Book Review: The Reef
At the time of writing this review the minute hand of the Doomsday clock sits at 2 to midnight. Why use a clock? It seems a poor metaphor. After all, a clock never goes backward. It makes the apocalypse as inevitable as time itself, it’s just a matter of when and by what means. We have other measures for our imminent destruction. The Great Barrier Reef is, after all, climate change’s “canary in the coalmine” looming large in the news for massive amounts of bleaching and vast swathes overtaken by the crown-of-thorns starfish. In such an atmosphere it was reluctantly that I first opened up The Reef. I anticipated 400 pages of scientifically substantiated gloom, barely qualified with a desperate pick-me-up in the epilogue.
A pleasure then it was to be transported from inevitable global catastrophe to a manageable crisis: the story of the Endeavour trapped in the “Labyrinth of shoals” of the great barrier reef. After marooned on a cay and things getting desperate, Captain Cook and his crew managed to patch a gaping breach in the Endeavor’s hull with a sail and various muck. When waters rise they escape. Today the spot is called Cape Tribulation where “all my [Cook’s] troubles started”. It is a well known story but best for the book’s the lead protagonist, the reef itself, to enter in a familiar scene, this time in the guise of nautical obstacle.
From here, the reef provides a lurid multifaceted backdrop for 12 mini-biographies of those that were marooned on it, were shipwrecked beside it, studied it, drew it, lived beside it and finally, protested to save it. McCalman, is somehow able to see the reef evolve in popular European consciousness from navigational hazard and backdrop of ‘native savagery’, to an authentic natural refuge to finally become a scientific wonder and subject of artistic beauty.
Of the twelve stories most riveting were the twin stories of James Morrill and Nacisse Pelletier who in the mid-nineteenth century separately became shipwrecked off the reef. Despite these wrecks happening 620 miles apart their stories are eerily similar. Each is rescued by local Aboriginals, Morril by a “clan of Birri-Gubba speakers” while Pelletier is rescued by the Wanthaala. Tentatively at first they are welcomed into their respective tribes, where they live for seventeen years.
Over time the two learn the local language and how to hunt, fish and gather food, as well as fire-stick farming. They fully absorb the aborigine’s culture and spoken history. When they finally come into contact with Europeans, they are reluctant to rejoin white civilisation. Without resorting to cliche, McCalman summons a tragic conflict expertly as he articulates being trapped between two worlds. Pelletier returns to France, where he is mocked as a savage and an outcast, never able to fit in and ending his days living in a lighthouse. As an Englishman, Morrill returns to Brisbane where he becomes a momentary celebrity. He tries to broker peace between his tribe and the rapidly expanding squatters that were quickly and violently overtaking their land. He pleases neither European nor aboriginal and becomes distrusted by both. We realise that he is one of the few Europeans that realises what is truly being lost by the destruction of the native inhabitants, and the futility of his attempts to stop it.
As we should expect history becomes a way to understand the catastrophe of the present moment. Throughout The Reef “progress” is almost always as destructive as when the squatters clear land and overtake native territory. Worse still it comes when the agents of destruction have no real concept of what they are destroying, what is being lost. Misinformation is crassly pervaded for personal gain. For example, Morrill and Pelletier’s stories were stolen and synthesised, souped up into a swashbuckling tale, then passed off as fact, the final product became a wildly popular bestseller, the aboriginals reduced to the barbarians of the age’s popular fiction.
For McCalman, redemption lies in those who try to understand the Great Barrier Reef, whether through science or art. Halfway through The Reef, the tone pivots from exploration, escape and shipwreck, to detailing a few lone souls that try to promote European understanding of the reef. It includes stories of Alex Aggassiz, a biologist that railed against Darwin’s dominant subsistence theory of coral atoll formation, as well as the harmony of art and science as William Saville-Kent’s book that brought the beauty of its subject to European attention.
The strength of McCalman’s writing comes from his research, that enables him to draw out his historical subjects, to furnish depth with their flaws and drives. They are each all too human. It allows readers to make it through the necessary but dry portions of scientific exposition. Perhaps the most resounding character is the artist John Busst who together with Judith Wright and Len Webb were responsible for fighting the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government to have the reef recognised as a marine reserve. Even compared to the standards set in Queensland today, the Premier Bjelke-Petersen was happy to see all natural resources ruthlessly exploited to the hilt. Busst is brash, abrasive, almost a misanthrope, but also a relentless fighter for the reef and every bit Bjelke-Peterson’s equal. Together with him, Wright and Webb were the heroes the moment demanded.
The final chapter The Reef, marine biologist Charlie Veron is gives an impassioned speech answering “Is the Great Barrier Reef on death row?” Spoiler alert: it is. That McCalman managed to suspend this grave idea until the final chapter is no mean feat. Over the previous eleven chapters the reef has become a character in its own right. And as with any character the reader will empathise and desire to save it. So we finish with a reef with a relatable face, and one we can identify more readily with than any ticking clock.
THE REEF: A PASSIONATE HISTORY By Iain McCalman, published Penguin Random House, 2013