Pranks were a part of everyday life for us, often hilarious and just as frequently infantile. Some are unthinkable today, like the time we bade farewell to a popular college tutor at the railway station. We managed to wrap his entire carriage in toilet paper and then unhook the engine. The stationmaster, on arrival, took the wrapping well enough, but when the engine moved off without the train, the driver wasn’t at all impressed. We calmed him down by agreeing to hook his train back on as he backed up. It seems that a lot of the fun has gone out of student life these days. That’s a pity, for it’s harmless enough and part of growing up, of feeling free.
As a university student, 1967.
Delayed metamorphosis
Perhaps I might have gone to the Amazon or some such place after graduating had fate not intervened in the form of a very attractive freshette called Kirsty Mackenzie. By now I was a different person to the chronic underachiever who’d first come to Armidale. I had become very much part of my all-male college, enjoying the good life, but I was still absurdly shy as far as women were concerned. In 1966 I found myself elected to the unpaid job of secretary of my college, one of my duties being to invite the junior common room committees of other colleges to an annual formal dinner.
These were normally stressful affairs for me, but that year Kirsty was among those who attended. She was the first-year representative of the newly formed Duval College, just across the road from Wright, and she seemed interested in my accounts of bushwhacking with Ric. I plied her, and myself of course, with what I thought was red wine but was in fact sherry. I didn’t know the difference. So, fortified with excess Dutch courage, I staggered up to my room and brought down my tiny pet pygmy possum to show her. She was very impressed. That did it. The next day I dredged up enough of my own courage to see her again. Then again, and again. My female-relationship drought of twenty-one years had broken.
Then came another quirk of fate: I ‘won the lottery’. All able-bodied Australian men born on the sixteenth of February, as I was, or on other birthdays selected by a lottery, were conscripted for military service in Vietnam. Like many other students, I’d been demonstrating against the war, once helping to block all traffic to the university on a bridge below the main campus. Maybe I could avoid conscription by claiming I had moral objections to the war? Perhaps my part in the demonstration on the bridge would suffice? If that didn’t work, maybe I could go to prison instead of Vietnam? In all honesty, my conscientious objection was not only to conscription, but to being separated from Kirsty. I decided on prison rather than war, not exactly a romantic choice.
Next trip home I told my mother about being conscripted and that I was refusing to go.
‘Don’t you ever tell your father, it would break his heart,’ she replied.
Wow. I’d expected that reaction from Dad, but not my wonderful, all-loving, all-caring mother. Wartime white feathers appeared before my eyes.
‘Dad,’ I said, in full confrontation mode when he got home a shorttime later, ‘I’ve been conscripted for Vietnam and I’m not going.’
‘Of course you’re not,’ my father said. ‘The whole thing’s a ghastly political farce.’
Two months later I received a summons for a compulsory medical examination at the Armidale hospital. Neither Vietnam nor prison seemed much of a substitute for Kirsty; I had to get out of both, I had to fail that medical. This was quite a challenge as I was medically fit for just about anything imaginable. I contemplated breaking an arm or leg somehow, perhaps not a simple task considering the innumerable injuries I’d survived during my bush-going ventures, not least that fall down Dangar Falls which should have finished me off for good. A better idea was to get bronchitis and claim, with medical records that hopefully still existed from my school days, that I suffered from asthma. The medical was only a week away: how could I get bronchitis in a week when I hadn’t had it in years? I went for hard runs along country roads, getting hot and sweaty, then dived into my college kitchen’s freezer room, sitting there in my jocks until I could stand it no longer. I did this every day, much to the amusement of the women in the kitchen.
Of course I didn’t even catch a cold. On the day of the medical I went for a last run along a different road in the hope that something would happen. It did. On the way back I saw an old haystack in a cow paddock, and jumping the fence and ignoring a chorus of moos I plunged in, burying myself in half-rotted hay. After a few minutes I had an asthma attack the likes of which I’d never experienced in my life. I staggered back to the road thinking my end was nigh, when along came a kindly motorist who delivered me to my college. My mates thought it a great joke. They took me to the medical and someone, I don’t know who, almost carried me to the appointed doctor. My eyes were bulging and I could hardly breathe. I told him I was always like this, sad to say. The doctor took one glance at me and shouted, ‘Get him outta here.’
Goodbye Vietnam, hello Kirsty . . .
Kirsty came from a historic cattle and sheep station called Stonehenge about 100 kilometres north of Armidale. The house was in a state of moderate disrepair but, surrounded by 2 hectares of wild garden, was endearingly beautiful – a home to be treasured, and Kirsty certainly did that. Needless to say, I became a regular visitor, always made welcome by her parents. I loved exploring the property with her on horseback, me on Kirsty’s wily old ex-racehorse who didn’t hesitate to jump anything. I just hung on for dear life and had a couple of rather nasty high-speed crashes. Much safer to build a fish pond, which I did among some granite boulders in a corner of the garden.
Being with Kirsty put an end to my solo bushwalks. I didn’t reflect on that much at the time because a friend of Ric’s had bought a mould for making fibreglass Canadian canoes, decked in and with a cockpit at each end. This allowed for bush ventures with a difference. Kirsty and I made an expert pair, she in the bow and I in the stern. We’d have only a crude map of where we were going, if any at all, and there were heart-stopping moments when, looking ahead, we saw that our stream had developed a horizon. That meant a rapid or a waterfall lay ahead. As we got closer we’d hear the roar of the water, and sometimes we shot over small falls that caused our canoe to plunge underwater before resurfacing to carry us on. We smashed a couple of canoes this way, on rivers running from the New England tablelands to the coastal floodplains. It was incredibly exciting, but, I’ll admit, rather dangerous.
Forty years on I made a pilgrimage back to Stonehenge. It had been resold a couple of times and fallen on hard times, but by the time I returned it had become a wealthy man’s mansion. The owner was delighted to show me around, especially the garden, which was his pride and joy and which I, a lover of beautiful places, found stunning.
‘There’s a really pretty little rock pool over there,’ he said, pointing to a distant corner as we walked around. ‘Nestled among a crop of granite boulders and full of orange lilies.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I built it.’ That took him by surprise.
The following year, honours graduation over with, it vaguely occurred to me that I should start looking for a real job. But what? Fortune, the wildcard of my life, intervened before my job search began. The zoology department needed an assistant for Hal Heatwole, a recently appointed associate professor, and were after an outdoors type – me. My job, among other things, was to catch reptiles, keep them in a newly built snake house, and assist with experiments on them. At the same time I could enrol for a master’s degree. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed the work, or my own project on lizards, but I loved going on trips with Hal to inland northern Australia searching for snakes.
One day four of us were in a rainforest when we came across an amethystine python, Australia’s biggest snake. It was nearly 6 metres long, with a head like a dog’s. I wanted to see how hard it could squeeze, so I asked the others to wind it around me, one keeping a hold of the head – no easy task – and another managing its tail. After a little struggling, three loops were around me. Then the snake started constricting
. It crushed the air out of my lungs and I felt my ribs caving in. I had no hope of breathing and certainly couldn’t speak. At that point the others urgently unwound the snake; I was lucky they still could. A daft experiment, not recommended, but I confess I’m a little odd about dangerous animals and dangerous places – they seem to attract me, especially when I’m alone. A dysfunctional sense of self-preservation perhaps? Maybe, but it’s more that I resent unnecessary fears getting between me and Nature. If I had not overcome my initial intuitive fear of dangerous animals (like funnel-web spiders) or dangerous places (like the outer edge of Long Reef) my life would be the poorer for it, just as people who are afraid of the dark suffer a sad affliction. It’s a personal thing, although it sometimes encourages me to make others confront their phobias, like when a television cameraman turned up to photograph some of our snakes and wanted me to hold one for him. I picked up a tiger snake and drooped it around my shoulders. Then another and another, until I had six crawling over me. The cameraman backed away as far as he could go. I wasn’t being brave or silly, I was merely showing him that it was cold enough to make the snakes placid, and harmless if treated gently. I knew what I was doing. But I don’t think this demonstration succeeded, for the poor guy fled just as soon as he could.
Back in the lab, my job had had a seriously doubtful start. Hal needed to collect salt from the salt-excreting glands of sea snakes, which are situated inside their nostrils. How? Hal considered this for a long time and decided that a condom, placed over the nose, would do it. Of course it was my job to get the condom, so I drove into town and paced up and down outside a pharmacy until there were no customers inside. I walked in, only to be riveted to the spot by a rather attractive shop assistant smiling at me. My shyness of old came back with a vengeance. She asked if she could help.
‘Ah, no – yes. I, er, well, I think I need some condoms.’
‘In the corner there.’ She pointed, her smile unchanged.
I bought a packet, pocketed the receipt and fled. Hal didn’t notice the trauma I’d been through; he just got on with the job. The first condom tore. He tried another – that nearly did it. Then another – that worked. Job over. This was fortunate as I’d purchased a pack of three.
A couple of days later Hal decided to use this method for the whole study, and he needed a lot more condoms. I drove back to the pharmacy and there she was again.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked, in what seemed to me to be an ambush.
I mumbled out my request, looking anywhere but at her, and she informed me that Durex came in packets of tens and hundreds. I bought a hundred.
But there were several snakes and the condoms had to be changed twice daily. A week later Hal told me to get more. He had no idea what he was asking of me.
Back to the pharmacy I went and, oh no, there she was again.
‘Really?’ she said when I muttered my order. She was trying not to grin as she took my twenty-dollar note. ‘That should keep you going for a while.’
I mumbled that they were for sea snakes.
‘Really?’ she said again. ‘I didn’t know sea snakes used them. See you next week then?’
I didn’t wait for a receipt.
Horrible woman.
One evening, on coming back from a long trip, I went straight to the snake house, which was situated on a parapet between the zoology and botany departments. I immediately saw that the heating had failed, and then realised that the technician who was supposed to look after the snakes hadn’t bothered to check on them at all.
I was relieved to see my beautiful amethystine python – the one that had been wrapped around me – moving, until I realised it wasn’t she that caused the movement. I flung open the door to find that the rats I’d left for her food had eaten their way into her body – she was too cold to defend herself – and were now eating her from the inside while she was still alive. There followed horror upon horror as I opened one compartment door after another. More snakes were dead. Dead rats were half decomposed. Those snakes still alive were moribund – yellow-bellied blacks, tigers, a death adder, a king brown and some copperheads among them.
Boiling with anger, I forgot to close the doors. I just stormed back to my room, there to spend half the night composing a speech about animal welfare. Next morning I went in to work late, not relishing the task ahead. However, instead of having to blurt out my speech I found myself cordially greeted by some zoology staff and two botany professors. The latter were beside themselves: the snakes, warmed by the morning sun, had found their way into the greenhouse, as well as up some scaffolding that builders were using to make repairs. The builders had walked off by the time I arrived and the whole botany wing had been evacuated by order of the vice-chancellor. I was told that louts had opened all the snake-house doors, and would I please oblige by ‘getting rid’ of the snakes. I said I would catch them, and did. I spent the day taking them to places where I hoped each might survive. The snake house was never used again.
In 1968 I graduated again, this time with a master’s degree in herpetology, and then wrote my first journal paper, on the reproductive cycle of a water lizard. The only problem with that was the name I gave the editor: Charlie Veron. He told me I couldn’t use a nickname. What to do about that? I couldn’t call myself John, so I used my initials, J.E.N. It sounded formal, but with no alternative this became the name on most of my publications.
With another year’s work I could have changed that master’s to a PhD, but I felt there was no point in that because my project seemed to be on a path going nowhere particularly interesting.
In May that year Kirsty and I were married. The wedding took place in the Presbyterian Church of Glen Innes and the reception was at Stonehenge. It was a very grand affair, with the whole Mackenzie clan and all their friends. We knew it was Kirsty’s father’s swan song as he had a terminal heart condition, so the wedding was as special for him as for us. I hadn’t been inside a church since I was thirteen, so that part was a bit of a struggle but my friends, who were just as religious as me, took it in their stride and drank merrily on.
We went to Heron Island for our honeymoon – that’s what research stations are for, after all – and on our return I was offered the post of teaching fellow by Professor O’Farrell, the head of the zoology department, presumably still grateful for my deliverance of his department from the dreaded snakes.
Scuba
Soon after I started my new job, a group of us decided to do something adventurous, like parachuting. This sounded fun and I was all for it, but one short phone call put that way out of our financial reach. What about scuba diving? In those days there were no scuba clubs and I was the only one who had met anybody who’d actually been scuba diving. I phoned the CSIRO’s Division of Oceanography at Cronulla, just south of Sydney, and arranged, when next visiting my family, to go for a dive under the auspices of someone who called himself the diving officer.
True to his word, this kindly man rigged me up with scuba gear and helped me, waddling along duck-fashion with fins and all, to a breakwater, then down over the rocks to the water’s edge.
‘Remember,’ he said, ‘don’t come up too quickly, and don’t hold your breath.’ He ambled off.
Following this comprehensive training course (Isn’t there more to scuba diving than this?) the dive itself was thrilling. I could see only about five feet ahead, mostly rock and mud, but the feeling of being weightless in a hidden world was exciting, if a little frightening. Like most beginners, I kept imagining sharks circulating just out of sight, waiting to eat me. I stayed down until I was freezing cold and then surfaced ever so slowly.
That was the sum of my diving training for over a year, and none of my fun-seeking buddies had more. No matter, we picked up snippets as we went. It wasn’t until 1970 that some of us obtained a formal diving qualification from a new diving school on the coast. That had nothing to do with learning to dive, we just needed a ticket to get tanks filled at dive shops.
In th
e meantime, encouraged by some interesting dives on rocky headlands, we decided to form a scuba club. The zoology department had a marine station at Arrawarra Headland, north of Coffs Harbour, only a few hours’ drive from Armidale. The station was a large fibro shed and was free, meaning we knew where the key was hidden. What’s more, we could borrow tanks from someone we’d met in Coffs.
Diving on the coast was all very well, but the Solitary Islands, visible from Arrawarra Headland, kept beckoning. How could we get there? The zoology department had a 14-foot aluminium boat with a small outboard motor that we could borrow – well, we didn’t feel the need to burden the department with paperwork, and the boat didn’t seem to be used for anything else. We discovered that as many as six of us could cram aboard without obvious signs of the boat sinking, and if the seas were calm enough we could easily make the mile-and-a-half journey to South West Solitary Island, which had a slightly protected embayment on the western side where we could anchor.
It was there that we found corals growing on rocks. As far as we could ascertain, corals had never been recorded anywhere along the New South Wales coast, so this was quite a discovery. There weren’t just a few corals, there were acres of them, in all manner of different shapes, sizes and colours, intermingled with giant anemones, clown fish, and masses of other marine life we thought only occurred on coral reefs. The place didn’t look anything like the reefs I’d seen at Heron Island; it seemed unique, while just as astonishingly beautiful.
A Life Underwater Page 6
