Mum definitely wouldn’t like me doing this . . .
Apart from being deadly poisonous, as all kids know, funnel-webs are very nasty-looking creatures, black and hairy with big curved fangs. The Sydney funnel-web is the deadliest spider in Australia and possibly the world. It is also by far the most aggressive. And just as I’d hoped, my spider sent the whole class into turmoil. The girls all started screaming, some of the boys too. Mrs Collins was horrified. She confiscated the biscuit jar, spider and all.
‘You are not to bring something like this to school! What would your mother say?’
Apart from such setbacks Mrs Collins was always interested in my collections, spiders and scorpions excepted, and sometimes she drew pictures of them on the blackboard with coloured chalk. Several other boys also brought interesting things to show-and-tell, but I usually knew more about them than they did. Not a great way to earn friends but it made an impression on Mrs Collins. She had nicknames for some of us; Mr Darwin was mine. I had no idea why.
One Tuesday I brought my jar of worms from Long Reef. As I opened the lid most of the girls scattered to the back of the classroom expecting something dreadful. They weren’t disappointed: I had forgotten to keep the metho topped up and the classroom got a blast of rotten worm gas, enough to make a sailor throw up.
‘Charles Darwin, get that out of here,’ Mrs Collins yelled.
Lunch break soon followed and so did the retaliation of my classmates. Charles Darwin? Within minutes the other kids had converted that to Charlie. I wanted to fight the kid who started it but was soon surrounded by his many supporters. They taunted me. Char-lee. Char-lee.
Mustn’t cry.
It was miserable being picked on like this, by all the kids, even some of the girls. It wasn’t as if I was unable to defend myself, because I was a good wrestler. The school had a sandpit where I regularly battled an older kid who reckoned he took judo lessons. He usually won but the boys in my class had no chance against me. All the more reason, it seemed, to gang up on me now.
My father, on hearing this tale, gave an unsympathetic smile. ‘You should be called Charlie,’ he said, ‘you’re the great-great-great-great-grandson of Bonnie Prince Charlie.’ I forget just how many greats it was.
‘Really?’ I had no idea who Bonnie Prince Charlie might be.
‘Your grandmother was a Stuart. You’re a direct descendant through her. Take a look at your toes; the second and third are webbed.’
I took off a shoe and sure enough my second and third toes were not fully separated. I hadn’t noticed that before. Dad explained that this was the mark of the Stuart family, of royalty. Was I in line for the throne of England?
My classmates weren’t as impressed by this as I was and kept calling me Charlie, after Mrs Collins, not the bonnie prince. I didn’t like that, but most kids had names they didn’t like and I couldn’t do much about it. Gradually, use of my nickname spread, including to adults, except for my parents unless in jest. John, my real name, has long been foreign to me, used only for my passport, credit cards and the like.
For my seventh Christmas, Santa, in whom I continued to believe as long as he did his thing, had given me a copy of William Dakin’s book Australian Seashores. It was subtitled A Guide for the Beach-lover, the Naturalist, the Shore Fisherman, and the Student. That was me! Or rather who I wanted to be, and it was full of photos of Long Reef and all the creatures that lived there. A lot of the book was too complicated for me to understand, but the captions of the photos had names for most of the animals I collected. I soon had a name for almost everything and could impress everybody, especially myself, with my knowledge of what was what. I must have impressed Mrs Collins also. I was not in her class by this time, but we were buddies and so I took my book to school to show her.
Not long afterwards my mother said she wanted to take me to visit a woman at Sydney University who worked with Professor Dakin as his assistant. Mum dressed me in my best clothes, combed my hair, and off we went 0n the train. It took us some time to find the zoology department but when we did we were shown into a laboratory, there to await Isobel Bennett, whose name was on the title page of Australian Seashores.
‘Charlie dear, how nice to see you,’ she said, beaming at me as she came in with hand outstretched.
I was stunned. How did she know that the kids at school called me Charlie? I shook the woman’s hand tentatively. She was nothing like what I expected. She wore an ugly white coat and dark-rimmed glasses and she stank.
‘What have you got to show me?’ she said.
‘I have some worms and stuff.’ I produced my jar.
‘Hang on,’ said Miss Bennett cheerfully, and off she went to get an enamel sorting tray, a magnifying glass and some tweezers. She tipped the contents of my jar into the tray – I’d made sure there was plenty of metho this time – and started sorting with her tweezers.
‘You’ve got a lot of polychaetes here,’ she observed.
‘Yeah, they’re my specialty really. I know most of them. From your book.’
She looked at me over the top of her glasses. ‘You do?’
‘Yeah, I had a Terebella too, but it fell to bits. But what I really want to know about are cunjevoi. You have different names for them in your book and I couldn’t follow it.’
Miss Bennett put down her tweezers and explained that cunjevoi are ascidians, a branch of the tunicates, which are hemi-chordates, part of the evolutionary path that leads to the chordate phylum.
‘What’s a chordate?’
‘Animals with backbones, like you.’
Now I was really struggling. ‘Cunjevoi haven’t got backbones.’
‘No, but they have larvae, like tiny tadpoles, and these do have something like a backbone, although it isn’t really. It’s called a notochord.’
I can’t believe this. This woman is weird.
My disbelief must have shown.
‘I’ll find you a slide and you can see for yourself with a microscope.’ She disappeared again.
When I found out what a microscope was, I knew it was something I had to have. I could see anything with it. I was going to have to keep Santa going for at least one more year.
Our discoveries with the microscope went on until my mother, bored to tears and refusing to look another worm in the face, said it was time to go.
While I wasn’t aware of it then, Isobel Bennett must have got quite a buzz from our meeting. Australian Seashores had only just been published and here was a small boy who was really into it. She gave me a bottle of formalin – the stuff she smelt of – and some collecting tubes. I never used either; I liked my jar and hated formalin. But all the same, our meeting was one of my life’s defining moments: Isobel Bennett was to become one of the most influential people in it.
I was always talking to my mother about how much I loved God, for I knew that Nature was his work and that made him very special. Mum always agreed. Dad never seemed to have anything to say on the subject and, poor man, always had something urgent to do on Sunday mornings. So it was usually just Mum, my sister Jan and I who went to church – St Alban’s Church of England, near Lindfield train station. I would polish my shoes until they glowed (God noticed these things), plaster my hair down with water, and hold my chin high while Mum tied my tie.
I liked the hymns best. Mum sometimes whispered, ‘Sing up,’ which was hard to do if I had to read the words at the same time, but if I knew them by heart I would snap the hymn book shut and yell, ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,’ so loudly and so high that people would turn and look.
God would approve too.
Not so Jan, who cringed with embarrassment and told me to shut up, digging me in the ribs. When that didn’t work she took to sitting in the pew behind me so she could bash me over the head with her hymn book. I usually spent a couple of hours back at church in the afternoons at Sunday school. I was sure I was the deacon’s pet pupil, the way I could recite more of the Bible than any of the other kids, and
I knew all the saints and their whacky stories, and of course I knew everything about Jesus and the things he’d done.
In God’s name, I saved all the pennies I could spare from my sixpence-a-week pocket money, putting them in a special tin moneybox. When it was full I proudly presented it to the deacon, for the wonderful job his church was doing rescuing poor black babies from their black heathen mothers and giving them to good white families for a proper Christian upbringing. These babies are now known as the stolen generations and I doubt they would thank me for helping finance their plight.
My God was the creator of the wonderful world of Nature, but unfortunately the deacon never seemed to talk about that. It was hard for me to see the connection between the church, with its fancy furniture, and the bush. My mother appeared uninterested when I pointed out that Noah’s Ark was the most important story in the Bible. No matter, she knew best and she was the person I wanted to please.
I did not have the emotional contact with my father that I had with my mother. Mine was a postwar world where children were mostly women’s business. Nevertheless Dad did a lot of things for me, including making a large pond for goldfish when I was about five. The prize of my pond was a rotund, goggly-eyed goldfish called Chloe. She was, I suppose, a good-looker as goldfish go, having lots of spots and a long graceful tail. She won a prize at a pet show, I can’t remember for what, and went on living in that same pond for twenty-three years.
My father taught me how to make things and use tools, turning me into a handyman with do-it-yourself skills that I’ve used all my life. Aged eight, I made a pond myself, for freshwater turtles, out of an old copper clothes boiler. There was an area for the turtles to come out to feed on pieces of meat or bake in the sun. Unfortunately they regularly escaped and would be gone for days, until the whole family mounted a search party and caught them again.
After that, ponds became a way of life. The goldfish would breed profusely come early spring, and I fed them on powdered whale meat that Dad bought somewhere. Whale meat sold as pet food? I now wonder about that.
My father also made me a large aviary for finches, canaries, and sometimes budgies, which I bred. I made a run for rabbits and another for guinea pigs. He eventually got cranky about so many ponds and cages cluttering up his well-kept garden and wrecking his dahlia bed, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. Mum insisted I keep the boy guinea pigs separate from the girls, and of course I wondered why.
‘Because we don’t need any more guinea pig babies,’ she said.
‘Do guinea pigs need to get married to have babies?’
‘Sort of.’
‘How do humans get babies, Mum?’
‘They’re given by God, darling, when their mothers are married. Now run off while I make dinner.’
I found this unbelievable, at least as far as guinea pigs were concerned. I was nothing if not observant and knew that guinea pigs had babies after eating nasturtium leaves and that they enjoyed nasturtiums so much they always played games, like chasings and piggy-back, after a feast. This theory embarrassed my mother, who told me not to be silly. So with that encouragement I collected a large pile of nasturtiums, as I had many times before, from our neighbour’s backyard where they grew like weeds. I piled them next to the guinea pig runs, then let them all out for a feast. Sure enough, a couple of months later, baby guinea pigs were everywhere. My first scientific experiment had proved my point.
I discussed this with Rick Smyth, who lived nearby and was in the class above me at school. Rick was the closest friend of my childhood. He was much more sensible than me, a counter to my constant excesses.
‘Nasturtium leaves? That’s dumb. Only guinea pigs like them – what about all the other animals? What about humans?’ Rick had been doing some research with the aid of his dad’s Lilliput magazines.
Curious, I went back to my mother, who declared I shouldn’t talk about such things until I was grown up. And that was all the sex education I ever got, Rick too for that matter. So we kept up our research and came to the unavoidable conclusion, and like most kids of my generation, I couldn’t believe it. My dad did that to my mum?
When I was almost ten my mother’s black cocker spaniel, Lucifer, died. For me his death was almost as bad as Ockie’s but at least it gave me a chance to campaign for a dog of my own, and after much opposition and negotiation it was agreed: for my tenth birthday I could go to the council pound and choose a dog, as long as it was small. I chose a very young puppy, one that was indeed small except for his feet, which were decidedly oversized. I named him Jinka and much to my delight, and my poor parents’ dismay, he grew and he grew and he grew, until he took on the appearance of a cross between a red setter and a labrador. By the time he was a year old we all saw that Giant was his middle name and great dane was part of his pedigree.
From my childhood to university, Jinka was my constant companion and I loved him more than anything else in my life. I taught him to wrestle, getting him in a headlock and then onto his back, forcing his front paws to the ground. I did that until he reached full size and became strong enough to toss me off unless I put all my weight right on his paws. Our fights usually started with me giving his nose a slap. He would growl, bare his teeth, raise his hackles and launch himself at me. Other times he’d walk up to me and start growling: Want a fight? If I took off his collar he knew that meant I couldn’t use it to cheat and so would have an especially hard time getting him onto his back. Then he would put up a hell of a battle; we could have been a stunt pair. My poor mother was always mending torn shirts and trousers and sticking bandaids onto cuts from accidental encounters with big teeth.
Perhaps it was because Jinka was the best bodyguard any child could have that my mother gave me a free rein to come and go just about anywhere I chose. I was always safe with Jinka and I chose to spend a lot of time in the bush, exploring the paths of Ku-ring-gai Chase, a rugged, beautiful national park about the size of Sydney that extended almost to our house. Any time I could spare I rode my bike to the bush and headed off down one of the tracks, Jinka racing beside me. Then we’d leave the path and walk on, away from all signs of habitation until we were completely alone.
Day or night, sun or rain, I loved being alone in the bush, and still do. Armed only with a knapsack, a couple of sandwiches and maybe an apple, I would go with Jinka for miles, until we reached a stream or some such peaceful spot, there to stop and sit, or just muck about. At these times I felt so much at peace that I would stop thinking. I wouldn’t go to sleep, for I could still hear and see things around me, just not think about them. I might see a dragonfly hovering, then darting off to chase another away. I would feel the trees move in the breeze, perhaps hear a bird fly past. Ten or twenty minutes might go by. Then I’d vaguely wonder about something I saw or heard and, as if coming out of a trance, I would start to think again and return to my usual, worldly self. These episodes, which I assumed were normal, always left me relaxed yet invigorated, and with the feeling that I had been close to Nature, close to my God.
I now know this state is called meditation by some, a state of mind developed with practice, but for me it was completely effortless, something I slipped into naturally, and I often did so well into married life. I valued it as a gift. Later, there never seemed to be the time for it and eventually I forgot about it. Now I yearn for that peace and solitude, the tranquillity I once had.
One afternoon in August 2015 I was sitting on a beach being interviewed with an Aboriginal man, Jarmbi Githabul, for a video about climate change and what it meant for humanity. On my mention of meditation he smiled at me and told me to google ‘dadirri’. ‘You can call it deep listening,’ he said. Later, I was astonished to read about dadirri, for that is exactly what I did and felt. Aboriginal people feel where they are, feel their land around them. I’m like them; I was born like them. Maybe all kids are, they just lose it before they know they have it. The freedom I had to roam at will in the bush during my childhood remains somethin
g precious beyond measure to me.
We stopped going to Collaroy around the same year I got Jinka, and went to other places for family holidays, including the Blue Mountains, a few hours west of Sydney by steam train. Our first trip was in midwinter, so cold we could have snow fights, but the attraction for me was a ‘museum’ next to our hotel. Actually it was a long fibro shed, owned by a local celebrity called Melbourne Ward, and unlike most modern museums it was designed to impart wonder rather than teach. It was crammed with natural history collectables of all sorts, with simple labels like ‘jaw of great white shark’, ‘Triassic trilobite’, or ‘shrunken head, Papua New Guinea’, but it was the fossils that interested me most. What had the world been like when they were alive, I wanted to know. And how long ago was that? Mr Ward always seemed to have the answers to my questions. I got to know him and he never wanted me to pay for my visits.
‘You’re a strange boy,’ he once said, presumably referring to my love of his museum. Strange or not, I always came away with a thirst for knowledge.
My passion for Ward’s museum must have struck a chord with Dad, for after my last visit he did a truly wonderful thing for me: he built a garage-sized ‘museum’ of my very own in the corner of our back garden, out of wooden packing cases that had been used to import cars from England. I loved my museum and kept all manner of exotic creatures in it: collections of dead insects and spiders as well as a live carpet snake, some lizards, axolotls and a big green frog. I also had a collection of fossils, minerals, rocks, and generally interesting things which I would add to whenever I could, borrowing them on a permanent basis from the attics or other repositories of junk that family friends had.
A Life Underwater Page 2
