The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (26 page)

Saville-Kent captures the color and multiplicity of Barrier Reef fish in
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities
, 1893.

As many reviewers predicted, William’s book made the Great Barrier Reef a place of celebration rather than notoriety, revealing its astonishing beauty and diversity to people with no idea of the existence of this tropical underwater world, and countering the negative perceptions arising from the stories of Eliza Fraser, Curtis, and de Rougemont. William’s photography also helped make coral biology an intriguing subject, and when Maurice Yonge and his Cambridge expedition went to the Reef (the story of which is to come in chapter 10), Saville-Kent’s was the only scientific book about the Reef they’d ever seen.

*   *   *

While completing the book, William had been offered a three-year contract by the West Australian government to work as a Commissioner of Fisheries. Leaving homesick-prone Mary Ann behind in England, he replicated his scientific and economic successes there, including publishing a pioneering study of the ecology of the Abrolhos Reef system, to the west of Geraldton. That Constance was working in Perth as a nursing sister for part of this time was possibly an additional attraction. On returning to Britain in 1895, William produced a similarly sumptuous record of his West Australian experience called
The Naturalist in Australia
(1897).

Great Barrier Reef Fishes
, in
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities
, 1893

Settling down to retire in Britain wasn’t easy after those years of tropical adventure and glamour. He and Mary Ann moved through a succession of houses in Chiswick, Croydon, and coastal Hampshire. For a time William also haunted the musty clubs of retired Anglo-colonial gentlemen, and lectured to amateur buffs at the Bournemouth Natural Science Society. But this all felt too superannuated for someone still harboring unfulfilled dreams and a fierce nostalgia. “Is [it] to be wondered,” he asked in the conclusion to his
Naturalist in Australia
, “that emigrants of … but a few year’s standing only … [in] Australia’s prolific soil and sunny clime, find it difficult to rehabilitate themselves contentedly amidst the grudgingly responsive fallows, predominating fogs and murky skies of their native land?”
50

His hints in the pages of
The Great Barrier Reef
about the potential riches of pearl cultivation eventually found some takers. In 1904 William returned to Thursday Island in the employ of the Lever Pacific Plantations Company, to transport fifteen hundred pearl oysters to the Cook Islands for cultivation. Although this experiment failed, his secret work on artificial pearls apparently made better progress. Returning to Queensland in 1906, he formed a pearl-culturing company with British and Australian financial backing, and leased a section of the Albany Passage adjacent to the Jardines. Bootles, who assisted with the new experiments, would later claim that William did actually succeed in culturing freestanding artificial pearls, but if he did he never reaped the rewards, which went to Japanese rivals.
51

William Saville-Kent’s unpatented pearl-cultivation method was one of two great secrets he carried to his grave when he died suddenly, on October 11, 1908, near Bournemouth, of a blocked bowel. Mary Ann sold all his books, papers, collections, and menagerie the following year. When read by others, his notes on culturing artificial pearls proved unintelligible.

Still, someone cared enough to decorate William’s gravestone with a symbol that he would surely have valued above any other—a collection of Great Barrier Reef corals. It would be nice to think that Constance put them there, but she never returned to Britain. As Ruth Emilie Kaye, she became an esteemed nursing sister and matron, and in her hundredth year received a letter of congratulation from the Queen, before dying on April 10, 1944 in Strathfield, Sydney.

Having worked in typhoid tents, a leper hospital, and a reformatory school for girls, Constance can surely be said to have redeemed herself. If the Reef could speak, perhaps it would say the same of her brother William.

8

PARADISE

Ted Banfield’s Island Retreat

I
N 1908 READERS IN THE WESTERN WORLD
were introduced to another publishing sensation from Australia, in the form of a new version of an old myth.
The Confessions of a Beachcomber
, written by E. J. Banfield, told the story of two modern-day Robinson Crusoes who’d abandoned civilization to live on a small tropical island within the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Dunk Island, named by Captain Cook after an Admiralty dignitary of the day, was one of the Family group of islands and islets around 110 miles north of Townsville and two miles from the mainland coast.
1

Edmund James (Ted) Banfield, a Townsville journalist of forty-four, and his wife, Bertha, a music teacher aged thirty-six, first visited the deserted island of three and a half square miles in mid-September 1896, while hunting for a site on which to build a getaway cabin. Like many Reef islands close to shore, Dunk had once been part of the mainland, and it was mountainous, wooded, and picturesque. Though it lacked the swaying coconut palms emblematic of the South Seas, it featured a fringing coral reef, a white sandy beach, and tall cliffs covered in trees and plants. A few hundred yards inland grew a forest of vine-entangled bloodwoods, Moreton Bay ash, swamp mahoganies, “Gin-gees,” and native figs. Varieties of acacia, pandanus, and flowering hibiscus shrubs edged the strand, and green webs of native cabbage scrabbled down the beach.
2

No sooner had the Banfields landed on the crescent bay at the northern end of the island than a canoe appeared, paddled by an Aboriginal man called Tom, one of Dunk’s few living original inhabitants. Tom, who had been born on the island and belonged to the now scattered and fragmented Bandjin and Djiru clans, had somehow learned of the Banfields’ intended visit and come over from the mainland with his mother-in-law, wife Nellie, and their nursing infant. To this tall, burly man with ribbons of scarification across his chest, this island was Coonanglebah, his lifelong estate, clan hunting ground, and Dreaming place. He knew its legends and habitat in microscopic detail, though he couldn’t lay claim to a square inch of it, and he conducted Ted proudly on a tour of the island’s main attractions, including its priceless freshwater streams.

Tom of Coonanglebah (Dunk Island), c. 1898
(John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)

Entranced, Ted stood on a long, sheltered plateau above the strand and ritually fired a rifle bullet into a bloodwood tree to mark the spot where they would one day build a house. Clouds of colored butterflies hovered over the beach, inspiring him to name the bay Brammo, after the poetic word for butterfly used by Palm Island Aborigines. Overhead, the trees shivered with colonies of white nutmeg pigeons and metallic starlings. This single visit was enough, Ted later claimed, to force an immediate and “revolutionary change” in the couple’s outlook and future plans.
3

Almost exactly a year later they returned to the island for a six-month trial stay, which, though it extended into years, was initially less than idyllic. During the intervening months they’d acquired a lease from the Queensland government for 128 acres of the best land, but Ted’s mental and physical health had disintegrated. Small and slender at the best of times, his weight had plunged to an alarming 116 pounds and he needed chloroform to sleep at night. Diagnosed with the wasting disease phthisis by his Townsville doctor, he’d been given between three and six months to live. This stark sentence precipitated his and Bertha’s decision to retreat to the island.
4

When the Banfields landed at Brammo Bay on September 28, 1897, their new servant Tom had to carry Ted from the boat to a blanket that had been specially laid down above the tideline. “Ready to faint from weariness and sickness,” he lay there longing to be home among the comforts of Townsville, while Tom and a hired workman lugged all the provisions, tools, and materials up to the plateau where the couple hoped to build a hut.

The following morning, Ted later claimed, he awoke to “a perfect combination of invigorating elements. The cloudless sky, the clean air, the shining sea, the green folded slopes of Tam o’ Shanter point opposite, the cleanliness of the sand, the sweet odors of the eucalypts and the dew-laden grass, the luminous purple of the islands to the southeast; the range of mountains to the west and northwest, and our own fair tract—awaiting and inviting … Physic was never so eagerly swallowed nor wrought a speedier or surer cure.”
5

Despite this miraculous regeneration, forging a new way of life took a little longer. Ted and Bertha initially slept in tents and ate Tom’s daily supplies of fresh fish, pigeon, and scrub fowl under the nearby bloodwood tree. Though still “in a frail physical state,” Ted helped his two workers clear an area of scrub, bolt together the cedar home, and begin work on a kitchen and veranda extension.
6

They felled a bloodwood and a bean tree, inched the logs to the site with a crowbar, and sawed them into rough planks. For foundations they mixed local stone with sand and tar. They scrounged posts and ridgepoles from the jibboom and masts of two wrecked ships that had drifted up onto the beach. The roof was made from cheap corrugated iron, the floor surfaced with beaten clay. And Ted, despite his “blistered and bleeding hands, aching muscles, and stiff joints,” molded an assortment of twisted jungle timbers into crazy but effective furniture. The overall result, he claimed, was a tropical counterpart of the log cabin that his guru, the American nature writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, had built on the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts around fifty years earlier.
7

Ted boasted that the shack offered no violation to “the genius of the Isle.” It was “a little shambling structure of rough slabs,” deliberately “unobtrusive” and “hidden in a wilderness of leaves.” He and Bertha shared the interior with a multitude of geckos, spiders, grubs, and swooping bats, who treated it as a type of cave: “the low walls, unaspiring roof, and sheltering veranda [are] so contrived as to create, not tickling, fidgety drafts but smooth currents … [that] flush each room so sweetly and softly that no perceptible difference between the air under the roof and of the forest is at any time perceptible.”
8

To match the hut, Ted began evolving a lifestyle like Thoreau’s, albeit a tropical version. On an island in the Great Barrier Reef, he said, “the career of the Beachcomber” offered “the closest possible ‘return to Nature.’” All year round Dunk provided “the tonic of the sea and the Majesty [of] the Sun,” which made for one of the most benign and equable climates on the globe. Influenza and all the other debilitating physical and mental sicknesses of the city, he claimed, were unknown. The odd bout of malaria troubled the couple less than the common cold. Clothes were hardly needed in any season—Ted wore only shorts and a large hat to shade his beaky nose and cowboy-style mustache. Bronzed and barefooted, he soon acquired the lean, muscular physique of a sailor. His weight climbed to 142 pounds, and he found he could labor in the sun all morning and swim in the clear warm waters of Brammo Bay all afternoon.

He felt that his entire sensorium had been revitalized. Scents of flowers, shrubs, birds, and marine creatures beguiled his nose. His ears became attuned to “the hum of bees and beetles, the fluty plaint of a painted pigeon far in the gloom, the furtive scamper of scrub fowl among leaves made tender by decay, the splash of startled fish in the shadows.” As a beachcomber, he’d cast off civilization’s discontents.
9

At the time when Ted was using it, the term “beachcomber” was generally a pejorative one. It had originated in, or at least become widely applied to, the South Seas, by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, and it described feckless, opportunist, hobolike characters who foraged for goods washed up from shipwrecks and lived off the sale of them. Ted’s use of the term was partly ironic, and partly a reshaping to denote an altogether different type of person, one who relied on the provisions of nature to live a simple but ethical, aesthetic, and sensual life.