The Great Barrier Reef

Matters of politics

Some five years before we moved, at a time when I was busy collecting snakes, the attempt to open the Great Barrier Reef up to mining and oil drilling was raising its ugly head. It all started in 1967 when an enterprising sugarcane farmer applied to the local mining warden for permission to mine Ellison Reef, near Dunk Island, for limestone to fertilise his crops. He claimed the reef was ‘dead’.

Fortunately for the future of the entire Great Barrier Reef, this caught the eye of the artist John Büstt, who immediately saw the ramifications of such a precedent and filed an objection to the farmer’s claim. On what grounds could Büstt object? Political manoeuvres commenced that quickly developed into one of the biggest conservation battles in Australia’s history. Both the Australian and Queensland governments claimed jurisdiction over the Great Barrier Reef but it transpired that, as The Reef is submerged at high tide and therefore not land, most of it is arguably in international waters, beyond the 12-mile territorial limit of sovereign countries.

It wasn’t long before much of the Queensland coast had been quietly leased by the Queensland government for prospecting, leaving little doubt about the fate of The Reef should it fall into the hands of environmental vandals like Joh Bjelke-Petersen. And indeed, when Bjelke-Petersen was elected premier in 1968 he quickly became a conservationist’s worst nightmare.

The mining warden required proof that Ellison Reef was not dead, and so began a string of conflicts that became both complicated and dirty. One after another, scientists, not wanting to get involved in anything that might tarnish their professional status, washed their hands of it, and even the longstanding Great Barrier Reef Committee, chaired at that time by Professor Bob Endean of the University of Queensland, declined to help. The University of Queensland even announced its ‘official position’: Ellison Reef was indeed dead. Where were the experts?3

It fell to Len Webb, a prominent rainforest ecologist; Eddie Hegerl of the newly formed Queensland Littoral Society (now the Australian Marine Conservation Society); Don McMichael, the newly appointed director of the Australian Conservation Foundation; and Vincent Serventy, the author of popular natural history books, to carry on the battle for the conservationists. In the end their efforts were unnecessary because the Queensland Minister for Mines stepped in and rejected the cane grower’s application on legal grounds. There were celebrations all round, but they were short-lived because by 1969 the Bjelke-Petersen government had approved petroleum exploration licences over almost the entire Great Barrier Reef and had called for tenders to start drilling for oil.

This woke Australians up: it was a time I remember well, even though I was by then just starting my work on dragonflies. Most geologists supported the drilling, most biologists opposed it, and all politicians feared it because of the growing groundswell of public judgement. Ill-informed views raged back and forth: wasn’t the Great Barrier Reef mostly just rock? Wasn’t the best way of conserving it to use it for commerce? Wasn’t oil actually good for corals? And so on. Opinion polls and newspaper editorials proliferated across the country and they made it clear that public opinion was decidedly against drilling.

As drilling rigs headed for Australia an all-powerful ally of the conservationists waded in. The Australian Council of Trade Unions, probably to goad the Queensland premier, banned the oil rigs and anything to do with them from all Australian ports. Many cheered, others thought it dangerous that unions had such power over governments. One outcome was an agreement to hold an inquiry into drilling, to be chaired by a judge and staffed by a petroleum engineer and a marine biologist. There were plenty of judges and petroleum engineers but where could an impartial marine biologist be found? The whole thing was shaping up to be ‘the trial of the century’, as one newspaper put it, until right at a critical point, in March 1970, the 58 000-ton oil tanker Oceanic Grandeur struck a rock in the Torres Strait, spilling its oil and creating a slick that started moving towards the far northern Great Barrier Reef. From then on, every oil spill on the planet got headline newspaper and television coverage and the inquiry was turned into a royal commission.

I was acutely aware of these events but slow to play any part in them, being preoccupied with so much else when my family and I first came to Townsville. Australia’s ‘long starvation of marine research’, as Judith Wright put it, meant there were few scientists with qualifications in marine biology.4 I certainly knew that, but had no idea what was in store when I was summoned to a meeting of the royal commission early in 1973. It was at the fledgling Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), and had to be held outside, under trees by the beach, as there was no room big enough in any of its buildings.

Someone from Canberra, sweating profusely in his suit and tie, chimed up, ‘Ah, er, Dr Veron – doctor, is it?’ I nodded. ‘I’m surprised we haven’t heard about you before – what exactly is your field of expertise?’

I explained my PhD on dragonflies.

‘So you have no qualifications in marine science?’

‘No.’

‘Then anything you say will be inadmissible. Thank you for your time.’

That was a slap in the face that didn’t go away.

Although he continued to cling to power, the conservation victories of 1974 substantially eroded the authority of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. As a last resort, the Queensland government issued a High Court writ restraining the Commonwealth from making laws affecting Queensland’s coastline. However, by mid-1975 it was mostly over: the then Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, pre-empted the writ by declaring federal ownership of the Great Barrier Reef, henceforth to be a marine park, and the High Court promptly backed him up.

Well do I remember that time. I might have been useless to the likes of a royal commission and I had no idea what Whitlam was contemplating, but for months I’d been getting strange phone calls from Canberra parliamentarians about corals, and more particularly, where reefs occurred.

‘So, eh, Dr Veron, let me get this straight. You say corals can be found where there are no reefs, right? And that the . . . uh . . . Great Barrier Reef actually extends to the coastline, even if there aren’t any reefs there, right?’

And so on. I knew something was afoot, but Whitlam’s proclamation took me by surprise, as it apparently did everybody else. Although I had helped, all this made me feel ill at ease. So little was known about coral, or in fact anything to do with The Reef. There was nobody to turn to, and almost nothing had been written about most of the questions that were put to me, not to mention the many more I was asking myself.

The tropics

When Kirsty, Noni and I first arrived in Townsville it had a population of only 72 000, although that made it the second-largest city in Queensland, a state almost twice the size of France and Germany combined. I imagined the university would be beside the sea with a nice view out to the Great Barrier Reef, but it was well inland, amid flat scrubland covered with chinee apples – nasty thornbushes. The city itself was nothing like it is now. There were hardly any trees in the suburbs, Cyclone Althea having devastated the place the year before our arrival, and most houses still looked barren and uncared for. And Kirsty soon discovered that as far as music and the stage were concerned she had none of the connections she so much valued in Armidale. However, we soon found a good side – people never needed to take the key out of their car, or lock their house, and almost everybody wore thongs, shorts and T-shirts everywhere, which suited us fine. And it was a very friendly town.

We’d been advised to avoid coming in the wet season, when the Bruce Highway, the only access road to Townsville from the south and in places just a single lane, was frequently closed for weeks on end. But as my post-doc could be started any time we decided to risk it in November, mostly because I couldn’t wait to begin my new job and O’Farrell had all but thrown me out of my old one anyway. We arrived without mishap, and as expected we found the city oppressively hot after the cool climes of Armidale. We were installed temporarily in a house with so many cane toads around it that the ground seemed to move at night.

The day after our arrival I was wandering around the university’s biological sciences department when I spied a door with the name Professor Cyril Burdon-Jones on it. He was the head of the department and the man who’d written to offer me my job. After getting his secretary’s uninterested nod I knocked and went in, dressed in my newly acquired Townsville regalia. The professor, a rather supercilious Welshman who put great store in formalities, didn’t seem to appreciate my tropical attire. Almost everything about him contrasted with everyone else in his department, half of whom were poms he’d recruited on coming to Australia. And so he kept his distance even from his recruits, who were a laidback and friendly lot and generally no better dressed than the locals.

‘G’day Prof, I’m Charlie Veron.’

‘I see,’ Burdon-Jones replied in a disdainful tone, an eyebrow slightly raised. He gave me a cool handshake, waved vaguely in the direction of the Great Barrier Reef and announced, ‘Your job is to go out there . . . and do something.’ As an afterthought he added, ‘And try to stay out of trouble.’

That was in fact the only job description I ever received, which meant I had a free hand – just what I wanted – but then neither of us knew anything about coral or the Great Barrier Reef. As it turned out, that day was the high point of my relationship with my boss for a long time. Over the ensuing nine months Burdon-Jones repeatedly announced, for no reason I could see, that he would be finding someone ‘more appropriate’, or ‘more suitable’ for my job. Not exactly what I’d hoped for, but at that time I had more important things on my mind.

After six weeks of living with the cane toads, which Kirsty found unnerving, we bought our own house. It was a roomy new fibro box on stilts, in a suburb of roomy new fibro boxes on stilts, just like the song about ticky-tacky boxes except there was no hillside, only flat clay. Certainly an aquarium was called for, but that was my thing; what was really needed was something for Kirsty. We had no money, so we bought a piano. Kirsty’s instrument was the violin, but she’d also learned piano at school.

New friendships came easily at James Cook University, and several people Kirsty and I met there became friends for life. One of these was Alastair Birtles, a large, bearded Englishman who had graduated from Oxford and then made some fascinating journeys to exotic places like the Red Sea. When we first asked him to dinner we discovered that he never did anything on time. No matter, in his normal style, which we were soon to get used to, he arrived only a day late. He was also late in leaving, having bunked down in our spare room, which became his room for the next nine months. Al was a welcome addition to our family, always interesting and always ready to pitch in when something needed doing.

Kirsty and I were still trying to cope with Ruari’s death and had decided the best way to do that was have another baby. Kirsty was already pregnant by the time we left Armidale, but soon after we arrived in Townsville she started to get repeated bouts of bleeding. The medical advice was to take it easy, but that changed when she began having contractions: she was sent to bed to rest. When the contractions got worse her doctor prescribed four ounces of Bacardi rum every two hours. At first one or two doses did it, but soon the treatment had to be kept up for longer, sometimes for days on end.

Being confined to bed in the oppressive heat and humidity of a Townsville summer, and at the start of a new life where there were no old friends and no family on hand for support, had a devastating effect on Kirsty. Gradually she withdrew from the day-to-day world and became less and less interested in wellwishers, until even reading to Noni became a chore. As the weary weeks unfolded she subsided into a state of confusion and disorientation. When she finally lost the baby, at the beginning of March, she was a mental and physical wreck with few feelings and no interests.

The effects of this prolonged struggle on top of Ruari’s death turned Kirsty’s life into an ordeal from which she took a long time to recover, and when she did we decided enough was enough – we would not have any more children. The only good side of the ordeal was that both Noni’s grandmothers came to help. We were able to get Noni into kindergarten three mornings a week, but most of the rest of the time she had one or other grandmother to play with. My mother was reluctant to return to Sydney at all until Kirsty was completely back on her feet, but also because she couldn’t bear to part with Noni, who was developing into an extraordinarily colourful character. It was a mutual love. Noni adored her gran, as did Kirsty – all part of the wonderful magic of my mother.

Throughout this turmoil I had to at least try to learn something about corals. The university library, as it turned out, had foreseen the potential for reef studies and purchased many books about marine life, including some about corals. These weren’t guide books, which didn’t exist in those days, but ancient monographs about taxonomy, mostly long and complicated and full of unexplained jargon. I despaired of most of them – they would have been no less incomprehensible to me had they been written in Latin, as indeed several were. So I decided I would try to do with corals what botanists often did with plants: map the community types, work out what the dominant species were, and classify communities accordingly.

This was not as straightforward as it sounds, because it depended on my being able to identify the dominant species, a task which inevitably turned me back to the daunting old monographs. But gradually a sense of determination took over. I would go out on the university’s new research vessel, the James Kirby, to local reefs to see the corals in real life, collect them, and then return to see what the monographs had to say about them. I had plenty of helpers on these trips as by then scuba diving on The Reef had started to become popular with students and they all wanted to come with me. This soon created a problem for the university: wasn’t diving dangerous? I kept being asked about regulations and qualifications. All such matters have a solution, at least they did then: I agreed to be the university’s diving officer and promptly gave anyone who’d taken a diving course and knew what they were doing permission to go diving. I believed then, as I do now, that for divers with sufficient experience, safety is a matter of personal responsibility, not regulation.

This solution made everybody happy. A lot of students accompanied me on many trips and before long I had thousands of corals to play with. That was all very well, but having a lot of corals wasn’t much use without knowing what they were, something I was clearly unable to work out. I could soon recognise dozens of kinds of coral and give them nicknames, but when I tried to identify them from the taxonomic volumes that meant something to me, I always came up with a litany of vague alternatives.

As I quickly discovered, the essential problem was that corals on reef slopes vary their growth form and skeletal structure according to the environment in which they grow. Thus a familiar coral growing on a wave-hammered reef front might be compact with short stumpy branches. If that coral is common it’s a simple matter to follow colonies of it down the reef slope to deep water, whereupon the same species gradually turns into something quite different, perhaps developing long branches. These different forms had been given different names by the experts because, I realised, without scuba these experts had never seen corals as I was seeing them. To make matters more complicated, big colonies regularly have one growth form at their top, different growth forms on their sides, and different forms again at their base. These growth forms had often been given different species names.

I decided to work these variations out – I had to, so that I could separate a single species from a group of related species – but I gave up trying to stick names on them. I lost faith in the idea that any clear picture of Great Barrier Reef corals would emerge if I relied on historical taxonomy: I would have to start from scratch, observing what could be seen on reefs rather than what was written in monographs. Eventually I decided to stop calling my work taxonomy altogether and instead call it population ecology. That at least seemed an escape route.

Had I made the wrong decision in abandoning insects? I began to seriously think so.

As luck would have it, the Second International Coral Reef Symposium was to take place in June 1973, and it was to be an event like no other. The organisers, the Great Barrier Reef Committee, chartered a 10 000-ton cruise ship, the Marco Polo, to take participants from Brisbane to Lizard Island in the northern Great Barrier Reef and back to Brisbane.5 This amounted to ten days of talking day and night, drinking beer, diving, and generally having a good time.

There were 264 scientists aboard: a perfect opportunity to meet the most important people in the business, especially for me, a novice. The first important person I met was David Stoddart, a freckled, red-headed, somewhat stout character with a deep resonating voice and pure Cambridge accent. By that time he was a seasoned and well-known reef geographer.

‘My dear fellow,’ said David, ‘how very nice it is to meet you. Sorry to have to tell you, but your paper was rejected – Pat Mather’s doing of course. I thought it the best of the bunch. But she doesn’t approve of people like you messing around with taxonomy.’

‘Oh?’ Pat Mather was a curator at the Queensland Museum.

‘In fact yours was the only paper to be rejected,’ he said, ‘but never mind, I’ve put it in anyway. Pat won’t notice, damn silly woman. More to the point,’ he continued, ‘why don’t you join our expedition later this year to the northern Great Barrier Reef? Bring the Kirby – go right to the top end. Would be great fun, eh? Don’t forget to bring lots of booze, there’s a good chap.’ Then off he went.

A few days later, I was sitting at a table on the aft deck having breakfast and nursing a hangover when a middle-aged lady with large glasses walked up to me, smiling.

‘Charlie Veron! What are you doing here?’

I had no idea who she was. I could only sit and stare at her.

‘I’m Isobel Bennett.’ She watched, still smiling, as that slowly sank in.

‘I’m working on corals,’ I said, for want of anything else to say.

‘Really? I thought you’d come back to the sea. You went to Armidale, didn’t you? I lost track of you after that. Well, catch you later.’ She disappeared.

As it turned out we didn’t have that catch-up; in fact I didn’t see her again that trip. Need I say that she left me curious as to how she’d recognised me. I was twenty-eight by then and had no distinguishing characteristics, except perhaps a husky voice and bushy beard. The only other time she’d seen me – when my mother took me to visit her – I was eight. I wondered about Issie, as everyone called her.

The Marco Polo continued on to Lizard Island, stopping at places of interest where it was met by launches to take divers out to pre-selected spots. The weather was mostly bad, the currents were mostly strong, and the divers mostly beginners. There were many rescues, one involving about ten divers strung out over hundreds of metres of open ocean, caught in a current and waving frantically as sharks (or so they no doubt imagined) circled. Sharks or no sharks, it’s amazing that everybody lived through that symposium.

On the last night, after we’d left the southernmost reefs and were heading back to Brisbane, the whole ship’s company met on the aft deck for a farewell buffet dinner and ‘ball’. That company included Cyril Burdon-Jones. I was on the dance floor when he walked up to me.

‘Enjoying yourself, are you? I didn’t think much of your paper, so I’m thinking I should find a more suitable person for your position.’

That sure took me by surprise. My paper had been well received, but that aside, I felt that his threat to sack me yet again, at that particular moment, was simply evil.

If I’m going to get sacked I may as well do it in style.

I grabbed the professor by his tie and shouted loudly that I was going to throw him overboard. It must have looked rather comic – the normally dignified Burdon-Jones being dragged across the dance floor, struggling like a spaniel on a leash. Some revellers around us started clapping; the professor was finding out what young people thought of him. At that point I let him go and he scurried off, not to be seen by anybody for what remained of the trip.

Once back in Townsville I wasted no time seeing Ken Back, the vice-chancellor, to get his approval – on the off-chance that I would still be on the university payroll – to use the James Kirby for the last phase of David Stoddart’s expedition. This wasn’t my first meeting with Ken. A few months earlier he’d summoned me to his office to haul me over the coals for writing to the local newspaper about a nickel refinery’s plan to dump wastewater into the ocean just north of Townsville.6 His beef was that I’d used the name of the university in my letter and shouldn’t have. I saw his point, but left his office talking about Kirsty and how my post-doc was going. I had the feeling that I’d met a friend.

Ken and I talked a long time about Stoddart’s proposal. He said he would discuss it with Davie Duncan, the skipper of the Kirby. The main part of the expedition was to take place in the central Great Barrier Reef; our part involved the Kirby, with me in charge, collecting Stoddart and some others and heading north to the Torres Strait, exploring the outer reefs as we went. It would be the first research expedition to the northern Great Barrier Reef.

A heavily laden James Kirby heading north on its maiden voyage, the Stoddart Expedition of 1973. As of 2016 this amazing vessel was still in service.

Underwater utopia

The Great Barrier Reef is known throughout the world as one of the greatest natural ecosystems on our planet. It is the largest and most spectacular structure built by living organisms on Earth, its size virtually impossible to comprehend. The first astronauts saw The Reef from outer space, the only living thing on Earth they could see. I’ve not had that pleasure, but I have seen it many times from the air. One of those times, thirty years ago, I had a bird’s-eye view from the nose cone of a Neptune bomber, sitting beside the then minister for science. As the plane flew on, hour after hour, one reef region after another came and went in what, for the minister, must have seemed like an endless progression of more and more of the same: he kept falling asleep. Poor man, he was frequently woken by my outbursts of enthusiasm as one favourite dive site after another came into view, yet when I retraced our flight path on a map after landing, we were both reminded that we’d covered but a fraction of the whole. Even from the air the Great Barrier Reef is too big to take in.

Diving on The Reef is something else again. Only the best movie photographers can capture the ambience of pristine coral gardens. These contain a profusion of life: corals, soft corals, fish, anemones, urchins, starfish, shellfish, and little creatures everywhere, a diversity never seen on land, not even in rainforests. Then there are the underwater cliff faces and ceilings of caverns ablaze with the colours of filter feeders: ascidians, sponges, sea-fans, crinoids and more soft corals, most beyond the knowledge of science.

Reefs in poor condition feel like graveyards, because divers hear only the bubbles from their own breathing. Between breaths such reefs are morbidly silent. Healthy reefs are the opposite; the healthier they are, the noisier they are, because they’re full of little animals all with something to say. This is especially so at night, when even a torch beam can start a cacophony of crackles, chirps and croaks. Some come from fish and are identifiable, but most come from unseen little critters, of which there are thousands of different kinds.

To dive at night is to enter a spectacular world, for the diver’s torch reveals these tiny animals by the thousand: iridescent clouds of plankton of all shapes and sizes, swimming frantically, lured by the light. At night corals open their tentacles to catch these little animals, transforming themselves into anemone-like creatures with long sinuous tentacles, quite unlike their daytime guises. At night, too, large predators of every description move through the distant darkness. Sharks roam unceasingly, sensing the presence of anything moving in the dark.

Photographers sometimes capture these scenes, by day and by night, but they can never convey the emotions of those of us fortunate enough to have looked upon this world first-hand. The greatest reefs of the Great Barrier Reef always instil awe and wonder. The sight of large animals – whale sharks, manta rays, giant groupers, a dozen kinds of big, ocean-going silver fish, sharks and the occasional whale – never fails to thrill. But there’s also fear, especially on the lesser-known outer reefs of the far north. The threat of depth is ever-present, for clear-water reefs that plunge down into deep ocean can be deceptive, a fatal attraction for a tourist wanting to get just a little more out of a trip of a lifetime. Sadly, a spectacular reef face is the last thing some ever see.

Electronic navigation and satellite imagery have virtually put an end to The Reef’s reputation for being one of the world’s most dangerous places for ships. Today, tropical cyclones are more feared than reefs, but there was a time when the Great Barrier Reef had more shipwrecks than the rest of Australia’s coast combined. A glance at any chart shows why, for there are thousands upon thousands of reefs of all shapes and sizes hidden just below the surface and enveloped by strong tidal currents. These form complex mazes from which, in a storm, there is little chance of escape without modern navigation and powerful engines. I have come across dozens of ghostly wrecks on The Reef, usually unexpectedly and always making me wonder what happened to the crew.

Although I’ve worked in almost all the major reef regions of the world, most of the exceptional dives of my life have been somewhere on the Great Barrier Reef.

My studies of corals started taking shape, and the more I saw of the Great Barrier Reef, the more big-picture questions arose. How did reefs grow? Why did they exist at all? Why did corals do all this building? Did they need reefs? Why did corals make colonies with such spectacular architecture? Why were so many different kinds of just about every major marine animal group to be found on them? Had it always been so?

We have answers to most of these questions now, but when I started thinking about them it seemed like trying to put together a dozen great big jigsaw puzzles all at once, with the majority of the pieces missing.

‘The Great Barrier Reef is only ten thousand years old,’ a colleague of mine announced during a seminar thirty years ago. She was both right and wrong, because there’s another player in this game: sea level change. Sea level change makes the Great Barrier Reef both old and young irrespective of geology or biology. It depends on one’s point of view.

John Chappell, a reef geomorphologist at the Australian National University, lateral thinker and good friend, had been making intriguing discoveries about sea level changes for decades, not on the Great Barrier Reef, but in Papua New Guinea, for when it comes to sea level you can work wherever uplifted reefs are best preserved, as the sea is almost the same level everywhere. During the ice ages the sea level went up and down in response to massive polar ice shelves forming, melting and re-forming, taking thousands of cubic kilometres of water out of the ocean and then returning it. In resolving the complexities of sea level changes, John took his inspiration as much from coral ecology – the living veneer seen underwater – as from geology. Certainly, it is the life on a reef, overwhelmingly corals, that builds reefs, but it is mostly the power of waves that cuts them down. Both processes are slow, taking hundreds of thousands of years, far slower than sea level changes, so reefs during the ice ages continually played catch-up with the sea. Some lost the race and drowned because the ocean was too deep when they started growing and their essential life support, light, was cut off.

Glacial cycles have changed the sea level, but only by about 150 metres or so and only during the Ice Age. Far greater changes result from sea floor spreading as continents move. That is decidedly geological and is full of crises. At one point in time the Mediterranean was not a sea, but a gigantic hole some 1500 metres deep on average and much deeper in some places. This hole was filled when the Atlantic broke through the Strait of Gibraltar 5.3 million years ago, forming the mother of all rapids, a single event in geological time that must have caused the sea level to drop enough to kill every coral that grew on a reef flat the world over.

Little did I know in my early years as a scientist that changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun – Milankovitch cycles, which pace glacial cycles in much the same way as a pendulum paces the speed of a clock – are another ingredient in this already heady array. Milankovitch cycles control glacial cycles, which control sea level changes, which make reef corals ephemeral, super-competitive, and addicted to algae: the story of coral reefs does indeed go all the way from astronomy to cell physiology in a single string of processes varying in time intervals from millennia to days.

I had something else to puzzle over in my early years, closer to home. Were reefs biological or geological structures, and if they were both, where to draw the line? In 1976, two professors at the University of Queensland edited a two-volume book about coral reefs, one volume devoted to biology, the other to geology. These emphasised the division, and the problem became worse when I read an article in which the author claimed that reefs were ‘fragile’. Reefs fragile? That was like calling a dam wall fragile. Argument about this separation of biology and geology went on for at least two decades, generating continual controversy.

We now understand that the living veneer of a reef is indeed fragile, because it is restricted to the interface of land, sea and air, zones where nothing else survives because they are the most violent places on earth when storms arrive. It is this living veneer that gets consolidated, by yet other types of algae and by the chemical action of rain and seawater, into a solid limestone reef, which is anything but fragile. That fragile organisms should build such enduring structures is one of Nature’s great paradoxes. We need to take a close look (as we later shall) at the ecological environment of corals to see how this is done.

I never researched any of these subjects personally, I just thought about them, mostly by sitting in a dingy with my toes in the water or on a beach, gazing out over a reef: a great way to occupy a lot of time.

A reef flat exposed at low tide on the Great Barrier Reef. The corals seen here and in the photograph below are at environmental extremes and have little in common.

A garden of coral in a protected muddy embayment on the Great Barrier Reef.

Reef builders

Coral reefs the world over are mostly built by coral, something they’ve been doing for hundreds of millions of years. This makes them the greatest builders that have ever existed, only to be pipped at the post very recently by us. Despite their extraordinary achievements, a coral is a simple organism, with the basic design of a sea anemone. Some have soft bodies but these are only very distantly related to hard corals, the Scleractinia, and there are many other differences, the most important being that it is the hard corals that build reefs, using the energy-capturing ability of green plants to do so. Hard corals, unlike anemones and soft corals, have skeletons of limestone, all with intricate designs. Some live alone and so are called solitary corals, but most that are found on reefs form colonies consisting of hundreds to thousands of tiny individual animals called polyps, all working together to produce the architectural masterworks we can see.

It has long been known that reef corals (sometimes called hermatypic or zooxanthellate corals) have minute algal cells (zooxanthellae) inside the cells of their inner body layer, and that these tiny algae produce nutrients by photosynthesis. Len Muscatine, an inspirational American coral physiologist, was making great strides in this field when I was doing my early work on corals, claiming that algae produce most of the nutrients that corals need.

At the time, I found this hard to believe because most corals are exceptionally good at catching their own food. During the day, polyps usually hide inside their limestone skeletons, but at night they show themselves, body and tentacles, looking, as I have said, just like little anemones. They don’t do this for fun, they do it to capture food, and that’s something easily seen. Corals in fact have voracious appetites, ensnaring tiny zooplankton in their tentacles, which are often armed with batteries of stinging cells. They stuff plankton into their mouths one after another, just like the anemones at Long Reef did with the worms I fed them.

But Muscatine was right – a habit of his. Experiments have shown that most nutrients corals use do come from their algae. It’s an intimate symbiosis. At least, this is the case with zooxanthellate corals, but there’s another group of hard corals, the azooxanthellate species, which have no algae, and these are mostly found in caves, where they only need reefs to supply zooplankton to eat. Azooxanthellate corals also occur in very deep, near-freezing water where there is no light at all. These groups are usually easy to tell apart: most zooxanthellate corals form colonies whereas most azooxanthellate corals live as tube-shaped solitary individuals. The symbiosis between coral and their algae is of enormous importance: it is the key to their capacity to build reefs, and as we will see, when that symbiosis breaks down it can cause mass death.

Reef corals, like forest trees, live in highly competitive ecosystems where corals vie for sunlight, often by forming sunlight-capturing plates, architectural masterpieces that make the most of the building material available and permit rapid growth. Branching staghorn corals do likewise, sometimes growing as much as 30 centimetres a year. These corals can be readily broken by storm waves or eaten by predators, so other species have a different strategy, forming solid structures that waves seldom break and predators seldom eat. While they’re small, these ‘massive’ corals, as they’re called, might be outgrown by the plates and staghorns, but they bide their time, waiting until storms and predators clear away the competition. Eventually they grow large enough to avoid being overgrown and then they get a continuous share of sunlight.

All this can readily be observed by divers, but what happens if a zooxanthellate coral is deprived of light? One of the first observations I made when I first dived on reefs was that the poorer the light (whether from turbidity, shading or depth), the slower the corals grow, until they don’t grow at all. Consequently the number of species dropped off the deeper I dived. Green plants do much the same thing where sunlight becomes scarce, but most green plants can’t capture live food whereas corals can. So what’s going on? Why are corals so totally addicted to their algae? I still ponder that question. The bottom line is that if any zooxanthellate coral is deprived of light they eventually die, no matter how much food they have. Corals are not on their own here; giant clams also capture food by filtering seawater, and like corals can grow on nothing other than seawater and sunlight because they also have photosynthetic symbiotic algae, albeit of a very different sort.

Light is not the only thing corals compete for; they vigorously compete with each other for space. At first glance they appear to grow harmoniously together, but on closer inspection, especially at night, they can be seen attacking each other, using their tentacles or, more commonly, bundles of long filaments extruded through their mouths. As soon as a filament touches another coral the battle is on, for each tries to sting or digest the tissues of the other. Peaceful-looking coral gardens are anything but peaceful; there are war zones everywhere.

But corals aren’t always competing. When it comes to reproduction they go to extreme lengths to co-operate. Across the entire Great Barrier Reef, one or two nights each year are like no other, for then mass spawning takes place. Like most plants and animals, corals need to be able to reproduce sexually, but as they can’t mate like mobile animals, they release eggs and sperm, usually in bundles, which float to the surface where cross-fertilisation can take place. This must be synchronised to within just a couple of hours, something governed by the time of sunset, the phase of the moon, and changes in water temperature. When every polyp of every colony of a whole coral garden spawns in synchrony it’s show time, for egg and sperm bundles are released in such quantity that the water column looks like a pink snowstorm, except that everything goes up, not down. Fish in frenzies eat their fill but still the show goes on, and not just with corals; other organisms, picking up on chemical cues, cash in on the timing of the coral spawning when fish are full of food and release their gametes also. The ocean surface becomes covered in slicks of pink spawn, all to be swept away by surface currents to another reef, or to oblivion. Mass spawning is a sight never to be forgotten, at least not for a year, when the whole show is played out once again.

Azooxanthellate coral. The bright colour comes from the coral itself, as these corals have no zooxanthellae.

Batteries of stinging cells on the tentacles of a coral.

A coral releasing egg and sperm bundles at night during a mass spawning event.

Expedition north

At the time of the Stoddart expedition (1973), it’s fair to say, nobody had advanced any clear idea about why the Great Barrier Reef is where it is or how long it has been there. But by the mid-1980s, about a hundred articles on its origin had been published, the consensus being that it was of recent age, mostly post-Pleistocene, meaning post the last ice age, as any pre-existing reef would have been removed by erosion. This idea followed work done in the Caribbean by the American geomorphologist Ed Purdy, who in 1974 hypothesised that reefs are composed of successive layers of limestone, each layer growing in response to a sea level rise.7 Not only did this create the internal morphology of reefs, as seen in seismic profiles, but it also controlled their modern shape and position.

As soon as Ken Back gave us the go-ahead for the expedition, a small group of us immersed ourselves in planning. We needed to go in December, when the monsoons came and the seas were usually calm, despite it being cyclone season. Calm seas or not, our plans were a bold move, for the charts of the time were frighteningly archaic: from Capt’n Matthew Flinders as amended (1802).

The places most of us wanted to visit were the ribbon reefs, the outermost reefs of the northern Great Barrier Reef, which form a spectacular chain starting east of the Torres Strait and running south almost to Cairns, a distance of over 700 kilometres. Tijou Reef looked especially interesting because, judging from depth soundings of the time, the abyssal depths of the Queensland Trough come closest to The Reef at that place. Just how far from the ribbon reefs was the Trough? This question was very Darwinian in scope and thought, for it begged a connection between the origin of the Great Barrier Reef and Darwin’s theory of the origin of atolls.

Ribbon reefs. The outer face (right) plunges into the Queensland Trough. The reef front is wave-hammered for most of the year.

Tijou Reef. This long ribbon reef, part of the outer Barrier, is about 1000 metres wide. The white line to the right shows the 1000-metre depth contour; the numbers to the left show depths in metres.

On the first leg of our expedition, we stopped at several islands where divers could work on corals and others could sample beach rock, reef flat corals and clams suitable for isotope ageing. We then headed up to Lizard Island, where the building of the now famous research station had just commenced, then on into almost unknown territory. After anchoring the Kirby on the western side of Tijou Reef, we crossed to the outer face in a tinny for a dive, and so became the first people, as far as I know, to dive anywhere on the outer face of the entire northern Great Barrier Reef. With the water crystal-clear we could see the reef face, spectacular in its grandeur, plunging steeply down and down. It was like diving down a mighty dam wall and it soon became obvious that this outer face of The Reef was the western edge of the Queensland Trough: the two were one. This did not sit well with any of the hypotheses later put forward about the age or origin of The Reef. To have maintained themselves in such a position, the ribbon reefs had to be old, very old, even as old as the Trough itself. It was during that first dive that I knew the northern Great Barrier Reef had a history nobody had even vaguely contemplated.8

That outer face is a deathtrap for divers, at least it was until dive computers, which sound warnings, came into use. On that first dive, I was so absorbed in the splendour of the reef face that by the time I checked my depth gauge I discovered I’d reached 50 metres, nearing the maximum safe depth for scuba, and I was going down rapidly. This caught me unawares because even at that depth the coral communities looked like those found on wave-hammered upper reef slopes. I’ve never been on the outer face of a ribbon reef when the sea is very rough, but judging from the corals the turbulence must be extreme. It’s only during the monsoon season, at the height of summer, that the sea goes calm, and then it may go so calm that it’s completely flat, without even a ripple. At that point the horizon disappears and the water surface reflects the sky, hiding everything beneath. If this happens at high tide the reefs are at their most dangerous, for boats get glassed in; it’s as if they’re floating on a gigantic mirror. Many times we drove a zodiac in front of the Kirby to warn Davie of a reef ahead.

At low tide, when the outer reef flat is high and dry, the ribbon reefs look very unlike most other reefs, for they’re so wave-pounded that there are no corals, just hard, consolidated, flat limestone pavement. So hard and flat that I imagined it might be possible to land a jet on it with impunity.

Diving on the outer face of Tijou Reef was memorable for another, absolutely extraordinary reason. A couple of us were down about 20 metres or so when we were hit – there’s no other word for it – by a blast of the deepest and most intense sound imaginable, as if we were in front of the biggest pipe of a giant organ. The same thing happened again the following year. I had no idea what it could possibly be until, many years later, I talked to a researcher who worked on whale sounds. He said it would have been a whale, probably a sperm whale, checking us out, doubtless because they hadn’t come across divers before. I’d never heard of this happening to anyone else, and nor had he. Maybe most whales today know about scuba divers and ignore them? The answer still eludes me.

We left Tijou Reef in mid-December and headed north to the remotest island of the Great Barrier Reef. Perhaps some historians would have known about Raine Island, but all we could find out about it was that it had a stone beacon built by convicts in 1844 to warn sailing ships away.

When we arrived we felt we’d rediscovered the island: 32 hectares of low sandy cay with the most incredible birdlife any of us had ever seen, as well as the biggest green turtle rookery on Earth, as far as we knew, with at least 280 turtles heaving their massive bodies up the beach at dusk. (Our discovery was dwarfed the following year at the same location when we counted nearly twelve thousand turtles in a single night, a world record for green turtles.) We watched these beautiful animals all night, for there is something compellingly emotional about a turtle nesting. Everything these animals do requires enormous effort, and they constantly seem exhausted as they search for a good nesting spot before they start digging, then laying over a hundred eggs in a pocket scooped out by their hind flippers. Finally, these nests must be covered up before the mother slowly makes her way back to the ocean and swims away.

Underwater, we saw turtles stacked three-deep on reef ledges, waiting for the night to come, and from the Kirby we saw several thrown high out of the water as tiger sharks ripped their fins off, the exhausted females being easy prey.

Our accounts of this place on our return attracted a lot of attention and led to the start of the Raine Island Corporation, resulting in the island being given the strictest conservation protection in all Australia. I returned to Raine Island several times, having been given special permission to go whenever I chose, a privilege that ended when the work of the corporation was turned over to the Queensland government in 2005. No grumbles there, I’m just happy to see the place protected, since anybody who goes ashore sends up clouds of birds and disturbs nesting everywhere.

Sadly, I believe this spectacular place and the life it supports is doomed because it has little chance of surviving the sea level rise now under way. This view is unpopular with most of the scientists and managers engaged in a battle to save the turtle rookery by building up the cay with sand from the mainland. The island is surrounded by deep water; will the sand survive a cyclone? I think not, especially at higher sea levels, but I suppose anything that might buy precious time deserves a try.

The beacon on Raine Island built by convicts in 1844.

Turtles starting their journey up the beach at Raine Island.

Further north we discovered the most formidable and spectacular reefs I have ever seen. These are the deltaic reefs that form the northern limit of the ribbon reef chain, and which in aerial photos look like a string of wide river estuaries, opening east into the depths of the Coral Sea. To the west there are vast areas of deltas, complete with progressively smaller tributaries.9 We had a set of World War II photos, the sum of all knowledge of them at that time. The mudflats forming these deltas, as we initially supposed them to be, turned out to be solid limestone with the tributaries, in the form of deltaic patterns, carved into them. The channels were all U-shaped in cross-section, with vertical sides and flat, rubble-covered floors.

What was most spectacular of all about these reefs were the currents on the ebb tide, for they were ferocious, the current in the channel we were in almost bringing the Kirby to a standstill, engine roaring at full throttle. Davie Duncan was a great skipper; we found an anchorage.

The deltaic reefs north of the ribbon reefs. The white parts look like mudflats but are solid limestone; the dark ‘rivers’ are channels cut by tidal currents.

‘Bloody hell, Charlie, coming here was dumb,’ he said as he wiped sweat from his brow.

Davie’s got no sense of history. Nobody’s ever been here before. Or if they have, they never lived to tell the tale.

Our first job was to confirm that these reefs were indeed solid rock and not mud; the second was to check out the channels. There was nothing for it but to start a scuba dive from one of the small back tributaries and let the current take us – three of us, with little marker buoys attached and followed by a zodiac – down the channels as they became bigger. We soon found ourselves going faster and faster with no chance of stopping. Although wildly turbulent, the water was very clear, giving no sense of movement, but in it were unseen forces of compelling strength, pulling us up then down, this way then that, sometimes spinning us full circle. The channel edges, almost devoid of coral, whizzed by and even the bottom, which we could glimpse deep below, appeared to be on the move. By the time we reached the main channel things were getting a little scary, but the sound of the zodiac’s outboard above us was reassuring. I was thinking it was time to call it quits and surface when a huge ridge of reef loomed ahead, forming a sort of sill, which we later discovered was the outer lip of the channel, about half a kilometre wide. Over the sill we went, at terrific speed, and then down down down, losing sight of each other as we went. Even the bubbles from my regulator went straight down. I inflated my vest at about 30 metres and, relieved that this arrested my descent, swam for the surface, searching for my buddies as I went. It was a daunting place, especially as there were hundreds of sharks all moving very fast, as if it were a feeding ground.

The surface, when I reached it, was a lonely place. My buddies were nowhere to be seen: all I could see were big, foam-topped standing waves, holding their position against the current, which was pushing me, and presumably my buddies, relentlessly away from Australia. There was nothing for it but to wait, and hope the others had reached the surface. Fortunately, our boatman had his wits about him. Our marker buoys had disappeared when we were pulled down, so he zigzagged back and forth until he found each of us. I have seldom been so pleased to see a boat, with the others safely in it, in my life.

Even for a zodiac with a powerful outboard, the return trip over the waves and against the current was slow, and once back in the channel we had traversed it was fascinating to see whirlpools and smooth mounds of upwelling water forming here and there and then disappearing as we sped along.

Diving when you have control of what you’re doing is one thing, but when you have none it is quite another. I know of nobody else who has dived in these channels. No surprises there, but at least we gained an impression of what they looked like. Later this gave me some ideas about how they had formed: from tidal currents, erosion, sea level changes and a subsiding continental shelf.10

Mer Island, known as Murray Island when we were there, lies to the north of the deltaic reefs. Legend had it that it was a dangerous place to visit as its occupants were in the habit of inviting unexpected arrivals for dinner. I had little doubt that they once did, especially after their chief, a massive man the colour of obsidian, bellowed with laughter as he told us how his father delighted in cooking and eating the tongues of shipwrecked sailors, or nearby Darnley Islanders when no sailors were around, while their owners were made to look on. Still chuckling, he invited us ashore. It was Christmas Eve and the island’s children were going to stage a concert.

We made our way to the village hall, keeping in mind the chief’s parting hope that we wouldn’t be turned into a traditional feast. The hall was a large corrugated-iron shed and there we waited, and waited. We were about to give up when the distant sound of children singing came wafting through the coconut palms. I bolted for our zodiac, not for safety, but to get my tape recorder. I decided to sacrifice Beethoven in favour of the children’s songs, but at first I had no idea how good that concert was going to be. The children filed in, dressed from head to foot in their best traditional Papua New Guinea-like regalia, and for hours – almost until dawn – they sang and danced, and I recorded the whole thing. I have never forgiven myself for throwing out, twenty years later, what I thought were a lot of old Beethoven tapes. I had in fact thrown out hours of children singing in Meriam Mir, a language that at one stage looked like it was on a path to extinction.

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.