Authors: Iain McCalman
Ted, like Thoreau, now saw the townsman’s pursuits as “devoid of purpose, insipid, [and] dismally unsatisfactory.” By shucking off “the poisonous years of the past” and the “artificial emotions of the town,” he and Bertha had attained a genuine “independence.” Unfettered by mortgages, they could live comfortably on around $250 a year. No gourmet’s feast surpassed the pleasure of eating fresh fish followed by homegrown pawpaws and golden mangoes. Ditching all schedules, they could “dally luxuriously with time” and “loll in the shade of scented trees, or thread the sunless mazes of the jungle … or bask on the sand.” “The Beachcomber … is an individual whose wants are few—who is content, who has no treasure to guard, whose rights there is none to dispute; who is his own magistrate, postman, architect, carpenter, painter, boat-builder, boatman, tinker, goatherd, gardener, woodcutter, water-carrier and general labourer.”
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Ted felt he exploited nobody. His daily bounty was thrown up on the sand, a tantalizing lottery generated by the chance actions of tides and currents. Today it might be a cedar log, tomorrow a weathered ship’s figurehead; someday, perhaps, the prize of a black or pink pearl lying inside the flesh of a goldlip or blacklip oyster. Living on an “Isle of Dreams,” the beachcomber was rich beyond imagination:
All is lovable—from crescentric sandpit—coaxing and consenting to the virile moods of the sea, harmonious with wind-shaken casuarinas, tinkling with the cries of excitable tern—to the stolid gray walls and blocks of granite which have for unrecorded centuries shouldered off the white surges of the Pacific. The flounces of mangroves, the sparse, grassy epaulettes on the shoulders of the hills, the fragrant forest, the dim jungle, the piled up rocks, the caves where the rare swiftlet hatches out her young in gloom and silence … all are mine to gloat over.
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He’d gained humankind’s most precious state: “freedom—freedom beyond the dreams of most men in its comprehensiveness and exactitude.”
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* * *
The Banfields lived in their simple shack from 1897 to 1903, but the realities of their life during this period bore little resemblance to Ted’s later depiction of it. He’d fled to Dunk Island less as a rebel against commerce than as one of its failures, in the hope that the place might offer a fresh stab at business success. A child of the Australian frontier, Ted longed to match his father’s pioneering achievements by helping to build a new commercial civilization on the Reef.
Jabez Walter Banfield, a sober, God-fearing Liverpool printer, had migrated to Australia in October 1852 to try his luck panning for gold along the Ovens River in northeast Victoria. Providing services for booming gold towns proved a better bet than chasing alluvial seams, so he set up a newspaper in the Victorian gold camp of Ararat and summoned his family in England to join him. After that, he’d risen with the town to become its leading burgher—a press proprietor, Justice of the Peace, magistrate, asylum patron, and celebrated local thespian.
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Ted, born in 1852, didn’t see his father until the age of two, but he instantly worshipped this domineering pressman. The boy strained to emulate his father’s talents and tastes, but with little success. Ted, small and intense with a puny frame, had a slightly palsied hand, and a watering right eye from a bicycle accident. All this confirmed Jabez’s opinion that his son was “something of a lame duck.” Moreover, he seemed neurotic and impractical, a talker and dreamer. By contrast, Jabez identified with his capable, self-confident eldest son, Harry, whom he anointed to take over the newspaper. Overshadowed and often miserable, Ted blamed himself for his father’s contempt, seeking escape and consolation in solitary bush walks and the nature philosophy of Thoreau.
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Determined to prove himself in his father’s trade, he moved in 1882 at the age of thirty to the Reef port of Townsville, where he helped an entrepreneur, Dodd Clarke, start a newspaper. Over the next decade Ted’s decision seemed vindicated, as he chalked up a string of civic and business triumphs in the vein of his father. He’d arrived in Townsville on the crest of a boom; the port was a service center for the northern goldfields and also the site of an expanding sugar industry. A trio of ambitious local businessmen was pushing to establish Townsville as the capital of a separate northern state, free from the interference of Brisbane. Robert Philp, a shipping and retail magnate; Thomas Hollis Hopkins, a merchant; and Thankful Willmett, a publisher, were quick to recruit the impressionable new journalist to their cause.
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With their help, Ted was able to fund a trip to England in 1884 to consult a specialist about his deteriorating vision. The subsequent trauma of having to lose his infected right eye in an operation was offset by meeting Bertha Golding, the daughter of Liverpool family friends. Bertha’s own affliction of partial deafness gave the couple an instant bond, but Ted also fell in love with her musical talent, good humor, and sharp common sense. They were married in Townsville in August 1886, and she won Jabez’s approval when the couple eventually visited Ararat. Flushed with hubris after taking over the editorship of the
Townsville Daily Bulletin
from his sick boss in 1889, Ted started writing boastful letters to his father, airily offering him advice on mining investments provided by magnate friends.
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The following year saw Ted’s bravura crumble. Dodd Clarke suddenly decided to resume his editorial position, relegating Ted to a humiliating downgrading. Further loss of face followed when he had to admit to Jabez that he’d lost his and Bertha’s combined savings on his mining speculations, and this at a time when his wife’s worsening deafness meant she had to stop giving music lessons. Ted’s depression deepened as the north Australia separatist cause fragmented in the face of opposition by British investors, as well as rivalry from the nearby sugar port of Mackay, and white trade-union hostility to the use of indentured Islander labor in the sugar industry. Infuriated, Ted published pro-separation harangues in the paper that were so extreme Dodd Clarke eventually had to intervene. Friends grew worried at Ted’s emotional brittleness.
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Ted would later claim that his breakdown and flight to Dunk Island in 1897 was fueled by a hatred of commercial civilization, but this wasn’t what he told family and friends at the time. His letters to Jabez and Harry represented the move as a shrewd investment in low-cost virgin land, ideally suited to the growing and sale of tropical fruits and other fresh produce. Cheap black labor, fertile soil, and a climate of high rainfall and steady sun would underpin production, while the weekly steamer visits to the island would enable distribution to markets on the nearby mainland.
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* * *
The plan proved easier to explain than to execute. For a start, the couple’s early life on Dunk was not as easy or healthy as Ted would later make out. His daily diary entries from January 7, 1898, show that the onset of the rainy season brought him and Bertha repeated and disabling doses of malaria and dengue fever. Bertha was additionally prostrated with bouts of internal pain that only ceased after she underwent an operation and three months’ recuperation in the Townsville hospital. There were also money worries. Before launching their proposed enterprise, they’d had to convert their landholding of 128 acres to freehold. This had to be financed. So, after only two years on the island, Ted resumed writing paid pieces for local newspapers.
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More than anything, Ted’s diaries reveal the couple’s dependence on the labor and skills of a succession of male and female Aboriginal workers: Tom, Nellie, Jinny, Mickie, Jenny, Toby, Sambo, Willie, Charlie, and others. Almost every day Tom or Mickie delivered fresh food from the sea, harpooning rockfish, shark, dugong, turtle, parrot fish, and much more. Ted seems to have been an indifferent fisherman himself and a worse sailor. Mostly he delegated the skippering of his boat to Tom, Toby, or Sambo, who picked up weekly supplies from the steamer and collected urgent items from the mainland ports of Cardwell, Bicton, Geraldton, and Townsville. While attempting to show off his sailing skills to Bertha in September 1899, Ted managed to capsize their boat in a sudden gust. Unable to swim, she was too traumatized ever to sail with him again. While sailing solo later that year he capsized once more, making so lethargic an attempt to avoid drowning that Bertha worried that he nursed a latent death wish.
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Most of their Aboriginal workers’ tasks were physically grueling. They cleared and fired dense scrub, hacked down jungle, hoed and planted an array of vegetables and tropical fruit seeds, and then weeded, harvested, packed, and transported the products for sale on the mainland. They erected fences against snakes and eagles, and built hen and duck houses; they collected fowl eggs, oysters, crabs, and crayfish to add to the island’s exports, and bottled and sold the abundant supplies of honey generated by Ted’s dozen hives of Italian bees. The daily duties of the “gins,” as Ted called the women, were no lighter: Nellie, Jinny, and Jenny had to weed, hoe, collect shellfish, and chop firewood, as well as cook and clean. As Ted’s energies grew, he also supervised a flurry of ambitious developments: the building of a boatshed at the back of Brammo Bay beach and a suspension bridge over the gully, the laying of timber rails for a boat trolley, the installation of a storage tank and pump, and the planting of dual lines of coconut trees leading up to their hut.
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Ted’s sweeping formal avenue and his flagstaff for commemorating ceremonial occasions suggests he’d begun to think of himself as the viceroy of an island empire. And as with imperialists everywhere, this aspiration led to the commissioning of grander premises and an expansion of his territorial domain. In January 1900 he decided to replace the hut with a professionally built bungalow. Six months later, he and Bertha gained approval to extend their landholding to 320 acres. Some of the money for all this came from a small legacy received on Jabez’s death in December 1899—news that caused Ted to grieve that he’d now never be able to justify his move to his father. Perhaps the grandiose, fin de siècle plans for Dunk Island were his attempt to silence this most insistent of ghosts.
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In any case, Jabez’s legacy was too modest to finance all of Ted’s ambitious plans, so he increased his newspaper work by writing regular leaders for the
Cairns Argus
and other papers. In February 1901 he confirmed his recidivism by agreeing to take over editorial duties on the
Townsville Evening Star
for six months. It seemed a portentous decision: Ted was resuming the kind of work that had caused his breakdown, and to do it he and Bertha were returning to civilization. Backsliding to their former life after only four years on Dunk Island, the couple appeared to have come full circle.
In the end they had a nine-month absence from Dunk, and when they returned in November 1901 it was to a crisis. Most of Ted’s bees had perished, shrinking the honey supply to nothing—and honey was their most lucrative export. The culprits proved to be two species of island birds: the Australian bee-eater and the white-rumped wood swallow.
The honey or the birds: Which had to go? This dilemma tested Ted’s deepest values, because his love of birds was fundamental. After wrestling with his conscience, he decided that a profitable honey business couldn’t justify the slaughter of such lovely creatures, which were after all only following their natural instincts. Discussion of the issue with Bertha led to a full-scale “review” of their philosophy of life and to the articulation of a new “grand objective.” They would give up honey production and other forms of commerce to turn Dunk into a bird sanctuary, where all but raptors would be protected—the hunting of the latter being a sentimental exception that Ted soon abandoned in practice.
Although it was the honey crisis that triggered this change, other forces had been pushing in the same direction. One was Ted’s reaction to rejoining the urban rat race for nine months. Although Bertha had enjoyed her respite from mosquitoes and loneliness, she realized that being away from Dunk had crystalized Ted’s love of island life. Somewhat surprisingly, though, returning to full-time journalism had helped him recover his muse. Belting out political leaders for the local newspaper was as tedious as ever, but he’d found new delight in writing Dunk Island nature pieces.
Once their house was finished in 1903, reading and writing began to occupy a growing chunk of Ted’s daily routine. As well as returning to his boyhood love of the romantic naturalism of Gilbert White’s
Selborne
and Thoreau’s
Walden
, he began studying works of marine and ornithological science. These included
The Great Barrier Reef
by William Saville-Kent, which Ted praised highly. He also began corresponding with several Queensland scientists who shared his floral and zoological interests.
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Giving up the commercial production of foodstuffs meant that Ted could spend more time exploring the island and its surrounds, which he did under the guidance of Tom, Mickie, Willie, and others. Ted began this education with many of the typical frontier prejudices of his day. He thought that Aborigines were a doomed Stone Age race, a childlike people incapable of rational thought, discipline, or morality, who treated the island as a larder for mindless consumption. But gradually Tom and Mickie, in particular, instilled in him a different kind of understanding and appreciation of Dunk’s marine, plant, and bird life. They taught him Aboriginal maritime, fishing, and bush skills, and they revealed to him marvelous hidden places and histories.
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It was Tom who led him to each of what became Ted’s most sacred nature sites. The first was a hidden cavern near Brammo Bay that had been caused by a meteor fall, and which Tom called
Coobee Cotanyou
, or Falling Star Hole. A friend of Ted’s, the writer and naturalist Charles Barrett, described it lyrically as “a cave whose mouth is overhung by ferns and jungle vines, and the lintel green with moss, a filter for water that falls upon rocks tufted with orchids the colour of dull gold.”
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