Mr g

Whether the gifts of intellectual, artistic and athletic excellence are apportioned by deities, genetic endowment, or blind chance, nobody denies the fact that they are apportioned unevenly. Consider Alan Lightman. He is a professor of theoretical physics and the humanities at MIT with cross-appointments at Harvard in both - theoretical physics and the humanities, specifically the art of writing. Clearly he was dealt a really good hand in life's lottery of gifts and burdens. Some years ago he wrote a best-selling novel, or novella, Einstein's Dreams, a beautifully, lyrically written story about time. Einstein, the Albert Einstein who conceived the theory of relativity, appears as a character in this novel, which could be loosely described as a metaphysical novel about Time as one of the fundamental constants of physics. Except that Time isn't a physical constant in this novel. As we all know from personal experience, time can move rapidly or slowly, can even stop altogether, can move in a circle. Indeed, it's a profound, light-hearted, challenging, thought-provoking, provocative work. Knowledge and understanding of theoretical physics aren't essential prerequisites but helped me to appreciate the book. If you haven't read it, do so.  Now Alan Lightman has done it again with another beautifully written little masterpiece, Mr g,  about how (and why?) god created the universe, or universes, and everything in it, or in them, starting with Time, then Space, then everything else. It's a lovely little book, modest, unassuming, great fun. Lightman has obviously thought very deeply about every detail, starting with lower-case 'g' for god, a modest creature whose Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva respectively disapprove and are bewildered by Mr g's decision to create the universe and everything in it. Like Einstein's Dreams, Mr g is profound, light-hearted, serious, thought provoking, provocative, beautifully written. Read it!

Books and what is in them

These days I have enough spare time to respond to on-line questionnaires if I think the questions are worth while; a few weeks ago I responded to 2-3 rounds of questions on the editorial and features content carried by the Globe and Mail, the nearest we have to a national newspaper in Canada. The 'incentive' to complete the questionnaire didn't matter - it was the interesting questions that attracted me. But there was an incentive, a $200 book gift card.  Amazingly, my name was drawn and I won the $200 gift card! It's the first time ever in my life that I've won anything in a 'lottery' like this. I have about $200 worth of books on my "Wish List" with the online book shop Chapters-Indigo, so I'll cash in the gift card and get them all I think. Next time you are invited to respond to an online questionnaire that offers a chance to win an award like this, you might want to spare a few minutes to answer the questions, instead of just deleting it as I've usually done in the past. You never know: maybe you will win too. 

The past week has been a book bonanza -- and I still have over $100 credit to cash in. Two of the books I now own are fictional biographies if such a term exists, fiction based on the lives and careers of famous people. One is the second volume of Hilary Mantel's superb trilogy based on the life, times, actions and interactions with others, of Thomas Cromwell.  The first volume, Wolf Hall, was the first book on which I wrote comments in a post on this blog, in March 2010. At the time I thought it was the best historical novel I had ever read. The second volume, Bring up the bodies, is about Thomas Cromwell's role in the destruction of Anne Bolyn, and the shifting political alliances in and around the court of Henry VIII in those years. It is as historically accurate as Hilary Mantel can make it, it vividly describes the intrigues and violent actions we know about from the historical record, and just as important, it maintains the high literary standard of Wolf Hall - and as I remarked after reading that first volume, I hope I live long enough and remain sentient so I will be able to read the third and final volume too when it is published. My other newly acquired historical fiction is David Lodge's version of the womanizing ways of H G Wells, the prolific and prodigiously polymath public intellectual and writer who bestrode the early decades of the 20th century like a colossus. I first encountered him in my adolescence when I read his Science of Life and Outline of History. I think this was the first work on history that I read for pleasure and enlightenment and it led me directly to the library of historical monographs that I read to preserve my sanity while I was a medical student, trying to learn the bewildering new languages of anatomical and physiological terminology. I moved on to Wells's social novels, Kipps, Anne Veronica and a few others, all of which I enjoyed, and which opened my mind to important social issues, and his science fiction novels, War of the Worlds, Invisible Man, and Things to Come (which I found rather dull and implausible). I didn't know until years later that Wells was a notorious philanderer.  There is nobody better qualified to write about H G Wells than David Lodge - professor of English at the University of Birmingham and author of a hilarious and perceptive series of novels about contemporary academia. The book bonanza didn't end there.  I also got The social conquest of earth, E O Wilson's latest lament about the ways in which modern humans are destroying life-supporting ecosystems on this earth, the only home we humans have; and A universe from nothing, a philosophical work about the universe (Which addresses the tantalizing question, Why is there something rather than nothing?). So far I've had time only to glance at these last two books, but I can see I'm in for a major bout of my habit of reading several books all at the same time. Somehow my brain seems able to discriminate among them, and I am comforted to discover that I seem to be as able as ever I was to pick up the several separate threads as I move from one to another, moved by whim and my mood at the time. Wendy thought it was a bad habit because it meant sometimes that books she wanted to read too got stalled on my bedside table when she wanted to shift them to her bedside table. She never read more than one book at a time despite my frequent encouragement to her to adopt my sinful ways. I revel in these ways, though sometimes so many books pile up on the bedside table that they overbalance and fall to the carpet below. When that happens nowadays, I move them out if I haven't advanced through them in the past few months, out to a book shelf elsewhere in my apartment, or out of my life altogether if I think I will never come back to read the rest of a book, to find out how it ends.  

As Time Goes By

My daughter-in-law Dorothyanne, mother of my grandchildren, has posted comments on As Time Goes By on her blog. I can't resist adding my thoughts. This is the immensely popular BBC domestic comedy about Lionel Hardcastle and Jean Pargiter, two 20-ish lovers who met at the time of the Korean War, in 1950, were parted for 38 years when a letter went astray, met again by chance when Lionel, now late middle aged, took Jean's daughter to dinner. It ran for 8 years on the BBC, perhaps because Jean's part is played by the great actor Judi Dench, but I think more because of the appeal of the gentle, benign interaction of the principal characters and the excellent supporting cast.  Wendy and I loved it, own the DVDs of the entire series, and watched it repeatedly. Less than a week before she died, Wendy managed to laugh (and cry a little) at the episode in which Lionel and Jean finally marry. Some of the appeal of this domestic comedy of modern manners to Wendy and me is probably because Lionel and Jean were our age, in their early 20s at the time of the Korean War. We could identify with them very easily; Wendy thought she had some of Jean's values and mannerisms, and Lionel's curmudgeonly conduct closely resembles the way I think and behave. The Korean War is an almost forgotten conflict now, but it loomed very large in 1950-53. At one stage the North Koreans pushed the South Koreans and their UN allies into a tiny pocket of land on the south coast of the Korean peninsula. Then American, British, Australian and Indian reinforcements arrived, pushed the North Koreans back to the 38th Parallel, and after a period of stalemate, a truce was arranged. But no peace treaty was ever negotiated and a heavily armed standoff persists even now, 60 years later. For a while in the early 1950s, I seriously considered enlisting in the Australian forces and serving in Korea. If I had remained in Australia in 1951 instead of going to Britain, I would likely have been drafted when conscription was briefly reintroduced in Australia. It's another example of "What might have been" if my life had unfolded in a different way.

Perhaps I should add a chapter to my memoirs on "alternative history"and speculate on how some of those other ways my life evolved might have turned out.

This is my 300th post. I know or can guess the identity of about half of the people who read this blog (up to 40/day now) but as the number of readers rises and the range of the audience widens, more seem to be based in countries where, so far as I know, I have neither friends nor professional colleagues. Who are the Slovenian readers, for instance? I get some feedback from friends and colleagues in personal emails, and - rarely - comments from strangers. I'm intrigued: I wonder who all the other strangers are, and why they read my blog.

Indonesia, 1972

Here is an abridged account of my short-term consultant appointment for the World Health Organization in Indonesia in 1972; when I get my scanner repaired, I will add a few photos to illustrate this.

In January 1972 my first glimpse of Indonesia was from 10,000 meters above. Through breaks in the monsoon clouds I saw a conical volcano with fumes and steam billowing from the summit. It may have been the 3,000 meter volcano on the island of Bali, which I saw later from sea level but it could as easily have been one of  many volcanoes on Java. 

The heat and humidity hit me like a body blow when I stepped off the plane to the tarmac in Jakarta (no air- conditioned arrival hall in those days).  Dr. Iwan Soutjaja was there to meet me, a short, stocky Chinese Christian Indonesian festooned with gold necklaces, bracelets and rings, who had evaded a recent genocidal assault on the 1000-year old Chinese communities in Jakarta and Surabaya in which over 300,000 died in a little-known and bloody episode of the Cold War (the CIA had started a paranoid rumour that ‘Red China’ was planning to take over Indonesia and install the entirely non-political Chinese merchants and traders as surrogate rulers).  Soutjaja was based in the Ministry of Health. He was the liaison man between the University of Indonesia and the local office of WHO, where my fellow consultant and I went next morning to meet the WHO country representative, a pleasant Dutchman, Dr. Kejir who grew up in what was called Batavia when he was a boy, now Jakarta. My fellow consultant was John Pemberton, professor of social medicine at Queen's University in Belfast. I first met him in 1961 at the home of Will Pickles of Wensleydale, a famous British general practitioner, author of Epidemiology in Country Practice.  At that time, John Pemberton was spending his summer holiday doing a locum for Will Pickles, whose biography he later wrote. John Pemberton and I had been asked to assess the status of teaching and research in public health at medical schools then serving the Indonesian archipelago and its 110 million people. There were plans to establish a school of public health in Jakarta, and our principal task was to advise the Regional Office of WHO whether adequate human and material resources were available. 

I found everything about Indonesia fascinating:.the scenery, the energetic and mainly bright people with whom we were working, the delicious exotic food, the contrasts between luxury hotels for rich tourists and corporate executives of multinational corporations, and the simple, sometimes squalid conditions of the Javanese. John Pemberton was not so happy.  He was often unwell and plagued with increasing deafness. A new hearing aid wasn't helping much because he had recurrent fungus infections of his ears. He was irritable and would ask our hosts to repeat things they had already said, because he hadn't heard clearly the first time, and perhaps also because he was more insistent than I on getting the facts absolutely right. I learnt a lot from him about the need for meticulous attention to detail. Since 1972 I have had feedback from some of those we met then, and from others, about benefits derived from our report and recommendations.    

My first day in Jakarta was a Sunday. I spent it by the swimming pool of the Hotel Indonesia.  I was struck by the number of young and beautiful local women who accompanied the middle-aged corporate executives relaxing around the swimming pool. That sight, and variations on it, recurred at other luxury hotels in Jogjakarta, and in Bali (where there were also, of course, many tourists). Bandung, where my room looked out at a smouldering volcano, was less full of overseas corporate executives, but a bevy of beautiful Javanese girls were waiting in the hotel lobby, in case any came along. We were not distracted from our work by these good-looking girls but business seemed brisk with business men from Europe, USA, Australia and Japan.

After a few days in Jakarta, we grew tired of the expensive and rather boring meals at the Hotel Indonesia, and went exploring. Not far along the road were some interesting Chinese, Indian and Thai restaurants. We tried these and liked them. I mastered the use of chopsticks, and consolidated my affinity for Chinese and Thai food. It was an interesting walk to these restaurants. Our route took us about 500 meters along a sidewalk of concrete blocks, some of which had had the ground underneath scoured out by monsoon rains, so they were tipped and tilted every which way; one or two had subsided a half meter or so below the rest, and in the dim street lighting, we had to watch our steps carefully. This was also the beat for some local ladies of the evening, who did their best, although unsuccessfully, to persuade us to dally on the way to and from our evening meal. The best of these restaurants, to which we returned several times, was called the Sky Room; I have a pair of fake ivory plastic chopsticks from there as a souvenir. 

Altogether we had about three weeks in Jakarta, in several instalments. We met the important dignitaries, officials of the Ministry of Health, staff in the University of Indonesia, local representatives of UN and NGO agencies. Also we used Jakarta as a base to visit interesting nearby experimental health centres. I was very impressed by the competence and dedication of the public health nurses who were educating traditional village midwives in elementary hygiene - teaching them to flame the scissors they used to cut the umbilical cord, to ‘drive out evil spirits’ (pathogens) instead of sprinkling ash from the cooking fire on the crushed end of the umbilical cord. They showed us figures to demonstrate the effect of this simple measure alone in reducing the neonatal death rate due to tetanus from almost 10 percent to near zero in a period of three years. Everywhere we went I was captivated by the beauty of the countryside, the lush green trees and neat paddy fields, the placid water buffalo, tidy villages teeming with cheerful, attractive people. I was struck by their youth - we rarely saw old people. The average age of the population, we discovered when we met the demographers at the University, was just over 20, less than half what it was in Canada. Almost half the population was under the age of 15 - their population bomb had not yet gone off. A very high priority was the national family planning program, which in retrospect can be seen to have been successful.   Later, in central Java and in Surabaya, we had our fill of seeing sick people: there was a gastro-enteritis, perhaps even a cholera epidemic, many kids with severe life-threatening measles, and a few with diphtheria, which I had never before seen.  There were cases too of Japanese B encephalitis and hemorrhagic dengue (almost indistinguishable from yellow fever). These are mosquito-borne diseases, with ubiquitous culex mosquitoes as the principal vectors.  But in the region close to Jakarta, although health problems abounded, we didn't see much that was dramatic, except a man who had been cut to pieces by a train (a common injury, because people cling all over every carriage) and several others who would obviously die from the injuries they had received in severe traffic crashes. One of the weaknesses of Indonesian medicine was revealed by these experiences: the nursing service inherited from the Dutch was very highly specialized. They had tuberculosis nurses, leprosy nurses, yaws nurses, and each could deal with no other condition than the one they had been trained to treat. Hence, a mortally injured man, a victim of a severe traffic crash, whom we saw in a small hospital for tuberculosis patients, got no care at all, because he didn't have TB.  The nurses there were very good at treating patients with tuberculosis but had no idea how to care for a critically injured patient – and no appropriate equipment, not even I-V sets.  In 1972 the Ministry of Health was wondering what to do with the large cadre of smallpox nurses who no longer had jobs because smallpox had been eradicated from the region.  In 1997, I met several senior staff of the Ministry of Health of Indonesia at a WHO conference in Bangkok, and heard that they had eventually managed successfully to redeploy most of these disease-specific nurses into more relevant roles.   

I asked Julie Sulianti, the Minister of Health, about this when John Pemberton and I paid her an official visit.   I had met her some years before when she was a political exile (Sukarno, the previous military dictator, had not been a friend of her family; his successor Suharto was, so she came home). In 1964 while I was at the University of Vermont, she was working with Ken Newell at Tulane University in New Orleans; we had other mutual friends as well, and so got along considerably better than lowly WHO short-term consultants usually would. Having had that previous personal contact was most useful; she smoothed the way in encounters with officials of the government, and arranged at my request for us to visit community development projects in and near Jakarta. 

We travelled around Java by road and air. Our first air trip was memorable. We flew from Jakarta to Semarang, a city on the north coast about half way between Jakarta at the west and Surabaya at the east end of Java. We flew, as on all of our internal flights, in a Fokker Friendship, a sturdy little plane with its wings above the wide windows out of which we could see the ground below on clear days. Often we saw little because this was the monsoon season, so heavy overcast and torrential rains were the norm and as often as not we flew bumpily through heavy cloud. We left Jakarta just before a heavy rain squall hit the airport, and flew through this squall all the way to Semarang, where we circled in the bumpy air for about an hour, looking down at the airport which seemed to be almost entirely under water. We could see the rows of landing lights at both ends of the runway, but the runway itself wasn't visible. Eventually the rain eased up and the pilot came in to land. We hit the water that covered the runway to a depth of a few millimeters. Spray flew high in the air all around us; we skated and slid from side to side, but remained upright and eventually came to a stop at the shed which served as the terminal building. Nobody was there to meet us, but we knew that we were expected at the local government guest house and found a taxi driver who spoke some English, to take us there (we had the address on a typed itinerary that we showed him). It was not a very auspicious beginning. The guest house was a mouldy, dilapidated ruin, a relic of Dutch colonial days, vastly inferior to former British Colonial Office guest houses in which I later stayed on several occasions in India. It was mildewed wood with a corrugated iron roof, and several rooms screened against mosquitoes - but the screens were torn and full of holes. Fortunately our beds had reasonably new and clean mosquito netting. Here, in the tropical steamy heat with incessant rain, mosquitoes were teeming throngs, roosting everywhere. Most were culecine, but we also saw anophelenes, the species that can transmit malaria. At that time, the local malaria parasites were said to respond to chloroquin, and neither of us got malaria, so I suppose this was true.

Dr. Amijojo, our host in Semarang, showed up, full of profuse apologies and explanations an hour or so after we arrived at the guest house. He was perhaps the most interesting and impressive man we met in our travels in Indonesia. He was then quite young, a senior lecturer not a full professor. He had some innovative and workable ideas. His work has been written up since then in Health by the People, a book edited by Ken Newell for WHO, although he was not credited - one of his seniors put his name on the paper. What our young host was doing was at that time, as far as I know, unique. He was deploying teams of students from Semarang University in community development projects in the villages in his district. The teams were made up of medical, engineering, agricultural science, economics and other students, each team about 8 to 10 strong. They would go to a village and assess its needs. The medical students did a health survey, the engineering students assessed the roads, dykes, dams and canals for irrigating rice paddies or sugar cane fields, the bridges, etc; the agricultural science students examined the condition of the rice paddies, the productivity of the chickens, and the economics students examined how the local and regional markets worked. The surveys were just the first step. Next the students dealt with the problems they had identified, first discussing at an open meeting with villagers what they had discovered and their plans to improve matters. Not only was this excellent experience for the students, it greatly benefited the villages. 

We spent four days in Semarang, during which the rain hardly ever stopped. At night it drummed on the iron roof in a steady roar that made conversation almost impossible. One night I awoke in the small hours. Everything was absolutely silent, the rain had stopped, the silence had woken me. Then within a few moments, a new sound arose, the cries and love calls of millions of frogs, including many in my bedroom. I put on the lamp by my bed; it was about 2 am. By the dim light of the lamp I could see hundreds of little green frogs within the small radius that was illuminated. They were puffing their necks in and out, out so far as to be almost translucent. They clung to the walls and hopped across the floor, many of them stopping for a few moments to mate, the male hopping briefly on top of a little female, in an orgiastic frenzy of unrestrained reproduction. When I got out of bed I had to tread carefully to avoid squashing them, and congratulated myself when I got back into bed again without any sticky or slimy remnants on the soles of my feet.

There was no shower at the guest house. Instead, in a curtained corner of my room, was a cubical concrete cistern about a meter and a half long, wide and deep. The house-boy explained that this was for ablutions, not drinking. I could dip a large pail in it and pour the water over myself, or I could immerse myself - get right into it and soap myself. I tried both. Immersion was more pleasant, because there was nowhere convenient for the water to drain if I poured it over myself, whereas when I got into the cistern, the overflow (Archimedes' principle dictated that there had to be an overflow) ran down the far side into a drain. The water was room temperature, that is, comfortably warm all the time. My system was to wash first my shirt, socks and underpants, hang these on a string across the other corner of the room, then lower myself gently into the cistern where I floated and washed for as long as I liked. It was comfortable and relaxing. The sides of the cistern were covered with water weed, and the water contained many mosquito larvae, but no frogs as far as I could see - it would not have been a good place for them, because if they got in, they would have no way to get out again. I quite enjoyed this unusual method of keeping myself clean. 

Our next stop was Surabaya, a steamy seaport which maintained some rivalry with Jakarta. The national tropical disease reference laboratory was in Surabaya, and the staff there and at the medical school were determined that if a school of public health was to be developed, Surabaya was the place for it. This and the rivalry were explained to us by Zbigniew Brzeziński, a Polish epidemiologist whom I had first met at an IEA meeting in Princeton New Jersey in 1964, and would meet again several times over the next few years. He had worked on the WHO smallpox and malaria eradication campaigns, and has a habit of escaping from Warsaw winters to warm, sunny tropical parts of the world. We had a rest day in Surabaya, and he, his wife and small daughter took us for a pleasant excursion to the hills above the city, where at an elevation of 1000 meters or so, the temperature and humidity were more tolerable than the steam-bath atmosphere at sea level. On the way to the resort in the hills, we drove past the bits and pieces of a young man who had been engaging in the local sport of hopping from the roof of one railway carriage to the next, had missed his footing, and had been cut into several recognizably human pieces by the wheels of the train as it passed over him. We first saw a leg, then another leg, and finally his head and part of his badly mangled trunk. Not a pretty sight, but an unforgettable one. It's one of my few clear recollections of the time we spent in Surabaya.  I remember nothing about where we stayed or the meals we had. I described and discussed the hospital conditions in my official report to WHO.  There were several epidemics at the time – severe gastroenteritis that probably included cases of cholera, measles which was killing many infants and children, and mixed with these a few patients with diphtheria and some who may have had mild smallpox, variola minor, although smallpox had supposedly been eradicated from Indonesia some years earlier. It was a splendid place for anyone interested in infectious diseases such as I was and am, or an infectious disease epidemiologist, but in other ways frustrating because of the inadequate surveillance system. Infection control, especially of childhood exanthemata, was a whole other matter! In almost all the hospital wards the occupancy rate was greater than 100%, in other words, several patients shared the same bed.  Pediatric beds often held three children at once and as far as we could tell, no distinction was made on the basis of diagnostic groups.

From Surabaya we were driven by car to Jogjakarta on the southern side of the mountains that form the spine of Java. This was a fascinating trip, through some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen anywhere in the world. There were lush paddy fields, some under water, some green, some with the rice ripened into rich golden colours and waving gently in the breeze under a benign sun. They get four crops of rice a year in that part of Java. There were banana plantations, pineapples, groves of rubber trees, then a picturesque winding road through a pass that crossed the ridge of volcanic mountains running the whole length of Java. At higher altitudes we saw tea and coffee growing. We glimpsed several of the volcanic peaks, but clouds concealed most of the highest mountains. 

Somewhere along that journey we stopped to see the ancient Buddhist temple at Borubador, which is on the summit of a low round hill, perhaps 300 meters above the level of the road and the rest house at which we had had lunch. John Pemberton was unwell and stayed there while I set off alone to climb to the top to see the stupas, the ancient bell-shaped shrines with which the hilltop is covered. These are the only Buddhist remnants in Java, which was conquered and converted to Islam during the great Islamic expansion in about the 12th century. A most surprising thing happened. I climbed up one side of the hill at exactly the same time as another man climbed from the other side. We reached the top simultaneously, and recognized each other at once: the other man was Frank Bell, who had been a classmate of mine at the medical school in Adelaide. We had met once since then, in London when he was doing his FRCS in the early 1950s. He was an orthopedic surgeon in Perth, and had been coming to Java every year for some time, spending a few weeks, teaching -- and learning about some simple and cheap prosthetic devices that could be easily manufactured from bamboo. We had a brief reunion there on the hilltop among the shrines, and then each went on our way, he towards, I away from Surabaya. We agreed to meet for a meal and a longer conversation when we both returned to Jakarta later in our travels, and duly did so.

Jogja, as it is usually known, is the ancient capital of Java, and another fascinating place. This is the home of the shadow puppets for which Indonesia, Java in particular, is famous. We stayed several days in a comfortable hotel with a swimming pool, which we had been advised to avoid because it was inadequately chlorinated  (we saw several hotel guests with itchy skin rashes and very red eyes, which presumably were due to infections acquired in that pool). The medical school there was the modern incarnation of a very ancient college of traditional herbal medicine, and our host, the professor and head of the department of public health, was proud of the connection, also proud of his western training in London. We thought his department had the best program of the six medical schools we visited. The hotel put on nightly displays of shadow puppets, as well as having, like all the other high quality places we stayed in, a troop of gamelin players. Gamelins are brass bells of many sizes that are gently percussed with soft-tipped drumsticks to produce most delightful music. I became and still am very fond of the almost liquid sound of gamelin music. One evening I went to a real shadow puppet play, rather than the ersatz variety at the hotel. I went with one of the junior staff members in the Jogja University department, who explained the plot to me. The characters are of course stylized heroes and villains; there is seemingly only one story, repeated over and over in endless variations, with the shadows of the characters moving on a sheet, lit from behind by lanterns and the voices of the puppeteers intoning the parts as they move. I have never seen an audience more totally absorbed in a performance than that one was. The other notable product of Jogja is the best batiks in Indonesia, that is to say, the best in the world. I bought several lengths of batik there for Wendy, and from these she made some fine evening dresses. I also got for myself an elegant summer shirt decorated with the pictures of shadow puppets. Jogja  is, or was then, a delightful civilized small city, where I would have been happy to stay a lot longer.  My friend David Waltner-Toews, a veterinary epidemiologist at the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, spent a year there with his wife and family, and says that it was for all of them a most interesting time, but after a few months they had had enough. By the time he was there, 15 years or so after I was, it had grown in size, had a crime problem and wasn't a safe place after dark. Neither there nor anywhere else in Indonesia did John Pemberton and I ever feel the least bit insecure.

We flew back to Jakarta from Jogjakarta, debriefed, then drove across more lovely country to the corner of Java that has the most volcanic activity, and is the setting for another picturesque city, Bandung.  As was the case in the other cities we visited, Bandung was an interesting mixture of ancient Javanese, Dutch colonial, and modern post-colonial architecture.  It is a thriving centre of commerce and trade, though how this began and evolved seems a bit of a mystery in view of its location and precarious position in the midst of so many active volcanoes – I could see three from my hotel bedroom window, a spectacular but rather unnerving sight. The nearest one could not have been much more than 2-3 kilometers away, and never stopped puffing out sulphur-laden steam the whole time we were there. The ground seemed to be in constant motion, shuddering with little tremors and occasionally more perceptible jolts. 

Then came Bali. I have been very fortunate in so many ways in my life and one is to have seen Bali before it was corrupted by tourism as it now is. In 1972, Denpasar was a sleepy backwater, hardly a city; the tourist invasion had barely begun. There was one hotel of acceptable standard, the Bali Beach Hotel where we stayed, and several cockroach-infested old hotels dating from Dutch colonial days along the main street of Denpasar. Bali was famous for its beautiful women, and for the fact that they wore their sarongs wrapped around their waists with their breasts bare. 

We saw some extraordinarily beautiful girls and young women clad like this, and were among the last to do so, because the regime in Indonesia, while not strictly Islamic, decided the following year that it was unseemly for women to walk the streets and go to the market so ‘improperly’ clad. Like the Christian missionaries who made the Polynesians wear clothes, they enacted a law that obliged the easy-going Balinese to conform to the dress code of women elsewhere in Indonesia. Pity. 

Bali is not only a most beautiful little island, with its tall conical volcano at one end, its palm trees, its paddy fields, streams and water falls; it is also culturally unique. First, the tide of Islam swept past it - in the 12th century when the rest of the Indonesian archipelago was conquered by the expanding frontiers of Islam, Bali somehow was overlooked. The sea between Java and Bali is narrow but can be stormy, and perhaps in those times the rulers of Bali were more warlike than they became later. For whatever reason, Bali was spared, and a unique blend of Hindu and Buddhist cultures evolved there, mixed with more primitive animist beliefs. Monkeys are sacred, and allowed to roam wherever they choose to go, as cows are in India. Every household has a multiplicity of gods, and observes many festivals in honour of each of these gods. One festival we saw celebrated several times was the cheerful rite of passage into adult life of girls who have just had their first menstrual period. This is a fertility rite: the little girl is dressed in ornate clothing festooned with trinkets and garlands of flowers, and is paraded through the village on a throne carried shoulder-high, while drums beat and trumpets sound. Another unique Balinese custom is to have male midwives, called dukuns. Balinese carving is justly famous, the only export trade when I was there. I bought two lovely Balinese wood carvings, carried one home by hand, a little woodland sprite playing a flute; and shipped the other, a dukun delivering a baby. I had long given up hope of ever seeing this again when it finally arrived, six months or so after I had seen it being packed and labelled at the Bali Beach Hotel. Those two wooden carvings are my most precious souvenirs of a brief but unforgettable stay in one of the loveliest places I have ever been. I have always wanted to go back there, although I know that by now the whole place has been so corrupted by mass tourism that it would be sad and even unpleasant to behold.  I was able to learn a lot about Bali in a few days because I met Manny Voulgaropoulos and his wife. They are Americans, he a public health specialist who was working for a small NGO, that had sent him to the medical school then being developed in Denpasar. His wife Joan is a social anthropologist, and it was she who told John Pemberton and me all that I know about Balinese culture and customs. I met them both again several times on future visits across the Pacific, after they moved back to Hawaii, where they were both on the staff of the School of Public Health. Occasionally since then I’ve bumped into Manny at annual meetings of the American Public Health Association.

During one of the interludes in Jakarta between the trips around Java and our final fling in Bali, I met and had a meal and a chat with Frank Bell, catching up on arrears of news.    Our dialogue was aided, like many conversations in Indonesia, by glasses of ice-cold Bintang, the excellent local beer, perhaps the only thing the Dutch colonists left behind that the Indonesians truly appreciated. Frank told me about his work as an orthopedic surgeon in Fremantle and his annual visits to Java to engage in an endless round of elective orthopedic surgery, interspersed with occasional emergencies. One recent experience had made a big impression on him. At the end of a day of elective operations, he was doing a final evening round of the patients he had operated on, and saw, at the far end of the ward, a bed that was carefully screened from all the others. He asked about the patient in this bed, and was told she was a young woman dying of gas gangrene, a complication of a compound fracture of her tibia. Frank was appalled, and asked to see her. The gangrene had extended to midway up her thigh, so if her life was to be saved, she would need a hind-quarter amputation - disarticulation of her hip joint and amputation of her entire leg. Gas gangrene is due to a highly infectious organism, Clostridium welchii, and if that gets loose in an operating theatre, disinfection is time-consuming and costly. He made a quick decision: he called for the necessary instruments and anesthesia, and there and then, over the protests of the staff, he did the life-saving operation with the patient in the bed behind the curtains at the end of the ward. He was pleased to observe over the next week or so that she made a smooth and uneventful recovery. But then, after a week or so, he began to ask about her, who she was, where she came from, who would care for her when she left hospital. That was when the staff told him her story. She was a ‘betja girl’ a rather upper-class whore who plied her trade from a betja, or rickshaw. Her leg had been broken when her betja was hit by a car. She had no family - that was why she was a prostitute. What was to become of her now? She needed months of rehabilitation, a very awkward and expensive kind of prosthesis, a tilting-table walking frame to balance on what remained of her pelvis. How was she, a one-legged prostitute to survive? Frank asked me, a specialist in community medicine, to advise him and his friends who would have to care for her after he went back to Australia, what could be done for her. The problem was not much like anything I had never encountered.  Her only possible future seemed to be in some sort of clerical work, perhaps in a community resource centre dealing with the problems of street people. Was she able to read and write?  Were there any suitable places for her to work? Frank didn’t know, he said he would ask.   It had been an enlightening experience for him: he told me that until the day he saw this girl a week after he had performed his heroic surgery, he had never before thought much about the social context of his patients. Now, never again would he fail to consider this aspect of their care, and in his teaching of the medical students in Perth, it would from now on become an integral part of their medical education. So he left Indonesia at the end of that tour a sadder and wiser man, and probably a better orthopedic surgeon and teacher.

Soon after that, John Pemberton and I left Java too. WHO was more relaxed about travel in those days than it later became. And John Pemberton surprised me: he was determined that we would not only return to the Regional Office in Delhi via Bangkok, we would so arrange our flight schedule that it would be necessary for us to stop overnight in Bangkok. The plan was advanced by strained political relations between Indonesia and Singapore, so the obvious route, Jakarta to Singapore then non-stop to Delhi, was not straightforward. Bangkok was the obvious connection, but flights that required an overnight stop called for creative planning. John Pemberton, aided and abetted by somebody in the British Embassy, managed to work out the only itinerary that would allow this. I am grateful to him for this, because although I was interested in seeing Bangkok, I wouldn't have bothered to go to so much trouble to make it happen; I felt fairly confident that some day I would get there anyway (as indeed I have, half a dozen times). On this occasion, we got there in the middle of the day and did not have an onward connection to Delhi until late on the following afternoon. That gave us time to see many famous Buddhist temples and shrines. They are unique, sometimes breath-takingly beautiful, especially the many spires and the Golden Buddha that had been successfully concealed from the Japanese during the war by painting it all over with thick black paint. Some of this still lingered in crevices, cracks and crannies. After our evening meal, John Pemberton surprised me even more - startled me - by suggesting that we should go to see the notorious red light district of Patpong Road. We chaperoned each other, so to say, to ensure that neither of us misbehaved. It was quite a spectacle. We stopped first at a dance hall where very scantily clad and sometimes stark naked young women squirmed and gyrated all over the floor, being ogled by large numbers of American servicemen on leave from Vietnam -- Bangkok was their principal R&R centre. This place was unfit for human occupation. It assaulted our ears with disco so loud it was physically painful and left us deaf for some time after we beat a hasty retreat; its flickering strobe lights made us feel dizzy; and the smell of sweat and cheap scent from a hundred or more naked female bodies was overpowering. We went next door, to a quiet, dimly lit bar, and came in as a young woman lying along the bar was inserting the end of a beer bottle into her vagina.   We sat for a while drinking a glass of the local beer, but we were tired and when it became clear to the management that we were there only to look at the goods and not to purchase any, we were firmly and not very gently encouraged to leave. By then it was quite late, so we went back to our hotel and to our beds and a peaceful, solitary, night's sleep.  On several later visits to Bangkok, I didn't revisit Patpong Road, but I did go to the Thai equivalent of Disneyland, a theme park with sham temples and canals resembling the real ones in Bangkok, without, however, the teeming throngs of people and constantly hooting car horns, noise, dust and turmoil that can make the real Bangkok an unpleasant city at times, despite its many attractions. Of the many cities I have visited around the world, Bangkok merits a place on the list of those I would recommend with cautionary notes, despite the beauty of its genuine temples. I think we were both glad to leave and get on our way to Delhi for our debriefing at the Regional Office of WHO.       

Debriefing in the World Health Organization South East Asian Regional Office, WHO/SEARO, was done by my former Edinburgh colleague Ray Mills, and was a leisurely process that left abundant time for me to explore some of the fascinating city of Delhi, especially Old Delhi.  I even had time on a convenient weekend break, to visit Agra and see the Taj Mahal for the first time.  But all that is another story I will tell in a future post on this blog. 

The end of civilization as we know it?

The financial section of yesterday's Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, a.k.a.  the Moan and Wail has a news item about slumping sales of Vegemite in Australia.  Apparently it's not grabbing the taste buds of the current generation of kids, as it did earlier ones.  The Seventh Day Adventists who originally made it in my childhood sold out to Kraft Foods long ago, and Kraft tried unsuccessfully to go global with it. Basically it's consumed (inhaled? absorbed percutaneously?) only by Aussies and Kiwis and those closely connected thereto.  

It's even possible if current trends continue, that Kraft might some day stop making Vegemite.  If they ever do, I hope by then I'll be long dead. I've lived outside Australia more than half my life, close to 50 years I suppose. But I have eaten Vegemite almost every day of my life, certainly every day when I'm home. I hope to keep doing so until I die.  To be on the safe side, I will add a note to my Advance Directive, the instructions about terminal care.  If I require intravenous fluids to keep me comfortable as I slide towards Valhalla, I want those caring for me to ensure that I get intravenous Vegemite. 

Barack Obama evidently doesn't like Vegemite; when he visited Australia one of his entourage suggested it would be improved if flavoured with chocolate, strawberry or vanilla. What a calumny!

Ottawa 1970-1978

What, if anything, would I do differently if I could relive the years from 1970 to 1978? So much happened to me professionally that at times I know I neglected the family when they needed me, although when I ask Rebecca, David and Jonathan about this, their answers reassure me that in reality I wasn’t as totally devoted to my work as I felt at the time, when family matters seemed often to be no more than background noise in my life, and the children’s passage through adolescence was entirely in Wendy’s hands. Professionally these were the most frenetically busy years of my life. One thing I would do differently if I had my life to live over again, would be to ease up, not take on so many things, not spread myself so thin. That was my worst mistake. I suffered because of this, and so did some others. But on balance, almost everything worked out well.

Our family in living room, 495 Island Park Drive,
November 1971

Among my first acts as department chairman was to establish formal weekly meetings to discuss in depth a relevant topic in public health science.  I set an example by taking the floor myself to discuss the policy implications of my research for the Royal Commission on Medical Education, considering the question how transplantable to Canada the conclusions might be. I invited scientists from other university departments and from Carleton University across town to talk to my group, and  government scientists from Health and Welfare Canada, Environment Canada, Statistics Canada, etc, and before long a weekly series of rigorous seminar discussions was firmly established. It became a tradition that is still going strong more than 40 years later.

I began recruiting staff, and soon had an impressive team of dedicated research workers, several of whom also played prominent roles in the teaching program. Together we established research in aspects of psychiatry (suicide and its prevention, depression, early child development); and a series of community health surveys; and under the direction of Lu Neri, studies of coronary heart disease. We also provided statistical and epidemiological expertise for clinical research workers throughout the medical school. For my first 4-5 years in Ottawa, I was also nominally head of family medicine. Indeed, I had been recruited partly because of my track record as an experienced and successful GP. I wanted to maintain the intellectual connection by way of epidemiological studies of family medical care; but the family physicians found my ideas rather threatening. Family medicine was evolving into an academic discipline in the early 1970s, and as a condition of full accreditation, the College of Family Physicians of Canada insisted that the University of Ottawa establish a free standing autonomous department of family practice. So in 1974-75 my department of epidemiology and community medicine went through a no-fault divorce from the department of family medicine, and lived happily ever after side by side with considerable cross-fertilization and mutual benefit   and never again any acrimonious territorial disputes. I kept my hand in, so to speak, and my clinical skills reasonably sharp and well honed, by seeing patients and supervising students at a street clinic, until one evening in the spring of 1975 when a student asked me what was the right dose for a drug he wanted to prescribe for a condition he'd diagnosed. I'd never heard of either the drug or the diagnosis, so I thought it was time for me to quit while I was ahead. After that, I honed my clinical skills mainly at grand rounds and by watching medical dramas on TV. 

I don’t think the weekly seminars were responsible though they may have helped, but soon I was invited to serve on several influential research grant review committees, notably the federal National Health Grant Committee, its provincial counterpart, and the Ontario Mental Health Research Grant committee.  Then came a phone call from Glenn Lamson, executive secretary of the NIH Epidemiology and Disease Control Study section, the influential review committee that set policy and reviewed applications for research programs, projects and personnel training and support in the USA.  This group met three times annually, usually in Bethesda, NW of Washington, but occasionally elsewhere, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston during my five-year term; additionally there were site visits to assess the quality of the facilities and professional team if the application was sufficiently interesting and/or costly. I was a member of site visit teams to many interesting places all over the USA and continued to serve in an ad hoc capacity as a member of site visit teams for some years after concluding my formal 5-year term.  The consequences of all these activities included several benefits. I visited and got to know the inside workings of prominent research groups all over the USA; I visited cities and towns and – because Glenn Lamson was a gourmet – excellent restaurants, all over the USA.I developed friendship networks with epidemiologists and other public health scientists all over the USA and beyond. Service on all these research grant review committees gave me a magnificent opportunity to get a broad perspective of research in all aspects of public health sciences in Canada and the USA, to meet all the leading research workers in both nations, and to gain insights into research policies and priorities.


In 1971-72 I was elected president of the Canadian Association of Teachers of Preventive and Social Medicine (CATSPM), and became the link to the (US) Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine (ATPM) which I had joined when we lived in Vermont in 1964-65.  Over the following years I became more active in ATPM, serving on several committees and was elected to the board of directors where I acquitted myself to everybody's satisfaction.


In 1972, and again in 1974 and 1976, I had brief, two-month furloughs from Ottawa, working as a short-term adviser or consultant to the World Health Organization South-East Asian Region (WHO/SEARO) in Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. These were each fascinating and mind expanding experiences. I described each of these experiences in chapters of my memoirs, and will post edited versions of each of them in future episodes of this blog. 


One thing I would not do differently would be our home at 495 Island Park Drive.

Wendy and Jonathan in the front garden at our home, 495 Island Park Drive, 1970. The top of the Colorado blue spruce is just visible behind the low hedge. This tree is now more than 20 meters tall.






There is much more I could say about those pressure-packed years of chairing the academic department but this post is already long enough, so I will save further thoughts for another time.

1969-1970: Our first year in Ottawa

As the days drew in and cold weather descended on Edinburgh in late autumn of 1969, I flew to Canada ahead of the rest of the family. My passport and landed immigrant card give the date, November 9, 1969. That was late enough in the year to miss all the fall colours in Ottawa, and for the first hard frost, the first dusting of snow. I observed my first wind-chill factor watching faces pinched against the bitter cold as people bent into the wind walking down O’Connor Street outside the windows of the Bytown Inn, while I sat warm inside eating my breakfast. The sight was daunting enough to reinforce my misgivings about our decision to leave Edinburgh where we were so happy, and start all over again in this bitter cold foreign land.  I went back to Edinburgh to collect the family, and all of us came over together a week before Christmas, incubating the season’s epidemic influenza. We all got it just in time for Christmas, which we spent cheerlessly in our pleasant rented house at 331 Island Park Drive, pleasant but lacking furniture, which hadn’t arrived because of labour disputes on the docks in Britain. So our arrival and early days were inauspicious and unhappy.  The move bewildered our children, shattered their happy friendship networks, obliterated all familiar landmarks in their lives. Perhaps worst of all, Rebecca had somehow become separated from her teddy bear between Montreal and Ottawa. We never did recover her teddy bear, and it took a long time for Rebecca to get over the loss. That loss was unhappier for all of us than the acute influenza we’d all been incubating as our plane left Heathrow, and which struck us down on our second day in Ottawa.  It was a miserable start to our new lives. Wendy and I boosted our morale by looking upon this beginning as the next episode in our journey home to New Zealand or Australia where there were no academic openings on the horizon, but, we felt convinced, there soon would be. We regarded our stay in Ottawa as an interlude, Canada as a stepping-stone in the oceans separating Scotland from our Antipodean homelands. It took many years for that subconscious feeling to dissipate.

The winter of 1969-70 lasted a long time, and we were without beds and other comforts for what felt like months. Friends of my father, David and Margaret McNicholl, the Australian high commissioner and his wife, lent us mattresses so we would not have to sleep on the floor. When our furniture finally arrived we began to feel a little more a sense of belonging, more quickly than we had in Vermont or in Edinburgh. One of the good things about Canada was the way we so soon felt at home. Canada is a nation of immigrants, and its social, cultural and demographic philosophy of the “mosaic” helps to give all who come here a sense of belonging right from the outset. The children settled rapidly into schools, made friends at once, and soon got over their homesickness for Edinburgh and the friends they had left behind. Rebecca, a good mimic, acquired the local accent almost at once. David, who had won a prize for reciting a Robbie Burns poem with the best Scottish accent in the class, clung tenaciously to his Edinburgh accent for years, maybe still has a trace of it. Wendy was soon absorbed into the neighbourhood, making good friends, some of whom she continued to see more than 40 years later. David also remains in touch with classmates from his first year in Ottawa, as well as with his Edinburgh friend John McTernan (who was one of Tony Blair’s staff in the 10 Downing Street years).

The spring brought good cheer. We saw our first display of the tulips which transform Ottawa every May. In those days a lovely avenue of elms lined both sides of Island Park Drive, and our garden was blessed with several more of these stately tall trees. Alas, all died a few years later of the Dutch elm disease. But in that first year they shaded us in the summer and their branches were the setting for high-altitude acrobatics by hordes of black squirrels. Wendy and I watched these acrobatics with fascinated interest, and briefly adopted a juvenile squirrel that was abandoned by its parents after it fell from a high branch.

My first few months were unsettling. I had been recruited by an old man about to retire, with the understanding that I would succeed him as department chairman. He acted strangely (soon after he retired, he became demented, ending his life sadly in a nursing-home for demented elderly people). His behaviour was reminiscent of the man for whom I had worked in Angaston in 1951: suspicious, secretive and very unfriendly; he gave me no help, indeed actively hindered me in getting acquainted with the way to run his little department, and in establishing networks with colleagues throughout the medical school and elsewhere across Canada. He managed to create such an uneasy situation by the time he retired, that the succession of the chairmanship to me was far from automatic. For several months it wasn’t clear whether I would become the chairman at all. Perhaps I might even be out of a job, a harsh and frightening possibility that I managed to keep from Wendy until the situation had been happily and successfully resolved.

Another disconcerting truth that he hadn’t bothered to mention was that the little house on the main campus that had been the department’s offices, was condemned, soon to be demolished to make way for new university buildings. My first quite urgent task was to find somewhere else for us. To a newcomer in town this was daunting. Fortunately I had some allies, and rather quickly I was able to secure splendid accommodation in the Lady Grey Building at the old Royal Ottawa Hospital, with abundant space for expansion as I built up the department. My speed and efficiency in completing the negotiations for this space impressed the dean, Jean-Jacques Lussier, and, I discovered years later, disconcerted another department chairman who was furious that I had been able to move in and secure this space before he even knew it was available.  About six years later I learnt that I had been used in the power struggle between two department heads, one of whom had made sure I would get this prime space before his personal enemy, head of another department, knew it existed. This later had unfortunate consequences; the loser viewed me as an enemy too, and not only never gave me any help but went out of his way to frustrate my plans, blocking or trying to block my attempts to recruit highly qualified staff. I was blissfully ignorant of these machinations in 1970, and set about moving the department into the Lady Grey Building with a song in my heart and ambitious plans to build a team in Ottawa that would be the equal of any in other parts of Canada.

Department of Epidemiology & Community Medicine

staff on veranda of cottage on the downtown campus of University of Ottawa, summer 1970, about the time we got our eviction notice. The splendid Unicentre now occupies the site where this cottage formerly stood.  

Making the magic last

My young friend Raman Kumar has posted on his blog a brief account of his parents' meeting, courtship and marriage, which like Wendy's and mine, is somewhat unusual, outside the main stream. You can read this at http://ramanreflections.blogspot.com, where there are many thought-provoking ideas and very well marshalled arguments on issues that matter in our world. Raman is a medical student at McMaster University Medical School, so you might say he's working at the coal face, in an excellent position to observe the human condition. His latest post is about the meeting and courtship of his parents, and I resonate to it because Karen and Pradeep Kumar's story is a little bit like Wendy's and mine. We kept rather quiet about the way Wendy and I met for many years but early in 1997 as our 40th wedding anniversary drew near, we both felt that it was time to come out and share with the wider world the story of our meeting.  The opportunity came when Shelagh Rogers, host of a CBC classical music request program, asked her listeners who had married on St Valentine's Day for stories about how they had first met. This was irresistible. I dashed off a brief account of how we met and what happened after that, sent it off to Shelagh Rogers at the CBC. She phoned me to check a few details, read the story exactly as I'd written it - and awarded me the prize for the best story in the large number she had received. So here is our story.

Winters in Southern Australia are cold, wet and rather gloomy but mercifully short.  By the middle of August, spring is in the air, days are sunny and warm, flowers and trees burst into blossom, song birds are nesting.

On the first fine Sunday morning in the spring of 1955, I was off duty in the group medical practice where I worked, and running late for a golf game with three friends at a modest little golf course on the southern outskirts of Adelaide.  I had delivered a baby in the wee small hours, and called at the hospital on my way to play golf to make sure mother and baby were OK. They were, so to catch up time I took a road I didn't normally use to get to the golf club. 

Some way along it, I saw two young women hitch-hikers by the side of the road. In those days not long after the end of the war and of petrol rationing, we picked up hitch-hikers. I had done a bit of hitch-hiking myself in England not long before then, so I had a soft spot for the custom.  The two I picked up were heading for the South-East, and could not possibly get there on that road.  I said I'd take them to a junction a few miles further on, where they could cut across to the road they needed. 

The young women introduced themselves, Louise and Jan (short for Janet). They were nurses, Louise from Zürich in Switzerland, Jan from Christchurch in New Zealand. They had been nursing in Perth for a year, had just come across from the west on the train – hitch-hiking would not have been feasible in that deserted part of Australia. They intended to see as much as they could in a month or so, were making ultimately for Sydney, where they would part and each would go home.

All this emerged in a conversation lasting perhaps ten minutes, until we reached the corner where I should have dropped them.  But by then I had decided I wanted to see more of the one called Jan, and I made a snap decision that changed both our lives. I was so late for my golf game my partners would have started without me anyway, I'd have had to find someone else, a stranger probably, to partner.  It was a lovely spring day.  I said I would drive them to the south coast, show them some of the sights along the way, then bring them back to Adelaide and they could set off on the right road to the south-east next day. 

Thus began the most magical day of my life. The spring sunshine was perfect, everything sparkled in the sunshine, and so did our conversation as we told each other who we were, what we had done with our lives to that point, what we hoped for in the future. It had got quite hot by mid-day, so I shed my heavy winter pullover and rolled up my sleeves when we stopped at the little town of Yankalilla to buy pasties and lemonade for our lunch.  Louise took a photo of Jan and me as we sat, earnestly talking, on the side of a hill above the beach.

We drove eventually to Victor Harbour, where there is a little island connected to the mainland by a causeway along which an ancient horse-drawn tram plods patiently back and forth during the tourist season. Not that day though, it was too early for the tourist season. So we walked across the causeway and around the island, gazing at huge ocean breakers all the way from Antarctica and dodging the spray as they beat against the rocks on the exposed southern side of the island.  

On the way back to Adelaide the two girls were singing as we drove along, and I did something I'd never done in my life before, I joined in with my hopelessly out of tune voice. By then I knew I definitely wanted to see much more of Jan.  

When we parted at the end of the day, we exchanged addresses, and not long after Jan returned home to New Zealand, I had my first letter from her. Soon there was a drawer full of letters, and another drawer full at her end. Jan's family name was Wendelken, and like all her family, she was nicknamed Wendy. During our intense exchange of letters, which was really an old-fashioned 19th century kind of courtship by correspondence, Jan became Wendy, and she's been Wendy ever since. 

Wendy came back to Australia in July (the winter) of 1956, and I drove through sleety rain in the Adelaide Hills, across to Melbourne to collect her from the airport and bring her back to Adelaide where she nursed at the Adelaide Children's Hospital for the next six months, while we conducted a more conventional 20th century courtship. We were married on February 14th – Saint  Valentine's Day –  of 1957. That photo Louise took as we sat talking on the hillside on the coast near Yankalilla has hung above our marriage bed ever since, coming with us to each of the homes in which we have lived. It is among our most precious family possessions. 

We've had a wonderful, rewarding, and richly interesting life together.  I think it's safe to say that we've made the magic last.

Louise Zuhrer's photo of Jan Wendelken (Wendy) and John Last on a hillside above Yankalilla beach. South Australia, August 1955