15 minute read
Reefs and rock lobsters
Stonehenge Ningaloo Reef, 2016. Drawn under water by Roger Swainston with graphite on translucent drafting film. 1800 x 3600 mm. All images © and courtesy Roger Swainston unless otherwise stated
Scientist and natural history artist Roger Swainston spends large portions of his working life under water, drawing the world’s coral reefs and studying and painting the creatures that inhabit them. Here he relates a typical day from one of his annual field trips, working on the Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia.
NINGALOO REEF, CORAL BAY, EARLY MARCH: I’m woken before dawn by the piercing calls of the resident Magpie Larks and lie waiting for a few minutes until, like clockwork, the seagulls start up their neck arching and squawking to urge me out of bed and start the day.
The morning ritual. I put a coffee to percolate on the camp stove and begin going through my checklist: camera charged and housing sealed, new sheet in the drawing board, graphite crayons sharpened .... With the sun coming up I heave all the dive gear into the boat, run through the checklist one more time and head for the boat ramp.
Now it’s all about maintaining a certain rhythm; getting the boat into the water and not forgetting anything essential is a disciplined sequence much repeated. Concentrating on multiple little details, getting everything ready, anticipation starts to rise until I cast off and motor out into the bay. That abrupt separation from land always provides a moment of quiet elation. Today I am working on a site about 30 minutes away and the trip out there is pure pleasure. I have the sea to myself this early and the boat hums along, planing over calm water in the windless early morning light. I check the water clarity, absorbing the breathtaking colours of the Ningaloo shallows, and judge the swell breaking on the outer reef to my left. Schools of Damselfish flee to left or right, and the occasional turtle basking at the surface wakes in fright and flaps panicstricken for the bottom.
I throttle back as I approach my destination. Known locally as ‘Stonehenge’, this circular cluster of ancient porite coral, in the lagoon just inside the main reef, is barely submerged at low tide. Surrounded by flat sandy bottom, a single colony of porite has grown ever outwards over many hundreds of years, sculpted by grazing Parrotfish, to form a broken ring some 15–20 metres across. I jockey the boat around to judge the drift, drop the anchor and cut the noise and vibration of the outboard. Sudden quiet. Gentle slap and clonk of the aluminium hull and the everpresent background rumble of surf on the outer reef. I’m right where want to be.
It’s not always like this. Some days the south-westerly is already up and I’m drenched by the spray and slop, shivering before I’ve even rounded the first channel marker. Some days it’s a real effort to make myself push on, through nasty chop and strong winds. But one thing is always the same, that moment when I roll backwards over the side of the boat and I’m underwater again; free, weightless, I’ve crossed over into another universe, and it feels like coming home.
Today the conditions are close to perfect, and it’s time to gear up. I struggle into the wetsuit, manhandle the overweighted tank and buoyancy compensator (BC) assembly. Still going through mental checklists. I’m on my own out here and there’s no quick back-up, so double checking everything has become an ingrained habit. Ready at last, I roll backwards over the side into the water, the crash and fizz of bubbles and that welcoming thrill. pull the weighted drawing board from the transom step and it takes me quickly to the bottom. Encumbered by the board and my underwater camera, I have to fin hard across to my daily vantage point on the sand. The enormous porite bombora, or ‘bommie’, fills my view.
I settle to the bottom, then relax and steady myself. kneel on the sand and set up the drawing board. I vent air from the BC and the extra weights I’m carrying hold me down firmly in position. My breathing slows, I’m getting comfortable, constantly looking all around me. Who’s here this morning?
I have been returning to this exact spot every morning for two weeks, finding my knee prints on the sea floor and re-inhabiting them. I have come to know the residents of this bommie and learnt their daily routines. The school of Surf Parrotfish always streaming back and forth, the Coral Trout that lurks at the limit of visibility when I first arrive, comes in for a close look and then, satisfied with its investigation, vanishes for the rest of my stay. Groups of Surgeonfish drift to and fro, and the occasional Grey Reef Shark glides through to check me out. There are always a few newcomers passing by, while others, slow to reveal themselves, are only just now making themselves known to me.
It’s a meditation, just the noise of my breathing, the steady din of bubbles rising past my ears, and the clicks and groans from the reef
It’s time to start work, though, much as I would like to just sit and watch the passing parade. I find my balance, adjust my gear a little here and there, fish around for a graphite crayon in the BC pocket. look up at the bommie flooded by morning light, down to the drawing board, up and back, find my starting point and begin. Almost immediately I’m totally absorbed by the process. The graphite goes on to the drafting film smoothly as I build the structure on my sheet, erase a line with a finger, fill in some detail, get down the edges of shadows before they migrate too far with the rising sun. It’s a meditation, just the noise of my breathing, the steady din of bubbles rising past my ears, and the clicks and groans from the reef. Time passes. It’s hard to maintain focus; always in the corner of my eye there’s some distracting movement or other. It could be a tiny Damselfish a metre away or a three-metre Tiger Shark in the distance. A flicker of movement draws my gaze downwards; a small Moray Eel has risen from its home in a lump of overgrown coral near my left knee to see what I’m doing. I don’t move as it peers curiously at me, undulating in the gentle surge. Sitting motionless for hours on end means that I quickly become part of life on the reef, just another strange sedentary visitor which most of the other residents come curiously to examine. I once had a passing Oceanic Manta Ray brush my head as it floated over me, attracted by the odd white rectangle of my drawing board, and a sea urchin take an hour to inch its way across both of my fins. Clouds of Damselfish sometimes obscure my view and all manner of fish approach to assess me before returning to their routines.
Back to the drawing. Time passes, the page darkens and fills. Now and again I pause, to stretch cramped legs or to take up the camera and capture a passing fish. Every day at the same hour I take a series of close-up shots of the section of reef I am drawing, aides-memoire for detail and colour reference. I never use flash under water. I’m trying to capture what I see, what anyone would see, and using flash gives a beautiful but wholly unreal image of the reef. Photography is also a means of building a visual index of all the life on and around the reef. Many of my underwater drawings will eventually be used as the foundation for large-scale panoramic paintings – ecosystem portraits showing the reef and all its diversity, all the resident and transitory life going about its business.
After two and a half hours I’m getting a bit cold and cramped, and that’s about all I can squeeze from a single scuba tank. Back on the boat I lie down in the sun for a few minutes to warm up, eat a handful of dates, swig from my water bottle, then change the tank, gear up and roll over the side again for another session.
The shadows creep across the reef as midday approaches, my cut-off point. Once the sun has moved behind the reef all is in shadow and I can no longer continue. I pick up the drawing board and my camera from the sand beside me, inflate the BC until I lift off the bottom and begin to work my way back to the boat.
Getting back on board is the hardest part of the day. I’m tired and my legs and back are stiff from holding still for so long, often starting to cramp as I manoeuvre the awkward and heavy drawing board with its fragile drawn surface. By now the seabreeze is in and the boat is heaving and pitching in the chop. ‘Push through it’, I tell myself. I get all the gear back on board and wriggle and struggle out of the wetsuit before I take a breather. Then it’s time to fire up the outboard, haul the anchor and head for home.
park the boat back at camp, wash down my gear and carefully hang up the drawing to dry. After a quick late lunch download photos and then begin to work up the day’s drawing. Under water I indicated dense shadows with shorthand signs, so I fill these in now and complete areas of detail which I don’t have time to fully execute during the dives. I refine the edges of the drawing where this sheet connects to the pages already completed to be sure they align perfectly. I then overlap today’s drawing with tomorrow’s blank sheet and trace a twocentimetre-wide strip along the edge. This provides my starting points for the next day’s work, essential to enable continuity across the entire drawing.
I’m now two thirds of the way into the largest work I have undertaken. It will be more than four metres when complete, 28 sheets in all. Some of the sheets will take several dives to complete, and having been in and out of the water multiple times will occasionally finish up a bit the worse for wear. The graphite I draw with is fragile when wet, easy to erase with a finger under water; once dry, though, it is pretty resistant. The inevitable few scratches will just have to be part of the work.
work away steadily under my tarpaulin verandah, and then in the late afternoon I look up to see Matty the chef crossing the lawn towards me with an esky. He plonks it down in the shade and we pop the lid off to reveal one of the largest Rock Lobsters I’ve ever seen, and definitely the strangest looking. It’s an enormous Saddleback Rock Lobster, as they are known locally – Panulirus penicillatus to be scientific – dark green with deep burgundy legs and a massively broad carapace. I’m absolutely thrilled by this. Though broadly distributed, they are rarely encountered here on Ningaloo Reef. I’ve drawn and photographed this species before, from Clipperton Atoll in the far eastern Pacific and from southern Madagascar, but I’ve never seen a monster like this one.
offer Matty a beer and we chat about the lobster’s capture while I pose the animal on a styrofoam box lid and spend the next half-hour photographing it extensively. This will certainly mean a change of plans. Tomorrow I will set it up in a life-like pose, surround it with ice and begin a detailed life-size drawing. That will take probably six to eight hours of concentrated work, so no boating or underwater drawing tomorrow.
When completed, this Saddleback Rock Lobster will be added to my ongoing project ‘Rock Lobsters of the World’, an undertaking to create life-size portraits from live specimens of the world’s 36 or so species. I have already painted nine species from various locations around the world.
Now even the most far-flung and isolated habitats show the effects of human intervention
Many of these were carried out over the past decade during voyages of exploration. As the expedition artist, side by side with scientific experts from around the world, I have been privileged to explore some of the most remote and untouched treasure troves of nature’s diversity. I have drawn and painted in the cloud forest of Santos Island in Vanuatu, dived for specimens on the extraordinary rocky reefs of southern Madagascar, explored the dry monsoonal forest of Mozambique and spent months on Clipperton Atoll, a speck of land in the far reaches of the eastern Pacific.
Over the years this privilege has been gradually overshadowed by the gathering clouds of massive change being wrought across the planet. Now even the most far-flung and isolated habitats show the effects of human intervention. Much of it we are all aware of – overfishing is everywhere, and plastic is now found throughout the food chain, not just washed up on the beach. Returning from a lengthy field trip throughout the south Pacific as far as Easter Island, in search of more Rock Lobster species, I was happy to have added five more to the growing collection, but sobered to see how diminished our underwater world is becoming. Everywhere I went, coral reefs are slowly dying and marine ecoystems are a long, long way off balance. Time is running out. We must all lend our weight in any way we can to push hard for change; simply maintaining the status quo will only ensure a rapid decline for all our oceans.
Ningaloo Reef seems so far to have been spared the worst of the dramatic declines we have seen elsewhere, such as along the Great Barrier Reef in recent years. In 2001, I began another project here; a series of five large-scale underwater drawings of the differing reef habitats in the Coral Bay area. Completed over the ensuing four years, they form the foundations for panoramic paintings that combine art and science in ways which will inspire and educate a wider public.
These paintings also serve as benchmarks for the health of the reef, providing an antidote to insidious bracket creep (a universal condition whereby subsequent generations are unaware of how much previously rich and diverse ecosystems have declined). Ningaloo Reef itself is still talked about in terms of its ‘pristine’ condition, when it is actually severely overfished and, in many ways, sadly diminished. Each year at the same time return to these drawing sites, descending to the exact same spot from which I made the drawings to take a photomosaic of the same reef scene. Now into its 18th year, this sequence of photomosaics is building into a unique record of development and change on the reef. Parts of this sequence, alongside a painting and one of the underwater drawings, will be installed in the new Western Australian Museum to be opened in 2020. am absolutely thrilled that the messages I have long wanted this work to carry will be brought to a vastly wider audience than had hoped.
Back here at Ningaloo, where I work for several months every year, it is my time to be completely immersed in the wonders of the coral reef environment. A day such as today fills me to the brim with wonder at the complexity and perfection of the natural world, the miracle of our common and fragile existence.
As the evening draws down, the sea breeze dies away and the omnipresent thump and rumble of the outer reef return as the backdrop to a gentle clatter of caravan-park dinners under way. Time to reflect on the day and the visual and spiritual feast have enjoyed, and to think of the coming tasks: the superb Rock Lobster which awaits my attention tomorrow, and the growing underwater panorama am slowly building. And to marvel again at how lucky I am.
