This piece was a creative writing exercise for the MA (in progress).
Win! Your Dream
Holiday!
Just describe it, and one lucky reader will go on their Dream Holiday.”
We all want to be
lucky. It’s been a while since I last thought about it, but you want to know
about my Dream Holiday? It ambushed me while I was sorting through boxes in my
father’s house after his death. There they were: the souvenirs of a life spent
travelling. It was my boast, when younger, that I had been one and a half times
round the world before I was three. Of course, I never remembered any of it.
But I Dreamed: one day I would go
diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
The Adventure
People laughed – adventure was for boys not girls. The books that fed the Dream said the same thing.
The great adventure stories by Willard Price starred two boys collecting animals for their father’s company. Television programmes filled the Dream with Technicolor but had no place for girls as they hacked through the jungles of Borneo or sailed the South Sea Islands. But the 1970s were a rapidly changing era, as one of my favourite writers, Terry Pratchett, later said “if you ignore the rules, then people rewrite them so they don’t apply to you”. As I was learning how to kayak and rock climb, things that only boys should do, attitudes were also changing. In my earliest dreams I go coral diving among the brightly-coloured fish and bring up treasures from the depths, but as I grew more aware of the pressures on the natural world I saw the damage and wanted to save it so others who came after me could see it too.
The Diorama
During the Great Sort
Out of my parents’ belongings I came across a diorama encased in resin: a true
gem of the tourism industry. As I twisted it in my hands, delighting again in
seeing the seahorse apparently swimming through purple coral while a starfish
lounged on the sand beneath, the old Dream jumped out: one day I had been going
to collect my own diorama from the coral reefs. I even learned how to cast
resin.
By the time my parents
arrived at the Great Barrier Reef, in the late 60s, tourism was strong. Before
then you imagine the women in their prim white dresses and sunbonnets,
accompanied by men in their stiff Sunday suits picking up shells and coral from
the reef at low tide. Even when my parents visited it was mostly daytrips in
glass-bottomed boats. Collecting the specimens for the diorama must have been
done by professional divers, bravely swimming through the clear waters, with
the new aqualungs that had first appeared in the war. I pictured them snapping
off coral and ramming starfish into a collecting bucket. Tourist divers rolling
backwards off the boat arrived in the 70s and 80s – and that was when, with
images from our new colour telly dancing in front of my eyes, that I first had
my dreams of diving the reef.
The Pearls
Eagerly I dip my hand
in the box again; this is like tour of my dream. I take out and open a red case.
Sixty silvery orbs nestle in black velvet. I tip them out; they feel like silk
in my palm. In these days of cultured pearls, my mother’s necklace of sixty
matched pearls is nothing spectacular, nor will it be worth much. When it was
purchased, over fifty years ago, the matched pearls would have been worth a
fortune.
Divers jumped into the
clear water with no mask or breathing equipment, with only a basket around
their neck. Powerful thrusts of their legs drove them down. A basket hanging around their necks, once
full the diver took it off and tugged on the rope attached. On the boat above
men hauled the basket and the diver to the surface. With the basket emptied,
the diver ducked under the waves again. Sometimes they held a large rock to
drag them to the bottom without the effort of swimming down.
It was a dangerous business. Japanese women dived through heavy curtains of arame seaweed, all the while wondering if this dive the sharks would get them. Pearl divers are rare now; young people won’t make the dangerous dive when there are safer options. Grafting a foreign body into an oyster to encourage the formation of 'cultured pearls' makes the job so much easier. Tourists swim in shallow lagoons checking over the oysters hanging on ropes. Pick your own – like strawberries.
“Over here,” I imagine a swimming guide saying, “are the two-year olds.”
Once opened, they
produce pearls of a quality seen in my mother’s necklace.
The Fisherman
Up ahead in our Dream
tour, you can see the gaping crevice where bottom trawling has dragged the
coral out of the reef. Overfishing means fewer fish, which scatter away from
our lights. Some fishermen squirt cyanide into the water to paralyse the fish,
making them easier to catch. Or worse yet, they use dynamite which stuns the
fish and destroys part of the reef with it.
I dust the passing years off the next souvenir from the box; I’d like to think the carved Chinese fisherman would disapprove of the wholesale destruction; he uses a pole and line. He would never use a plastic net then discarded it as it snagged on the corral. Rotting fish are trapped in the weave. Old and damaged equipment thrown overboard onto to the reef causing ‘Ghost Fishing’. It’s not just fish trapped; there are heart-warming internet videos of humans cutting turtles and whales out of nets.
Did you see the picture of
the deformed turtle shell caught in the plastic beer holder? Many sea birds are
dying because they are eating the bright plastic thinking they are shellfish.
In June 2016, thirteen sperm whales washed up dead on Germany’s coast with
stomachs full of plastic.
The Coral
I stare in dismay at
the final souvenir to emerge; it’s a piece of white fan coral. Mass coral
bleaching events have filled the news this year, turning the coral reef ghost
white – like the souvenir from my box. 2016 was a disaster year for coral reefs
around the world. Mass coral bleaching events filled the environmental newsfeeds.
With human over-reliance on burning fossil fuels, the ocean water is now too
warm. The coral expels the colourful algae. And when the coral dies, the
diversity plummets.
Agricultural run-off from modern intensive farming leeches into the ocean. Green algae blankets the coral, our dream tour is becoming a slimy nightmare.
Just when we are
despairing, many countries are banning the plastic bags that sea turtles
mistake for jellyfish and eat. Reef fishing is being brought under tighter
control and we have learned that despite the massive bleaching events some
coral can recover. Scientists have discovered heat-resistant algae that can
help the corals.
There are creatures,
like turtles, which have swum the seas of the Great Barrier Reef since the time
of the dinosaurs. Yes, we all want to be lucky and ‘Win’, but we need to act
now to save the reefs or there will be nowhere for our children and
grandchildren to take their Dream Holidays.
