limited interests; it’s confined and shaped by their shared cynicism. They see an electorate made up of beasts and babies, people who want to be fed and stroked, who are passive, greedy and suspicious. When necessary, you can inflame them by frightening them or making them angry, but the best thing to do is to leave them alone and let them shop.

  But I found that many people were curious and generous, happy to volunteer their time, their expertise – even their car or their house – for a good cause. I discovered that despite the consumer current of selfish insularity, there were still those interested in the common good. Many, many volunteers busted their boilers for Ningaloo. Some were there running off flyers, donning goofy turtle costumes, grinding out FOIs, showing us their scientific research, briefing us in hallways and carparks and airports for nearly three years. These folks were my midlife postgrad course in civics.

  Our first public meeting, in September 2001, filled a 200-seat auditorium. From the wings I saw lots of grey hair and older faces, which surprised me. I’d been drafted to speak, pitched as the headline act, but I felt like a bit of an imposter. I was bait, really, something to attract the crowd so others could present the science and outline the politics and the challenge ahead. Here was my first major lesson in activism: we didn’t just need to fill an auditorium, we had to get media coverage. And in order to bring the sharks, you need blood in the water. Without an eminent person or a crazy stunt to present in the hours before the daily deadline, there’s next to no chance of getting a journo or, heaven help you, a TV crew to show up and give your cause some attention. It felt to me that I might be both – an eminent stunt about to fall flat. The second lesson in activism is to pretend this bait-and-switch routine is not really happening, and you must act as if it isn’t because journos despise ‘celebrity activists’. And gimmicks. The fact that they’ll only show up if the celeb is wheeled out or the gimmick deployed is something they’d rather not have rubbed in their faces. The third lesson is not to take any of this personally, because they don’t. Except the part about having the rules of the game openly acknowledged. Apparently that’s offensive.