John (Charlie) Veron

Marine science via the UNE bush

Long before he became the “godfather of corals” and sounded the alarm about climate change impacts on our magnificent reefs, acclaimed marine scientist Professor Charlie Veron studied possums and lizards and dragonflies at UNE. In fact, the 1960s and 1970s on the Armidale campus was a time for him of discovery, scholarly independence and personal growth that set the scene for his stellar career.

“I was such an underperformer at school,” Charlie recalls.  “I was near the bottom of the class in every subject and had no self-confidence. I was that sickly, deadbeat kid in the corner who was often belted for not doing what he was meant to be doing.”

He preferred, instead, to explore Sydney’s rockpools and national parks in search of creatures. A blue-ringed octopus (Oci) became his beloved pet and young John Edward Norwood Veron would delight in introducing his classmates and teachers to his wildlife collection, most famously a funnel-web spider smuggled in in a biscuit tin – earning him the nickname Charles for his Darwin-esque tendencies.

“School did not agree with me,” he says. “So can you imagine my shock, at the end of high school, when I earned one of only 10 Commonwealth scholarships to study anything I wanted, wherever I wanted in the country?”

He chose UNE, Charlie says, to get as far away from Sydney as he could. The rural setting appealed, where he could connect with nature, but he connected with something much deeper, too.

“I initially wanted to study psychology, to find out who I was,” says Charlie. “But the problem was that it was in the arts faculty at UNE and all the subjects I wanted to do were in the science faculty. So I did psychology on the side and was welcomed by the psych department because I was a good lab rat. This went on for years and years. I’m sure I featured in many people's PhDs.”

The beauty of his Commonwealth scholarship was that Charlie had free rein to study what he liked; the time and space to develop his own thoughts, “unfettered or unmoulded by those of others”.

“That’s been the story of my life,” Charlie says. “I revelled in all the subjects that were on offer at UNE. I was curious about nature and had the chance to go out and soak up the natural world and wonder about it. UNE was so good for that. I might have been running in a forest and would begin wondering about lichens and trees, so then I would go down to the botany department and sit in on lectures.

“I did half a degree in botany, some chemistry and a whole year’s worth of geology, and none of that appears on my academic record. UNE provided a foundation for growing and expanding, for thinking laterally to get to the truth of matters. I was like a kid in a lolly shop, I really was. Joining all the sciences together has been a signature of everything I’ve done in my career ever since, and that all started at UNE.”

It was also at UNE, quite surprisingly, that Charlie joined a small scuba-diving club and found a passion that has sustained him for almost 60 years and 6000 hours. Exploring the Solitary Islands off Coffs Harbour with friend Terry Done, Charlie found corals where none had been recorded before.

“UNE had a little marine station at Arrawarra and I used to go there an awful lot,” he says. “I would ‘borrow’ the zoology department’s tinny and go out to the islands to look at corals. I had no boat licence, no diving record, and I’d take other students, too. Today, it would seem very reckless.

“I was gob-smacked by what I saw – acres and acres of coral and all this other marine life. We set about getting together information for a marine park proposal – not even the Great Barrier Reef was a marine park at that time – and it finally happened 30 years later.”

While completing his PhD on dragonfly neurophysiology (the way nerve cells receive and transmit information) Charlie became a teaching fellow at UNE in the fields of zoology, physiology and genetics. The results of his own research came “thick and fast” and, after presenting at an International Congress of Entomology, he was offered three overseas postdoctoral positions. He turned down all three to accept a post at James Cook University to study corals, having never attended a single marine biology lecture.

“One of my UNE professors said I was dumping a promising career in insect physiology for a scuba-diving holiday,” Charlie remembers.

The amazing career that unfolded would have surely made that professor smile more than once.

Charlie became the first full-time researcher on the Great Barrier Reef in 1972 and, two years later, the first scientist employed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), the organisation that he would go on to lead for almost a decade. He taught himself everything there was to know about corals, starting “from scratch” with taxonomy, and has since studied most of the world’s major reefs and named one-quarter of the known coral species. He also discovered the Coral Triangle and founded the Orpheus Island Marine Station.

Having produced 100 publications on everything from coral palaeontology and taxonomy to biogeography and physiology, including the three-volume Corals of the World bible and the GBR tome A Reef in Time, Charlie is widely credited with transforming our understanding of coral reefs. Most recently, his science has informed reef conservation in the wake of the dramatic climate change-induced declines he was among the first to highlight.

Now, Charlie is once again drawing on that talent for field observation and lateral thinking, as part of an ambitious mission to preserve coral species in aquaria all around the world. It’s a strategy not embraced by all scientific colleagues – Charlie’s preparedness to challenge orthodoxy and bureaucracy has courted both steadfast allies and enemies – but he sees it as an essential insurance policy.

“We have already lost about 15 of the more common coral species on the GBR,” he says. “If we can keep corals alive in aquaria, then there will come a time when the gene jockeys in molecular biology can develop temperature-resistant corals. We’ll then be able to repopulate the reefs with genetically-modified corals. The alternative is that we leave corals to go extinct and that’s it; end of story.”

It's an outcome Charlie cannot countenance.

“Coral reefs are home to 50% of all marine life. If we wipe them out, you have an ecological collapse of the oceans and that will lead to an ecological collapse of everything. Coral reefs lead the way because of their vulnerability to carbon dioxide, and therefore temperature. As a scientist who stitches things together, I saw this happening before others did and now we have the evidence to prove it.”

Charlie was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia this year, in recognition of his services to marine research, but says he’s unlikely to turn up for the investiture and would trade it in a heartbeat for “something more useful” to protect the Great Barrier Reef. His latest clarion call urged support for UNESCO’s recommendation to the World Heritage Committee to place the reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

“The Australian Government is putting political expediency ahead of the reef and dodging responsibility for climate change, and that is unforgiveable,” Charlie says. “I am 77 years old and there’s no personal interest in this for me anymore. I don’t care about the honours; I just care about conserving our reefs.”