Authors: Bill Bryson
The setting could hardly be bettered. It stands on a big bay, sheltered by long white sandbars. I walked to the front through warm end-of-day sunshine. The Abrolhos Islands were sixty kilometres out to sea – well out of sight of the mainland – but I could clearly see, only a couple of miles down the coast, the headland called Red Bluff, where the two mutineers were marooned.
As I strolled along the front, two things caught my notice – that a few hundred yards out in the bay a boat, half sunk, was being towed very slowly into the harbour through a narrow channel between the sandbars, and that crowds of people were gathering to have a look. The biggest cluster of onlookers was on the jetty at what appeared to be the commercial side of the harbour about a mile away. Here on the resort side of the harbour there were lots of people, too – sitting on the bonnets of cars parked along the beach, gazing from the balconies of seafront homes and apartment houses, coming out of shops and pubs to stand and watch. About it all, there was a strange, almost eerie silence.
I asked a man sitting on a car bonnet what was going on. ‘Oh, it’s a fishing boat that got holed on a reef last night,’ he explained. The accident had happened at two thirty in the morning, far out to sea, and for a time it looked as if the boat might be in serious peril. To add to the tension, the skipper had his seven-year-old son with
him – evidently taken out with him as a treat. Three other local fishing boats had gone out to rescue them. I looked at my watch. They’d have been at it for sixteen hours by now. I remarked on this to my informant and he gave a small smile, as if in apology. ‘It’s been a long day for the town,’ he said. ‘We’ve been on a bit of a knife-edge. Still, it seems to have turned out all right.’
Kalbarri has a year-round population of 1,500, and I would guess that two-thirds of the town was there. As the boat came through the sandbars and its safety seemed assured at last, people from all sides of the harbour clapped warmly, as if welcoming home the winner of a regatta, and called encouragement. I thought that was wonderful – that a whole town would turn out to watch a stricken local fishing boat brought in. If I handed out fivers, I’m sure I couldn’t find a thousand people to watch me limp into port after a night of peril. I decided I liked Kalbarri very much.
In the morning, I rose early and drove the couple of miles along the coast to Red Bluff Beach where I had been told I would find a cairn marking the spot where the two naughty Dutchmen had been left to their lonely fate. It was a dramatic spot – a very large rock platform bashed by waves, which threw spray everywhere. Leading off to one side was a long duney beach marked at intervals with signs saying: ‘Caution – Dangerous Rips’. The ocean was a bright turquoise, and the long beach was being pounded by a fury of big waves.
I had a good hunt around the area but couldn’t find the cairn anywhere, and there was no one out at this hour to ask except for a couple way down the beach exercising a bouncy dog. It hardly mattered. Whoever built the cairn
had to have done so long after the fact and was almost certainly guessing. So I just enjoyed the sunshine and sea-freshened air, and realized with a touch of surprise that the idea of being stranded here wasn’t entirely without appeal. It was a lovely spot. The sea was lavishly fruitful and the hills behind abounded in materials for building. Looes and Pelgrom – again for mysterious reasons – were quite generously endowed by Pelsaert. They were left with a small boat, some food and water, a few tools and some trinkets with which to trade with the natives, if any could be found. There were certainly far worse places in the world to see out your days – not least a fetid and malarial dungeon in Batavia, which was their alternative fate. Assuming cordial relations with the natives, you could make quite a nice life for yourself here.
I was quite taken with the notion – not least because it was so patently a real possibility here. The coastline of Western Australia north from Perth is astoundingly beautiful and almost entirely untouched by development. Beyond Kalbarri there is not a single town for some 200 miles to Carnarvon, and just one side road to the sea – the one I was heading for at Shark Bay. Beyond Carnarvon, it’s much the same for another 1,800 miles to Darwin – just a coastline of undisturbed splendour dotted at distant intervals with small communities. Altogether, Western Australia has some 7,800 miles of coastline and only about three dozen coastal communities, even including those along the south-western peninsula from which I had just come.
That is, of course, why it took so long to discover the stromatolites at Shark Bay. Though they are there on the edge of an accessible shell beach, for any fool to see, they weren’t noticed by anyone until 1954, and not identified
by science for another decade. But then with almost 23,000 miles of Australian coastline to investigate, it takes time to get to it all.
From Kalbarri it was forty miles back to the North West Coastal Highway – there is still just the one road in and out – and then another hundred or so miles on to Shark Bay. In two and a half hours I passed just three other cars and a solitary barrelling road train. At one point I saw a couple of mysterious dots in the road far ahead. It turned out to be two workmen, digging a hole in the middle of the highway and protected from either direction by a single orange plastic cone placed in the centre of the road about five feet from where they worked. This was, you understand, the main west coast highway. It was an arresting reminder of just how far from anywhere I was. This was about as far from the main population centres as you can get in Australia. By road from where I was now, it was over 4,000 kilometres to Sydney and nearer 5,000 to Brisbane. Even Alice Springs, the nearest town to the east, was 4,000 highway kilometres away, because of the way the roads ran. At length, in the middle of a featureless nowhere, I came to the turnoff for Shark Bay. I followed a newly paved side road for a few miles to another, unpaved side road, which passed through a marshy landscape for another mile or so. It ended at an old telegraph repeater station at a place called Hamelin Pool – a complex of white wooden buildings, one of which now announced itself as a museum, another as a café and gift shop.
The car park had only two or three other cars in it, but as I stood reading an information board two coaches pulled up in convoy, wheezed to a pneumatic halt and almost at once began disembarking streams of passengers – all white-haired, camera-toting and blinking confusedly
under the impossible glare of sun. They appeared to be from all over – America, Britain, Holland, Scandinavia. Having come this far, I didn’t wish to share the experience with a hundred twittering strangers, and I set off for the beach in a brisk stroll along a chalky track. It was amazingly hot. A breeze was running in from the sea, but it seemed only to bring more heat. After about half a mile the track brought me to a sumptuously sunny bay, flat calm and of the deepest aquamarine. At some distance across the water a long sandbar ran in a lazy curve out to sea. This, I gathered, was the Fauré Sill – a thirty-mile-long dune barrier that nearly encloses the bay and gives it its special character, namely warm, shallow, very saline waters of the sort that once prevailed across the planet when stromatolites were king.
Nowhere in any direction was there a sign of human intrusion except directly ahead where a nifty wooden walkway zigzagged for 150 feet or so out into the bay over some low, dark, primeval-looking masses that didn’t quite break the water’s calm surface. I had found my living stromatolites. Eagerly I boarded the walkway and followed it out to the first cluster of shapes. The water was as transparent as glass and only three or four feet deep.
Stromatolites are not easy to describe. They are of so primitive a nature that they don’t even adopt regular shapes in the way, say, crystals do. Stromatolites just, as it were, blob out. Nearer the shore they formed large, slightly undulant platforms – rather like very old asphalt. Further out they were arrayed as individual clumps that brought to mind very large cow-pats, or perhaps the dung of a particularly troubled elephant. Most books refer to them as club-shaped or cauliflower-shaped or even columnar. In
fact, they are shapeless grey-black blobs, without character or lustre.
It has to be immediately conceded that a stromatolite formation is not a handsome or striking sight. I can almost guarantee that your reaction upon seeing a bed of living stromatolites for the first time will be to say ‘Hmm’ in the vague, ruminative, cautiously favourable tone you would use if you were given a canapé that tasted better than it looked but not so good that you wanted another right away, or possibly ever. It is a sound that says: ‘Well, I’ll be.’
So it’s not the sight of stromatolites that makes them exciting. It’s the
idea
of them – and in this respect they are peerless. Well, imagine it. You are looking at living rocks – quietly functioning replicas of the very first organic structures ever to appear on earth. You are experiencing the world as it was 3.5 billion years ago – more than three-quarters of the way back to the moment of terrestrial creation. Now if that is not an exciting thought, I don’t know what is. As the aforementioned palaeontologist Richard Fortey has put it: ‘This is truly time travelling, and if the world were attuned to its real wonders this sight would be as well-known as the pyramids of Giza.’ Quite right.
Stromatolites are rather like corals in that all of their life is on the surface, and that most of what you are looking at is the dead mass of earlier generations. If you peer, you can sometimes see tiny bubbles of oxygen rising in streams from the formations. This is the stromatolite’s only trick and it isn’t much, but it is what made life as we know it possible. The bubbles are produced by primitive algae-like micro-organisms called cyanobacteria, which live on the surface of the rocks – about three billion of them to the
square yard, to save you counting – each of them capturing a molecule of carbon dioxide and a tiny beat of energy from the sun and combining them to fuel its unimaginably modest ambitions to exist, to live. The byproduct of this very simple process is the faintest puff of oxygen. But get enough stromatolites respiring away over a long enough period and you can change the world. For two billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 per cent – enough to allow the development of other, more complex life forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.
The chemical process involved in this makes the little cells very slightly sticky. Tiny motes of dust and other sediments cling to their surfaces and these slowly bind and accrete into the rocks I was looking at now. The stromatolites thrive here not so much because the conditions are particularly amenable to them as because they are discouraging to other creatures. The reason stromatolites don’t exist elsewhere is that they would either be washed away by stronger tides or eaten. Here nothing else can survive the bitter salt waters, so there is nothing to graze the stromatolites away.
That stromatolites gave rise to life on earth, then became a food themselves and were eaten out of existence has a certain irony, of course. Something not entirely unlike that happened to me now, for as I stood studying the crystalline waters the elderly day trippers could be heard coming down the track, and a few minutes later the spryer among them began to arrive on the boardwalk. A woman in a Miami Dolphins eyeshade took a position beside me, stared at the water for some moments, waved away a couple of flies, then regarded her husband and in a voice
that would have drowned the clang of a steelworks said: ‘Are you telling me we just crossed a
continent
for
this?’
I was feeling charitably disposed, so I turned to her with an understanding smile and with all the gentleness and tact I could muster I endeavoured to ease her into a position of appreciation for this marvel that lay at our feet. I saluted her perceptiveness in recognizing that stromatolites were not much to behold, but explained how their diligent, infinitesimal chemical twitchings, over a span of unimaginable duration, made the world the green and lovely place it is. I pointed out too that at only two other places on earth have such living formations been found – one elsewhere in Australia, the other off a remote coral cay in the Bahamas, both much smaller and practically inaccessible – so that this was the only place in the world where visitors could with relative ease examine these singular creations in their full understated glory. So in fact, I concluded – and here I offered my warmest, most ingratiating smile – this really
was
worth crossing a continent for.
She listened with what I can only call an air of startled submissiveness, never taking her gaze from my face. Then she touched a hand to my forearm and said: ‘Did you know that you have the most terrible sunburn?’
I took a walk along the neighbouring shell beach until the flies made it impossible to persevere, then wandered back to the telegraph station. The museum was locked and in darkness, so I went to the café. The trippers, I gathered, had stopped for refreshments because the lady in charge was busy rounding up cups and plates. I wondered in passing how she managed out here to feed coachloads of people 140 miles from the nearest supermarket.
‘Yes, love?’ she said brightly as she passed.
‘I was wondering if it’s possible to see the museum.’
‘Course it is. I’ll get Mike to take you.’
Mike was Mike Cantrall, an equally cheery middle-aged fellow with a raffish earring and an easygoing manner, who emerged from the kitchen wiping his hands on a tea towel and looking pleased to be excused dishwashing duty. He took me to the museum and with some difficulty unlocked the door. The museum was small and airless and felt as if it hadn’t been opened for months – he told me that not many visitors asked to see it – but entirely charming. One room was devoted mostly to stromatolites. It had a fish tank with a stromatolite quietly bubbling away in it – the only one in the world in captivity, apparently. On an old TV and VCR he showed me a four-minute video, which gave a concise rundown on what stromatolites were and how they were formed. Then he picked up a brick-sized fragment of old stromatolite and passed it to me and I made the appropriate expressions of surprise at how heavy it was.