My Life Line (Episode 1)
Once Upon A Time
I was born during the inaugural International Geophysical Year, the year when the Cold War rivalries of the two ‘super-powers’ were put aside by the world’s scientists in order to, ironically, conduct cold climate research in Antarctica, the coldest, highest and driest continental ice block (sheet) on earth. But I was not predestined to become an earth scientist or geologist / physical geographer (a Geo for short) as I have done, or as I now call myself, an ecologist (Eco as commonly overused), a ‘Planet Guardian’ or Kaitiakitanga is a better and more spiritual Maori descriptor for earth guardianship!
I spent my first decade in Bognor Regis in Sussex England at what is considered to be a seaside resort by English standards. My parents then decided to move to New Zealand (NZ) to start a new life after the economy hit hard times (my first experience of economic decadal boom and bust cycle). When I tell people I am from Bognor that sounds like a place with no swamp, and that I was a Bognor Man, it connects me back through time to Palaeolithic (0.5mya[1]) remains found at the nearby Boxgrove flint tool quarry.
Although, during German classes, I once said to my Teutonic tutor that I was a pure-blooded Anglo Saxon, which I thought was a good joke at the time, that back-fired when she became excited about our strong-shared heritage! I guess my blue eyes and blonder hair (now grey or gone), added to a possible shared ancestry. To me the Angles and Saxons were a mixed bag of pre-Europeans who interbred. I now consider myself an Oceanian, now residing for five decades in Australia (the land of ‘OZ’) and NZ, but part of the Pacific Village.
We stayed with some family friends after our worldly goods were packed into tea chests. I got into a fight with my older brother Simon and remember raising my elbow in defence that caught him in the eye. He had a shiner through the early part of the voyage and I was seen by the ship stewards as the rascal that punched him. We set sail from South Hampton in 1969 (200 years after Captain Cook sailed from Plymouth just along the south coast), across from Portsmouth’s Navy Yard where my uncles had been stationed on ships and subs post-WWII (including stationed on the HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship from the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). We voyaged six-weeks on an ocean liner (‘cruise’ ship), the SS Northern Star, with several stops at incredible and even now in my mind, unforgettable places. As we left the dock a guy was waving and weeping and his glasses fell overboard but I’m sure at that point he was too emotional to care only later blindly staggering around the ship until the first port of call to pick-up replacement glasses.
I still vividly recall passing through the Bay of Biscay, in a notorious Atlantic Ocean storm, standing solo in the centre of the ships long deck and watching it seesaw from my pivotal position amidships, making me a ‘midshipman’ albeit as a mini-man! My family and every other passenger were in their cabins feeling wretched with seasickness for a few days as we battled through the storm. I only succumbed to sickness after a few days when I went into the head (ablutions) down below and the terrible smell hit me.
We reached the first stop in the barmy Spanish Canary Islands (~[2]30°N), off the African coast at Las Palmas, as we called it, and visited a hacienda where the famous mariner Christopher Columbus lived half a Century ago. I’ve always loved the enclosed courtyard gardens ever since but they may have been more Arabic than Spanish. We went in a bus around this steep mountain without any rails as we looked straight down the long drop-off. We finally reached a restaurant at the top overlooking the island. We saw our first black peas and when they told us they were fish eyes we could not to eat them.
While at sea my younger brother Shaun and I ‘borrowed’ some cigarettes and matches from a lounge and went into a storeroom at the stern but despite the fact that both parents were heavy smokers we couldn’t take more than a couple of puffs and never smoked them again. Looking back, I remember paint cans and rags and wonder whether there could have been more of a problem starting a fire than being two underage smokers!
We then crossed the Equator, with the usual dunking by King Neptune, the King-of-the-Sea, not Aquaman, on our journey to the beautiful South African city of Cape Town, the Dutch East India Company founded port (1650s), where unfortunately Table Mountain was draped in cloud. We went shopping for summer clothes but as Dad and us three boys walked along the wide and clean pavement an old black guy standing in the gutter suddenly keeled over covered in blood as though he’d been shot, Dad quickly took us back to the boat.
We then went around the cape of L’Agulhas and on to Durban (~30ºS) where we received our first fragrant assault to our senses at the Indian markets and then bused inland to the Natal’s green Land of a Thousand Hill’s where as young boys, we saw our first eye-catching beautiful brown skinned, brown eyed, big bare breasted Zulu women dressed in brown grass skirts (cliché’). Apart from wandering around the traditional village grass thatched huts I don’t remember seeing too much else!
Then, after a long-haul across the Indian Ocean we arrived at what was then shabby Fremantle where the ship disgorged many Ten Pound Poms and others as ships have done since convicts were dumped there from the 1830s, as Great Britains solution to overcrowded cities. We went on to Melbourne where we visited the Museum with its wonderful window waterfall on a wet windy day; then on to sunny Sydney where we raced across ‘The Bridge’ in the Pursers’ private Merc to Bondi Beach for a day out and left behind some of our new ‘African’ clothes; and finally, arriving at one of the world’s most stunning harbours after Cape Town, Wellington, surrounded by green hills with wooden box homes but no greetings by Maori goddesses dressed in beaded bodices and grass skirts as we had expected from the fanciful brochures.
[1] mya — million years ago
[2] ~ — approximate