The Coast of Coral Read online

  There was nothing for it but to hurl myself into the foam and to battle out from shore as best I could, using alternatively a spasmodic breast stroke and a kind of despairing, going-down-for-the-last-time overarm. After what seemed a very long time, the catamaran loomed up beside me and I was dragged aboard. The first thing I did was to put on my flippers so that whatever else happened, I would no longer be left to my own feeble resources if I had to enter the water again.

  The catamaran then turned to sea, its outboard motor laboring heavily every time we climbed the towering waves crashing in toward Bondi. Once out of the shelter of the bay, it was perfectly obvious that we had no hope of div­ing; we would have our hands full getting back to shore in one piece. The sturdy but overladen little craft was swung round into the waves, and at this point I reluctantly consigned to the deep the excellent lunch that Lois Link-later had just given me.

  When at last we got back into the relative shelter of the bay, it was still too rough for the catamaran to get ashore. Don brought it in as close as he could, then one by one its crew swam ashore with their equipment, using the typical Australian white-water technique I had already seen in action during the wobbegong hunt. I followed a little later; despite my still enfeebled condition, I was able to reach the rocks without much difficulty, as Mike had already taken my Aqualung and camera ashore. A few minutes later, Don followed in the now-lightened catamaran, and it was seized by willing hands before it had a chance of overturning in the surf.

  That was the end of our first attempt to dive off Bondi. Two days later we had rather better luck, when we got the catamaran out in calmer weather and Don led me down to the bottom of the bay on a personally conducted tour.

  He was using a two-cylinder unit, while my single cyl­inder was only half full and also had a slight leak. It took me some time to get below thirty feet, for at first my ears bothered me, but presently I pushed my way through the pressure barrier and joined Don on the bottom, sixty feet down. The water was quite clear, which surprised me since it had appeared dirty from the surface, and I felt rather sorry that I had not brought the camera with me. I had felt it best to avoid such complications on my first deep dive for a year, and in strange waters at that.

  We swam to and fro over the rocky bottom, Don hold­ing fast to a thin line which was our only connection with the distant, bobbling speck of the catamaran. Up there on the surface, Mike was holding the end of the cord and trying, in vain, to interpret Don’s occasional signals. We disturbed several large fish—including one, a banjo skate, whose name describes it perfectly.

  I was right on the bottom when I realized that my air supply was practically exhausted, and that only a couple of mouthfuls were left. My Aqualung was a shallow-water unit, with no reserve supply, and it was admittedly bad practice to stay down until the last gasp. I grabbed hold of Don, indicated that my cylinder was empty, and started to swim to the surface. As long as I didn’t dawdle on the way up, I was in no danger. When ascending, an Aqualunger has to breathe out, not in, as the compressed air in his lungs expands. Moreover, during the climb to the surface the relaxing pressure enables one to suck a few more gulps of air from the cylinders; I timed it rather nicely, and broke water just after swallowing the last cubic inch of air.

  During the rather long swim back to the catamaran, I breathed through the snorkle tube which no Aqualunger should ever dive without. All the way back, Don held my hand—a touching gesture which he hastened to explain as soon as we climbed aboard.

  “They catch all the big sharks just where we were div­ing,” he told me. “I wanted us to stick together so that my air bubbles would frighten them away.” I was so deeply moved by this charming and considerate act that I felt quite unable to frame any suitable reply.

  Mike was also somewhat speechless when we got back to the catamaran. He had calculated that I had not more than fourteen minutes of air for the depth at which we were working, and I had actually been down about twenty minutes. When I did reappear, he was just about on the point of going down to see what had happened.

  As a suitable finale to this dive, Don then took us to view the impressive collection of sharks’ jaws kept on dis­play at the Dorsal Club, a small boathouse overlooking the bay. Here were jaws up to two feet across, filled with scores of razor-sharp teeth. Most of them had been removed from sharks ten or fifteen feet long, all of them taken off Bondi.

  I looked at the grinning white jaws and their serrated ivory fangs—and then I glanced across the bay to the crowded beach, thinking how many of these imposing sets of dentures must be hungrily patrolling these now placid waters. And I shook my head wonderingly as I considered the fantastic risks people took in search of amusement. . . .

  It is impossible to leave the subject of sharks without mentioning one of the most fantastic murders ever recorded in the bulging annals of crime—the so-called “Shark Murder Case” which caused a great stir in Australia some years ago. A large shark had been captured alive and placed in a tank in the Sydney Zoo, where it swam round disconsolately looking rather sorry for itself. It was obvi­ously sick, and after it had been in captivity a few hours it regurgitated its last meal. The zoo attendants were star­tled, to say the least, when they noticed a human arm float­ing around in the pool.

  The Criminal Investigation Branch got to work on this gruesome Exhibit A, and were able to identify the arm’s owner from the fingerprints. In due course his suspected murderers were arrested and tried, but because this is true life and not fiction, no one was ever convicted.

  One can draw several conclusions from this extraordi­nary event. The first is that sharks take a long time to digest their food and probably don’t really enjoy human flesh. And the second, which is hardly original, is that no writer of fiction ever dare attempt to match the improba­bility of truth.

  V

  Enter the Cops

  “We’ve got the cameras, we’ve got the Aqualungs, and we’ve got Sydney harbor,” said Mike one evening. “There’s just one thing we need to make a good underwater picture.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  “A pretty girl. Look at Lotte Hass—”

  “Willingly.”

  “—she’s the star of half the pictures Hans sells to the magazines. Why shouldn’t we try and get into the act?”

  “Doubtless you have someone in mind,” I said resign­edly.

  “Her name’s Margaret, and she lives just across the bridge. I’ve fixed everything up. After breakfast tomorrow, I’ll drive over and collect her while you get the cameras and lungs ready.”

  It seemed quite a good idea; at the worst, it would give us some practice in underwater photography. The sun was shining, and everything seemed all set for an interesting morning beneath the waters of the harbor. Whistling cheerfully, Mike went out to the car and promised, “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “O.K.” I answered, “I’ll have everything ready by then.”

  It took me less than half that time to assemble the nec­essary equipment in the hall of the small private hotel where we were staying. Then I sat down inside the door to read a book and to await the return of Mike—and Margaret.

  I had barely made myself comfortable when there was a knock, and I looked up to see a rather large gentleman standing in the entrance.

  “Does a Mr. Mike Wilson live here?” he asked me.

  “That’s correct,” I said. “But he’s out at the moment.”

  “When will he be back?”

  I explained the situation, said that I was Mike’s partner, and was there anything I could do to help?

  The large gentleman looked me over with a coldly pro­fessional gaze.

  “No,” he said. “It’s Mr. Wilson we want to see.”

  Not until then did I notice, parked on the other side of the road, a black Holden sedan sporting a whip antenna and containing two other characters who, though not built on quite the scale of the one confronting me, were obvi­ously cast from the same mold.

 
; “Uh-huh!” I said to myself. “What the heck has Mike been up to now?”

  “We’ll just wait outside,” said the uncommunicative vis­itor, and joined his companions, leaving me in a somewhat agitated frame of mind. There was nothing I could do about the situation; I didn’t know Margaret’s phone number, and in any case Mike was probably on the way back by now. I tried, without much success, to get interested in my book again. And then, by one of those improbable coincidences which would never happen in a well-constructed novel, another crisis blew up in the house behind me.

  Our landlady, whom I shall call Mrs. Morgan, was a rather overpowering person with a quiet and inoffensive little husband. We got on well enough with both of them, but this morning it was obvious that they were not getting on very well with each other. For some time I had been aware that Mrs. Morgan’s voice had been growing shriller and more agitated, while Mr. M.’s had been becoming more and more subdued. I had tried to ignore this evidence of domestic disharmony, but could hardly continue to do so when Mrs. Morgan grabbed the phone in the hall just behind me and began to call for the police.

  Despite Mr. M.’s efforts to stop her, she must have managed to get through to the local station, for this sort of conversation ensued:

  “Hello—is that the police? I want protection—my hus­band is trying to murder me.”

  (Slight interval, while Mr. M. manages to get hold of the phone.)

  “Don’t worry, officer. I’m afraid my wife’s a little hys­terical.”

  “Hysterical! I’m hysterical?” (Quantities of high-pitched laughter.) “I want the police! Give me Detective-Inspector Smith!”

  (Another scuffle over the phone. Several guests pass through the hall, looking rather embarrassed. The Battling Morgans take no notice of them at all.)

  “It’s quite all right, Inspector. My wife’s just imagining things.”

  (More laughter, but no further phone conversation. At this point, I rather fancy, the police lost interest and hung up on the prospective murderer. Five minutes later, all was peace and quiet again.)

  And ten minutes later, Mike arrived, with Margaret beside him. She was certainly decorative, but I was a little too worried to notice that. As soon as Mike had come bounding up the garden path, waiting to introduce us, I broke the news to him.

  “Don’t look now,” I said, “but there’s a carful of cops over there waiting to have a word with you.”

  With more unconcern than I could have mustered in the same circumstances, Mike strolled over to the waiting patrol car, leaving me to entertain Margaret as best I could. She, poor girl, obviously did not know what to think. Perhaps she wondered if we were part of an international gang that had been planning to ship her to Buenos Aires. . . .

  To our vast relief, Mike’s conversation with the cops was short and moderately friendly. It turned out that they were rather anxious to know exactly why he had just paid a visit to his excolleague Billy Black, now in jail awaiting trial for stealing a car, borrowing a yacht without the owner’s permission, shooting three policemen, and similar minor infractions of the law.

  The case of Billy Black (this is not, of course, his real name) was a sad one. He had been a good friend and part­ner of Mike’s for six months out on the Reef as a diver, and as a frogman in an act they had done together. But he had got himself involved with too many girls and, judging by his behavior, had suffered some kind of breakdown dur­ing which he had literally run amok. He had been caught only after a statewide hunt culminating in a running gun fight, and Mike had been to visit him purely out of sym­pathy for a friend in trouble. The police, who were busily preparing their case—knowing that Billy had the cleverest criminal lawyer in the country defending him—were naturally curious and suspected some ulterior motive.

  The whole affair gave us some anxious moments, for we were afraid that one side or the other might call on Mike to give evidence regarding Billy’s character and ac­tions—which could have been highly inconvenient just when we were planning to leave for the less accessible regions of the Reef. But we never heard any more about the matter, and in due course Billy was given five years to consider the folly of his actions. I thought he was rather lucky, but in Australia shooting at policemen (even when you hit them, as Billy did) is not regarded too seriously when it is only a first offense.

  A few weeks after the trial, one of the national maga­zines came out with a lavishly illustrated life story of Billy under the tear-jerking title, “A Mother’s Boy in Search of Death.” In an attempt to analyze his psychology, the writer decided that Billy’s love of diving was a proof of a hidden death wish. This produced a great splutter of indignation from his expartner. “If wanting to dive proves that you’ve got a death wish,” snorted Mike, obviously thinking of his parachute activities, “what does that make me?”

  Though I felt sorry for Billy, I also felt sorry for the policemen he had punctured. However, it was certainly bad luck that their colleagues had chosen that particular mo­ment to visit us. We tried to explain the situation to Mar­garet, but I don’t know if she really believed our story. For that was the last we ever saw of her, and the end of our attempt to provide some competition to Lotte Hass. At least, the end of that particular attempt, for from time to time Mike still goes down to the sea with a pretty girl and an underwater camera. I am still, however, waiting to see any photographic results.

  VI

  How to Call on an Octopus

  The road to the Reef was a long one, both in terms of distance and of time. It was more than four months from the moment when I met Mike at the end of 1954 to our first landing on an island of the Great Barrier Reef. Most of that time was fully occupied with obtaining and testing equipment, making contacts with everyone who could con­ceivably help our expedition, and waiting—not long enough, as it turned out—for weather conditions in the north to improve.

  During this period, we made two trips south from Syd­ney. The first was to Canberra, Australia’s unique capital, where we met the Secretary of the Prime Minister’s De­partment and other government officials, all of whom did their best to assist our plans. Canberra is like no other city we had ever seen. Fifty years ago, the site was one vast sheep farm, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. Now it is a city of some twenty thousand people, most of them civil servants. But it is a city so completely integrated into parks and wooded areas that except in the shopping and residential quarters it is seldom possible to see more than one building at a time. Calling Canberra a garden city does scant justice to it; on several occasions we thought we were miles out of town in some well-kept forest—only to find that we were in the very heart of Can­berra all the time. The extreme devotion of the capital’s planners to the unspoiled countryside, and their refusal to build more than two or three stories high, has naturally caused much controversy. Nothing is sacred to the Austra­lians (except possibly cricket) and one of their descriptions of Canberra is “six suburbs in search of a city.”

  For both of us, our most vivid recollection of Canberra is concerned with the Mount Stromlo Observatory, mag­nificently sited on a mountain a few miles from the capital. When the instruments now being installed there are oper­ating, this will be one of the finest observatories in the world—certainly the finest in the southern hemisphere.

  A few years before, a forest fire had swept over the mountain, destroying some of the observatory buildings but luckily not affecting the main installations. It was a little depressing to see the seventy-four-inch reflector—which I had admired four years before when it was on display at the Festival of Britain—concealed beneath a maze of scaffolding, with its great mirror still in the case that had brought it halfway round the world. It must have been still more depressing for the astronomers who were anxious to start using the great instrument.

  Mike and I were wandering over the mountaintop when we encountered a ruggedly handsome stockman wearing a vivid checked shirt and mounted on a fine chestnut pony. He explained that he was on his
way to doctor a sick cow, and I engaged him in conversation for some time while Mike photographed us from various angles. One day, I shall have great pleasure in exhibiting these colorful mementos of Mount Stromlo Observatory at a meeting of the British Astronomical Association—for the bronzed and burly cow doctor we met patrolling his mountain range is now Her Majesty’s Astronomer Royal. We very much wished that these cartoonists who always depict astronomers as spin­dly, bulbous-domed creatures peering through thick-lensed spectacles could have seen Dr. Woolley galloping over the landscape.

  It was on the Canberra road, also, that we met our first motorized gypsies. They waved us to a halt, told us some cock-and-bull story about running out of gas, and then insisted on reading our hands and “blessing” the contents of our wallets. We think we got away without loss, but other motorists—judging from subsequent court proceed­ings—were not so lucky. When we returned from Canberra the gypsies were still putting on their act of waving from the roadside like stranded travelers, but this time we roared past them with rude gestures. We waited anxiously for a couple of miles to see if anything would happen to the car, but we must have been going too quickly for any of their curses to catch up with us.

  Our second journey to the south was to a picturesque speck of land, Bowen Island, a hundred miles down the coast from Sydney. At this point lies the important naval base of Jervis Bay, the entrance to which is guarded by Bowen Island, although all the gun emplacements and mil­itary installations have now been removed. The island’s only permanent human inhabitants are an elderly Scots couple who act as caretakers and look after the anglers and spear fishers visiting the place. Bowen Island also supports a colony of minute but extremely bad-tempered penguins, standing about nine inches high. These are so pretty and so easily caught (especially when they emerge from their burrows at night) that it is hard to resist picking them up. They then belie their attractive appearance by cursing madly and removing all accessible pieces of hand with their needle-sharp beaks.