My own private Amazon
As an environmental scientist working at an Australian university, I’m scarred by the thousands of cuts inflicted upon the natural world and those institutions and individuals entrusted to monitor its wellbeing. A colleague quipped that being a biologist in the 21st century was like being a curator of a national gallery that was ablaze; our entire lives spent torn between deciding which priceless artworks to grab on the way out; which lineages, which ecosystems to save. Sofie’s Choice played on the widest of screens. As well as losing the species we study and places we cherish, our workmates and collaborators succumb. Those whip-smart researchers with freshly-minted degrees you meet at conferences presenting elegant work already challenging paradigms? You might cross paths again in the next couple of years but chances are they won’t become peers. What outsiders label a leaky pipeline, insiders know to be a crumbling aqueduct; obstinately obsolete. Most science PhD graduates join the banking sector, their independence and critical thinking applied to different columns of ones and zeros, remunerated far more than their mentors already moulding the next cohort of impressionable minds. Academics are acutely aware of how insignificant we are, how easily we’re shouted down. No-one I’ve voted for has ever won anything.
This drama plays out over one’s career; ideology and passion burning brightly, but not indefinitely. Many burn out, fade away or step aside. To keep at it — to keep chipping away despite it all — takes a particular mindset. Rather than intelligence or analytical prowess, it’s other qualities that endure and sustain those who remain. While circumstance and rusted-on privilege helped us secure tenure, creativity and perseverance keep us in the game. So what’s the elixir that drives us, the stuff we hold most dear, the motivator that assuages the constant rejection that distinguishes our profession? It’s hope. Hope is our stock-in-trade, hope is the currency we accumulate and invest, the bounty we cultivate and share.
How can environmental scientists sustain hope in the modern world? How can we inspire others to shine when our own lamp begins to flicker and wane? With all that we know about the fallibility of governance structures and the creaking instability of planetary processes that make breathable air and drinkable water? How can we move beyond incremental advances of our caveat-laden research papers and rally society to stride forward with purpose, to invest in a future for all rather than riches for the few? How can we keep on keeping on?
For some, hope is a thing with feathers. Not me. I study birds, I know too much about them. I routinely break off conversations to eavesdrop on distant birdsong, attach a name, retrieve favoured foods and preferred nesting sites, then reconcile that fact-file with my current location, time and season to ponder reproductive status, migratory dynamics and population trajectories, then suddenly wonder why the person I was talking to is regarding me so strangely. Within a minute or two of listening to a recorded dawn chorus, I can tell if that area has been overgrazed, if the eucalypts are flowering or if there’s an extended drought a thousand kilometres away. My team now trains computers to identify species, infer pattern to inform policy, sifting through archived recordings that will one day remind people how wild places sounded. Birds are the units that define my science, the ambassadors of the ecosystems I study, the lenses that focus my understanding of the mechanisms defining them. They’re the living breathing vocabulary I use to craft narratives describing and defending the habitats I hold dear. They’re way too close to be the beacons I need.
For me, hope is a thing with fins. It’s fish but, more than the animals themselves, it’s everything they represent — that vast viscous majority of our world where physics and physiology conspire to forbid mankind from living. The worst we can do is trespass and despoil from afar. The most intact and inaccessible wilderness is underwater.
My connection with fish runs deep. Growing up in suburban Melbourne, my family had a series of dogs and cats, but we also had a fishbowl. Occasional trips to the aquarium shop were a highlight. I realize now how patient my father was — all he wanted was a replacement fish or two, a mission that might entail ten minutes in the shop, but oh no — I had to look at every single tank. I would start by regarding the names written in white marker on the front glass. I’d try and imagine what a gourami or a rasbora might look like, conjure up a tetra or loach in my mind’s eye, then peer closely within to locate the inhabitants and attach names to creatures. And what wondrous creatures! Some transparent, some weirdly luminous. Then, blurring my eyes till the humming pumps and gurgling filters fell away, I was transported there. I was underwater.
Around that time, I decided marine biology was my destiny and, therefore, I must learn to scuba dive. Having watched dozens of documentaries, I deduced special training was required to master ‘ze aqualung’. Squinting at the flickering black and white transmission, I distinguished air tanks and tubes, bubbles and face masks. I perfected my regimen of scuba breathing, inhaling through the right corner of my mouth then exhaling from the left, diligently practicing as I walked to school until it became second nature.
My first snorkelling experiences were during an undergraduate fieldtrip to the Great Barrier Reef, also the time I realized birds were the ideal animals to answer the ecological questions I found most fascinating. Exploring underwater was so much better than expected. Not just the myriad glistering life forms, but how it felt. How I felt. Back then I was scrawnier (a mate still reckons I need to run around in the shower to get wet) and while this means I chill rapidly in cold water, it also makes me neutrally buoyant in the sea, giving this ornithologist that most coveted superpower — flight. Up, down, over there — all within easy reach. Different rules apply in this place. The gawky technician with sloping shoulders who avoided eye contact when setting up our teaching labs was transformed once he broke the surface. He held his breath for an impossibly long time, moving with the grace and poise of a ballet dancer. Being underwater is as revelatory as it is humbling. Swimming over a school of large trevally, I watched them tilt to one side in unison like mirrored louvers, regard my silhouette momentarily, decide I posed no threat, then tilt back to resume their fishy business. Unlike the decades I’ve spent on land, the years living in forests, the months ensconced in one particular rainforest to divine its secrets and delineate my science, my time underwater is measured in minutes, hours at most. This rarity affords significance. I treasure my pearlescent underwater experiences as others treasure diamonds.
The first time snorkelling with my wife, pregnant with our second son, is one such cherished memory. We swam out from a tropical beach toward a darker area just visible from shore. There were corals and sea-snakes, a bejewelled ray. Floating at the surface, looking down and holding hands so we could squeeze and point and share, we were joined by a fellow traveller. You know those pert yellow fish with black stripes that you see swimming beside sharks and dugongs in documentaries, cruising along in their own precarious safe space? One of them appeared out of the blue, barely the size of a matchbox, and swam directly in front of us, sharing our leisurely journey back from the outer reef all the way over the endless dappled depths through sandy shallows to the beach, leaving us only once we stood up in knee-deep water.
Fishing is another facet; again, a pursuit enjoyed so rarely that it’s special. When my oldest son finished school, we marked the occasion by heading to the high country. We walked to the top of Kosciusko and camped for a week in the shadow of the main range, wading in gin-clear waters trying to outfox trout. It’s become a fixture we relish but also a pretext for being together. Fishing occasionally yields food and affords new ways to prepare feasts for the people I love. Whether emulating whitebait fritters we tasted in New Zealand, mocked up with fresh mosquito fish from the backyard dam; çeviche from a couple of tiddlers caught off the Busselton jetty paired with lime juice that magically converted translucent muscle to flaky meat with chemistry rather than heat in the privacy of the campervan fridge; or fiery gumbo with grilled mullet and stock from the previous night’s red-throated emperor served as the sun set over Shark Bay.
While on sabbatical, though, I discovered another aspect of my underwater adoration, a golden thread long woven into my tapestry, but only then did I catch it in the right light and see it glinting that I realized what it was and reflected on what it meant. Like en-dashes and hour-long lectures, sabbaticals are a quaint contrivance to which acadæmia holds dear. This was my third sabbatical, an opportunity for my family to join me living in a far-away place; far from domestic strictures that defined our days and diminished our desires, away from the administrivia that occupied my office and intruded upon my headspace. A time to regroup, think deeply and rekindle the fundamental curiosity that got me this far; to remind myself why I keep chipping away despite it all.
This sabbatical began strangely. The scientist who invited me to come and work with his team on the big island of Hawai’i — who wrote the requisite recommendation on letterhead paper that satisfied my university’s committee — forgot to tell anyone at his end that I was coming and was taking extended leave when I arrived. They weren’t sure what to do with me, eventually deciding I was best classified as a volunteer, gave me some forms to fill out and showed me a cubicle I could use so long as I kept out of the way. It was an isolated forest research station with a high turnover of hungry early-career types, most of whom had already been burned. Eye contact was rare, meaningful conversation rarer — it was weeks before my presence was acknowledged or my perspective sought. It worked out just fine. I thought, I wrote, I crafted and integrated.
Our oldest son, the fisherman, joined the high school running team that trained for a couple of hours after classes. Our other boys were finished by three, so I needed to come up with something to do each afternoon before heading back to our rented house where my wife was working on her own scientific projects. Spending time exploring the island was problematic. Those shapely trees with colourful birds cloaking the jagged ranges that attract so many international visitors held less charm for me. They’re among the worlds’ worst invaders, outcompeting local plants and animals living nowhere else, pushing them up to the high forests where disease-carrying mosquitoes can’t survive and there’s just enough food left by the pigs and deer and mouflon introduced to give people something to hunt.
The Pacific beckoned and we found a sheltered cove where local families paddled and relaxed, away from sunburnt tourists. Onēkahakaha became our snorkelling spot, my refuge for five afternoons a week for several months. Each day was a lucky dip — how many sea turtles would we spot? Would we see that puffer fish with blue spots, or that metre-long tubular jobbie like a stretched-out seahorse? Would we hear that mechanical popping sound or glimpse a toothy barracuda flashing past or see that bizarre glowy thing in the cave beneath the waves?
Our youngest son took to the water with brazen self-assuredness. Within weeks he was clearing his mask, duck-diving down to pick up sea cucumbers or cowries, his skin becoming bronzed and his tousled hair sun-kissed. Turtles were his favourite — he’d spot one from the shore and swim out to approach it, bringing along choice morsels of algae from rubble in the shallows they couldn’t reach and patiently feed them. Our second son hadn’t shown such naturalist tendencies. I had a cage trap set beside the chook pen a few years earlier, hoping to catch a persistent fox. He came in from collecting sticks to start the fire and mentioned that there was a bird caught in it. “Oh really, thanks. What kind of bird?” I enquired. “Dunno, some kind of parrot”. It was a blackbird. No dramas. Rather than naming animals, the periodic table was his jam. If our musical preferences and favourite flavours harken back to the womb, maybe his unborn experience in coral reefs transformed him early on…? We borrowed some books and he inhaled them, becoming the taxonomic authority for all fish-related questions. He taught us how to pronounce the humuhumu-nukunuku-a-pua’a, local name for the Picasso-esque triggerfish we’d see patrolling the shallows. He’d found his element and it was beautiful to behold.
Seeing him grow into the role, I realized why being underwater snorkelling with my boys was so special. It’s not my comfort zone as a scientist. Those shimmery things, that blob with noodly appendages we’d see and poke — I had no idea what those beings were; not even which phylum they hailed from. That’s when the epiphany hit. The wonder I experienced underwater was contingent on how little I knew about what I was seeing. I didn’t interpret it or attempt to pull it apart for analysis. Quite the opposite, just blissful open-mouthed wide-eyed gawking, leaving ample space for others to inhabit and grow, to learn and impart. The wonder I experienced underwater was the kind of experience others have when entering a forest, walking in a meadow, or gazing upon a mountain range. When an unfamiliar bird alights on the back fence, or a whole flock wheels overhead in the late afternoon, oblivious to the concrete and chaos beneath. Those rapturous moments that sustain people, help them endure hardship; sculpt values.
These are the scenes and casts of characters I study. I know about them; I known names and faces, functions and histories. But in dissecting these scenes, by replacing the wide-angle lens with binoculars to focus on miniature details, I’d forgotten that feeling. That corporeal resonance. When you first hear a lyrebird in full song, a forest oratorio complete with celebrity cameos and a romantic subplot. That humbling feeling when you round a corner and look up to see the big tree of the forest, that one individual that has withstood more than you can know and wrap your arms around it and exchange breaths. That feeling of unadulterated awe as you watch the morning sun play across an undulating landscape, picking out relief like headlights on a track; no signs of humanity all the way to the skyline. For me, those scenes no longer pan out that way. I hear the chainsaw in the lyrebird’s repertoire and ponder how long they’ll continue mimicking songs of less fortunate birds that have long since died out. I look beneath the forest giant to note the absent saplings, the spoor of invasive herbivores preventing seedlings from growing up to replace it, the weeds tracked in by other visitors who took selfies amid the ‘wildflowers’. I see the vast forests long designated as reserves and realize that their roadless extent paradoxically undermines their continued existence, unprecedented bushfires impossible to access and control.
When I look at a forest, it’s akin to looking at something you’ve made, a blanket, bookshelf or barbecue. You see the gap, the wonky join, the botched finish. Your personal experience means you see what others cannot — what lies beneath, the inner workings and dodgy workarounds. The wonder that first drew me to forests is essential to catalyse my work and empower others to join forces, but it’s illusory — it’s still there but needs to be carefully curated. But how? Do I lock it away in quarantine to keep it pure? Keep a journal or album of first impressions as reminders? Undertake regular pilgrimages to special places, forest shrines or sacred groves. I do all of these things but it’s not enough; it falls well short. I realized I needed to find a font of wonder because it underpins everything I do. It’s what I strive to inspire in others about wildlife and the places they live and the functions they perform that create a world worth living in. The students I teach, the landholders I trust, the travellers I meet on the road; the committees I counsel, the councils I advise, the advisors I try to influence. About birds and their ways. About the mistletoes they pollinate, decorating the trees and fertilizing the soil. About wildflowers blazing in the understory, embroidering roadside remnants of woodlands that once swathed our continent.
To rekindle hope, to remind myself of what’s at stake, I now know that fish and the lucid realms they represent are my muse. Living in the bush constrains al fresco aquatic options, but an engineering solution presented itself while renovating our old house. We poured an extra thick foundation beneath one wall, defining a nook that would become my own private Amazon, a tangible, ever-present source of wonder.
Realizing this vision has been a long and thoroughly enjoyable process, involving the acquisition of skills and words previously unknown: self-levelling concrete, bulkhead flanges and the dark art of fluidized bed filtration systems. My aquarium emulates a tributary of the Rio Negro, clean white sand, tea-coloured water, emergent tree trunks and luxuriant fringing vegetation. I’ve populated this microcosm with outlandish characters — wood-eating catfish, electro-sensory knife fish that recognize individual people, silver-plated headstanders that patrol and pirouette. I lived with forest people in southern Guyana for months during an expedition, camping deep in their domain. I swam in the creeks, marvelling at their sweetness. Among the more memorable meats was laba — the firm white subtlety of roasted paca, corgi-sized cousin to the capybara whose nocturnal gnawing drives Brazil nuts to be encased in ever harder shells. The Makushi confided in me that once you’d tasted blackwater and feasted on laba, you would always return to Amazonia. They were right and, now that this aquarium’s a reality, I’ll never leave.
Like all living things, my tank’s a work in progress. Having been in the design phase for almost thirty years, I’m clearly in no great hurry but the closer I came to completing each stage, the more challenges presented themselves. I looked forward to the day I could lie in the strategically-positioned hammock, wrestling with a conundrum, struggling to find the right words or grasping for motivation and glance over to spy fins rippling in dappled water and feel that mental glitch click into alignment like a properly-seated bulkhead flange.
This hope, this joy I need? As well as immersive encounters, it arises from expectation. My grandmother lived till the ripe age of 102 — until her late-nineties she lived in a country house, growing her own vegies and berating the sixty- and seventy-something-year-olds for taking the bus to the library. It’s only just up the road, she’d say. They should walk! Her garden was the very reason she thrived — there was necessarily tomorrow. Those gooseberries needed pruning. It was time to sow the chervil. Looking ahead makes the future inevitable and measurably better.
Rather than giving me a strategic spark, my interactions with the recreated riverscape have become more organic; appropriately, more modular. It’s my outlook when I greet the day with an espresso and croissant, parsing overnight emails and contextualising morning headlines. Regular shared encounters with fish that are fast becoming familiar faces. With my wife, our boys, my social media mates. A Friday night ritual has begun. Crank up some metal, pour a finger or two of single malt and dive in. Witness the territorial skirmishes, the flirtatious fin flicks, all reflected by the melding mirrored surface. To get a closer view, I cleaned up a bodgy bench and moved it from beside the barbecue to prime position, directly in front of the tank. It’s the right height but the weathered timber is uncomfortable. Which works out well. Enlightenment is strong stuff — a small dose does the trick.
One Friday, I marinated on a new project; making a worthy replacement for the bench. Wheels began turning…
Natural edge slab, something local but with a hat-tip to the Amazon… Maybe a chunky trunk as one support, buttresses and curves emulating the sinuous curves of a tropical tributary…
There’s ancient wisdom about this, as beguilingly simple as it is transformative. About being present. Aware. Rather than “three easy steps” or “tried and trusted techniques”, you just have to work it out. That’s the whole point isn’t it? Pay attention, acquire data, think it through. This process also underpins my science, heck, it’s the basis of all science. Keep acquiring data and adjust, about-face as needed. And, ultimately, learn when to make the call. When it’s done. I realized I’d been putting off the official end point to my aquarium project.
No, no — there’s still a few things to sort out. I’ll wait till the fish are a bit bigger, till the plants are more established. It’s not quite there yet.
On the spur of the moment, I climbed into the hammock and drank it all in. Of course there’d be refinements and tweaks but it was done. Time to stop walking toward the horizon and start enjoying the view; marvel at this microcosm, this fluvial facsimile made uncannily real through the forced perspective of refraction. Then it dawned on me. That old bench, the placeholder? It’s all it needs to be, there’s no need for a bespoke upgrade. The rough-hewn timbers and vernacular design would be right at home on a Brazilian riverbank. Job done, done well; move on. By continually looking ahead, you can forget how far you’ve come. Pausing now and then is crucial. To calibrate. To celebrate. To remind ourselves what’s at stake.
This is about decisions and priorities, values and voting preferences; unspoken core beliefs. Lyrebirds may not survive this century and I’m at peace with that. But the tree ferns they nest within, the cool gulleys they roam amid trickling rivulets and chuckling frogs — that’s what we’re fighting for. And I’ll be darned if some jumped-up, third-rate primate will relegate all of this to the fossil record.
This isn’t about personal gain or legacies. It’s a calling. Just as nurses tend the sick despite it all, environmental scientists tend every other life form. Win-win solutions are in hand, justifications fully costed; our students, colleagues and the statistical sleeper cells of once-were-scientists that have infiltrated global financial networks are poised to mobilise. All that’s missing is collective will. The will to decommission stranded assets and the structures propping them up past their use-by dates; the will to recover and redistribute stolen goods and establish new frameworks founded upon equality; the will to call out contrived polarization and vested interests, to reject confected misinformation and commodified convenience.
Drinking deeply from my wellspring, I’m renewed, reinvigorated; shining bright. We’ve got this; I’m on a roll! I’m not even breaking a sweat. Then again, that’s the beauty of being underwater. You’d never even know.
