A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  I was confused. I understood what had happened, but I couldn’t feel it had happened. My mother had always been there for me, every day of my childhood, then every day of my school life. She was my anchor, my guide, my fountain of wisdom. It was beyond me to realise that all of this, my lifelong blanket of unquestioned love and security, had suddenly ceased to exist.

  My thoughts for my father, sister and grandmother came to my rescue; I plunged into worrying about them rather than myself. I believe to this day that my mother and father had a perfect marriage, an absolute love affair going back to the time when my mother had only just left school. If they ever disagreed about anything, and surely that must have sometimes happened, I never noticed. If my mother wanted something done, Dad did it. I knew her death would be a catastrophe for him. I just wanted to be with him, and with Jan, for whom it must have been agonisingly real as she was still living in the family home. I tried to imagine how it would be for my grandmother, who had lost her only, much loved daughter.

  Mum’s funeral was at St Alban’s, the church where I’d spent so much time as a child. I will never forget that day. Not only was the church packed, standing room only, but the surrounding grounds were also. There were hundreds of people I barely recognised; I’d had no idea how big my mother’s world was. It seemed that half the shop owners of Lindfield were there. Through the mist of my grief I saw our Italian greengrocer with tears pouring down his face, and our milkman, and postman, and so many others I didn’t know. That day when I said farewell to Mary Veron was the day I discovered who she really was.

  At that time I also discovered something unexpected about Noni. I would have thought that a five-year-old wouldn’t understand death, especially one who’d never come across death before, as far as she could remember. Yet Noni seemed to understand completely. She knew she would never see her gran again and she would not be consoled. Gran was the most wonderful person in her world and her closest friend. For years she clung to the last present my mother had given her – a plastic, silver-painted clockwork bell that played ‘Jingle Bells’.

  The loss of her gran had a permanent effect on Noni, giving her a head far older than her age and leading her to think deeply about the big things in life – good and evil, and who she herself was, or wanted to be.

  My mother had died only six weeks before the three of us were due to depart for England. I felt at first that I couldn’t leave my father, but as time wore on it became clear that there was nothing I could do for him. He had lived with death throughout the war years and perhaps this had toughened him, I don’t know. My sister was with him, now his faithful housekeeper. My grandmother suffered alone. True to her stoic, Victorian, impenetrably deep nature, she kept her tears to herself, but I knew that facade well, we were very close.

  Back home, still in a haze, I realised that if I didn’t work on those museum specimens now, I would have to do it some other time, and soon. Kirsty knew this also, so we decided to go ahead with our plans, except for the touring, which Kirsty said she couldn’t face alone.

  I had never been to a foreign country at that point, apart from Papua New Guinea, and Kirsty had only been to New Zealand on holiday as a child. In fact, I had hardly seen a building much older than my grandmother, and perhaps for this reason I’d never taken any interest in history, which I loathed at school along with almost everything else. And so I had a strange feeling as our plane circled down over London and I saw the houses of parliament, the Tower and Big Ben. Of course I knew they existed, but the old saying ‘seeing is believing’ became all too true for me. That feeling of profound ignorance of something important took a leap forward when we did a bus tour around London and ended up at Windsor Castle. Who built this place? Why? Who paid for it? How did the plumbing work? I had questions without end. Kirsty could answer many of them as she’d majored in history at university, but more and more I felt I had to learn about history myself. And so I started a personal journey of discovery of the history of England, vaguely like my discovery of classical music. I developed a fascination with the past – piecing it together – which has never left me.

  At first I was taken aback by the corals in the British Museum because there were so many I’d never seen, but those from the Great Barrier Reef, of which there were thousands, all had a feeling of familiarity. I started to recognise the insights and mistakes of taxonomists of the past, especially when they’d given a new name to what was only a variation in growth form due to the environment in which the coral had grown. I made seemingly endless notes. It was tedious work, as there was sparse information with most specimens, usually only a label saying who’d collected it and roughly where it was from. For many there wasn’t even that. Not surprisingly I became interested in the personal side of the collectors, in fact I had to, to make sense of what they wrote.

  A fanciful eighteenth-century painting of coral collecting. Many coral names used today stem from these times.

  Gradually, too, I learned to interpret old manuscripts in ways that approached reality as their authors saw it. It was Henry Bernard who interested me most, because he described so many species and had much to say about most of them. Like several other taxonomists of his time, he never saw a living coral and, taking tunnel vision to an extreme, thought there was no reason to do so. And so he had little understanding of the corals he devoted most of his career to writing about. (He also went off on odd tangents, like criticising Darwin’s theory of atoll formation.)

  A type specimen displayed in the British Museum, borrowed from Paris’s National Museum of Natural History.

  What concerned me most was an almost complete lack of study by Bernard and his contemporaries of anything but single specimens, or at most small groups of specimens. Why describe a coral as a new species without knowing, or even wanting to know, how it differed from other species? Bernard’s work was mostly highly respected by his peers at the time, but they might have been forgiven for considering it pointless, as some ultimately did.

  For two long months I battled corals in that dusty museum while Kirsty occupied her time visiting places of interest and revelling in music concerts and the theatre. When I’d had all I could take we hired a car and made the tour of Scotland that Kirsty had planned with Mum, staying in B&Bs or with the families of our Townsville friends. But we both longed to be back with Noni. I was very envious when, after a trip to the Netherlands, the time came for Kirsty to head home. There were more museums on my itinerary, in Europe and America.

  At the museum in Paris I was sidelined somewhat by the French for not speaking their language, but the museum’s coral palaeontologist, Jean-Pierre Chevalier, came to my rescue and we spent a good deal of fruitful time finding type specimens that had been presumed lost or were mislabelled. I wrote notes to go with these, tying them to the specimens, but saw during a later trip that they’d all been removed. No surprises there: how dare a novice, and an uncouth Australian at that, attach notes to such historic specimens.

  From Paris I went to several other European museums, the most interesting being Berlin’s, on the Russian side of the Berlin Wall. I was refused permission to stay overnight in the east, so every morning I had to go through Checkpoint Charlie, which turned out to be well named for I was always searched and questioned by Russian-speaking lowlife called border guards, just like those at Khabarovsk. However, in the museum it was a different matter: the Germans were delightful people and I made a friend of Dieter Kühlmann, one of the museum’s curators, who years later was to join me in Japan. I found many ancient type specimens from the Red Sea, some still in packing cases in the basement where they had been put for safekeeping during World War II. Many of these were of great historic value, especially the type specimens described by the German coral taxonomist Christian Ehrenberg in 1834, which I soon realised could be distinguished from the others in his collections by a black border he’d drawn around their labels.

  After Germany it was on to America, where I was warmly welcomed by one museum a
fter another. I spent most of my time at the Smithsonian, where most of the types were kept, but not surprisingly I had the same problems with the corals as I’d had in Europe. I found many were as pointless as those in the British and Paris museums because new species were described from single specimens and had little associated information. But others were not: I was especially impressed by the work of James Dana (1813–1895), a geologist who took up corals as a sideline. He’d had insights into coral taxonomy that none of his contemporaries remotely matched, mostly because he clearly did his own field work.

  At the other extreme was A.E. Verrill (1839–1927), who published an astounding amount of taxonomy, only a small part of which, fortunately, is about corals. I gained the impression that he was considered some sort of hero by Yale’s Peabody Museum, but as far as I was concerned he seemed to have no idea about corals, apart from what other people had to say about them and from rummaging through the specimens others had collected. His holotypes were mostly barely identifiable fragments. Worse, he had a habit of depositing one holotype in one museum (usually the Peabody) and another of the same name, but actually a different species, in another museum (usually the Smithsonian). His accompanying description sometimes appeared to be of a third species. He also got type localities wrong: Montipora from the Gulf of California? Platygyra from Hawaii? I don’t think so. Such a mess. Perhaps he did better with other groups of animals, but I can’t imagine that he ever saw a living coral.

  A few years ago I emailed a curator at Peabody about one of these problems and was surprised that he remembered me. To my delight had a name for the mess: Verrilliana.

  My non-working time in America had an amusing side. On arrival I made a beeline for the Smithsonian, where a kindly curator who studied sea fans installed me in a nearby hotel frequented by museum visitors. That night, feeling a little jetlagged, I went for a walk. I usually head for a park or botanical garden when stuck in a city, but as they seemed in short supply around my hotel, I followed my feet to what appeared to be Washington DC’s red-light district. There I found streets that kept me entertained for miles. Chatting about my walk at morning tea at the Smithsonian the following day, I noticed that people around me had stopped talking and were listening closely.

  ‘Do you have any idea how dangerous it is where you went?’ someone blurted out. Most of those in the tearoom declared they wouldn’t even drive down some of the streets I’d walked, even in broad daylight. None of this had remotely occurred to me: that was the joy of being an Australian who thought danger was all about snakes, sharks and spiders, not people.

  That evening, back in my hotel room, I noticed a row of locks on the door, a chain and a spy glass. In the lobby a sleepy clerk told me she wouldn’t set foot outside the front door after dark under any conditions. I felt like I was in a prison.

  Then I remembered I had a means of escape. Not long before this trip a friend of Kirsty’s family, an old judge, promised to give me a phone number to call if I wanted a place to stay in DC. The judge died soon after this, but his wife remembered his promise and looked the number up for me in his diary. I was reluctant to make that call, but stuck in my hotel room I felt I had to do something.

  A woman called Margaret answered the phone, and I explained who I was and wondered if she could put me up for a couple of days until I found a hotel in a less dangerous area. She gave me her address and told me to call a cab.

  Her house was a very grand mansion. I was shown to a guest-room the size of an apartment, complete with walk-in cupboards, a bath that looked more like a swimming pool, even a private sauna. I stayed with Margaret for my entire time in DC. She was middle-aged, very bored, incredibly wealthy, and so were all her friends, to whom I was introduced as ‘the house guest from Australia’.

  For a while the house guest amused himself at a succession of dinner parties by telling ever more incredulous stories about killer sharks the size of submarines, and kangaroos that delivered mail in their pouches. In return I was propositioned by one bored female after another, reminding me of the film The Graduate. But I had no wish to visit luxury yachts in the Bahamas, or villas in the Appalachians, I just wanted to work on corals. And so I was chauffeured to work in a big black Cadillac every morning and collected in the Cadillac every evening, usually to be dragged off to yet another party and surrounded by yet more rich, bored, middle-aged women.

  After three weeks my departure drew close. Over breakfast one morning I brought up the subject of the judge, who I had to thank for arranging my stay.

  ‘What judge?’ Margaret said, looking surprised. ‘I don’t know any judge.’

  I had dialled the wrong number. An Australian accent worked wonders in America in those days.

  My final stop was Cornell University, Ithaca, to see John Wells, a professor of geology. Considered by most to be the world’s foremost coral taxonomist, John was an elderly yet sprightly character with a lively sense of humour. We hit it off immediately, especially as he was keen to hear my views on how corals varied in structure according to where they grew and the consequences of this for taxonomy. I chatted on about the possibility of creating a single global taxonomy of corals. Discouragingly, he thought this an impossible goal, however desirable. We also talked about coral distributions, he being the world’s keeper of records.

  John had two houses, one on Cornell’s campus, his winter home, and the other on the edge of Lake Ontario. He called the latter house Lucky Stone, because of the many stones around it with holes in them. These, he explained, were fossil wormholes, although he didn’t say why they were lucky. On his study wall at Lucky Stone, John had a large chart showing the distribution of coral genera. These were ranked in descending order, from most common to least, down the first column, and countries were ranked in descending order, from most diverse to least, across the top. The chart was covered with crosses in pencil that indicated a genus was present, and there were dozens of changes and question marks. Changes in the order of the rows or columns had resulted in multiple patches being stuck on with Sellotape, some of it ageing and peeling off.

  I spent an hour or so adding new crosses here and there, and more question marks, all of which we discussed. John told me he’d redrawn the whole chart several times. Clearly a new edition was needed – this one was falling apart – but I was a little taken aback when, our discussions over, he ceremoniously took the chart off his wall, rolled it up and handed it to me.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Look after it, won’t you.’

  I felt humbled. I later helped myself to a lucky stone and hung it around my neck.

  The following year, 1976, I was invited to a coral taxonomy workshop hosted by a marine station on Enewetak Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. It was an ideal opportunity, as those invited included many taxonomists I’d befriended during my time in museums. But my impulsive past came back to haunt me. The marine station was on a US military base, and the US apparently didn’t approve of me throwing an ASIO agent down a stairwell. Permission to travel to the Marshall Islands was denied.

  After a flurry of letters, I was eventually given a visa, valid from the exact day I arrived in Hawaii en route to Enewetak Atoll to the exact day I was to leave, and so it remained for all my trips to the US until the system became computerised. After that I was ‘randomly selected’ for searching on American flights – for twenty-eight flights in a row.

  John Wells was the guest of honour at the Marshalls workshop because he had done much of his original work there. He’d been fiddling with photos I’d sent him of a highly variable species that he had named Plesiastrea russelli. I had changed both his species name and the genus to which he’d assigned it.

  ‘Charlie, isn’t this going a bit far?’ he remonstrated. ‘Some of these photos, surely, are of other species – several other species, I’d say.’ The species in question was common around the islands.

  ‘Okay John, let’s take a look at some live specimens,’ I said.

  I fetched my scuba gea
r and collecting basket, dived down to about 50 metres, and gathered a series of specimens at regular intervals all the way up, finishing on a sunny, wave-hammered reef crest. I cleaned them and laid them out on a bench in sequence. John spent hours pottering up and down, looking at them with his hand lens, grouping them one way then another, as I looked on trying not to smile, for I had done something similar myself many times on the Great Barrier Reef.

  ‘I surrender,’ he said, straightening his back. ‘Most palaeontologists would have called most of these specimens a different species, and they would probably have made several genera of them. But I agree, they are all one and the same species.’

  By that time I was confident of my work, but the consequences of environmental variations in species for taxonomy was something still not accepted by most coral biologists, so it was good to have John’s affirmation.

  Rivendell

  This very interesting trip was somewhat spoiled on my return home. There a letter from AIMS awaited, informing me that my contract to work on coral taxonomy had been changed from three years to two, and that I was to be reassigned to ‘other work’. I was devastated, then outraged. Coral taxonomy had grown tremendously important to me, and so had Rivendell, my new country home. It would be impossible to keep Rivendell without a good job, and the only job I wanted was the one I had. My work was turning into something original and worthwhile by any standard. Nevertheless, I felt I had no choice but to act decisively: I resigned my job, cleared my desk and left.

  It was a horrible time, especially as I knew I was putting my family’s security at risk. Fortunately, the pain didn’t last long: a few days later I received another letter, this time from the chairman of the council, referring to the institute’s actions as a mistake and extending my contract to work on coral taxonomy to four years. I realised then that I had been caught up in one of the endless power struggles within AIMS. My semi-permanent war against bureaucratic nonsense had begun.