Authors: Iain McCalman
It’s unclear who thought to embed a sympathetic journalist on the conjoined islands during the expedition’s early weeks, and then to syndicate the resulting articles to newspapers in Australia’s key cities, but it has the hallmarks of Richards’s genius for publicity. The decision to select Barrett for the job was also inspired. A knowledgable nature journalist with several respected books to his credit, Barrett combined the romantic passion of his late friend Ted Banfield with the pipe-smoking bonhomie of a favorite uncle. The content of his seven subsequent feature articles show that he’d been carefully briefed. Even so, he faced a daunting task to translate the theories and experimental procedures of laboratory-inclined biologists into mass-media fare.
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In retrospect we can see that Barrett’s approach to the task anticipated those modern TV reality shows that lure volunteers to undergo the rigors of running an Edwardian country house, or sailing an eighteenth-century coal bark, although in this instance the people, places, and challenges under scrutiny were genuine. Barrett wanted to convey to his audience what it felt like to be living and working with these young scientists on a “three acre flake of rock and sand.” His narrative combined accounts of the dangers, hardships, and beauties of a coral isle with everyday details of human social life and with evocations of the wonders of biological research.
When the journalist landed on the island, the young scientists were still settling into their new home and preparing a work environment. Barrett cleverly turned these mundane tasks into a romantic saga of building a “village” and research station on a remote desert isle. Echoing Yonge’s view that “a coral reef from the standpoint of a biologist is a particular community of animals and plants with a definite ‘organization’ of its own,” he represented the expedition as an intricate working democracy. Men and women, junior and senior, white and black: all threw themselves unreservedly into cooperative tasks, both hard and humble.
17
This was “science in shirt sleeves,” and in blouses, khaki shorts, and sandshoes. “Youth is at the prow, but pleasure has not the helm,” Barrett quipped. Maurice Yonge sawed planks to make bookshelves. Mattie dressed somebody’s coral-scratched leg. Sheina Marshall, the phytoplankton expert, used a plane and hammer to improvise laboratory stools from packing cases. Other women heaved brimming buckets of seawater from the beach to the aquarium. “We are not ornamental, we’ve come here to work,” they said.
Gender equity cut both ways: “men whose business it is to study plankton and echinoderms” were busy washing socks. Andy Dabah, the Aboriginal handyman from the Yarrabah mission, climbed up a coconut tree to fix the wireless antenna and tossed down half a dozen fresh nuts for the scientists. His wife, Gracie, was cooking for the party, while her two young children helped in the kitchen, or played on the coral strand with empty pickle jars.
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In no time they’d created a sophisticated laboratory, crammed with benches, high stools, glass vials, microscopes, a centrifuge, dissecting baths, an aquarium of colored fish, and rows of reference books. In the evening, tired figures wandered into their rough huts of Australian silky oak to rest briefly on camp beds, before gathering in the long room that doubled as the laboratory and communal dining room. The facilities had cost a mere six hundred pounds, Barrett pointed out admiringly, and he estimated the whole expedition’s costs at ten thousand pounds (it proved considerably cheaper).
There was also just enough time before dinner to contemplate “the end of a perfect tropic day and the night is still and full of stars, with the sea quiet and no sound from the outside world but the cry of a homing tern. The coconut palms print their fronds in the shadow on the coral sand, as the lighthouse beams go sweeping by, making long silver pathways for miles across the water.”
Afterward the little group of scientists gathered round hurricane lamps to discuss everything from the behavior of bêche-de-mer to the latest novels. Some played bridge; others wrote letters, read books, or prepared to go fishing in the “flattie.”
“Do you like it here?” Barrett asked a couple of the women. Gweneth Russell responded for them all: “I think it is wonderful.” Barrett was not surprised: “waking early, they hear honey birds calling in the palms and waders crying plaintively along the coral strand.” What a way to start the day.
Yet, Barrett reminded his readers, “a scientific expedition has serious work to do.” The shore party, led by Thomas Alan Stephenson, assisted by his wife, Anne, was studying reef animal ecologies. They aimed to isolate “typical areas” within different environmental zones. They’d already mapped out a ten-foot-square “coral garden,” photographed it in sections, and counted its inhabitants. They were also dredging up samples of seabed mud and sand for examination in the lab. Their eventual aim was to work out the breeding habits and seasonal behaviors of sixteen key marine animals, “about which little is known.” These included giant clams, sea urchins, corals, crabs, and bristle worms. Many species appeared to show some strange connection between breeding times and particular tidal and lunar phases—another mystery to be unlocked.
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Working with the shore party was a “physiological group” of Maurice, Mattie, and a young Australian student, Aubrey Nicholls. They aimed to investigate “the family life of corals,” especially how corals feed and grow—what Maurice thought “the most fascinating [problem] marine biology has to offer.” Among other experiments, they used clamshells, drainpipes, and logs to attract coral “settlers,” and constructed bases on which to graft varieties of coral species. After distributing these bases over a range of reef environments, the scientists would monitor the differing growth rates of the new coral. This was vital information because reefs were always competing with the forces that worked toward their destruction, which ranged from burrowing crustaceans to coral-eating fish and torrential rainstorms.
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The Australian Frank Moorhouse was also one of the shore party, and Barrett observed that his work as an economic biologist would have vital significance for the future wealth of Queensland. The marine creatures Moorhouse was investigating included smoked bêche-de-mer for the Chinese market, and the crimson- and red-banded trochus shells whose nacreous interiors were used in the Japanese button industry. Moorhouse had found a little “nook” in the fringing reef from which he could observe the live snails of the trochus, which were also easily gathered by hand at low tide. Andy Dabah would later build Moorhouse separate trochus and oyster pens for his experiments, but prior to that, Barrett reported, Moorhouse worked in the lab with a microscope, “seeing what no one had ever seen before—the very beginning of
trochus
shell life.”
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Barrett also wrote about going plankton hunting with the “boat party” in the waters surrounding the Low Isles, which he claimed resulted in some of his strangest experiences. Frederick Russell, Gweneth’s husband, stalked zooplankton, the microscopic animals that float almost unseen in every drop of reef seawater, and on which scores of predators feed. Sheina Marshall chased phytoplankton, especially the tiny vegetable diatoms that make up the “pastures of the sea,” and which are the base of a food chain that works up through corals and fish to humans. A. P. Orr, the chemist, was investigating the chemical compositions of plankton environments, testing samples of seawater for salinity, phosphates, nitrates, oxygen, and organic materials. He was also measuring the light densities of seawater—something Barrett joined him in—because phytoplankton, being plants, were dependent on light for energy.
Barrett regarded plankton catching at different water depths as very like big-game hunting, except that it was a “scientific sport … with a definite object [and] its results are of economic value.” In these seawater safaris, “the score is made up of problems solved, secrets of Nature’s ways discovered.” More mysteries lurked unexplored in the waters of the Low Isles, he claimed, than in the jungles of New Guinea. But instead of guns, the researchers’ weapons were fine-meshed trawling nets, insulated water bottles, depth recorders, and tin cylinders painted black so as not to attract sharks. Barrett felt a frisson of anticipation as he peered into the collecting jar, hoping that some new species of pelagic life would be wriggling among the mass of copepods, crab larvae, tiny jellyfish, Sagittoidea (arrow worms), diatoms, and Foraminifera (minute, single-cell protozoans). He was also excited because he’d only seen such bizarre creatures in drawings: “Believe me it is revelation to spend even a day in a tropic sea, with plankton hunters, who hunt for research.”
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Some aspects of Low Isles research also carried the thrill of real danger. The expedition was equipped with a specially built diving helmet modeled on one pioneered by the American biologist Alfred Mayor. Made of galvanized iron and with two glass windows, its air supply depended on continual hand pumping. Frederick Russell, looking like “Ned Kelly preparing for a police offensive,” was the first of the expedition’s scientists to use it, observing the radiant corals below the reef’s edge.
Barrett was envious until he tried a shallow dive himself, to be abruptly reminded of wearing a wartime gas mask. And down there, he couldn’t help thinking about man-eating tiger sharks, groupers with indiscriminate jaws, giant clams (
Tridacna
) waiting to clamp on the unwary diver’s foot, or the toxic fangs of sea snakes, just like the six-footer he’d seen over near the mangroves. Still, these young scientists seemed as brave as they were clever: “nobody is worrying at all about the perils of the reef,” Barrett wrote. Sensibly, they were more concerned about avoiding everyday annoyances like the sting of jellyfish, the scratch of jagged corals, and the needle-sharp spines of sea urchins.
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But the peril was real enough the day Barrett traveled with the boat party to Batt Reef, on the outer Barrier, where they hoped to view “a section of the submarine structure which ranks as one of the wonders of the world.” A stiff breeze made the boat “curtsy” as they passed beyond the shelter of the mangroves. This turned into “a proper dusting” as they crossed the eight miles of open water to the outer reef. Eventually they sighted a line of breakers and the shadows of “ominous brown and yellow ‘isles’ beneath the surface.” Soon they were caught in a coral maze. Quickly they posted a lookout at the masthead and others at the prow. Despite these and a detailed chart, the helmsman had “an anxious time” as they missed a patch of submerged reef by less than half a boat length.
Barrett was reminded of Cook’s incredible navigating ordeals among these “coral strewn waters,” an empathy that grew as they were battered by “swinging seas” on the return voyage: “one huge wave crashed aboard the
Luana
, and all the way home to our island she was dodging Pacific rollers large enough to make a coastal steamer shudder.”
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Barrett’s final article ruminated about symbiotic cooperation on the Reef. Despite the ferocity of the struggle among most reef species, some marine creatures chose to become what he called “mess-mates”—not unlike the Low Isles scientists themselves. These mess-mates, however, could display radically different styles and degrees of friendship. Some species, parasite-like, exploited their hosts; others were commensal, with one species prospering from the partnership at no cost to the other; and some were mutually cooperative, with the relationship benefiting both partners. Maurice Yonge’s chief task on the expedition was to find out which of these modes fitted the puzzling association between reef-growing corals and the tiny brown algae living in their tissues.
Yonge had found a range of examples of mutually cooperative relationships among the marine creatures of the Low Isles reefs to use for comparison. Barrett himself had captured a small shrimp—“a lively red-tailed midget”—which lived in the body cavity of a giant anemone. Another, smaller anemone gave refuge to a scarlet-and-white-banded pygmy fish. One species of bêche-de-mer even endured what we might regard as the indignity of having a glass eel take up tenancy in its anus. Gall crabs built a home within the rocky cavities of the reef itself, influencing the madreporic corals around them to form a small living room for the female, complete with a tiny passage to the water. Such was love on the Reef.
As he prepared to leave the Low Isles, Barrett confessed to finding this marine research endlessly fascinating, and he envied the young scientists their future year there. They were happy people, both because they were working “in a fairyland” and because, as Alfred Mayor had written, “love, not logic, impels the naturalist to his work.”
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* * *
Charles Barrett’s newspaper articles constituted a remarkable piece of journalism, much of whose accuracy was confirmed in the details of Maurice Yonge’s prosaic daily notes. Barrett’s syndicated articles generated so much local interest that crowds of curious picnic parties began appearing on the Low Isles, forcing the scientists to fence off their experimental areas and equipment. Still, they couldn’t complain: Barrett had won for the expedition the nationwide enthusiasm of Australia’s public and scientific communities.
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Of course, he’d sometimes idealized or oversimplified the story. Some omissions were a result of his early departure. He never saw, for example, Yonge’s occasional flares of exasperation, such as when the Australian Museum conchologist and ichthyologist Tom Iredale brought his young son and a guest to stay on the island without prior consultation. He didn’t see the irritating amount of time Yonge had to spend managing finances, entertaining visitors, organizing work rosters, and conducting meetings to report on research progress. And the sympathetic journalist didn’t stay with the expedition long enough to observe the sheer physical and mental exhaustion entailed in working long hours in tropical humidity, heat, and rain. “Let no one think that life on a coral island is unending bliss,” Yonge later wrote ruefully.