The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (40 page)

Here is how Charlie Veron came to know about the prospective extinction of the Reef, and why I think he thinks we should care.

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One day in 1951, John Veron, a second-grade boy of six at East Lindfield primary school, in the bushy northern suburbs of Sydney, presented his nature-loving teacher Mrs. Collins with his contribution to the ritual of show-and-tell. Holding up to the class his tableau of dead frogs, spiders, and wasps fastened onto cardboard, she admiringly dubbed him “Mr. Darwin.” A few weeks later, when ordering him to take a jar of putrid marine worms out of the classroom, she reinforced the title, “Mr. Charles Darwin.” His classmates, with the usual flair of children for seizing on difference, instantly turned this into the nickname Charlie, chanted with a rising pitch on the first syllable and a falling inflection on the second—Char
lie
, Char
lie
. Though neither he nor his taunters had any idea who Charles Darwin was, the boy was branded for life.

Mrs. Collins, to her credit, didn’t lose interest in her protégé. Hearing later of Charlie’s concern that a newly published text,
Australian Seashores
, had failed to mention some of the marine worms in his collection, she urged the boy’s mother to take him to visit the amiable coauthor of this book, Isobel Bennett, at the University of Sydney’s zoology department. Awed by the tall, white-coated lady wearing huge spectacles and smelling of formalin, Charlie was ecstatic when she used his nickname and praised his knowledge of the specimens tipped into her enamel tray.
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We may guess that Isobel Bennett felt some instinctive affinity with this earnest, self-taught little boy. She loved the seaside world, and was a woman in a male-dominated department who’d begun her career as a research assistant with no formal qualifications, only her amateur enthusiasm. Their meeting was portentous. “Issie” would become as loyal a friend and patron to Charlie as the kindly Cambridge botanist John Henslow had been to Charles Darwin.
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But these were Charlie’s last positive memories of school. Like Darwin, he was moved for his middle and senior years to a more famous private establishment that made his life a misery. Charlie’s experiences at Barker College in Sydney verged on the traumatic. He slumped to near the bottom of the class in most subjects, loathed what he perceived as the pompous senility of the teachers, and acquired asthma and a stammer. His retreat into himself was interrupted only by flares of temper at bullying schoolmates and by covert rebellions against his teachers.

The boy didn’t even compensate with especial prowess on the sports field: Charlie was indifferent to the manly activities of football and cricket. His ex-brigadier father had tolerated his son’s love of nature, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment at all these signs of the boy’s inability—an attitude sometimes echoed by Charlie’s otherwise loving mother. Even now, Charlie cannot recall a single word of praise from either parent throughout his childhood.
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One antidote to the misery didn’t last. Young Charlie developed an intense reverence for the designer God who’d given mankind the lovely gifts of nature. At the age of thirteen, however, he experienced a counter-conversion. A classmate lent him a glossy journal article on the missing link, which summarized Darwin’s hypothesis that humans had evolved naturally, without divine assistance, from apelike ancestors. Charlie’s rational mind, steeped in naturalist knowledge, recognized the idea as irresistibly true. He was appalled that it had been kept from him all these years. Tearful confrontations with the school chaplain and headmaster confirmed the conspiracy. After being confined to home for several weeks to regain his mental health, he returned to school as an implacable evolutionist.
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Like Darwin, Charlie drew his deepest consolation from an inborn love of nature. What others saw as a hobby, he knew to be a lifeline. Nature offered him everything: sensual and aesthetic delights, physical tests and thrills, intellectual and imaginative mysteries, and emotional escape and comfort. He found peace and pleasure walking the beaches of Collaroy, searching the rock pools of Long Reef, riding his bike along the bush tracks of Ku-ring-gai Chase reserve, wrestling his dog Jinka, labeling specimens for his garage museum, and hand-feeding bits of crab to his blue-ringed octopus, Ocky, in happy ignorance of the creature’s lethal venom.
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Just as Dr. Darwin had decided that his son’s pedestrian academic record made him suitable only to become a Church of England clergyman, so Charlie Veron’s parents decided that the boy’s poor school results destined him to become a bank clerk. Chance—that crucial element in natural selection—rescued both boys. Charles Darwin’s opportunity came when his friend Henslow was asked to find a gentleman companion to entertain naval captain Robert Fitzroy on the HMS
Beagle
’s circumnavigation of the world. Charlie Veron’s luck was more outlandish still. The New South Wales government had decided on this single occasion, in the final year of Charlie’s schooling, to indulge an experiment by an educational psychologist to test whether IQ results could predict future university success better than did school-leaving exams. To Charlie’s astonishment he topped a select group who were subjected to a rigorous series of competitive tests. This earned him a scholarship to attend any university in the country.
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*   *   *

Charlie Veron would have loved Darwin’s chance of an informal scientific apprenticeship sailing around the world, exploring wild lands and investigating puzzles of nature. Given that those days had passed, he opted for a modern equivalent. To the bafflement of his scholarship administrators, he asked to enroll as a science student at the small rustic University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. The university was situated in the middle of the crisp, sunny country that had imprinted itself on Judith Wright’s imagination, and it helped to heal Charlie. His asthma vanished and he found he could run for miles through the bush with exhilarating freedom. He made boisterous friendships at his all-male college, he discovered the sublime music of Schubert and Liszt, and he joined the university’s Exploration Society.

I loved being alone in the wilderness, going long distances, constantly talking to myself in my mind, thinking about all I saw, and soaking up the beauty of one place after another. Every day I would make a point of finding a quiet spot, preferably beside a stream, sitting down, remain absolutely still, and gradually let myself stop thinking. I would be aware of the light on the water, maybe a dragonfly hovering or a cricket chirping, but I wouldn’t think about it. This might last for twenty minutes, then a thought would come into my head, and I would come to as if out of a trance. I would get up relaxed and rested as though I had slept for hours.
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An ardent sea lover, Charlie overcame the disadvantages of living inland by hitchhiking to the nearest islands at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. On his first trip to the Reef he stayed at beautiful Heron Island, where he was proud to show some French underwater photographers where to find giant manta rays on the sandy floor of the Wistaria Reef channel. A few years later he followed up this initiation by camping with ten student friends for two weeks in the solitude of Zoe Bay, on the forested island of Hinchinbrook, near the Palm Island group. They swam naked in the warm clear waters and tested their courage by climbing the steep side of the island’s soaring 3,675-foot-high mountain.
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Apart from a newly arrived associate professor, Harold Heatwole, the university’s department of zoology offered little direction or guidance. This suited Charlie perfectly: he treated formal research requirements as chances to extend his recreational naturalism. Studying glider possums for his honors thesis introduced him to the eucalyptus forests of Dorrigo and to the bush skills of its foresters. Working on the temperature regulation of lizards for a master’s degree was less stimulating, but he earned some part-time income collecting snakes for the department—at least until he secretly released all the snakes, rather than see them die from the defective conditions of their confinement.

Unusually, he was also hired as a teaching fellow to run the diverse courses of academics who were away on sabbatical. Again, Charlie didn’t mind: teaching across the whole departmental curriculum, including genetics and physiology, proved an unexpected joy. Even so, he felt devoid of scientific ambition—apart from a hazy longing to imitate Darwin’s adventurous colleague Alfred Russel Wallace by exploring the Amazon.
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Falling in love with a fellow student, Kirsty Mackenzie, deferred Charlie’s jungle dream. Wanting to remain at university with her, he began to scratch around for a PhD topic that might attract three further years of university funding. While jogging one misty morning he noticed that blue dragonflies had turned gray in the dawn. As the fog lifted, he watched them “orient themselves to the rising sun” and turn back to blue. Charlie had found his subject. The university’s head of entomology was known to love dragonflies, so Charlie grabbed his chance. He became an entomologist, with enough funding and equipment to develop a thesis. He taught himself to monitor dragonfly eye functions with an electron microscope; to record changes in color, temperature, and behavior; and to use a freeze microtome to examine minute slices of frozen tissue. Balancing this intensive lab work with time in the field, he spent hours at a lagoon just outside of Armidale, observing his swift-flying subjects.
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But dragonfly work, though intriguing, didn’t satisfy Charlie’s craving for exploring nature. Early in 1967 he decided to escape thesis tedium by taking a rudimentary scuba diving lesson. With the shouted advice of “Don’t come up too quickly or hold your breath” ringing in his ears, he plunged into the sea off Cronulla in southern Sydney, to discover a new state of being: “The dive was fantastic! I could see at least six foot, mostly rock and mud, but the feeling of being weightless in a hidden world was thrilling and a little frightening.”
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Other life-changing experiences quickly followed this underwater epiphany: marriage to Kirsty in 1968 was followed by the joyful birth of a daughter, Noni, in 1970. Yet Charlie’s hypnotic new hobby stuck through all these excitements, to the extent that he and Kirsty spent part of their honeymoon gazing at corals off Heron Island.

Two years later Charlie took a formal diving ticket—a qualification required in order to scuba dive—and then set up a scuba club among his fellow students. The half-dozen founder members based themselves at Coffs Harbor, where the university’s zoology department owned a fibro shed and a fourteen-foot tin runabout. Cramming themselves into the boat one day, they decided to expand their horizons by taking the one-and-a-quarter-mile journey to the Solitary Islands. Here, diving off South West Solitary, Charlie and his friends made their first marine discovery. Nestled beneath the rocky shore, in a zone assumed to be well south of the tropics, they found an embayment of tropical corals “growing in abundance.” Perhaps influenced by the feats of Eddie Hegerl’s student divers at Ellison Reef, they decided to survey the Solitary Islands corals as a way of pressing for the area to become a marine nature reserve.
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The rudimentary nature of their diving techniques and their slender knowledge of marine species marred the mission, yet it would have incalculable implications. The student who’d been allocated the task of collecting the corals had to drop out, so Charlie took his place. Without realizing it Charlie had found his future subject. Not long after this, at a time when his dragonfly thesis seemed in the doldrums, he rather desperately cited this amateur coral survey in response to an advertisement from James Cook University (JCU), Townsville, for a postdoctoral scientist with scuba diving abilities to work on the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
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While he was waiting to hear back from James Cook University, the disparate strands of his PhD thesis suddenly came together, and in 1972 he found himself at the Fourteenth International Congress of Entomology in Canberra receiving a prize for the best student paper, based on the findings of his dragonfly work. Four offers of postdoctoral scholarships immediately followed, including, to his astonishment, one from James Cook University in answer to his application: Charlie had been the only candidate. A prestigious Canadian university led the field of scholarship offers with an enticing package, so Charlie accepted, writing half-dazed letters to decline the others. Suddenly he’d metamorphosed into respectable Dr. J. E. N. Veron, entomologist and academic-to-be.

Then the doubts began to surface. Did he really want to join the kind of university environment where postgraduates had to compete fiercely against one another, as well as guard against their ideas being stolen? And the thought of losing his independence was horrible: he’d “just be a cog in a machine and not free to follow my own nose.” Thinking guiltily that he should at least take JCU’s advice to complete his Solitary Islands coral report, Charlie visited the University of New England library to find only one pertinent book on the shelves. It was
The Great Barrier Reef
, written by his old mentor Isobel Bennett. As he flicked through the pages, he couldn’t help thinking that “it was full of photos of the place I had just said I was not going to work in, work that would be all mine, in a place that was so important, and so beautiful and so challenging.”

He quickly scribbled two letters, to Canada and to Townsville, each asking to reverse his previous decision. With this one impulsive action, Charlie Veron triggered three bizarre outcomes. He was assailed by “a blubbering barrel of fury” for giving up a career as an entomologist in favor of “a diving holiday”; he became a marine biologist overnight, without having ever attended a lecture in the subject; and he became the Great Barrier Reef’s first full-time scientific researcher.
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