Suzanne Falkiner

Peter Grant Watson’s daily routine now began with an early morning dip in the sea. The small reef sharks, well-fed on numerous shoals of fish, left them alone: they were easily frightened off if you splashed with the palm of the hand, according to Dr Steel, although they sometimes carried a harpoon or tomahawk while swimming. After breakfast came several hours of ethnological work, followed by another sea-bathe, and then a meal at midday cooked by Louis Olsen, mainly of fish he had caught on the turn of the tide the previous day. In the afternoons they worked again.

Brown had arranged for the male inmates to be brought to him one by one under the canvas shelter, where he assigned them numbers and began compiling a list of their ‘European’ names—Dick, Jimmy, Nobby, Tiny, Shank, Possum etc—along with their tribal names, ages and district. Brown and Grant Watson then ‘interrogated’ their subjects intensively, using the painstaking method evolved by W. H. R. Rivers at Cambridge. Sitting down individually with each informant, they asked a string of questions to establish family details—who was your mother? who will your brother marry? what do you call your mother’s brother?—until a mathematical pattern (later dubbed by Malinowski a ‘kinship algebra’) emerged that could either be matched with a previously-discovered type or classified as a new discovery. Evenings were spent in conversation, or relaxing on the sand dunes overlooking the sea.

Peter was in his element. On the island’s outer edge, where the long Indian Ocean rollers washed endlessly onto a submerged coral shelf at the foot of the low cliffs, the receding tide uncovered aquarium-like pools filled with vivid new sea life. On the eastern, or inner, side, where the waves broke gently on little sheltered beaches and shallow bays, tiger sharks basked in the sunlit water and dugongs grazed on seagrass. The island’s wallabies—which Peter believed had adapted to drinking seawater—were so fearless that they explored their tents at night, scampering and playing under the camp beds, while giant turtles lumbered inland onto the moonlit sandy wastes to bury their eggs. Peter, when not assisting Brown, spent his time in nothing but a pith helmet and a towel around his waist, exploring and collecting specimens and spearing fish. Even at noon, when the temperature reached 115 under their shade cloth, the sea breeze made the heat quite bearable. This zephyr, freshening at sunrise before sinking to a dead calm at evening, also blew away the flies.

But if Peter was able to observe a great deal about the wildlife on Bernier Island, he learned relatively little about Brown, who—while talkative on other matters—was reticent about himself. Rex had stayed behind in England to be married, Peter knew, but Brown never spoke of his wife, and in the months they were together he wrote to her only twice, and then only on half a sheet of paper. When knew each other a little better, however, Brown spoke of a ‘Russian princess’ he had been engaged to as an undergraduate at Cambridge. (This was probably Sasha Kropotkin, daughter of Russian nobleman and anarchist Petr Kropotkin: Brown had a taste for distinguished connections, observers noticed.) Like Rex, she had been an avowed anarchist—though again like him, one devoted to personal freedom rather than political upheaval. But due to some regrettable mistake, it seemed, the engagement had gone wrong.

‘During several evenings as we sat looking out over the beaches, listening to the cries of the oyster-catchers and the sea eagles that circled above us in the darkness, feeling gloriously remote not only from Australia but from Europe and from our earlier lives, Brown propounded the theory of anarchism’, wrote Grant Watson. A Francophile, Rex also sought to emulate the cultural discernment of the French, compared to whom, he thought, the British were barbarians. But if Brown by now had nearly renounced the Anarchist doctrine, he leant instead towards socialism—although he perceived a danger in any movement that exalted the state above the individual:

“Democracy?” I asked.

The word seemed to lose itself in the quiet noises of the night. Here we were, far away from any meaning it might have. After a long interval, Brown said: “We have the Present, if only we could appreciate, and surely we can in a place like this.”

So it was, so long as we kept ourselves free from the human politics which stirred and crackled amongst the hospital staff.