I once heard the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan remark that one difference between Americans and Canadians is that Americans will invite new acquaintances into their homes, but Canadians invite them to meet in a pub or restaurant, preferring to keep home for family and friends. I don't know how good a generalization that is, but I do feel Canadians are not nearly as outgoing and open as Americans. I have often been astonished to meet an American for the first time and be invited to stay at his or her home after a very short period of conversation. It is a quality I admire and appreciate.
In Canada, in contrast, we are far slower to extend such hospitality, but when we do, it seems more deeply felt and meant. Australians are much more open and gregarious than Canadians, but without the underlying assumption of superiority many Americans express. And the use of language by Australians is enthralling, from the contraction of words as in “uni” (university), “ute” (utility vehicle), and “servo” (service station) to novel terms like “larrikin” (hooligan) and “come the raw prawn” (attempt to deceive).
On that visit in 1989 with Tara, Phil Noyce and his wife, Georgina Tsolidas, accompanied us on a jaunt to the Great Barrier Reef. We flew to Cairns, the northernmost city on the east coast of Queensland. From there we traveled north by bus for another hour to the sleepy town of Port Douglas, where, a few years later, the wonderful Australian film Travelling North was shot. Port Douglas at the time was a tiny village with a few shops and a harbor where the Quicksilver, a large twin-hulled catamaran, is moored. It departs for the barrier reef daily, tying up at a permanent float at the outer reef. From there, tourists fan out to scuba dive or snorkel or just go down into a viewing area under the float.
Our first trip to the reef was heaven. We had never experienced such diversity of form and color, including dozens and dozens of species of coral — immense beds of purple stag coral with antlerlike branches, and huge domes of brain coral. There are giant clams with lips of green, pink, and purple, threatening to clamp onto unsuspecting divers the way they do in horror movies, and fish from immense groupers to parrotfish, pufferfish, and tiny clownfish hiding in the protective tentacles of soft corals. The Great Barrier Reef is truly one of the wonders of the natural world.
When we returned from our enchanting trip on the Quicksilver, we noticed an excavation site a block away from Port Douglas's Four Mile Beach with a sign saying an apartment building was soon to go up and one suite remained for sale. Phil, Georgie, Tara, and I bought it. Tara and I have enjoyed it ever since, an investment that represents our commitment to Australia as a second home. In the eight years I had lived in the United States, the idea of staying there permanently never entered my mind. But there in Port Douglas, having spent a wonderful day on the Great Barrier Reef, then walking the exquisite sands of Four Mile Beach in perfect weather, we seriously thought about moving to Australia. We have never regretted remaining in Canada, but we do feel privileged to be able to return to Australia again and again.
We fell in love with Port Douglas because it seemed a throwback to another time, when people moved at a slower pace. But when we returned a few years later, the town had been “discovered” and had undergone a major growth spurt that included a new Japanese-backed luxury hotel. Eventually the Quicksilver was sold to a Japanese company, and now high-end restaurants attract more tourists, and the feel of the place has changed. But the Japanese invasion and explosive development are just the latest assaults to change the area.
From December to March, the hot, muggy weather leads locals and visitors to spend a lot of time in the water. But you can't go swimming along Four Mile Beach, because of the “stingers”—poisonous jellyfish — some of which can incapacitate and even kill an adult human. Pictures of victims with stinger “burns” are pretty brutal, displaying open sores and wide swaths of red, swollen tissue. The only ocean swimming in the summer is in “stinger nets,” which are strung out in the water and provide a haven from the jellyfish. It's not the way I had imagined spending time in the ocean.
Stingers were not a hazard in the past, because there were plenty of turtles that fed on them. But the turtles were “harvested” for their meat and shells, and at some point their numbers became so depleted that they could no longer sustain themselves, and they disappeared. Stingers and stinger nets now are just an accepted part of the hot season — but they didn't have to be. Let's hope the great interest of tourists in viewing turtles will help spur the reintroduction and protection of this species.
Two hours' drive from Port Douglas is the Daintree, a jewel of tropical rain forest that is easily accessible and delightful to explore. Yet in the adjacent lands around it, lots are being cleared and sold off for development. Every time I've visited the Daintree, I've been overwhelmed by the immensity of our ignorance and our arrogance in the way we treat nature. A few years ago, biologists “fogged” some of the canopy of the Daintree with pesticide, just as research entomologist Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institution had done in the Peruvian Amazon, and, like Erwin, they found thousands of species of insects that had never before been seen by humans. It is thought there must be tens of thousands of species in the Daintree yet to be discovered.
But remember, when a new organism — plant, animal, or micro-organism — is collected, it can be “keyed out,” meaning its taxonomic position is identified, and if it is new to science, it can be named. When a name is assigned to a new species, that does not mean we know anything about its numbers, distribution, habitat needs, or interaction with other species or even such basic biology as what it eats, how it reproduces, or when it matures. It is breathtaking, therefore, that even though we remain almost completely ignorant of most of the species' needs and interactions with ecosystems, we do not hesitate to destroy those ecosystems to get a few “resources” that we find useful. We should remember the story of the goose that laid golden eggs and realize that entire ecosystems like the Amazon and Daintree forests are the goose. Only so long as they flourish will we be able to collect the golden eggs.
BEFORE MY THIRD VISIT to Australia, I received a message that someone named Peter Garrett, who sang with an Australian group called Midnight Oil, had offered to do an event with me in Sydney on my next visit. I wrote to ask Patrick Gallagher who this guy was and whether he was legit. Patrick replied that he was a big name and Midnight Oil was a very popular group, but the publisher seemed hesitant about the idea of my doing an event with a rock band. His reluctance gave me visions of trying to deliver a serious talk in front of a screaming, drug-crazed audience interested only in hearing the rock group. Uh-uh. I told Patrick to thank Peter but turn him down. Patrick seemed relieved.
Huge mistake. I soon learned that Peter and the Oils were not just big in Australia, they were huge! And they were on their way to conquering North America and Europe.