The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (24 page)

Such triumphs added weight to a proposal for a full-time job that William had dashed off to the Premier of Queensland, Sir Thomas McIlwraith, just before joining the survey on the
Myrmidon
. His timing proved perfect: Queensland’s two rival conservative leaders, McIlwraith and Sir Samuel Griffith, wanted to join political forces and both were worried about the depletion of the state’s marine resources. All of the Reef’s marine industries, including the lucrative pearl-shell trade, had been showing falling returns because of overfishing and the incursion of Japanese luggers. New licensing regulations passed in 1881 had not worked. By March 1889, even the Torres Strait pearlers were pressing for restrictions to be placed on the harvesting of immature pearl shell.
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In that same month, William received an offer from the Queensland government for a three-year, full-time position as Commissioner of North Australian Fisheries on a substantial salary. He immediately traveled to Brisbane by train, accompanied by his wife, Mary Ann, and another unnamed member of his family, probably Constance. The three moved into “Ellan Yannin,” a comfortable Queenslander house high off the ground with wide verandas and trellises of climbing vines. Set in bushland at Kangaroo Point, overlooking the Brisbane River, it was soon filled with genteel objects, including a piano, stylish furniture, and a handmade shotgun for hunting birds.
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A well-paid job was not the only by-product of William’s voyage north. While waiting for repairs to the ship in Darwin, he had gathered and recorded local fish species with the help of a policeman, Paul Foelsche, who was also a noted photographer. Mary Ann, on hearing William’s subsequent account of the man’s photographic achievements, seems to have been inspired to give her husband a “modest form of camera.” This in turn prompted him to buy two baby fern owls from a local bird salesman to use as photographic subjects. Both actions proved portentous, the camera because it brought William’s disparate artistic, scientific, and technological talents into a single unified focus, and the two baby owls because they liberated repressed feelings of love and whimsy in his wounded personality.
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William loved his camera and his birds, recording every antic, posture, and vocal acquisition of the two “balls of fluff” with the besotted delight of a new father. As brother and sister, the owls displayed the same bonds of affection that he and Constance had shown each other long ago at Road House. Like the two children during that terrible time, the owls played “with delightful abandon” in the presence of those they loved, but shrank and froze into sticklike immobility in the threatening presence of others. So deeply did William identify with the little creatures that he even visited the local zoo to chirrup greetings to its collection of downcast fern owls. He admitted also to a strong urge to “open their prison doors” and let them fly free, a feeling his sister would have understood only too well.
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If, as seems likely, Constance did share William and Mary Ann’s Brisbane home for part of 1889, it would have been a chance for the two siblings to restore something of the broken trust between them. In the winter of that year, Mary Ann and a female relative traveled down to Sydney by rail on an unspecified errand. Soon after this, Constance’s movements can be tracked with some certainty. The year 1890 marked the beginning of her new career in Australia. Starting as a volunteer in Melbourne’s typhoid tents, “Ruth Emilie Kaye,” as she was now known, went on to enroll at the Alfred Hospital, embarking on what would turn out to be a long and distinguished nursing career.
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*   *   *

Released suddenly from the strain of unemployment and potential exposure as a murderer, William also discovered a refuge from worldly cares and his past at the remote marine frontier of the Torres Strait, a place where he could exercise his full range of talents and ease the shackles on his stiff personality. After the setback in Tasmania, he was eager to show off his practical usefulness and economic value as a marine scientist and resource manager. A review of Queensland’s fishing industries, plus conversations with McIlwraith and Griffith, suggested an urgent need for what he called “a redemption” of the edible oyster and pearl-shell industries, especially the latter. The Torres Strait pearling industry, normally one of Queensland’s leading revenue producers at around $350,000 a year, had become so exhausted that much of the harvested shell was now too small for button manufacturers to use.
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Ever since his time as an aquarium biologist, William had championed artificial cultivation as a means of developing sustainable fishing industries. But nobody had yet come up with a way of doing this for pearl shell. Most of the region’s shallow pearl-shell beds were exhausted, and deep-sea beds could not be protected from plunderers. Veteran pearlers also denied the viability of transferring immature oysters to shallow pools because this would mean severing their “abysses” (anchor cables), which would cause them to die or drift away on the currents. Moreover, luggermen believed that young oysters would perish in transit even before this.

Between 1889 and 1891 William made three extended stays in the Torres Strait to tackle these problems. Enthusiastic support from two of the region’s most influential Europeans made his task a good deal easier. Frank Jardine was a pearler-adventurer from Somerset, near the Albany Passage, and John Douglas was Government Resident and Police Magistrate at Thursday Island: both helped William to visit the deepwater Old Fields near Badu Island, where, using boats and diving equipment, he was able to collect abundant samples of immature shell.

Jardine, his wife, Sania, and son, Bootles, also offered William hospitality in their cliff-top house at Somerset, and provided sites for the giant clamshells filled with seawater that he used for his oyster-transplantation experiments. Having successfully transported young pearl oysters from the deep beds in these portable aquariums, William also discovered that a series of shallow coral rock pools near John Douglas’s Thursday Island residence offered current-washed environments perfectly suited to oyster growth. To his delight, the young pearl oysters “adapted themselves with alacrity to the novel environment.” They grew new abysses until their shells were heavy enough to resist the currents by their own weight. In one six-week period most of William’s young oysters added an astonishing half an inch to their shells.
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After canvassing opinions from both small- and large-scale pearlers, William recommended a program of industry reforms. In order to replenish oyster stock, he contended, Endeavour Strait needed to be closed to pearling for three years, and no pearl shell should be sold before reaching an interior measurement of six inches—a size enforceable by inspection. At the same time, accessible banks, foreshores, reefs, and shore stations around the strait could be leased to luggermen for the transfer and “cultivation” of immature shell. Such a measure would also reduce dangerous and expensive deep-sea diving, enable owners to stop their divers stealing pearls, and deter poaching by foreigners. In 1891 the Pearl Shell and Bêche-de-Mer Fisheries Act of 1881 was amended to include all William’s suggestions.
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Investigating a variety of edible oyster beds at the southern end of the Reef, around Wide Bay, Mackay, and Cooktown, also buoyed William’s spirits. He became convinced, half wistfully, that there was no more “perfect elysium” than the life of a north Queensland oyster farmer. “In no other country in the world,” he wrote, “is so healthy, congenial and non-laborious a means of earning a substantial competency open to … all classes.” He helped these farmers combat the problem of losing a high percentage of free-swimming oyster embryos (spat) at sea by building cheap, split-paling collectors on which the spat could cling. He also urged the industry to develop advanced culturing processes whereby ova could be matured into viable embryos within hatcheries.
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Taken overall, William concluded, the twelve-hundred-mile extent of the Great Barrier Reef represented “a vast harvest-field ripe for the sickle, wherein, as yet skilled biological labour is all but unknown.” Much could still be done, he suggested, to exploit lucrative and potentially sustainable marine resources such as edible fish, dugong oil, turtle meat, tortoiseshell, and black coral.
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Yet it was as a scientific rather than an economic biologist that William grew to love the Reef. He thought the region’s intertidal areas and “lime saturated” coral seas to be “one of the most active and visibly effective of Nature’s petrological laboratories.” And Thursday Island, he believed, offered a site “unequaled” in the world for the study of tropical biology. To prove his point he threw himself into a breathless research program, drafting scores of scientific papers, collecting specimens for London’s Natural History Museum, investigating new species with his dissecting knife and microscope, and sketching and photographing varieties of corals for a projected book on reefs.
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One intriguing mystery lay almost at his back door in Brisbane. While inspecting oysters at Moreton Bay—the huge saltwater bay into which the Brisbane River flows—he noticed substantial remnants of dead corals belonging to the prolific reef-growing genera
Madrepore
and
Favia
. But why had these once-thriving corals died? A change in climate bringing colder temperatures was one possibility. Or perhaps a geological elevation of the seabed had lifted the corals out of reach of the tides. He thought it most likely, however, that sandbanks had shifted to obstruct the inflow of seawater into the bay at the same time as it was inundated by river floodwaters. This combination would subject the corals to toxic doses of fresh water.
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So little was known at that time about the character and behavior of the different coral types within the Reef. The celebrated HMS
Challenger
expedition of 1872 had collected sixty-one species of Australian reef corals, yet William, who made no claim to exhaustiveness, discovered more than seventy different species of
Madrepore
alone. Different reef locations also gave rise to distinct combinations of coral types.
Madrepore
corals, like the staghorn, dominated at some Port Denison reefs; luxuriant, bush-like clumps of
Millepora
at some Palm Island ones; mushroom corals off Adolphus Island; and leathery, bright-green
Alcyonaria
corals at many of Thursday Island’s reefs. Yet on reefs of the outer Barrier, such as Warrior Reef, he found no signs of the hummocky stony coral species then known as
goniastrae
,
meandrina
, and
astraea
, which were present on most inshore and fringing reefs.
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Reef corals also proved more protean than he’d expected. Colors often varied considerably among separate colonies of the same species, and even within what were clearly different growth epochs of the same colony. Though William did not say so explicitly, this seemed to imply environmental adaptation. Non-coral species, he noticed, also made a surprisingly large contribution to reef building. Scientists had long realized that other species with limestone structures were assimilated into coral reefs, because their skeletons were sometimes obvious in reef boulders. Now William gave an exhaustive list of the organisms that could be so absorbed. It included nullipore algae, whose tissues were lime-encrusted; minute protozoa from the class Foraminifera; sea urchins; starfish; and trepang, all of which appeared to contribute to the lime cement and conglomerate that made up the reefs.
36

Knowing exactly how fast corals could grow suddenly assumed a dramatic significance, when on February 28, 1890, the pride of the British India and Australian Steam Navigation Company’s fleet, the
Quetta
, hit a submerged coral pinnacle in a well-charted area between the Albany Passage and Adolphus Island. The huge steamship sank in three minutes, with the loss of around half of its 182 passengers and crew. Asked to investigate the site, William concluded that the coral pinnacle responsible had grown to become an unmarked hazard during the thirty years since the last survey. Accurate studies of coral growth rates in different environments needed to be undertaken urgently.
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When it came to studying the prolific Reef order of Actiniaria, which includes anemones, William received unexpected help. Soon after arriving in the Torres Strait he met Alfred Cort Haddon, a younger Cambridge scientist with a reputation for his work on British anemones. Worryingly at first, Haddon’s mission on the Reef seemed identical to William’s own: “I propose to investigate the fauna, structure and mode of formation of the coral reefs in Torres Straits … to map the raised and submerged coral formations,… to investigate the fauna of the lagoons of the shore exposed at low tide and of the submarine slope … to endeavour to determine the zones of different species of coral and of associated invertebrates, and also what conditions of light, temperature and currents are favourable or otherwise for the different species.”
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As it turned out, the men did not in practice compete, because Haddon’s growing fascination with Islander culture eventually took him to anthropology. In the meantime the two Englishmen were delighted to pool their knowledge. Each named a new species of anemone after the other. William’s discovery, the giant twenty-four-inch
Discosoma haddoni
, had the additional attraction of a “commensal” relationship with a small colored fish and a pink-striped shrimp. He speculated that the fishy visitors paid for their safe haven by serving as lures to attract other marine creatures into the anemone’s mouth.
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William believed, too, that he’d acquired an advantage over most marine biologists by learning to use photography as a tool for the scientific study of reefs and their inhabitants. In a pre-scuba world, living corals were rarely seen because they grew under water. Even photographing them was possible only during fleeting periods of exposure at low spring tides. Then, and provided one worked with great speed, corals could, William boasted, “be reproduced with the fidelity that photography alone can compass,” and that no pencil could equal. Photography could reveal the geological structures of reefs, map the distribution and relationships of reef corals, and capture the exact likenesses of marine species while they were still brimming with life. Photographs could also serve as precise records of changes in coral growth and distribution over time.
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