Chris Darwin, great great grandson of Charles Darwin, says his famous forbear was endlessly curious. Photo: Gary Medlicott
CHRIS Darwin, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, lives in the Blue Mountains surrounded by tall gum trees.
I ask him what he thinks about last weekend's bushfires. "I would have got toasted," he says. "I would have stayed with my house." Does he equate the fires with climate change? "It's hard to tell from a single traumatic incident," he says. "But interpreting a single event as a global phenomenon can be a big mistake." It is not, he assures me, what Charles Darwin would have done.
Chris Darwin, 47, is wonderful company, asking as many questions as he answers. He is dressed in a suit and sounds English but has lived in Australia since 1986. He lives with his wife and small son Erasmus at Glenbrook, working as a guide for activities such as abseiling and rock climbing. In 1989, he and a group of friends climbed a snow-topped mountain in Peru, taking with them a table and chairs, then held a dinner party at the top. They were, he says, "just a bunch of inspired amateurs". Like Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago this week.
I ask Chris when he first became conscious of living in direct descent from one of the 19th century's most revolutionary thinkers one whose ideas are still argued about and, in America, the subject of major political debate. "There was no epiphany," he says, "just a gradual awakening." The same happened with Charles Darwin's thinking about evolution. Chris personalises Charles' theory as follows: "Basically, he was saying you are a very charming, very intelligent ape."
The idea of evolution had been in the family for 50 years or more. Charles' grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had been talking about it at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Chris thinks Erasmus is a more interesting figure than Charles. Charles merely published the theory and he only did it then because someone else was planning a book saying much the same. Chris thinks Charles was terrified of going public. "He was still going to church every Sunday. He had a wife who believed he was going to hell. He had friends who were vicars."
The Darwins were already a wealthy family when Charles married Emma Wedgwood, of Wedgwood china fame. "He never did a day's work in his life," says Chris. What did he do? He thought and pursued his passion for studying nature. Chris believes there were two Charles Darwins one before he married and one after. During his married years, when he fathered eight children, he was a recluse and chronically ill. The death of one of his daughters as a child is said to have deeply affected him.
But he describes the young Charles, the one who went around the world on HMS Beagle, as being "like the person you meet in youth hostels who's reading a thick text on botany while everyone else is talking about where they got drunk last night".
Charles Darwin, says Chris, had opinions on everything, including Australia's poor prospects as a result of the important places held in colonial society by former convicts. "He was endlessly curious intellectually and he didn't edit himself."
Chris has a saying: "Every age suppresses the unthinkable. Darwin expressed it."
Chris believes Charles' response to the new bushfire phenomenon would be to lay out all the available knowledge and then gradually advance to a theory by logical steps. Jumping to conclusions is contrary to the nature of the intellectual enterprise.
Shortly before he died, Charles Darwin said he had no sense of having sinned by publishing his theory of evolution, but he did regret "not having done more good for his fellow creatures". In 2002, Chris received a large inheritance through the Darwin family. After a lengthy investigation, he bought 68,000 hectares at White Wells in Western Australia and handed it over to the Bush Heritage Foundation, which, he says, "is the best NGO conservation group in Australia".
He explains that 25 per cent of the world's threatened species are in Australia, half in a belt running across Western Australia. The area, formerly a sheep station, is now called the Charles Darwin Reserve.