Hawksbill – by Grace Heathcote
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The turtle registers our presence with a flick of an eye, but does not pause. We are crouched so close we can see the salt-crust around her eyes, the dark-and-light patchwork of her face, the soft wrinkles on her neck. She watches us as we watch her. Where do we fit, I imagine her thinking: friend or foe?
Her strong back flippers scoop the sand to create a deep pit. Surprisingly dextrous, they stretch into the cavity and cup the sand carefully to lift it out. Underneath the fine top layer, the sand is damp and clumps rather than crumbling back into the space below. Her movements are a slow and steady metronome – stretch, scoop, lift, flick the sand away. Swap to the other flipper and start again – stretch, scoop, lift, flick the sand away.
Digging completed, her back flippers rest as gentle anchors either side of the opening. She exhales, then begins to lay, the eggs flashing in ones and twos through the beam of our red torchlight. They are perfect, glistening as they thud softly into the pit.
The cadence of her movements and the steady drip-dripping of the eggs lulls me. A breeze has been tugging at my shirt, urging me to notice the dry whisper of grasses behind the dune, the percussion of waves sliding up and down the shoreline.
On the far edge of the Groote archipelago, a collection of over forty islands in the north-western Gulf of Carpentaria, it is easy to be starstruck.
“On the far edge of the Groote archipelago, a collection of over forty islands in the north-western Gulf of Carpentaria, it is easy to be starstruck.”
In 2006, the Anindilyakwa Indigenous Protected Area was declared here, preserving a million hectares of land and sea that support dugong, sawfish, rays, over 150 species of fish, six species of turtle, and internationally significant seabird rookeries.
Anindilyakwa people tell Dreamtime stories of this place, where ancestral creatures travelled across the land and sea, bringing the plants, animals, hills and rivers into being. The sea turtle is an important totem to the Anindilyakwa people and appears in rock art across the islands. The most north-easterly of the archipelago’s islands, known as Amburrkba or North East Island, sacred to the Anindilyakwa and uninhabited by people, now sustains some of the largest remaining nesting aggregations of hawksbill sea turtles on the planet.
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Above the almost-full pit, the turtle shifts her weight and starts to push loose sand over the eggs. Each powerful stroke of her flipper sprays sand for a metre or two, masking her nest under an arc of crumbs.
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This species of turtle, the hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), has ancestors that date back 110 million years, surviving apocalyptic events like those that drove the dinosaurs and much global megafauna to extinction. But the hawksbill quite literally carries a target on its back. The distinctive orangey-brown mottle of the hawksbill shell – tortoiseshell – has symbolised elegance and luxury since ancient times, a prize for bounty hunters. After his conquest of Ptolemy XII, Julius Caesar declared the discovery of Alexandrian warehouses full of tortoiseshell to be the greatest of rewards. Ninth-century caravans travelling the Great Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean carried precious cargo of tortoiseshell, ivory and rhinoceros horn. Later, the global sea trade of tortoiseshell was ruled by the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English, particularly from the East Indies. This trade continued throughout the twentieth century, when several million tortoiseshells were imported into Europe, Asia and the United States to embellish jewellery, combs, brushes, boxes and ornaments.
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On Amburrkba it is easy to feel buffered, protected, from the rest of the world. We lost phone range long before we caught sight of the island. Here there are no lights on the horizon, no aircraft buzzing overhead or drone of traffic, no banter between neighbourhood dogs. And yet, even on the remote beaches of this archipelago, the hawksbill has not escaped the long fingers of trade. For almost two hundred years, Macassan fishermen from Celebes (what is now known as Sulawesi) visited Arnhem Land and the Gulf each year to collect sea cucumber – trepang – and to trade for turtle shell and pearls with the Indigenous peoples. An estimated 1,000 hawksbill shells were harvested across northern Australia annually, bound for Macassan markets.
Two hundred years of a freewheeling harvest in hawksbills around the world led to a plummet in global population numbers. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the species was declared critically endangered and placed under the protection of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. While the tortoiseshell trade continues illicitly in some places, including by some of our nearest neighbours, overall volume has reduced substantially.
Perversely, though, the rise of plastic has allowed replica tortoiseshell to remain a popular fashion statement. This is particularly ironic given the increasing chokehold of plastic debris in our oceans and coastlines.
“Here there are no lights on the horizon, no aircraft buzzing overhead or drone of traffic, no banter between neighbourhood dogs. And yet, even on the remote beaches of this archipelago, the hawksbill has not escaped the long fingers of trade.”
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We watch the turtle retrace her path across the sand. She is cumbersome on land, vulnerable, slowed by the burden of gravity. The water that she moves toward offers relief but it also holds a new, even greater challenge. The Gulf of Carpentaria has become a magnet for marine debris, washing in from the north and remaining, trapped in a perpetual circular eddy. Even under the cover of darkness, I know the turtle will be churning up colourful plastic fragments in her wide tracks. Yet this demoralising confetti isn’t what worries me the most. For three years I have been visiting the main island, Groote Eylandt, to work alongside Anindilyakwa rangers conducting regular coastal surveys for marine debris and abandoned fishing nets. These ‘ghost nets’, named for the ghoulish way they continue to drift on their own, can reach monumental proportions. Nets weighing several tonnes each have been hauled out of the waters of the Gulf, decorated like morbid Christmas trees with the bones and shells of their never-ending catch.
We record each net, removing as many as we can from the coastline and freeing dozens of trapped sea creatures. The rangers try to teach me the Anindilyakwa names of the yimenda (sea turtle) species we find: dingaluwa (hawksbill), enuwa (flatback), yijirakamurra (olive ridley), yinubungwaya (loggerhead) and yimuwarraka (green). More often though, we pick out the remains of rotten or desiccated carcasses that were not so lucky.
Sea turtles are intrinsically connected to the health of the marine environment, and a decline in population has wider implications. Hawksbill turtles, for example, graze on sponges throughout the coral reefs in the northern part of the Groote archipelago. Many of the sponges that the turtles target have the potential to overgrow and suffocate the coral reef itself. By keeping these fast-growing sponge species under control, the hawksbills promote growth and regeneration of the coral, allow reef fish better access to food, and give the slower-growing sponges a chance. The reefs here, dominated by hard acropora and turbinaria corals, provide habitat and shelter for thousands of marine organisms. What will happen if the floating rafts of nets carry too many hawksbills away?
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Across cultures and throughout history, turtles have symbolised longevity, stability, patience, fertility and strength. Hindu, Chinese and Indian mythologies all reference the ‘World Turtle’, an immense creature supporting the world on its back. In some North American Indigenous stories, it’s said that the world was built by layering mud on the back of a turtle. When the Earth trembles, the World Turtle is stretching beneath this great weight. If we disrupt the balance of this burden, we push the World Turtle closer to its limits, testing the foundations that support us.
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The turtle has lumbered as far as the waterline. We watch as she pushes on, the waves reaching up and around her, smoothing over the pockmarks her flippers have left on the beach. Leaving her legacy with us, she disappears beneath the dark blanket of water. ▼
Image: Tim Sheerman-Chase
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