A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  For me one scene is particularly poignant. It was filmed on a floating restaurant in New Caledonia where revellers were living it up, drinking and dancing, yet just under their boat the coral reef was dying. Has it come to this? Is humanity really going to party on regardless of what’s happening to the planet? I think not; the wall of ignorance that many have battered their heads against is crumbling. Even in Australia, the cries of climate change denialists are waning and a new era of thinking and caring is tangibly dawning. It is a change being led by technology and younger generations.

  The older I get, the more people I meet who tell me that their love of the natural world stems from their childhood. When these people were children they were scientists, for they were keen to observe, explore and understand. Some stayed on that path and are now teachers or professionals, others went in different directions but remained amateur naturalists. All have a gift they were born with, the ability to appreciate Nature. What greater gift can a person have?

  Despite the parallels between my life and that of my namesake, I flatter myself that I am most akin to Aboriginal people, in thought at least. They have survived this long because they have understood their land, have listened to it, been a part of it. Certainly they did not seek dominion over it. Like it or not, all humanity is going to have to learn that lesson, for the age of exploitation is all but over. We will either learn to protect and be part of what we still have or become some sort of alien life form on our own planet. Or go extinct.

  As the saying goes, we seldom see things as they are, we see them as we are. While the view from my coffin has changed many times, one perspective has remained constant, and that is that every hour of my life I spent in a meeting was a wasted one, and every hour I spent with Nature has been blessed.

  Afterword

  Night comes quickly in the tropics. From my swingchair on the terrace at Rivendell, dogs at my feet, a book and a glass of wine at my elbow, I love to watch the last flocks of cockatoos, ibis, cormorants and lorikeets flying high overhead. Higher still, the pelicans glide effortlessly in V-shape formations. Then, almost out of sight, I see flocks of kites spiralling on steady wings as they catch a ride on the last thermals of the day. I like to listen to the chatter of the little birds as they prepare for sleep and to the frogs and crickets as they commence their nightly croaks and chirpings. To my right a couple of possums argue in their harsh guttural rasp. They are high in a fig tree that now overgrows the big rambling house behind me but which started life as a pot plant in a corner of my office at AIMS. To my left lies a long expanse of a small river, enclosed by trees and full of life. My view constantly changes as night comes, with the season, and with the light of the moon.

  It wasn’t always like this. Two hundred years ago I wouldn’t have had to clear the riverbank in front of me of lantana and chinee apple, and I might have been wary of the locals, for they would have found me a very curious person, perhaps another invader. For thousands of years before that, little else would have been different, but going back twenty thousand years the river would have been dry, the trees absent, and the locals would have been three or four days’ walk to the east of Rivendell – where the coast was before the sea rose. Perhaps these first Australians might have ventured as far inland as my home on hunting trips, but mostly they would have lived near the outer edge of half a million square kilometres of savannah woodland, the place we now call the Great Barrier Reef. The young men would have hunted goannas, kangaroos, emus, and larger animals that no longer exist. Women and children probably remained on the coast, climbing the rugged escarpments that separated their limestone caves from narrow beaches below, perhaps to check on fish traps or to gather turtle eggs and shellfish. The air would have been full of the sound of waves, the squawking of seagulls and the laughter of children.

  As darkness came, the day’s bounty would have been cooking and the firelight might have revealed paintings and ochre-filled etchings on the cave walls. Maybe the cold night air would have been filled by the ethereal lament of didgeridoos and the chanting of songs telling of how the sea had once risen and destroyed their home but given another in its place. At that distant time, giant marsupials might have ambled down the bed of my river, keeping a wary eye out for monster birds of prey and, for a further forty thousand years before then, watching out for humans, the only other creatures they need fear.

  Nowadays, night takes away the river if the moon fails and brings with it the dark thoughts that plague me. Super-cyclones the likes of which I have not seen before impinge upon us, and the river I love could come threateningly close, yet I know that future climates could see it run dry for years. Science has revealed the facts of the matter and they are starkly clear: there will be no better future without drastic action on climate change. I will not be taken by surprise, but most of my countrymen will. The worst heat, fires, droughts and floods on record have already taken place in my fig tree’s lifetime, and in just that blink of an eye we have lost half the world’s coral colonies, and reefs everywhere are stressed.

  I write these last words having just returned from a flight over The Reef and some diving near Cairns with a television crew. The reefs I saw, from both above and beneath the water, were all severely bleached. Now I fear that this could have happened to the entire Great Barrier Reef. I had imagined I would be gone before the worst of my fears were put to the test, but now I’m afraid this may not be so. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to take solace in the thought that I’ve done my best to protect the place I so deeply love and which has played such a big part in a life more fulfilling than I ever imagined. But I suspect not.

  Notes

  1 Veron, J.E.N. (1973), ‘Physiological control of the chromatophores of Austrolestes annulosus’, Journal of Insect Physiology 19: 1689–1703 and (1974); and ‘Physiological colour changes on Odonata eyes. A comparison between eye and epidermal chromatophore pigment migrations’, Journal of Insect Physiology 20: 1491–1505.

  2 Belatedly, after learning a bit about corals, Veron, J.E.N., How, R.A., Done, T.J., Zell, L.D., Dodkin, J. and O’Farrell, A.F. (1974), ‘Corals of the Solitary Islands, Central New South Wales’, Australian Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 25: 193–208.

  3 Wright, J. (1977), The Coral Battleground, Thomas Nelson, second edition (1996), Angus & Robertson. Judith, a writer and poet of great acclaim, was the daughter of P.A. Wright, whose family mansion Booloominbah I saw on my first day at the University of New England.

  4 ibid.

  5 The Great Barrier Reef Committee, founded in 1922, is the world’s oldest coral reef society. Its main task was to establish and run the Heron Island Research Station. In 1988 its name was changed to the Australian Coral Reef Society, which has flourished ever since.

  6 The Yabulu nickel refinery then dumped its waste into dams, turning them into one of the worst environmental problems in Queensland’s history.

  7 Purdy, E.G. (1974), ‘Reef configurations: cause and effect’, in Laporte, L.F. (ed.), Society of Economic Palaeontologists and Mineralogists, Special Publication 18: 9–76.

  8 The southern Great Barrier Reef tells a different story, for there the Coral Sea is relatively shallow and is littered with fossil reefs now drowned by movements of the sea floor and the effects of eons of sea level changes.

  9 Veron, J.E.N. (1978), ‘Deltaic and dissected reefs of the Northern Region’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B Biological Sciences 284: 23–27.

  10 Veron, J.E.N. (1978), ‘Evolution of the far northern barrier reefs’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B Biological Sciences 284:123–127.

  11 Yonge, C.M. (1930), A Year on the Great Barrier Reef: The Story of Corals and Their Greatest Creations, Putnam, London.

  12 Grosse, P.H. (1860), Actinologia Britannica. A history of the British Sea-anemones and Corals, Van Voorst, Paternoster Row, London, England: 362pp.

  13 Veron, J.E.N. (2003), Inge, Glass House Books: 227pp.

  14 V
eron J.E.N. (1992), ‘Environmental control of Holocene changes to the world’s most northern hermatypic coral outcrop’, Pacific Science 46: 405–425.

  15 Veron, J.E.N. (1992), Hermatypic Corals of Japan, Australian Institute of Marine Science Monograph Series, 9: 244pp.

  16 Nishihira, M. and Veron, J.E.N. (1995), Corals of Japan, Tohoku University (in Japanese), 439pp.

  17 Wells, J.W. (1955), ‘A survey of the distribution of reef coral genera in the Great Barrier Reef Region’, Report of the Great Barrier Reef Committee 6: 1–9.

  18 Veron, J.E.N. and Minchin, P. (1992), ‘Correlations between sea surface temperature, circulation patterns and the distribution of hermatypic corals of Japan’, Continental Shelf Research 12: 835-857.

  19 Veron, J.E.N. (1986), Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Reprinted by Hawaii University Press, Honolulu, 642pp.

  20 Veron, J.E.N. and Hodgson, G. (1989), ‘Annotated checklist of the hermatypic corals of the Philippines’, Pacific Science 43: 234–287.

  21 Veron, J.E.N. (1993), A Biogeographic Database of Hermatypic Corals: Species of the Central Indo-Pacific, Genera of the World, Australian Institute of Marine Science Monograph Series 10, 433pp.

  22 Veron, J.E.N. (1995), Corals in Space and Time: The Biogeography and Evolution of the Scleractinia, Cornell University Press, New York. 321pp.

  23 Wells, J.W. (1956), ‘Scleractinia’ in Moore, R.C. (ed.), Part F Coelenterata (in the 23-voume series Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology): 328–444.

  24 Veron, J.E.N. and Kelley, R. (1988), ‘Species stability in hermatypic corals of Papua New Guinea and the Indo-Pacific’, Association of Australasian Palaeontologists Memoir 6: 69pp.

  25 The condemnation was in Heck, M.K and McCoy, E.D. (1978), ‘Long-distance dispersal and the reef building corals of the eastern Pacific’, Marine Biology 48: 348–356. The proposal was in Dana, T.F. (1975), ‘Development of contemporary eastern Pacific coral reefs’, Marine Biology 33: 377–374.

  26 Grant, V. (1971), Plant Speciation, Columbia University Press, 563pp.

  27 Veron, J.E.N. (2002), ‘Reticulate evolution in corals’, Proceedings of the ninth International Coral Reef Symposium: 43–48.

  28 Veron, J.E.N. (1995), Corals in Space and Time: The Biogeography and Evolution of the Scleractinia, Cornell University Press, New York. 321pp.

  29 Grigg R.W. (1995), ‘Evolution by reticulation, Science 269: 1893–1894.

  30 Vicariance is the proposition that if a gene pool is divided by a barrier over evolutionary time, two or more species may exist if that barrier is removed. Thus species are formed by division, but not fusion, of genetic lineages. Phylogeography proposes that species originate spatially by vicariance as revealed by cladistics. On small scales of space and time this should mostly be so; however, cladistics disguises evolutionary change on larger scales.

  31 Veron, J.E.N. (2008), A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End, Belknap, Harvard: 289pp.

  32 Darwin, C.R. (1842), The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. Being the First Part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle, Under the Command of Capt. Fitzroy, R.N. During the Years 1832 to 1836, London: Smith Elder and Co.

  33 Letter from Sir Charles Lyell to Sir John Herschel, 1837.

  34 H.S. Ladd, E. Ingerson, R.C. Townend, M. Russell and H.K. Stephenson (1953), ‘Drilling on Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands’, American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin 37: 2257–2280.

  35 International Consortium for Great Barrier Reef Drilling (2001), ‘New constraints on the origin of the Australian Great Barrier Reef: results from an international project of deep coring’, Geology 29: 483–486.

  36 Beaman, R.J., www.deepreef.org

  37 Veron, J.E.N. (1985) ‘Aspects of biogeography of hermatypic corals,’ Proceedings of the Fifth International Coral Reef Symposium, Tahiti, 4: 83–88.

  38 Veron, J.E.N. and 6 co-authors (2009), ‘Delineating the Coral Triangle’, Galaxea 11: 91–100.

  39 Veron, J.E.N. (2000), Corals of the World, Australian Institute of Marine Science (3 volumes): 1410pp.

  40 Veron, J.E.N. (2006), ‘Darwin Medal presentation: corals – seeking the big picture’, Coral Reefs 25: 3–6.

  41 Aragonite, the form of calcium carbonate that modern corals use for building skeletons, is more soluble than other forms. This makes corals relatively vulnerable to ocean acidification. Palaeozoic corals built their skeletons of calcite, the least soluble form, but they went extinct at the end of the Palaeozoic anyway.

  42 Veron, J.E.N. and nine co-authors (2009), ‘The coral reef crisis: the critical importance of <350ppm CO2’, Marine Pollution Bulletin 58: 1428–1437.

  43 Veron, J.E.N. (2009), ‘The coral reef crisis’, Occam’s Razor, ABC radio.

  44 Veron J.E.N., Stafford-Smith, M.G., DeVantier, L.M., and Turak, E. (2015), ‘Overview of coral distribution patterns of zooxanthellate Scleractinia’, Frontiers in Marine Science doi: 10.3389/fmars.2014.00081.

  45 Veron J.E.N., Stafford-Smith, M.G., Turak, E., and DeVantier, L.M., (2016), www.coralsoftheworld.org.

  46 Veron, J.E.N. (2015), ‘The potential of type species to destabilise the taxonomy of zooxanthellate Scleractinia,’ Zootaxa 4048: 433–435. 42.

  Acknowledgements

  Many who read this book might well wish that various of their friends and family had also recorded their life story and I hope some will be encouraged to do so themselves, for their loved ones at least. I wrote an account of my life, calling it ‘Charlie Veron’s Story’, for this reason. All well and good, but a private family memoir is a very different matter from publishing one for the whole wide world to read. Being a private person, I agonised over this for years and was still prevaricating when I visited Rick Smyth, my friend since early childhood and his wife Jane. Janey put it simply: ‘Charlie, when you’re eighty, are you going to be happy this was published or not?’ So I stopped dithering and called Iain McCalman, who had used ‘Charlie Veron’s Story’ when writing his extraordinary book The Reef: A Passionate History. Iain referred me to Ben Ball, publishing director at Penguin Random House, who gave me some very sound advice about how the manuscript might be redrafted. I thank Ben for all he did. He then turned it over to Meredith Rose, who Iain, always one for a joke, described as ‘a real dragon’. As expected, the dragon turned out to be as un-dragon-like as could possibly be imagined. Thank you so much, Meredith, for all you did for me, and for just being you.

  As I have said in all my books over the past two decades, my partner, Mary Stafford-Smith, has always given me compelling advice. This book is no exception. I thank her again for her insights, thoughts and corrections. Without the encouragement and help of Iain, Ben, Meredith and Mary this memoir would never have come into being. I have been very privileged.

  I thank Geoff Kelly for his drawings and paintings. His artwork is everywhere in my books, all given freely and always exceeding what I hoped for. Once again, I feel very grateful to that wonderfully talented and thoughtful man. I wish there had been space for more of his work here.

  Memoirs with the time-span of this one are very demanding, especially when it comes to recollecting details of events long ago and more particularly putting them into some sort of chronological context. Kirsty, my former wife, has an excellent memory for such matters and after reading my original manuscript was always there to help, encourage and correct.

  Back in 2005, Gregg Borschmann, now environmental reporter for our national radio, made about eight hours of recordings of me chatting for Australia’s oral history and has since interviewed me many times for various ABC radio programs. All this helped me draw the strings of my complicated life together and I am grateful to him for doing so.

  Helped by Gregg no doubt, a string of writers, journalists, educators, filmmakers and television presenters have introduced me as ‘a modern Darwin’ or ‘the godfather of corals’ or the like. Not surprisingly, many of these people have wanted to know about my background a
nd there have been others, most memorably Sir David Attenborough, who encouraged me to write this book. Of course, I found their interest flattering but more importantly, encouraging, when my many doubts about doing such a thing needed propping up.

  I resisted the temptation to send the manuscript to a lot of people. After all, I hate killing trees and my story goes down many paths that they, individually, would know little about. However, I did send it to Richard Pearson, Len Zell, Lyndon DeVantier, Mike Balson, Katie Veron and Ric How. I appreciate their corrections, comments and reminiscences. My links with the Birtles family are many; those with Hillary Birtles’ parents go back my entire life, so they alone were able give me an adult’s glimpse of both me and my parents from my earliest years.

  Most of the people mentioned in this book, and dozens who are not, have had emails or phone calls from me when I wanted to know a detail about a person, a place or an event. Although they may not have known it at the time, Terry Done, John Meagher, Hal Heatwole, Rich Pyle, Kerry McGregor, Dave Hannan, Emre Turak, Mac Horn and Susan Kennedy all contributed over the years in different ways.

  I’m grateful to the photographers who have allowed me to use their work. I especially thank Peter Donkers for the extraordinary aerial photo of the Long Reef rock platform where I played as a child, and to Phil Colman for alerting me to it, the cover photo of his own book on Australia’s temperate seashores. Special thanks go to John Rotar for digging out his old photos taken during our work at the Solitary Islands during our earliest years of scuba diving. I also thank my old friends Boris Preobrazhensky, Rick Grigg and David Stoddart who died while this book was being written.