A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  On our last evening at Mer I found myself on the main beach, sipping beer with a guy called Eddie Mabo. Eddie (1936–1992), now enshrined in Australian history for his spectacularly successful legal moves to give indigenous people ownership of their own land, was all grumbles. Certainly he complained about the white man’s law that said his people did not own their own land, but he also complained about his own people. He wanted to build a tourist resort on a small island adjacent to Mer, a pretty place shaped like a horseshoe and which sometimes had bubbling water in the middle, the last murmur of an almost extinct volcano deep below. Eddie admitted the island was sacred and that the islanders wanted none of his ideas. Most of them, he added, wanted him banished from Mer altogether. That’s a bit of the history I’ve never seen in print.

  Unfortunately David Stoddart had to get back to England before we headed to the ribbon reefs, so we put him ashore at Lockhart River Mission, halfway up Cape York. Although he couldn’t participate in any of our diving – he was no swimmer – he spent his time surveying vegetation on the little coral cays we visited and was generally a delight to have on the boat, mostly on account of his incredibly old-world sense of humour and his colourful language. His deep booming voice, which continually echoed around us, was an amazing mixture of upper-crust Cambridge and the pits of sailor-swearing, which, no matter how blue the words, always ended up sounding like poetry.

  His last day’s work done, a few of us went ashore to collect him. He looked suspicious as we approached, as well he might. We pounced on him, stripped him, rolled him in some mud, dragged him up the beach, rolled him in sand and sat him up. I then photographed him grinning at the camera with just his hat on.

  The expedition had a memorable aftermath. In January 1976 the Royal Society staged a formal symposium to commemorate the first expedition to the Great Barrier Reef in the early 1930s, and despite my relative youth – for that institution in those times – I was invited to London to participate. The symposium was staged in the Great Hall, with paintings of British scientists of old leering down and accompanied by much pomp and ceremony. Incredibly, all but one of the original expedition members were still alive and able to meet us. The symposium was chaired by Sir Maurice Yonge (1899–1986), the expedition’s famous leader and one of the first scientists to undertake rigorous experiments on reef organisms in the field.11 Two days were spent presenting and discussing the results of our work, Stoddart himself being the man of the moment. The day before the symposium began we embarked on what could only be described as a pub crawl around London, with him spouting profanities all the way. I was again fascinated by his sparkling eloquence; he had one language when with the likes of me and quite another when VIPs showed up, at which point his choice of words was impeccable.

  With that encouragement, when it came time for me to speak I decided to spice the tone up a bit by including my slide of David in his birthday suit on his last day of the expedition. This was met with stony silence. Not a single chuckle. I took a deep breath and went on. When I finished my talk I walked off the stage amid a decidedly muted ovation. Then, just audibly, I heard a deep voice in best Cambridge accent coming from the front row: ‘Veron, you fucking little cunt, I’ll get you for that.’

  Things didn’t improve. That evening there was a formal dinner, a very formal dinner, with about a hundred guests all dressed to the nines. I, resplendent in hired bow tie and dinner jacket, was seated in the furthest corner of the dining room, as befitted the lowliest of the company. Sir Maurice and David, along with the most important members of the original expedition, were seated at the high table on a dais. The wine waiter, a stooping old man in tails who looked as if he’d just emerged from a Charles Dickens novel, purposely poured just two fingers of wine into my glass.

  ‘Aren’t you a snotty old fart,’ said I, upholding the best of Australian tradition.

  Next round I received one finger. That meant war. At the end of the meal the old man handed me a decanter of port, as ancient protocol decreed, and glaring at me he told me to fill my glass and be so good as to pass the decanter to my left. He pointed left to aid my comprehension. Apparently passing it to the right, or anywhere else, was secret code for ‘there’s a traitor in the house’.

  I looked him in the eye. ‘That’s not ’ow we do it down under, mate,’ I said, and got up and walked around the table, in the wrong direction, filling everybody’s glass.

  That got silent stares from the high table. I thought Sir Maurice would have a stroke, but apparently he wasn’t as bothered as I imagined. When he was invited to visit AIMS some years later I asked him and his wife Phyllis to dinner. I expected that to be a stiff occasion but it turned out to be quite the opposite. Sir Maurice regaled us with stories of his life, including, with a big grin at me, mention of a time when the Royal Society had a strange custom about passing the port. That night he drank so much wine I ended up carrying him to bed.

  When Sir Maurice was a very old man, Kirsty and I visited him and Phyl, as she insisted we call her, at their lovely old stone house in Edinburgh. There was an ulterior motive for my visit, at least as far as AIMS was concerned. Among the many things my fledgling institution craved was old-fashioned respectability. Wouldn’t it be special if AIMS acquired Sir Maurice’s library, reputed to contain many old and rare volumes, and made a display of them at the entrance to its own library?

  Just about the last topic I wanted to broach with Sir Maurice was what he intended to do with his books after he died, but he made the task simple by bringing up the subject of his pension. Not being money-minded – something I could relate to – he had retired on a fixed income, and of course that had gradually eroded. Now he had good reason to worry about Phyl’s security, she being much younger than he. So he jumped at the idea of AIMS buying the whole collection, despite my protestations that it would be like selling part of himself.

  And so the library was catalogued, Blackwell Publishing were assigned the task of valuing it, and AIMS promptly paid up, the amount being somewhat irrelevant to them.

  ‘Disgraceful!’ said David Stoddart, a dedicated bibliophile himself. ‘Sending such a collection to that uncouth rabble of yours! Who’s going to read any of it, eh?’

  Well, I did, at least some of the old monographs, mostly because they were as much works of art as the science of the time, and I made good use of the volumes about corals. However, nobody else ever turned a single page of the most precious volumes. I know that because I kept the key to the glass cabinet they were housed in and nobody asked for it. Thus it was me who noticed one hot humid day that mould had invaded the cabinet. I made such a fuss about this that the whole collection was transferred, cabinet and all, to a museum in town where the ancient volumes would be properly cared for.

  Stoddart, as only he could, turned the whole matter into his singular style of amusement. For the next couple of decades, I received the occasional letter from him on the same subject. ‘My dear fellow,’ they would always start, ‘did you know that an original Grosse 1860 (a beautiful, long-forgotten volume) is up for sale?12 It has Sir Maurice’s name in it; somehow it seems to have missed the AIMS sale. Such a shame.’

  When David died in December 2014 I wrote a brief account of our friendship to be read at his funeral, one that I think would have made the lovable old rogue laugh again.

  A Wayward Career

  The first AIMS scientist

  One evening the year after the Stoddart expedition, I had a call from Ian Croll, owner of a public aquarium on Magnetic Island, just opposite Townsville. Would I like to come out on his speedboat and try to find the Yongala? The SS Yongala was a 3700-ton passenger freighter that sank with all hands in a gale near Townsville in 1911. She is now a popular tourist dive spot, but in the ’70s was almost unknown because she was hard to locate. Ian and I found her with the help of a spotter plane, and thus were among the first scuba divers to see her. She’d been plundered long ago, presumably by scavengers using pearl diver’s equipment, but as com
pensation there were a couple of big groupers stationed at her bow, facing the current. They were so unconcerned about our presence that I put my arms around one for a photo.

  On our return journey that day the weather turned bad, so it was late on a very dark night when we finally reached the beach opposite Ian’s house on Magnetic Island. I jumped off the bow to fend the boat off the sand but found myself in a couple of metres of water. When I surfaced, spluttering, someone shone a torch in my face.

  ‘Charlie Veron,’ a woman said, ‘what are you doing here?’

  It was Isobel Bennett again. How did she always know where to find me? We agreed to meet the next day for lunch at Ian’s place. When we did, Issie insisted I apply for a job at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, soon to start up in Townsville. I’d already thought about that of course, but imagined the place would not be at all to my liking as I was a self-motivated field worker, not the right person for the high-powered laboratories AIMS would probably have. Issie bullied me unmercifully and so I promised to write the letter. But I never did, because a couple of days later, Ken Back and his wife Pat invited Kirsty and me to a buffet dinner at their house to welcome Malvern (‘Red’) Gilmartin, the newly appointed director of AIMS, to Australia. Red, a red-headed stocky ball of American energy, had come to the Antipodes because he thought he would like the rough-and- tumble of Australians. Ken and Pat must have had fifty guests at their party, so I saw little or nothing of Red that night, and as I’m not at ease with such high-flying company I fortified myself with some of Ken’s nice wine. In fact I became so fortified that according to one account I ended up dancing on his dining table. All I remembered was being the last person to leave and taken to task by Kirsty. She said my behaviour had been disgraceful. Red apparently had another view, which was that he’d just met the sort of Aussie he’d been told about and one who worked on corals to boot.

  The phone rang very early the following morning. ‘Are you Veron?’

  ‘I suppose so, not sure.’ My head ached horribly.

  ‘What would you say if I was to offer you a job?’

  ‘Dunno. What job? Who are you?’

  ‘Gilmartin. To catalogue the corals of the Great Barrier Reef. Starting tomorrow. Your lab will be the large steel shed in the old quarantine station at Pallarenda. See you there.’ He hung up.

  Tomorrow was a Sunday. Nevertheless I followed Red’s directions and there was indeed a shed in the old quarantine station, which I found after a little reconnoitring around Pallarenda, a satellite suburb on the north side of Townsville. With Muggin our spaniel in tow, I parked on the lawn next to the shed, which was locked. Then a man in a white lab coat came running up, screaming about trespassing on a quarantine station and telling me he was calling the Commonwealth Police, adding that I would get thirteen years for this. Poor guy, nobody had told him that his station was now the Australian Institute of Marine Science. I wasn’t too sure about that myself, so I told him what he could do with his quarantine station and made a hasty retreat.

  A few days later I received an official letter of appointment from Red, saying that I would be employed on a three-year contract to compile a taxonomic monograph on the corals of the Great Barrier Reef. The obviously multi-authored job description was divorced from reality, especially the time the work would take, but no matter. A week after that I received another letter, from George Melville, the general manager of AIMS, informing me that the director could not make appointments but that he could. The job description was exactly the same. A week after that yet another letter arrived, this one from the chairman of the AIMS council informing me that the general manager could not make appointments but that he could. The job description was again the same. That was my introduction to bureaucratic thinking, but I couldn’t have cared less. I autographed a piece of paper and so became the first scientist to be employed by AIMS.

  That meant resigning from James Cook University. When it came time for me to leave, Professor Burdon-Jones, who hadn’t spoken to me since the incident on the Marco Polo, was a changed person.

  ‘John, you are a credit to the university,’ he said – he was just about the only person alive who still called me John. ‘Your appointment has been one of the most satisfactory I have ever made.’

  Really? That was an about-face if ever there was one.

  ‘It’s going to be difficult to find a replacement for you, especially at such short notice,’ he went on.

  ‘I know just the person,’ I said. ‘Terry Done. He’s just finishing his PhD and was one of our mob at the Solitary Islands. Nobody better.’

  ‘Well, John, I certainly respect your advice,’ said the professor.

  In later years Burdon-Jones referred to me in terms of ever-increasing praise and finally, after his wife and companion since childhood died, we talked a lot about his life. Despite our age difference and history, we became good friends. Strange how these things can turn out.

  The origin of AIMS is unrecorded history, but I well remember many discussions about it. In 1968 Burdon-Jones had proposed to the Australian Academy of Science that an institute be established at James Cook University to provide the science needed for The Reef’s future conservation and management. The academy apparently thought this a good idea, but found his plans too modest. By that time Australia had become a world leader in radio astronomy; what could Australia do next? With its long coastline extending from the tropics to Antarctic waters, the Pacific on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other, Australia was, they decided, uniquely placed for marine science.

  The Australian Institute of Marine Science Act was passed in 1970, and after a prolonged delay an interim council (board of directors) was set up, chaired by Max Day. That was an extraordinary coincidence for me because Max had been head of CSIRO’s Division of Entomology in Canberra when I gave my prize-winning paper there. Not only that, his personal research field at that time was colour change in insects. He knew my work well.

  When I arrived at the quarantine station that no longer was, Red Gilmartin had brought an assistant over from America, and soon AIMS acquired a personnel officer, a purchasing officer and an accountant. It didn’t take long for me to realise that battlelines were being drawn between Red and George. Mostly Red’s fault, according to Max, who can’t have been impressed when Red didn’t show up at some council meetings and walked out on others.

  The first thing I did was secure Len Zell, one of the founding members of our old scuba club, as an assistant. And so, with Terry Done lined up to take over my post-doc at the university and Len now assisting me, the coral part of our group at the Solitary Islands was getting back into action – on the Great Barrier Reef.

  Nevertheless, I can’t say I was overly thrilled with my new job. Our steel shed wasn’t exactly welcoming and the whole place was rather empty, a far cry from my cosy spot at James Cook, where Kirsty and I had made close friends.

  It was Burdon-Jones who suggested I stay on at the university until Terry arrived, and as that was going to be the best part of a year away I gratefully accepted. By the time I finally cleared my desk and moved to AIMS, quite a few staff had moved in, mostly imports from other countries, a colourful outgoing bunch.

  A little before he was due to arrive, Terry asked Kirsty and me to reconnoitre the country around Townsville for a rural block of land where he and his wife might build a house. They changed their minds about this, but we went out reconnoitring anyway, and that’s how we came across land for sale about ten minutes’ drive south of the town, in a rural subdivision called Oak Valley. There were no oaks there, just scrub – mostly chinee apple, lantana and eucalypts. We found a superb 2-hectare block that commanded an excellent view of a tree-laden river and was completely private. Kirsty and I just looked at each other and thought the same thing: why live in town when we could be out here?

  Within hours we had decided to build a house on the block and move out of our fibro box as soon as possible. We weren’t going to be put off by trivial de
tails either: the only access road was via a rocky ford across a creek that flooded every wet season, and there was no water, no electricity and no phone. Noni was thrilled at the prospect of living there, and after looking around for a while hammered a stake into the ground some 10 metres from the river and announced that this was where our front door should be. And that is where it is.

  Russians for starters

  Having accepted my job offer – all three of them – my first day on AIMS’s payroll wasn’t spent learning the ropes, but with Len on board RV Kallisto, a Russian research vessel out of Vladivostok. This came about because the Russians had applied for permission to undertake marine research in Papua New Guinea, at that time a protectorate of Australia. Red told me that the Australian government insisted on an Australian overseeing the ship whenever it was in PNG waters. The Kallisto, according to Red, could be a spy ship. Nobody else contacted me about the matter, which seemed a little weird, especially when Len and I received bright red diplomatic passports in the mail.

  The ship was a rundown 4000-ton ex-German freighter, part of World War II reparations to Russia. Me in charge of this? I hadn’t a clue what a ship this size did and I’d never even been to Papua New Guinea. If it was a spy ship, who or what was it spying on, and what was I supposed to do about it? What was I going to say to the Russian who actually was in charge? ‘Sorry mate, I’ve got your job now’? These were the thoughts going around my head when I was taken to the cabin of the real scientist-in-charge.