Travels Abroad

Trouble in Japan

By 1984 an interesting picture had emerged from all this work on Australian corals. We saw that on both coasts, species richness decreases in an orderly sequence from the northern tropics to southern temperate latitudes. That was hardly an earth-shattering revelation, but when this sequence was superimposed on patterns of temperature, currents and the occurrences of reefs, the results said a good deal about reef ecology. The question that naturally arose was: do similar patterns and correlations apply to the Northern Hemisphere – from Indonesia to Japan? I had been pondering this very question when I received a phone call out of the blue.

‘Dr Veron? I am Dr Shirai. Please come to Ishigaki Island and report on the corals there. All expenses paid.’

I knew roughly where Ishigaki Island was, just north of Taiwan, at the southern end of the Ryukyu Islands chain. The timing and location could not have been better.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘When do you want me to come?’

‘As soon as possible. Please bring personal diving equipment, camera and suit. We have tanks and all you need. We would be greatly honoured by your visit.’

A few weeks later I was on a plane to Ishigaki Island. As it circled around to the airport I saw that the island had a mountainous spine down the middle, a narrow coastal plain on all sides covered with rice paddies, and an almost continuous line of fringing reefs. A perfect place for diving.

I met Dr Shirai as soon as I walked down the aircraft steps. He was tiny, with an intelligent face and a happy smile, and was immaculately dressed, as if he were going to a business conference.

‘So sorry the mayor is not here to meet you,’ he said.

His English was excellent. I must have looked a bit surprised, because he explained that a mayor in Japan was the godfather of all things, not just a political leader. Then he looked a little worried. ‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-nine,’ I said, wondering why he’d asked.

‘Please do not be thirty-nine.’ He frowned. ‘Forty-five is better. Please come with me, we have a meeting in the airport reception room where you will meet the press. Very important.’

A press conference about me? What’s this guy on about?

The reception room turned out to be full of bright lights and big television cameras; there were many technicians in overalls, reporters with notebooks, and important-looking men sweating in their perfectly fitting suits, just like Shirai’s. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Coral taxonomists just don’t get this sort of treatment.

Someone welcomed me in faltering English, then turned to a camera and started a long speech in Japanese, which of course I didn’t understand. This was followed by another welcome by someone else in a few practised English words, and then another long speech in Japanese. On this process went, again and again. Cameras, not to mention floodlights, were on me almost continually as one immaculately dressed man after another bowed formally and eagerly shook my hand. It seemed that I was some sort of celebrity. What was going on?

After two hours, during which I understood nothing, I must have looked as bored as I felt, for Shirai chipped in. ‘Please excuse all this. It is the Japanese way. We are greatly honoured by your visit. We invite you to a banquet in your honour. Very important. But first I will take you to a beautiful guesthouse reserved for your visit. Did you bring a suit? No? Then I will have one delivered.’

Is he kidding? The last time I wore a suit was at my wedding.

The guesthouse was indeed beautiful, as Shirai said. It was built in traditional mainland-Japanese style and stood alone on a headland surrounded by trees. I had the whole place to myself, to be looked after by ‘Papa-san and Mama-san’, an elderly couple who spoke no English. But no matter; they certainly seemed a friendly pair.

The banquet, held in a large, tatami-mat room on the top storey of a modern hotel, was another novel experience for me. A circle of low, polished, heavy wooden tables were covered with platters of traditional Japanese food. There were no women, just middle-aged men, about thirty in number, all dressed as I now was in a grey suit complete with tie, tie pin, and a fake breast-pocket handkerchief. Sartorial splendour isn’t high on my list of achievements; I’m sure I looked every bit as uncomfortable in my suit as I felt.

I was placed with Shirai on one side and the mayor, who had just returned from Tokyo, on the other. The mayor must have been about seventy years old and had a heavy build and a large, kindly face. He had bowed surprisingly low to me, and shaken my hand warmly. I took an instant liking to him, or at least to his smile. He spoke no English but we both knew a little German, his presumably from the war, so we got by with basics.

Japanese food has long since gone international, to great acclaim, but back then I’d never even seen a Japanese restaurant. I’d heard, to my horror, that Japanese ate fish raw, and there it was – in all manner of different colours, most wrapped in seaweed, with rice. I decided to start on something less challenging. A small pile of green stuff on the side looked relatively harmless, and so my first mouthful of Japanese food was straight wasabi. It seemed an age before I could breathe again, much to the concern of the mayor.

Shirai was the only English speaker in the room, as far as I could hear. He chatted with me on occasion, explaining the food and showing me the way sake was drunk. As soon as anybody in the vicinity emptied their cup, all were refilled together. That way everybody got drunk at the same rate, everybody except me, that is, who apparently had a greater tolerance for alcohol than the Japanese. This seemed to give me a certain status, as did the ease with which I handled chopsticks (we used them at home) and sat on the floor – gaijin (foreigners) were not supposed to be able to do such things.

After the banquet had concluded I was chauffeured back to my guesthouse to the waiting arms of Mama-san and Papa-san, rather under the weather and wondering what the whole show had been about.

The following day there was no diving; the boat wasn’t ready, I was told. Instead I was asked to attend another banquet in my honour, this time as the guest of the Director of Fisheries. This was held in another hotel, but seemed to me to be an exact rerun of the previous night – the same circle of men, no women, and the same food. The day after that the boat still wasn’t ready, so Shirai collected me in his car, an enormous black Lincoln Continental, for a sightseeing tour. He was so small he had to sit on a large cushion to see over the dashboard. I’m only a bit over average height in Australia, but according to the locals I was the tallest of the forty thousand people on the island.

That night there was a ‘formal dinner’, which was more of the same except that this time Dieter Kühlmann, the curator I’d met in the Berlin museum nine years earlier, was there. Dieter had just arrived from Berlin to join me for a couple of weeks’ study of the foreshores. He also did some diving with me eventually, as did Shirai and his assistant, but mostly I saw little of Dieter. Nevertheless, he was welcome company, particularly at the banquets, which never seemed to end.

For day after day our diving was cancelled on one unlikely pretext or another, but the banquets continued, always with the same men in the same suits. This must have been costing a fortune. Furthermore, Mama-san and Papa-san’s television was almost always on and I’d see myself in every news broadcast. My photo was on the front page of nearly every newspaper. Why? It wasn’t as if I did anything, and who would care anyhow? Shirai said it was just the Japanese way and to forget about it. This sounded increasingly phoney.

One day, when out walking, I was warmly greeted by a local dive shop owner, and so when yet another day’s diving was cancelled I stole away from the guesthouse with Papa-san’s ancient wooden wheelbarrow, went to the dive shop and borrowed a couple of tanks. The nearby reef flat was about a kilometre wide and the tide was in, so I swam to the outer edge, photographed corals all morning and then swam back, a journey taking several hours. Shirai thought this terribly dangerous. It wasn’t, but it did prompt him to make sure our boat, a fishing trawler, would actually be ready the following day.

Thereafter, if the boat wasn’t ready (‘Very sorry’), I would go off by myself. Every time the boat was ready, there were reporters to interview me, in Japanese of course, and one or two television cameramen were always waiting. I would again be on television and my photo would again be in the local newspapers. Not Dieter’s photo, nor Shirai’s either, just mine, and of course I had no idea what all the newspaper articles were about.

After a couple of weeks of this, the mayor arrived at my guesthouse with a huge bowl of fruit and managed to say he knew that I was unhappy with my visit, so to cheer me up, would I please come to a special private dinner in my honour? I said I would; I always did. This time there were fewer men in suits, but there was a gorgeous girl, called Butterfly, seated next to me. Not only was Butterfly astonishingly beautiful, but she spoke perfect English, albeit it with a slight American accent. She explained that she was visiting Ishigaki Island from Tokyo. She had no idea why I was on the island except that it had something to do with diving. It was the most interesting dinner I’d had in weeks, even if it did take me a while to work out what her job actually was.

Two days were unusually interesting. On the first we went to the southernmost point of the island, where I embarked on a long swim to a bay that had no road access. The corals there were more or less the same as in other places until, abruptly, they were all white. Initially I thought this must have been the result of a crown-of-thorns starfish outbreak, but I soon ruled that out. Every coral was completely dead; starfish don’t do that. I decided it had to be due to something dumped in the water, but then I remembered recent reports of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. This was the first instance of mass bleaching in Japan, and the first I had personally witnessed.

The second interesting day was a visit to a wide expanse of reef near the village of Shiraho, at the end of the island, close to the airport. The attraction was a lagoon in the outer part of the reef flat, clearly visible in the aerial photos we had. Shirai initially refused to go, saying that the villagers were dangerous; there’d been some sort of riot there. He gave in after I told him I would ask the dive shop owner to take me there if he didn’t. So off we went, in his big black Lincoln Continental, which was a bit of a struggle because it didn’t fit down most streets. However, sure enough, there was evidence of a riot everywhere, including a street barricade made of bits of houses, furniture and overturned cars. The village was deserted.

We hadn’t taken scuba tanks that day because Shirai claimed he didn’t want them in his beautiful car, so we set off wading. Shirai went knee-deep while his assistant took photos of him every few metres, with the village in the background. I kept wondering why as I continued on to deeper water alone.

The lagoon turned out to contain the biggest stands of blue coral, a living fossil, I’d ever seen. I had seen these corals many times, but never on this scale. I took lots of photos of them, later to be reproduced in my books and in magazine articles all over Japan.

After that, one day merged into the next, each with the same routine. Either the boat would be ready, allowing me to get on with diving, or I took myself off with Papa-san’s wheelbarrow. By this time Dieter had returned to Germany. I carried on because I needed to complete the study for my own purposes, but I’d become so sick of reporters and cameramen that I bluntly demanded Shirai send them away, and in future not tell them when we were going diving. It was all very strange, and could not possibly be ‘the Japanese way’.

The following morning things came to a head. The boat was ready, and so were the cameramen. After Shirai had made sure the cameras were on him, he came over to talk to me about the weather. I’d had enough. To show him the Australian way, I smiled sweetly at the cameras, picked Shirai up and tossed him over the side of the boat. Splash. I never saw him again.

The project was cancelled. I kept on diving and collecting and photographing corals, usually leaving my cameras on the beach under a towel when collecting. I soon became a tourist attraction, with one glass-bottomed boat after another hovering above me, their outboards making a horrible racket. I would give them the finger, until a honeymooner told me this meant nothing to the Japanese and showed me the hand motion that did. That worked.

One day I returned to the beach with my laundry basket full of corals to find that my cameras had vanished. I went to the guesthouse and tried to explain to Papa-san that I needed to call the police. He didn’t understand, so I tried again. Then his face lit up; he led me into the kitchen and there they were, on the table, with my towel folded neatly beside them. The next day, I took the cameras on my first dive then went collecting, leaving them on the beach. The same thing happened; a group of children were ‘helping’ me. But why? I could only conclude that they were treating me as some sort of hero, as some of the local men did.Certainly they seemed to know something that I didn’t about why I was on the island.

At that point the Director of Fisheries turned up and told me that he’d taken over the survey himself, and that I could do all the diving I wanted, except near the airport, where it was ‘too dangerous’. When my work was all done – and he was very attentive, considering my barbarian ways – he flew with me to Tokyo, where we did some sightseeing and had some fabulous meals. Oh, how I had come to love Japanese food.

Of course I was very suspicious about all that had happened, so before leaving Japan I put together collections of newspaper articles about me and posted one set to the Australian embassy in Tokyo and the other to Katy Muzik, a researcher at the Smithsonian and presenter of natural history programs that were popular in Japan. I had met Katy in America and knew she’d once lived on Ishigaki Island, and that she spoke fluent Japanese.

The embassy made no response, but Katy knew exactly what was going on: a plan to increase the length of the Ishigaki airport runway to accommodate wide-bodied jets. That would involve extending it over the reef flat and Shiraho Lagoon. A large hill adjacent to the airport would supply the necessary rock. The mayor, the old man I’d trusted, had foreseen this and purchased the hill for next to nothing. When the airport development was proposed, the hill was suddenly worth $us70 million. The riot at Shiraho had been in protest against the development, peace being declared only after it was agreed that two foreign experts would make a study of the corals of the island and evaluate the worth of the reef that was to be destroyed. Shirai had allegedly been offered $us3 million to produce a report that vindicated the government’s, and the mayor’s, proposal. I was their reef expert, Dieter’s role was to make notes and drawings of the foreshores. All the television appearances and newspaper articles had been fakes, always reporting me toeing the government’s line. This hadn’t fooled the locals, but that didn’t matter to the mayor – decisions about such things were made in Tokyo.

Katy said I must write to Asahi, Japan’s most widely circulated newspaper, saying why I had gone to Japan and what I had done. My brief article caused an explosion. All Okinawan newspapers carried a photo of me with headlines like shirai accuses veron of lying. There was another riot at Shiraho. The following day the governor of Okinawa called an emergency meeting in Naha, the capital. I was accused of all manner of devious crimes, which, through a telephone linkup to my desk at AIMS that my accusers didn’t know about, I could immediately rebuff. Television companies, especially NHK, had a field day. A dozen Japanese reporters must have come to Australia to interview me, and one morning NHK had me talking live on a breakfast program from Townsville, the first ever live coverage of a news event between Japan and Australia.

Over the several years that followed I made many more trips to Japan, usually accompanied by Moritaka Nishihira, a professsor of marine biology at a university in Naha and a delightful roly-poly character whom I dubbed my little Buddha. He and I visited all the tropical island groups of the Ryukyus that had good coral, and then Kyushu. But my last dives in Japan were without Moritaka, for they were along the coast of Honshu, where corals were scarce and not so interesting for him. Doing this, I found the most northerly coral communities in the world, at the Tateyama Peninsula, south-east of Tokyo. I caught a ferry from Tokyo and stayed in a little inn on the western side of the peninsula, near where the corals were. There were not only living corals there, but also fossil corals, in an area where the land had been uplifted several thousand years ago. Naturally I went fossil-hunting and soon found a 3-metre-deep drainage ditch where specimens of species no longer found along the mainland coast had been dug up. After many hours of scrabbling around in the ditch I looked up to see a row of peasants watching me, clearly at a loss as to what I was doing. This was a great time to test my fledgling Japanese; perhaps predictably, they understood not a word.

The morning of my last day at Tateyama I decided to go for a swim. There were no sharks of course – Japanese love shark-fin soup – the only thing to be wary of were ships going in and out of Tokyo. I waved at a couple of ferries that passed me but only received blank stares for my trouble. Swimming back, it seemed that the trees around the lighthouse on the tip of the peninsula kept changing, and then I realised I wasn’t getting any closer. I was being swept around the headland by the current – next stop Hawaii.

That was a long day, and for a time I felt it might be my last. There was no way I could outswim the Kuroshio, but I thought – hoped – it would have a small coastal gyre as it headed into the North Pacific. So I swam across the current to where I thought this might be. It was rather scary but the sea was calm and the lighthouse was slowly coming into the right position. I had started out on the west coast of the peninsula and ended a long way up the east. It was getting dark by the time I walked back to the inn, hungry and very tired. That little swim was not a good idea but the study was definitely worthwhile.14 It’s one that can never be repeated, because the living corals have all been dredged and the fossils are now under apartment buildings.

I look back on my time in Japan with a good deal of wonder. Over the months that followed my stay on Ishigaki Island, both the mayor and the governor lost their jobs, but the battle over the airport raged on for ten years. In the end, Shiraho Lagoon was proclaimed a national monument, although I’m not sure what conservation value that had.

I kept returning to that strange country for years, to study, for conferences, and sometimes I was invited for ceremonial occasions. I don’t know what happened to ‘Dr’ Shirai (the Dr bit was fake, or so I was told) but I did revisit Shiraho, where I was warmly welcomed. When I was leaving, a local took me to the town garbage dump to show me the remains of a burnt-out Lincoln Continental.

In 1992 I published a monograph on the corals of Japan.15 And in 1995 Moritaka and I – mostly Moritaka’s doing – produced the lavishly illustrated, rather expensive book Hermatypic Corals of Japan, in Japanese.16 All well and good except that I had become familiar with Japanese corals in finest detail, and troublesome aspects about how closely related species could be distinguished were always cropping up. It was the same feeling of disquiet I’d felt when working in Western Australia, although in Japan the combinations of species that caused me trouble were mostly different. Once again I had to do some diving on the Great Barrier Reef to reassure myself that I hadn’t made mistakes.

Ishigaki Island, showing living corals in the foreground, the reef flat (yellowish), the beach (white), the coastal strip of agricultural plots, and the mountain ridge behind.

A coral knoll at the Ryukyu Islands, Japan. It is a formidable job identifying each and every coral.

Blue coral in Shiraho Lagoon, Ishigaki Island, Japan.

Pacific forays

The earliest scientific account of the distribution of corals on the Great Barrier Reef was by John Wells, who originally described the dropout sequence of coral genera from north to south.17 Nothing surprising in that, but what was interesting was that tropical corals did not have temperate replacements, as have almost all other marine animal groups. Why not?

In 1984, with the last volume of Scleractinia of Eastern Australia published, I made more trips to the ends of The Reef in between visits to the west coast. When satisfied that I’d filled in the main gaps in my records, I plotted the results and was almost dismayed to find that the dropout sequence for species was even more orderly than it was for genera. The far north of The Reef, where species numbers were low, was an exception, due to the turbidity and strong currents of the Torres Strait, an unhealthy combination for just about everything.

The sequence begged further questions. Did all groups of corals drop out at the same rate? Was it due to the temperature gradient down the reef, or battles with seaweed, or the presence or not of reefs? If the last, what was it about reefs that permitted a different diversity? The first question at least could be answered without further ado: mushroom corals (Fungia) dropped out quicker than the others, and so, to a lesser extent, did Porites. The interesting thing about Porites was that the colonies mostly became smaller in the south. This was unexpected because Porites, in experiments and in the geological record, are usually one of the best survivors when conditions get tough.

As work in Western Australia continued it became clear that a similar dropout sequence applied there, although much of that could be explained by the big gaps between reef areas. Both coasts had south-flowing currents and both had a temperature gradient from the tropical north to the temperate south. Both also had reefs, with a much higher diversity than nearby places where the temperature was about the same but there were no reefs.

Japan was the best place on the planet to take a better look at this question. The Kuroshio, the world’s strongest continental boundary current, originates around the northern Philippines then streams north, past Taiwan, up the length of the Ryukyu Islands, finally turning east along the southern coast of Honshu. These conditions mean that there’s no other place in the world where the relationship between temperature and diversity can be studied in anything like the detail it can in Japan.

These were the thoughts that bumbled around in my head when I first headed for Ishigaki Island, and they stayed bumbling around until I became determined to make a detailed study of them. Early in my travels to Japan I discovered that, being a nation of seafood addicts, the Japanese kept very careful records of ocean temperature, that being a good indicator of what seafood might be where. I could get some temperature records from central government agencies in Okinawa and Tokyo, but these were usually open-ocean records collected by ships of opportunity – mostly passenger liners and freighters. The records that mattered as far as I was concerned were those taken inside reef areas, right where the corals grew. These were kept by small research stations or local government agencies, which seldom shared them with anybody. To conquer this I developed a symbiosis with a couple of Japanese volunteers who accompanied me. The records, which the Japanese never published, would be politely handed over to me, ‘the foreign expert’, while my buddies did the talking.

Over the years we worked on about ten islands in this way, some in remote places. Each time, I would make a copy of whatever temperature records there were, then go diving.

This study confirmed the widely held belief that the minimum temperature for reef development was 18°C. That sounds simple enough, but why should it be so? What I found was that about a quarter of all corals could tolerate a temperature of 10.5°C, and a half tolerated 14°C. Even so, the old notion that reefs did not occur where the temperature went below 18°C held true, almost.18 They won’t grow if the temperature falls below 18°C for more than a few weeks. Corals can tolerate a much lower temperature, but a key factor is that they need at least 18°C to grow fast enough to provide homes for the herbivores that keep seaweed in check. It’s a matter of ecology, not temperature tolerance.

It is now popular opinion that climate change will allow corals to disperse to higher latitudes. That’s a sexy notion but it’s been overplayed. Most reported latitudinal range extensions are actually due to improved identification skills or to the chance discovery of a species that wasn’t previously recorded. That doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there before. Some may come and some may go over geological time – the normal way of things for most organisms living at the extremes. Certainly, distributions are likely to change a little, but it will be change to distributions that have always been changing, and that’s a hard thing to attribute to temperature or anything else, including differences in light regimes and mechanisms of reef erosion.

We may see corals appear on the north coast of New Zealand, as it may now be getting warm enough and they were there in the geological past, even building small reefs. It is more a question of getting the right current to take coral larvae there.

Today there are hundreds of magazines and dozens of books devoted to the underwater world of coral reefs, but in the early 1980s there was almost nothing. I’d been publishing my findings in scientific journals and monographs, but such publications conveyed little to the public, and nothing of the biology and beauty of reefs to anybody. So I decided to write a book for lay readers, which became Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific.19 This was no small undertaking as it needed thousands of photos, making it expensive to produce. Angus & Robertson, at that time Australia’s foremost publisher of natural history books, welcomed my proposal and so I began the long task of putting together a volume that ended up rather larger than intended. It had a lot of information that would have been new to most readers, including scientists.

I also had an ulterior motive: Noni had always wanted me to write a ‘beautiful’ book about corals and I wanted to dedicate this one to her. As a frontispiece I included a distant underwater photo of her taken by Ed Lovell on her first dive, at Keeper Reef.

Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific was published in 1986, and in 1987 I was privileged to be awarded the Whitley Medal for Australia’s best natural history book – Noni would have loved that. As far as I know, the book contained the first photo of a bleached coral, something of little interest then, but prophetic of times to come.

The Scleractinia of Eastern Australia series and Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific gave both AIMS and myself a measure of international recognition. At least AIMS thought so – I was promoted to the top rung in 1987, the only promotion I ever got that didn’t involve winning some sort of argument with a bureaucrat.

With my work on Japanese corals well under way, I was delighted when an opportunity came to make a study of the corals of the Philippines, where the Kuroshio starts. This was paid for in a rather unusual way: Ed Gomez, then professor of zoology at the University of the Philippines, had attended a coral taxonomy workshop that Carden Wallace and I had given in Phuket, Thailand, and he was keen to see this work extended to his own country. Being a man of great initiative, Ed had obtained a large grant from the US State Department for me to give a lecture at his university. When I arrived in Manila I went straight to Ed’s office, where I saw a pile of pesos covering half a table.

‘Good to see you, Charlie,’ said Ed with a grin on his face. ‘This was to be for your lecture,’ he went on, gesturing towards the pile of banknotes. He then carefully pushed the pile to the other side of the table, except for a single note which he ceremoniously presented to me. ‘This is for your lecture’, he said, ‘the rest is for your study.’

I never did give the lecture. I used the money to travel all over the Philippines with Gregor Hodgson, an American coral biologist who lived in Manila and spoke fluent Filipino, as well as a couple of regional dialects. I felt a twinge of guilt about not giving the lecture that America had so generously paid for, but Gregor and I did produce something much more valuable: a publication about the corals of the Philippines.20 It was nothing like the detailed monograph it could have been, but we wanted to be careful not to tread on the toes of Professor Francisco Nemenzo, who was nearing the end of his days after spending a lifetime studying Philippine corals and producing a string of publications about them.

Our work involved some very interesting diving, all in small boats using scuba tanks that Gregor was always able to scrounge, even in small villages. One dive was more memorable than most: we had headed out in a canoe with an outrigger and tiny outboard motor. The driver spoke no Filipino, although he seemed to understand that he was to anchor – he had a length of rope tied to a chunk of rock for this purpose – and wait for us. When we finished our dive he was nowhere to be seen. This was no great problem because there were boats everywhere and we literally hitchhiked back to the village we’d set out from. When he saw us there, our boat driver nearly collapsed with fright – he thought we were ghosts. He’d never heard of scuba diving, and when we hadn’t surfaced the poor guy assumed that we’d drowned and was terrified he would be accused of killing us.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Philippines, particularly the small towns and villages, I was continually shocked at the poverty, especially the number of destitute children. Gregor had to stop me giving away all our money; he also had to stop me getting into disputes with people who were treating animals with appalling cruelty. I was much bigger than most Philippine men, but Gregor insisted they had knives and would not hesitate to use them. I was also distressed by the plight of young girls. ‘They’re either married or for sale,’ Gregor said, for a girl could earn more in one night than her father might in a month. They were usually taken back into their otherwise devoutly Catholic families once they’d reached their use-by date, early twenties at the latest, but after living in Manila hotels for years, and probably having contracted the diseases of their profession, a poor village life, perhaps without the prospect of a husband, must have seemed like a prison.

I saw the same thing throughout Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The culture that these people had built up over a thousand years was being trashed wholesale by Western and Japanese wealth. Worse were the movies the villagers knew about, featuring live rape, even murder. I lived with locals in all these countries and had a glimpse of real life, so different from that served up by tourist operators.

For many years afterwards, I kept in contact with the students and university staff I met in Asia, often helping them to get jobs or scholarships. No trouble for me, life-giving for them. I was also able to repay Ed Gomez for his support of our study. Ed had founded the Marine Science Institute in the north-west Philippines. It was an impressive building, the likes of which did not exist in any other developing country. Then a Taiwanese company started to build an enormous cement factory right next door; it would have destroyed the institute. When I next saw Ed he was in bad shape, having fought against the factory with all he could muster, to no avail, and he believed his life was seriously in danger. I wrote to President Marcos, on AIMS letterhead, giving myself the status of grand professor of all things marine. I said I felt obliged to inform him that he would be shocked to hear of the imminent destruction of his precious institute (which he presumably neither cared nor knew anything about). He must have been in a particularly dictatorial mood, for he ordered the immediate closure of the factory. The whole exercise would have taken me an hour at most, and AIMS even paid the postage.

After the Philippines, Gregor and I went on to Vietnam to work on corals with local experts. Driving up the coast road at that time was like driving through a National Geographic magazine, with one rustic picturesque scene opening onto another. We spent three weeks on the central coast, working out the corals and comparing them with those of the Philippines on the other side of the South China Sea. Our journey ended in Hanoi, at a time when the whole country was jubilant about America’s decision to normalise diplomatic relations. I found it hard to see what these people were so happy about given what America, and Australia for that matter, had done to them.

It was also a time when the US was lifting its embargo on White House tapes made during the Vietnam War, and I spent a surreal half-hour listening on the radio to the deep gravelly voice of Henry Kissinger telling Richard Nixon that ‘nukin’ the fuckers’ wouldn’t go down well with the American people. From my hotel window I could see Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, right where the bomb would have been targeted.

I left my hotel to get a bite to eat. People were dancing in the streets in celebration, reminding me that many years ago I only just dodged being conscripted to come to their country to help kill them.

Shortly after the studies of the corals of the Philippines and Vietnam were finished I had an interesting sojourn in Vanuatu, which Terry Done organised. We had a large yacht, the Coongoola, perhaps not the fastest of vessels, but its owner knew the country and kept his boat in good shape for diving.

This turned out to be a thought-provoking voyage for me. Swimming over the coral, I saw none of the problems of taxonomic detail that had plagued me in Western Australia, Asia and Japan. I swam on, getting a little bored with seeing so much more of the same.

What’s here that tells me I’m not on the Great Barrier Reef? The corals are identical.

A subliminal thought almost surfaced, then faded away when I saw Zoopilus, a large delicate coral that looks like a Vietnamese peasant’s hat. This coral is not found on the Great Barrier Reef. Later I pondered the ship’s chart. Vanuatu is just the other side of the Coral Sea from The Reef, not far away as currents go. I thought about the role currents might play in evolutionary change. But it wasn’t until many years later that this thought became clear and I was able to incorporate it in my concept of reticulate evolution.

All such matters went on hold when we reached the island of Tanna and walked up Mount Yasur, an active volcano and mega-spectacular sight. The crater is gigantic. Deep in its middle is a second, small crater which, every half-hour or so, exploded with the noise of battleship guns, sending streams of lava half a kilometre into the air like a giant Mount Vesuvius firework and shaking the grey-ash ground we stood on. We watched transfixed, until some hot ash came down a little too close for comfort.

Not long after we were there, a tourist died from a direct hit by a chunk of scorching rock, and the place is now often closed to sightseers. A pity; unless the volcano is in one of its angry moods, the risk in seeing it is surely worth it.

The Coongoola, slow but roomy, Vanuatu, 1988.

The Indian Ocean

Six contour maps showing the global distribution of coral genera were published between 1954 and 1985, the first being John Wells’s, the last being mine. All vaguely indicate some sort of centre of diversity in the western Indian Ocean. Why so? Where did the corals come from? The Tethys Sea, an ancient seaway which, as I will describe, periodically included the Mediterranean and covered much of Europe? Or did they come from the Indo-Pacific’s centre of diversity? Or had they been there as long as Africa has?

When I started working in the Red Sea in 1985 these were unanswered questions – or rather, nobody had asked them. The Red Sea has a well-known geological history. It is mostly very deep but has a shallow opening to the Indian Ocean. That shallow opening means that all the life in the Red Sea has been there for less than fifteen thousand years, because the sea level during the last ice age was low enough to isolate the sea, turning it into a hot, lethally saline giant trough about as homely as the Dead Sea is today.

I first worked in the Ras Mohammad National Park, at the southern tip of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, in 1985, making a detailed inventory of the corals there and shipping a large collection back to Australia. Tourists had started arriving in substantial numbers by then, and Egypt was thinking that some sort of hands-on management might be a good idea. The first job was to find out what needed managing.

As soon as I started diving, memories of Ehrenberg’s specimens in the Berlin museum came flooding back, but much more poignant were recollections of my detailed studies of Western Australian corals, large numbers of which I was seeing again. Or more or less seeing again, for most were a little different, not surprisingly considering the distance between the two countries.

I revisited the park with Mary (whom you will soon meet) in 1996 and was horrified to see that it was overrun with tourists, mostly Germans and Italians. Tourists have pretty much trashed the park now, there being limits to the numbers such a place can take, but at that time the reefs were still in good shape. The government was encouraging conservation because the park generated more foreign currency than the Pyramids and Sphinx combined. Egypt also made a fortune from ships that ran aground there, as we immediately saw when we arrived. The rangers took us to see where a big Cunard cruise ship had hit the reef. The ship itself, by then in a dock, was badly damaged and listing heavily, but Mary and I, reluctant witnesses, had a hard time finding much damage to the reef at all. Nevertheless, Cunard was fined ₤8 million, which was pocketed by the Egyptian government, not the national park.

Although I had all the necessary permits to collect corals – the first and last the Egyptians would ever issue, so they said – I had to keep my specimens covered up, even when I was with a park ranger, because the locals, as well as most tourists then, were very protective of them. We left the park with hundreds of photos of the corals and another detailed collection. The corals in the region are now disappearing rapidly due to oil spills, land development and mass bleaching. However, I did describe several new species and don’t doubt that there are more to be discovered before they disappear.

On another trip a few years later, rangers took me sightseeing. I wanted to see some Bedouins, who had led the same nomadic existence since biblical days. I was shown into a traditional, dark, carpeted tent, where I could vaguely make out a man sitting in the corner. He started talking about corals. There was nothing unusual about that until he asked me a very specific question. That stopped me in my tracks, and in all honesty I could only say that he should ask Bernard Riegl, a well-known coral scientist who knew all about the matter.

‘I am Bernard Riegl’, he said, sounding like he had a grin on his face. Was there nowhere I could go where my knowledge of corals didn’t get tested?

On another trip, I visited an ancient Catholic monastery, the site of the burning bush of biblical fame. The bush looked a little careworn, though not particularly old, but of much greater interest was the Catholic library, the second-biggest in the world outside the Vatican and the home of hundreds of ancient icons. The icons were still in excellent condition due to the low humidity of the Sinai, and the fact that Napoleon had ordered his troops to leave the place alone. I’d heard that one of the monks there was an Australian and I was going to seek him out when I felt a firm hand on my shoulder.

‘G’day,’ said a broad Australian voice. ‘Heard you were coming. I’ll show you around in a sec, but would you mind taking a look at this bloody laptop of mine, it’s driving me nuts. It won’t talk to my scanner.’

And now I’m fixing a computer for a monk in a Catholic monastery in the Sinai desert.

It turns out that the Red Sea has around 340 species of coral, only fifty or so fewer than anywhere in the western Indian Ocean. So all the old contour maps had got that wrong. A few species are endemic but they are unlikely to have arisen in the Red Sea itself. No corals could have survived the high salinities the Red Sea reached when it was cut off during the last glacial cycle, and the timeframe is not long enough for them to have evolved since then. So those species must have recolonised via the straits and then gone extinct elsewhere. Most western Indian Ocean species, including these, probably crisscrossed the Indian Ocean many times. Be that so or not, they aren’t just exports from the Indonesia–Philippines archipelago, as are the corals of the eastern Indian Ocean: many appear to have originated in the west, and perhaps some go as far back as the Tethys.

Of all the places on the East African coast I visited over the years, Zanzibar was for me the most interesting. It had a colourful history as an ancient trading port and, more importantly, a small, privately owned island with some of the most unusual coral communities in the whole Indian Ocean. Chumbe Island Coral Park, then owned and run by a dedicated German conservationist, Sibylle Riedmiller, was special. Sibylle had been struggling with local politicians for years, trying to get legal recognition of her park. When I was there, the President of Zanzibar had publicly rebuked her, claiming that corals were rocks, so what was the point of protecting them? I joined the battle on her behalf – successfully, I think. A year later Sibylle offered to give me joint ownership of the park, but I declined. Such a venture might have been interesting but would have plunged me into yet more battles, and my life was complicated enough as it was.

The evening before I left, I chatted to the rangers who looked after the park. They were a small, dedicated group, and having a visitor who knew about corals was a big occasion for them, so we went on talking into the night. They told me of their work and revelled in the interest I took. I felt I should spend more time doing such things; it was a small thing for me, but so important for them.

Not long after I first worked in the Red Sea I made my first trip to Madagascar. It wasn’t a particularly successful trip because I was on my own and in those days scuba tanks were hard to come by. Nevertheless, I dived in many places on the west coast, hoping that one day I would return.

It wasn’t until 2005 that I had that opportunity, along with some colleagues. The trip was run by an American conservation organisation, which, with a curious lapse of judgement, chartered the Inga Viola, one of the most unusual boats I’ve ever been on. She was a 1932 Danish fishing boat but looked more like an old Chinese junk as she was made from curved planks that formed a rather beautiful sweeping deck, which unfortunately leaked profusely whenever it rained. A white box-like wheelhouse adorned the rear of the deck. The skipper, the only crew member, was an Englishman even older than his boat. Most interesting of all, the Inga Viola was powered by a 1928 diesel engine that by rights should have been in a museum. But there it was, with two cylinders, each about 2 metres high and looking more like a pair of microbreweries than an engine. The one used for starting needed kerosene poured into it from a bottle and compressed air from a scuba tank; it was such a complicated procedure that it took half an hour to get through – if nothing went wrong, which it almost always did. It was agreed that if needs be, meaning if the skipper died, I was to be the boat’s ‘engineer’, because of my interest in engines. He gave me a five-minute lesson.

Long live the skipper. There’s no way I’ll be able to get this contraption going without him.

The Inga Viola at top speed, Madagascar.

We loaded our stores and out we chugged at top speed, about 4 knots. Not surprisingly we broke down on our second day, or rather one of the cylinders did; a con rod broke. The skipper, not in the least fazed, unbolted the sump under the disabled cylinder, removed the con rod, wrapped a diver’s weight belt around the crank shaft to balance the weight of the disconnected piston, and off we went again, chug chug chug at a new top speed of 2 knots. Not only were we dependent on that one cylinder for propulsion, but it also drove the scuba compressor and the generator; we couldn’t even operate the ship’s radio without it. God help us if we needed a mayday.

Mechanical problems aside, the diving was good and the offshore reefs were in excellent condition, but as far as I was concerned, the boat was a floating coffin; it had no chance of getting away from a cyclone, and it was cyclone season. With an uncharacteristic concern for safety, I got off the boat after a couple of weeks and worked on my coral collection in a guesthouse in Nosy Be, usually surrounded by inquisitive locals. While I was there a cyclone threatened, prompting me to start planning a rescue mission, but fortunately the cyclone missed the boat, which by chance was in a protected inlet still with the others on it.

‘We didn’t hear of any cyclone,’ the skipper later said. That would have been because the cyclone had veered to the north and his radio wasn’t on since the engine wasn’t running. The following year another cyclone hit the same place and the mighty Inga Viola went down at anchor. I hope someone salvaged the engine.

Curiously, we recorded more species on our first dive than the French had during the years they occupied the marine station at Nosy Be. This made me wonder just what they’d done with their time: enjoyed their wine and cheese perhaps? By the time we’d finished our work we had confirmed that Madagascar had the highest diversity of corals in the western Indian Ocean, something we’d expected from previous reports but which had never been proven.

Reef slope, Chumbe Island, Madagascar. This is a favourite photo of mine because it shows the many growth forms corals have.

Back in Antananarivo, the capital, a rebellion broke out the day before we were due to depart and the airport was closed. We had no way of getting off the island, try as we did, even looking out for a passing yacht. However, the rebellion was peaceful, apparently enjoyed by all, and it allowed us to see something of the island. Most interesting of all were the fascinating animals the island is so famous for and which live nowhere else, including several species of lemur and chameleons. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, so slash-and-burn land clearing goes on unabated. All the forests, including some which were national parks, had been heavily logged; the only tree I saw that was thicker than a telegraph pole was on a privately owned patch of land, and had its own armed guard. That one tree would be worth several months’ income for a would-be tree thief. The outlook for that wonderful place is grim indeed.

Unfortunately, although I have studied its corals in museums, I’ve never been to Chagos, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This must be a special place for marine life, because it’s the stepping stone that links the western Indian Ocean with the east. It is an extensive atoll complex, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the three studies made of the corals there yielded very different accounts.

In preparation for a book I was planning, I made a string of field trips across the Indian Ocean in the late 1990s. These included a study of the corals of the northern Seychelles, and an all too brief look at those of the Maldives, but I did a thorough job in southern Sri Lanka and western Thailand.

Having done so much work on the Western Australian coast and seen the role that currents and temperature play in determining coral diversity there, I became interested in the opposite – in isolation. There are many places to study isolation in the Pacific, but there are not many in the Indian Ocean that are distant from major coastlines and the influence of strong coastal currents.

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands form a true atoll about halfway between Sri Lanka and Australia. I joined a Western Australian Museum trip there in 1994 out of curiosity about the corals that might occur in such isolation, and also because of the place’s unique history. There are many islands making up the atoll, one inhabited by about five hundred ethnic Malays, mostly Sunni Muslims, and another by a small number of Europeans. At least that was the case when we were there; now there are five hotels. The Clunies-Ross family had occupied the atoll since the early nineteenth century and ended up running their own feudal government there, even minting their own currency. Not surprisingly, Australia took offence at this and put an end to it in 1978, so by the time we turned up, no family members were in residence. The original 1888 mansion, Oceania House, an extraordinary sight for such an out-of-the-way place, was empty but as the front door was wide open I had a peek around the ground floor. It was very impressive, with tiled floors and an ornate bar complete with glasses, full decanters, and bottles galore. The bar looked much like a traditional English pub, except for a dozen or so hens that wandered in and out, happily clucking away.

The locals there were obviously a law-abiding lot. The one and only policeman on the island told me there’d only ever been one misdemeanour – someone had helped themselves to a little money from the shop cash register, but that was many years ago.

One day a German photographer turned up and asked us to drop him off on one of the small islands. He took some underwater photos of the wreck of the SMS Emden, the German light cruiser that had been fatally damaged by HMAS Sydney during World War I. He made a lot of money from those photos: why weren’t we smart enough to think of that?

The corals were rather disappointing. The atoll lagoon had turned anoxic (devoid of oxygen) due to a rare failure of the usual tidal flushing, and there were no corals left alive when we arrived. But we dived a lot on the outer faces, which were in good shape. Biologically there were few surprises. The isolation of the islands was always going to dictate that the diversity would be low, and the presence or absence of species appeared to be a matter of hit-and-miss, rather like terrestrial island biogeography, about which theories then abounded.

Over many subsequent years we eventually made sense of the origins of eastern Indian Ocean corals, most of which are exports from the equatorial central Indo-Pacific. The key to these migrations is, as I’ve said, the capacity of coral larvae to make long-distance journeys, something we still have a lot to learn about, but which is fundamental to all coral biogeography and evolutionary theories. That corals have a great ability to disperse is taken for granted today, but before this was realised most theories put forward on the subject read like fairy tales, with no possible basis in reality.

A sad end and a lifeline

Throughout much of the mid-1980s Kirsty had been increasingly feeling that while I was getting on with my life – travelling, having all sorts of adventures, working, travelling again – she was stuck at home bearing the brunt of family responsibilities and unable to exploit her own talents, except when in a theatre production. And when she was, she had a long drive, at night, to wherever she was rehearsing. I knew this was unfair; it was no small matter.

Coincidentally, in 1988 the husband of a schoolfriend of Kirsty’s who ran adventure tours as a hobby asked me to be the guide on a trip to the northern Great Barrier Reef for writers and photographers. As this was a perfect opportunity for Kirsty to see The Reef for the first time and to do so in her sort of company, I agreed. The trip, to take place the following year, would require some time to organise and in the meantime we took a long-planned holiday in Israel, arranged by our Israeli friends.

In those days it was still possible to travel anywhere in Israel and we did, even wandering freely around Jerusalem, which was soon to become impossible. Katie, whose health had continued to improve, enjoyed floating on the Dead Sea (as opposed to in it, due its extreme salinity) and we were all entranced by Masada, the mountain fortress where the Jews made their last stand against the Romans. Kirsty and I enjoyed the company of the Israelis, including new friends we made, but Kirsty felt that I was still working. One day I went diving at Eilat, Israel’s tiny strip of reef at the tip of the Red Sea, and received a hot reception when I inadvertently surfaced in Jordan. I also looked for fossils when we went into the desert. In that sense, I knew I was always working. I still am, and always will be; it’s who I am.

Perhaps our return home highlighted the problems Kirsty was having with me: it seemed to her that I was never there for her, and it was true. From my point of view, no amount of work or travel seemed to stop the relentless decline I’d been in since Noni’s death. Kirsty announced that she’d had enough; she decided to leave Rivendell, with me or without.

So in May that year we bought a house in town, and heartbreakingly I put Rivendell up for sale. Kirsty moved into the new house and offered me a room where I could come and go as I pleased. I tried doing that, and spent a couple of nights listening to the neighbour’s dog barking instead of possums arguing, and smelling the neighbour’s cooking instead of wattles. It felt horribly claustrophobic. I lasted only those two nights, then withdrew Rivendell from sale and went home.

Kirsty’s move wasn’t just about real estate. Our once idyllic marriage had seen such unrelenting bad times that it had become little more than a survival mechanism. I started to slide into bouts of my old pill-popping depression, taking the phone off the hook when at home in the evenings for fear someone would call. Buffer, my much loved labrador, was always at my side.

The trip to the northern Great Barrier Reef went ahead later that year. Kirsty’s friend had chartered a 200-ton converted Scottish collier, the Noel Buxton, which seemed just about due for the scrapyard. Fortunately the weather was good, so she stayed afloat and we were able to see the far northern ribbon reefs without too many of our number getting seasick. We stopped off at some of my favourite places, including Raine Island, which we could only see from the sea, as by then it was under strict protection and my special-exemption status had expired. We kept going until we reached Mer Island, where I met again some of the locals I remembered from visits long before.

It was an enjoyable trip for all aboard, which included Issie Bennett. It was always good to catch up with her, and as usual we had many long talks. I was only just beginning to realise how the freedom I’d had to be in the natural world as a child had moulded my future, and I found myself talking to a kindred spirit on that score as well. It was only then, too, that I learnt it was Mrs Collins, my old teacher, who’d persuaded my mother to take me to see Issie and who’d later told Issie about my scholarship to the University of New England.

I think Kirsty, who’d come to know Issie, would have enjoyed the trip, but she had decided against going. Being married in theory but not in practice had left us with nowhere to go, and so we agreed to separate. Divorces are never nice things, especially after twenty-two years of marriage, and more especially after all we had been through, but if anyone must have one, let it be like ours.

The Family Law Court judge was an amateur actor and had been in a production with Kirsty.

‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘you are aware that I know Kirsty personally; do you think this might influence these proceedings?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Kirsty,’ he said, ‘you are aware that I know Charlie personally; do you think this might influence these proceedings?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Well,’ said the judge, ‘you guys know what you’re doing. Done.’

Kirsty and I then had a very sad dinner. It was all rather surreal. There were no lawyers telling us what to do. Kirsty had her house and such investments as we owned; I had Rivendell and Buffer. It wasn’t until much later that Mary, forever alert to social justice, pointed out that this wasn’t a fair division. I had a career and a good salary; Kirsty had neither, for it was she, not me, who’d sacrificed a career for our children. I needed to remedy that, Mary said. I suppose these sorts of issues occur with most divorces, but Kirsty’s and mine was unusual; we were able to settle such matters ourselves, and we remain close friends.

I first met Mary Stafford-Smith when she came to my office at AIMS to talk about her PhD project – the effects of sediment on corals, which she was doing at Lizard Island on a scholarship from York University. All I remember of that conversation is Mary telling me what she thought I should think of her project. At any rate, she did most of the talking and seemed to have things well under control.

A couple of years later I was sitting at a table in the AIMS canteen having lunch. There were several other people there, including Mary, who was telling engaging stories about life on Lizard Island, and in particular her encounters with Agro, the island’s crankiest sand goanna. By the end of lunch she had me entranced. This was no small thing, as I’d been alone at Rivendell, shunning any contact with humanity, for a long time. I decided to invite her to dinner, then took a week to summon up the courage.

Shortly afterwards, Mary headed off to her mother’s home in England to write up her thesis. I visited her a few months later and she took me to see Cheveley Park, the horse stud her family had owned and where she’d lived until she was seventeen. I was flabbergasted. The grounds, the trees, the main house and the hundred-odd horseboxes (stables), complete with red-tile roofs and clock towers, were staggeringly beautiful. There were fields of freesias and daffodils everywhere, and giant cedars of Lebanon, more than nine hundred years old.

Mary immigrated permanently to Australia in the latter part of 1990. I met her at Townsville airport, a small figure almost entirely hidden behind 120 kilograms of luggage on a trolley, which she, Mary-style, had talked herself out of paying any excess baggage for. My new life had begun, one that Mary was to transform into something I could never have imagined.

Early on, she decided that we should have our own seagoing boat. It needed to be a displacement hull, not a speedboat, and one that could be towed on a trailer by our Troop Carrier. After much looking we found the perfect design, a boat with a solid fibreglass hull and diesel engine. We also found someone who could build it for us in Brisbane. Wanda (named after the fish) was a terrific little boat, incredibly seaworthy if a little slow.

She proved her worth when Mary, having obtained a post-doc scholarship at James Cook University to continue her studies on coral, spent most of her time in 1993 at the Orpheus Island research station doing experiments. Her field work was done from Wanda, with me turning up at regular intervals, helping here and there and enjoying the working holiday.

This was a good period for my own work too. In 1992, with a monograph on Japanese corals published, I followed with another on coral biogeography, which brought together all that was known on the subject at the time.21 Mary helped a lot with these, as well as several other studies I was doing. She had computer skills I could only dream of, and in return I helped her with my knowledge of corals and with technical aspects of her experiments. She was becoming a good critic of anything I wrote – we forged an extraordinary working partnership on top of a loving personal one. I had a guardian angel somewhere, even though it had a lousy track record.

Everything seemed rosy indeed until, in passing, Mary mentioned the subject of children. She wanted children! With all I’d been through, wasn’t this the last thing I wanted? But after a rethink I realised I had to stop the tragedies of the past from dominating my future, so the ensuing conversation was brief. A short time later, Mary’s pregnancy test was positive. Another new beginning had just begun, but in the meantime we had a journey to make.

Our Troop Carrier wasn’t just good for towing Wanda, and Mary was keen to see the outback, especially after hearing of my travels there as a student. Back then I’d met up with several groups of Aboriginal people in very remote places and made a point of talking to the elders about their spiritual affinity with the land. I imagined I understood that, at least a little, for it seemed not so different from how I felt about my own world. And so in the winter of 1994, with Mary six months pregnant, we teamed up with her brother Mark and his partner Jenny, who reassuringly was a doctor specialising in obstetrics, and made a seven-week pilgrimage along the Canning Stock Route, which runs inland from the Great Victoria Desert in the south to the Great Sandy Desert in the north.

At the northern end of the Canning we farewelled Mark and Jenny and continued on by ourselves to the southern border of the King Leopold Ranges Conservation Park. We stayed there a week, camping under the stars among the many branches of the Drysdale River, at least 100 kilometres in all directions from any other human and perhaps where only Aboriginal people had ventured before. It would have taken months for me to get my fill of that lovely peaceful place. I sat and watched the river for hours: a freshwater crocodile might come and go, and if I was really still, all sorts of other wildlife came close by – jabirus and even a small mob of emus. I regularly cooled off in the river, freshwater crocodiles being harmless (something Mary took a degree of convincing about), then explored a little or did nothing. Unhappily, doing nothing wasn’t what it once was. Thoughts persistently invaded my peace: I was losing the gift of not thinking, and felt much the poorer for it.

Our daughter Eviie was born in December, not long after our return. Following a brief period of anxiety on my part that it could all happen again, we had a time of celebration the likes of which I hadn’t felt in many a year.

My sister Jan lived to see Eviie, but only for a couple of months. Fourteen years had passed since Noni’s death, yet Jan was still dealing with her private sorrows by drowning them in alcohol. I went to see her in Sydney soon after getting back from our trip and it was obvious to me, if not to her, that she was in a bad way. I persuaded her to sell her house and move to Rivendell where we could look after her. She became terminally ill while with us and died after two weeks in hospital. She was fifty-seven. What a waste of a life. It was only in the last few years, after she’d moved out of the family home, that she had a chance to do anything she herself wanted to do.