The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (44 page)

But much had changed when we returned a dozen years later. Although Eric Deeral was too frail and ill to see us, his legacy was everywhere apparent. Years of patient work as an MP and elder had transformed the social landscape. Much was also owed to Eric’s extraordinary niece, Alberta Hornsby (née Gibson). Alberta is a phenomenon: a small woman with a gentle voice that belies a granitic determination. Listening to her uncle’s quiet wisdom, she realized that beneath the one-dimensional story of the encounter between blacks and whites were complex layers of historical and contemporary meaning, within which lay the seeds of a renewal of pride and respect for today’s Guugu Yimithirr and Kuuku Yulanji.
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So Alberta became a historian, and a myth buster for black and white alike. Her reinterpretation of the encounter came not just from scouring books and documents, but also from patient talks with elders, and discussions with scholars at conferences and seminars across the country.

As we filmed, Alberta and I sat on the ground at Grassy Hill, the stony rise that overlooks Cooktown. Below us were the snakelike folds of the Endeavour River and the distant waters spotted with shallow green smears of coral. This was the spot from which Alberta’s ancestors had first spied the three-masted
Endeavour
limping through the shoals to the riverbank. I asked her about the aspects of the encounter that puzzled me, in particular the sequence that led the Guugu Yimithirr to first ignore, then fight, and ultimately make peace with their invaders. Her informed explanation of the mutual bewilderment of the Europeans and the Bama has, I hope, deepened my own account. The Bama, she said, regard the encounter as a tragedy of misunderstanding, one that yet contains potential for change. Eric Deeral’s knowledge and insight, for example, are now incorporated in Cooktown’s annual reenactment. Since 2010 the Discovery Festival has gone from being a white bacchanal to a genuine cross-cultural event. The local policeman must be bemused.

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By the time we waded onto Dunk Island for our next bout of filming, gale-force winds were driving sheets of rain along Brammo Beach. This seemed appropriate, for Ted Banfield’s paradise isle now looked like a First World War battlefield. The luxury resort had been devastated over two days in February 2011 by Cyclone Yasi, which had ripped the fronts off apartments, peeled back roofs, twisted the steel frames of the function hall, and dumped tons of sand into the swimming pool. Palm trees had been stripped to stalks, and the nearby forest canopy decapitated. Yasi had made a mockery of Hideaway Resorts’ “cyclone-rated buildings to category five,” themselves a response to Cyclone Larry, which had inflicted twenty million Australian dollars’ worth of damage on the same site only four years earlier.

We were given generous access to the surviving amenities by the thoughtful general manager of the resort and his remnant staff, who were still struggling to bring order to the chaos. The site was up for sale, but who, we wondered, would buy a place so firmly on the flight path of successive and ever more ferocious cyclones.

We’d come to meet Susi Kirk, who was helping out at the resort but lived apart from it, in a storm-battered mudbrick house. She’d arrived in the early 1970s, a twentysomething swept up in the same romantic currents that had carried John Busst and other “escape artists” to the beautiful Family group of southern Reef islands. In 1974 the charismatic Bruce Arthur, who’d once been an Olympic wrestler and was now a tapestry maker, began an artists’ colony on Dunk. It found buyers for its work among the resort’s customers and added a splash of bohemia to the island’s natural attractions. Bruce died in 1989, leaving Susi as guardian of his and his predecessors’ legacies.

Susi roared up on an ancient motorbike with a chainsaw, crowbar, and several muddy shovels in a trailer. She exuded enthusiasm and practicality. She was currently caring for most of the island’s abandoned livestock, clearing branch-clogged pathways, organizing transport for workers who wanted to escape to the mainland, and providing homemade cookies for those who stayed behind.

Wherever Susi went, you could feel morale lifting. She was passionate about the continuing spirit of Ted Banfield, and guided us by boat to one of his hidden places, the enchanting Cave of Falling Stars. Her faith in the island’s natural resilience echoed a moment in 1918, when Bertha Banfield brushed aside Ted’s cyclone-shattered pessimism by showing him fresh buds growing from a torn tree stump. When I reminded Susi of this she told a story of her own, about putting so much cement on a crumbling mudbrick dome left to her by Bruce Arthur that she’d unwittingly turned it into a bunker. Providentially, this had afforded her protection from both Larry and Yasi: “And it will cope with the next one just as well.”

After we’d left, we heard from the manager that Susi had spoken so passionately to a visiting New Zealand family that they’d decided to buy the resort, and rebuild it in a smaller, eco-friendly and more cyclone-resistant form. I was again reminded of Bertha’s rallying words to Ted in 1918: “So let’s get the clocks going. There is work to be done.”
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The northern Cape York town of Lockhart River, the last of our filmsites, was no reputed paradise. Home to an Aboriginal community of seven to eight hundred people from five different language groups, it is cut off from road access during the wet season, and its inhabitants have a life expectancy twenty years lower than the Australian average.

Among these inhabitants are the descendants of the Uutaalnganu-speaking people who rescued the cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier and transformed him into Anco of the Sandbeach country. Like so many Aboriginal clans, this one, too, had been severed from its heartland, its members forcibly intermingled with others when the Anglican mission was disbanded around 1968. The remnant mission community was moved inland, to what has now become the Lockhart River township, on land adjacent to an old mining airstrip.

Once a byword for drunkenness and violence, the town had, since 2001, become a dry community, with penalties for the sale, acquisition, or consumption of alcohol. Its artists, especially a group known as the Lockhart River Art Gang, were prominent in the extraordinary renaissance of Aboriginal art. And the community’s mayor, Wayne Butcher, a dynamic man of Uutaalnganu descent, had masterminded a drive to restore the ancient coastal culture of the Pama Malngkana, or Sandbeach people.

In Anco’s time the Pama Malngkana were brilliant hunters and fishers in the Barrier Reef lagoon, and later that century they provided the trepang and trochus-shell industries with skilled luggermen. But resource exhaustion and the supplanting of pearl-shell buttons by plastics put an end to all this. When founding a community-based fishing industry, Wayne and his colleagues had thus to start from scratch. They had to find new and sustainable produce, which they did in the form of rock lobsters and mud crabs, and also master new methods of catching, preserving, and transporting the produce to distant markets.

It was a tough undertaking, with numerous early setbacks, but Wayne was sustained as much by its social effects as its profits: “They are a different bunch of men when you take them out … [o]n a few days camping, chasing crays, their work ethics change, they change personally.”
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One other vein of cultural renewal at Lockhart River took us by surprise. We checked into the modest timber units that are the town’s visitor accommodation, and there on a stand in the foyer stood a well-thumbed copy of Stephanie Anderson’s wonderful translation of Anco’s story,
Pelletier: The Forgotten Castaway of Cape York
. Books were not much in evidence at Lockhart River, but we were to see well-used copies of this one at three separate localities.

Further confirmation of the story’s impact came early the following morning, when Wayne was forced to put a quota on the number of locals joining us for a filmed beachside discussion of Anco. In the end we were rationed to just three; otherwise, as Wayne pointed out, Lockhart River local government would cease to function.

Dora, Gabriel, and Patrick were Uutaalnganu descendants who identified deeply with Anco’s story. Gabriel’s late grandfather, Alick Naiga, whose photograph appears in Anderson’s book, passed on his knowledge of Sandbeach times to the anthropologist Athol Chase, who wrote a chapter on the Pama Malngkana for the new edition. Grandfather Alick had displayed a direct link to Anco in the form of identical initiation scarifications on his chest.

Dora, too, knew the details of Anco’s rescue intimately. Through her we came to realize just how vital this story has become for today’s Lockhart River peoples, offering as it does a portal into a world they thought they had lost: a rich, complex way of life that a combination of mission doctrine and government hostility sought to eradicate. Stephanie’s translation of the book has revived memories of heartland, kin, lore, and language, and is indeed a source of hope.

Of course, I don’t pretend that these three uplifting episodes can stand for the future of the Reef as a whole, but they do symbolize for me the resilience of the human heart, something I’ve encountered so often in writing this book. And ultimately we need both heart and mind if we are to meet the challenges that confront this unique country of sea, island, and coral that we call the Great Barrier Reef.

This brings me back to Charlie Veron, with whom this epilogue began, for nobody better embodies these twin properties. No single individual has explored the Reef more widely, no mind has engaged more trenchantly with its long history, and no heart has felt its present and future plight more intensely.

And in fact, nature offers us a model in this regard: the magical, reef-creating symbiosis between microscopic algae and a tiny polyp. We might see the algae as the heart that generates the energy its partner depends upon, and the polyp as the mind, having a purposive direction to build their joint production of coral. And also to protect it in the face of torrential forces of destruction—breakers, coral-feeders, cyclones, sediment, pollution, mining, overfishing, and water that is too hot and too acidic to bear.

It is a symbiosis which, as we have seen, has survived for some 240 million years, but which will split should those harsh forces so dictate. If anything can inspire us to prevent this, it’s that very partnership itself, between two of the tiniest and most fragile creatures in the sea.

NOTES

PROLOGUE: A COUNTRY OF THE MIND

1. LABYRINTH: CAPTAIN COOK’S ENTRAPMENT