Greece and Turkey in 2004

To welcome my Turkish readers, here are excerpts of a letter I wrote to our families in

New Zealand and Australia after visiting Greece and Turkey in 2004:

                                                                                                                                  

We arrived in Athens on a blustery autumn afternoon when the bay of Salamis was speckled with foamy white-capped waves and spray, not at all like Homer’s wine-dark sea.  But it was warm and sunny and the sunshine continued for the whole 5 weeks we were away, temperatures mostly in the mid to high 20s.  At Delphi about 700 meters up on Mount Parnassus we were cool, but only enough to need a light jacket. When we got to Ankara for our last 5 days we thought we’d need the winter clothes we’d lugged everywhere for a month because on the same dates a year earlier it had been snowing, but despite cool nights it was mid-20s by day even there. It drizzled briefly when we were in a bus between Olympia and Delphi, and it rained the morning we left Cappadocia, but the sun came out later both days.

Temple of Zeus, Athens; Parthenon in background

Athens was for me a wonderful renewal of acquaintance with a city rich in legend and history that I’d last seen in 1953. It was Wendy’s first visit.  On our first full day we walked through the Plaka, a neighborhood of narrow lanes, fascinating shops, and appetizing restaurants, scaled the Akropolis and scrambled over the uneven surfaces as close as we are allowed to get nowadays to the Parthenon. The ancient monuments I roamed all over in 1953 are now quite rightly protected by barriers from direct contact with myriads of tourists. I remember the Parthenon as almost translucent white. For many years I had a tiny piece of sparkling white marble that I picked up in 1953 when tourists were allowed to wander anywhere and acquire such fragments.  Now the Parthenon and other ancient monuments are stained a dirty brown by exposure to exhaust emissions from the innumerable cars and buses that choke the streets of Athens. The sculptures and friezes in the Parthenon Museum at the far end of the Athenian Akropolis (like the looted Elgin Marbles in the British Museum) are still white.  At Cape Sounion about 60 Km away, the marble columns of the Temple of Poseidon hint at the original pure white, and so do the surviving columns of the Tholos and the Temple of Athena at Delphi. At Ephesus and Pergamon far from traffic on the Aegean coast of Turkey, the marble remains mostly pure white.  But everywhere we went in Greece the exposed marble has lost its sparkle.   

We surprised ourselves by our energy and agility on the steep hills where the most spectacular ruins are located.  Jonathan gave us walking sticks as going-away presents. Wendy found hers essential, I was glad of mine at the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion, on the steep slopes of Mount Parnassus at Delphi, and on several hazardous hills that we scaled in Turkey to see the temples and fortresses at their summits; but I managed without it most of the time.

In Athens before our tour of Greece and Turkey, as well as seeing the Temple of Poseidon, we went to the Archeological Museum.  In 1953 I spent most of my museum time in the toilet, so I appreciated seeing it again with a steady gut. We had a long walk to get there along roads where buses were stopped and patriotic songs blared from loud speakers mounted on the lamp-posts.  The remnants of the Greek Communist Party, just a few hundred members now but very noisy, were staging a street demonstration against the Iraq war.  We charged through their ranks from across the street to the museum, Wendy flourishing her walking stick to clear the way. Footsore at the end of that memorable day we got back to our hotel on the Metro, an excellent underground railway. This museum is a marvelously rich collection of artifacts ranging from prehistoric through classical Greek to Hellenistic.  There are many statues, pottery, weapons, armour, all dated and displayed clearly in spacious galleries and halls.  The highlights include a perfectly preserved bronze Zeus, slightly larger than life size, recovered from the sea off Cape Sounion a few years ago. Many bronzes, weapons and marble statues have been recovered lately by underwater archeology. Another precious relic is the ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ found by Heinrich Schliemann in the ruins at Mycenae.  The Agamemnon of the Iliad flourished in the 8^th century BCE if he existed (he probably did, Homer’s human characters were very likely based on real people); but the mask, and other gold ornaments that Schliemann found are nearly 1000 years older than that and their provenance is uncertain.

Each evening we took the hotel shuttle bus to Syntagma Square, setting for the parliament, and strolled through the Plaka to browse the shops and to eat a Greek meal, sip a glass or two of Greek wine. One evening we took in some night life with traditional folk dancing and – imported in the Ottoman period and retained after the liberation of Greece in 1830 – a spectacular display of belly-dancing.  By rights we ought to have seen this in Istanbul, but the Greek belly-dancer was probably as good as any we’d have seen along the Bosphorus.  She gyrated and jiggled in all the appropriate places and that’s all that matters.

After five days in and around Athens we joined a bus tour to Corinth, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Olympia, Delphi, and a few other places along the route though the Peloponnesis and back over the new suspension bridge at the western end of the Gulf of Corinth at Patras. We had a small tour party and an excellent guide who knows and loves Greece and its history. She told us all about it at length in English and French as we progressed around the country. This was much better than my experience in 1953 with a guide who spoke only French (albeit with an accent so atrocious that I understood him almost as well as the French students with whom I traveled!).

Epidaurus alone is worth the long trip to Greece, a vast open-air amphitheatre that seats 12,500 people and has miraculously perfect acoustics.  I climbed to the top so Wendy could whisper sweet nothings to me from the sandy stage, and every syllable was clear as a bell.  Another couple from Canada in our small tour party, both originally from Uruguay, sang a Latin American love duet, similarly as crisply audible. It is a magical place, and like many we visited, a place where we would happily have lingered longer. Epidaurus is also the site of the Temple of Asklepios where Hippocrates practised and taught medicine so it had extra resonance for me.

The Greek mainland at the end of the Balkans is made up of rugged mountains that we had to cross to get to Olympia on the western side of the Peloponnesian peninsula, climbing to about 1000 meters before descending to the fertile alluvial plain beside the Ionian (or southern Adriatic) Sea. Olympia is a little way inland, and it’s where Greek recorded history began – all dates were counted from the first Olympiad in 776 BCE.   Here as at all these archeological sites there is a small museum as well as the partially restored ruins of temples, an amphitheatre, and the stadium of the original Olympic Games conducted every 4 years from 776 BCE until ended by edict of the Christian emperor Theodosias in 394 CE.  The museum at Olympia has wonderful friezes from the pediments of the ancient temples, and – the highlight – the beautiful statue of Hermes by Praxilites (4^th century BCE). This is enough to justify a visit to Olympia. 

At Delphi

We left the best till the end.  Delphi is breath-taking.  I have never forgotten the details of my visit in 1953, and I am very happy to have had a chance to see it again after half a century, very pleased too that we were able to scramble up and down the steep slopes and gravel-strewn paths to see almost all of the structures scattered over this site, the ‘navel of the world’ as the Greeks called it, because of the mystical symbolism of the three mountain ridges that intersect there. The setting of Delphi alone makes its beauty unforgettable, and there is so much ancient history as well as so much myth and legend embodied here, that – like so many other places we visited on this tour – I would love to have stayed much longer. 

On the drive back to Athens we went past Thebes, but this time I looked in vain for the place where three roads meet where Oedipus had his ill-fated encounter with his father, argued with and killed him before going on to Thebes and marrying his own mother. (Is the Oedipus myth based in fact? It’s easy to believe it is).  A new expressway and commercial and residential development have obliterated that mythical meeting-place which was pointed out to me in 1953.   

On October 16 we embarked at Pireaus for what ought to have been a three-day cruise through Aegean islands, ending in Kuşadasi on the Turkish coast.  But Royal Olympic shipping lines had been barred from Turkey for defaulting on port taxes, so our cruise lasted only one day.  We did visit Myconos, a lovely little island with picturesque windmills and a tame pink pelican, where every house is white stucco, but early next morning we disembarked at Samos, crossed the wharf to a Turkish ferry and sailed across the narrow sea to Kuşadasi, where a minibus met us and took us to Izmir (formerly Smyrna).  The extra day at Izmir was a much needed rest day after ten strenuous days of touring which we had found quite hard work.  We were glad to relax, unwind, and have our first experience of the fabled delicious foods of Turkey, and get ready for more strenuous touring.  It was Ramadan, but few Turks seem to observe strict Islamic customs, because all the restaurants were already crowded before sunset.  

 "High street" at Ephesus

Everybody said Ephesus would take our breath away, and it did.  This large site is the remains of a flourishing metropolis in Hellenistic and Roman times, with marble streets, a library second only to Alexandria, an amphitheatre, many temples, a communal flush toilet (a 24-holer!) rows of shop fronts, even a brothel with an advertisement for the charms of its occupants carved into the marble pavement.  Ephesus was a rich seaport 2000 years ago, but the harbour has silted up, the Meander River on which it is situated has meandered off in a different direction, and Ephesus is now several Km inland.  It is another place where we would have liked more time.  It was the same story next day at Pergamon, about 80 Km up the Aegean coast from Izmir in the opposite direction from Ephesus.  Our guidebook describes Pergamon as ‘vertiginous’ and so it is – neither Wendy nor I, nor the Australian couple who shared our guide that day, felt comfortable standing too close to the steep cliffs on the edge of the Akropolis and the amphitheatre that clings to the steep side of the cliffs.  Pergamon also has rich medical associations. It’s the birthplace and medical school of Galen, with the remains of the ancient hospital and the lecture theatre for the students. At the end of our visit to Pergamon, with the obligatory visit to a carpet factory (we visited many carpet factories in Turkey!) our minibus dropped us at the airport for the short flight to Istanbul, where we arrived about 8.30 pm, catching glimpses of the Bosphorus as another minibus ferried us to our hotel in the heart of the city.

Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, and before that Byzantium, is one of the world’s truly great cities.  We heard estimates of its population ranging from 11 to 17 million, and everything we saw suggests the reality is nearer the higher than the lower estimate.  The Bosphorus is a geological and geographical marvel, quite apart from its fascinating and turbulent history as the setting for this great city.  At the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago when the North American ice fields thawed, the Athabasca ice dam burst, trillions of metric tonnes of fresh water suddenly flooded into the Atlantic Ocean, a great tidal wave several meters high, funneled huge volumes of water into the eastern end of the Mediterranean, up the Aegean Sea, and over the cliffs at the north-eastern end of the Aegean Sea into the fresh-water Lake Euxine, in a devastating ecological catastrophe. Lake Euxine and the plains along its southern shore were inundated and transformed from a bountiful fresh-water inland sea into the dark and different Black Sea, and the fertile fields on its south shore where agriculture was beginning to develop, were submerged 30 meters or more under water. This was the reality that probably became the biblical flood, the legend of Noah and other ancient tales.  The 35-Km narrow twisting valley through which the sea water poured was gouged out to a depth of 20-30 meters to become the Bosphorus. Byzantium grew up along the strategic waterway between the grain fields of the Black Sea littoral and the seaports around the Mediterranean – and between Europe and Asia. Troy was the fortress at the other end of the Dardanelles (the Hellespont) at the southern end of the Sea of Marmora, and like Byzantium, it was a city of tremendous strategic importance, Helen of Troy notwithstanding.  The whole region is steeped in history and I feel privileged to have had a chance to see for myself the setting for so many of these fabled and historically important places that I’ve known about since I was a boy. 

Blue Mosque, Istanbul

We began our exploration of Istanbul at the Hippodrome, where chariot races were held in Justinian’s time, now decorated with an obelisk (a triplet of the centre-piece of the Place de la Concorde and Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment) and no longer recognizable as a place where chariots could walk, let alone race, but nonetheless a great public space.  We strolled from there to the Blue Mosque, one of the greatest of the Islamic mosques, to admire its austerely beautiful interior and the exterior vista of its graceful minarets and domes, overlooking the Bosphorus – surely one of the loveliest religious shrines in the world. We went to Topkapi Palace, once the stately home of Suleiman the Magnificent and his womenfolk, now a marvelous museum with rich treasures, gold, jewels, rooms full of the possessions of Ottoman rulers from Suleiman’s time to the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 when Kemal Attaturk made it into a museum.  These rich treasure-houses are on the southern side of the Golden Horn, the inlet that runs off the Bosphorus in the heart of the historical district of the city.  Another great building that is now a museum is Dolmabahce Palace, also on the Bosphorus in what it now the business and financial district. Here are many hotels including ours, and the bustling Taxim Square off of which runs a long street lined with fashionable shops, arcades and many lanes with delectable restaurants, a handful of which we were able to sample. On those first few days we also visited Hagyasofia, originally Santa Sofia, the cathedral church of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, then a mosque, and since Kemal’s reforms, a museum, in which the original Christian mosaics and frescos are being restored – though in the cavernous gloom and high on the walls and alcoves, most are barely visible. We browsed the Grand Bazaar and the Spice (or Egyptian) Bazaar, bought a few bits and pieces for the family (Wendy isn’t a bargainer and I’m not much better, and the essence of trading is to bargain, starting with an offer about a fifth or a quarter of the price the seller asks). We had a cruise in a ferry boat along about 10 Km of the Bosphorus from the quay beside the Golden Horn to the newer, more northerly, of the two massive suspension bridges that link Europe to Asia. 

We had 3 days in Istanbul before my hosts, Çagatay [pronounced Char’h’tai] Guler and his colleague Etem Erginoz, collected us for a 3-day excursion to Gallipoli, Troy, and points south.  After that excursion we came back to Istanbul to see more of it – a second look at the Grand Bazaar, a visit to the huge underground cistern that supplied Constantinople with fresh water, a magnificent arched cavern built in Justinian’s time. 

 With Professors Guler (L) and Hayran (R)

We stayed for this second visit at the University of Istanbul’s residence, an old palace on the edge of the Bosphorus just north of the new bridge to Asia.  From the dining room windows a couple of meters above water level we had a superb view of the passing parade of ships – tankers, freighters, luxury liners,  ferry boats, yachts, launches, tiny dinghies from which fishermen caught many small fish in the rich nutritious waters where the Black Sea  and the Aegean mix and mingle.  We had a couple of excellent meals in this restaurant, as well as too much breakfast each morning. By the time we left Istanbul, all the surplus flab I’d shed in our energetic explorations of the Parthenon, Delphi and the other sites in classical Greece was back again. On our last day in Istanbul, Çagatay Guler took us across the new bridge to Asia to meet the urbane Osman Hayran, the Dean of Health Sciences at the University of Marmara which is on the Asian side of Istanbul.  Osman Hayran drove us to some vantage points for spectacular views back towards the European side of Istanbul. We visited a lovely ‘kiosk’ – a small and beautifully decorated palace.  

 Lunch by the Bosphorus

 We had lunch beside the water at a superb seafood restaurant in a fishing village near the Black Sea end of the Bosphorus. This drive confirmed our image of the jagged mountainous terrain that makes up this fascinating part of the world. Istanbul has expanded from the comparatively gentle slopes of the ancient city of Byzantium and the medieval city of the Ottomans to the precipitous hills and ravines all along both sides of the Bosphorus, where houses and high-rise towers are often perched precariously on cliffs.  If anything the Asian side is even more rugged than the European. Driving along the main road beside the Asian side of the Bosphorus, we climbed steeply and descended as precipitously, often with grades steeper than any I’ve ever dared to drive on.  After that splendid fish lunch we walked up a very steep hill from the village towards the castle that guards the Asian side of the entrance from the Black Sea to the Bosphorus but it was further than Osman Hayran had thought so we turned about and came down before reaching the crest where we would have seen the Black Sea – by then we were 300 meters above the sea so it had been quite a climb, but we had almost as far to go before we would get the view.  I’ve seen the Black Sea from the air and we would see it again flying in from Ankara, so it may be as well that we turned back when we did – Çagatay Guler is out of condition, a smoker, and he was a bad colour when we turned back.

Graves at Anzac Cove

 ...and at Shrapnel Valley

In emails before we left Canada I had mentioned to Çagatay Gfler that I hoped we would be able to visit Troy and Gallipoli, but I never expected that he would take over a week off immediately before hosting the National Public Health Congress in order to take us there himself as well as show us his beloved Istanbul. He and his cheerful, linguistically challenged protege Etem Erginoz met us at our hotel at 8 am on the morning of October 22.  I assumed the plan was to take us to a tourist agency, but soon realized that they planned to take us themselves to Gallipoli and Troy.

Kemal Attaturk's inscription, Turkish Memorial, Gallipoli 

We had heard about Turkish hospitality.  We were about to experience it. Çagatay Gfler is one of the kindest people we’ve ever known, altogether a lovely man.  His English is adequate, not as fluent as that of many of his colleagues, although better than Etem Erginoz’s often mangled mishmash. (English is the language of instruction and communication in most Turkish medical schools but only partially at Hacettepe University in Ankara).   Çagatay Guler’s accent and comprehension are adequate, and he compensates for imperfections with endearing turns of phrase, the most memorable of which is “In my childish time” when reminiscing about what life had been like in Turkey, especially in Istanbul, when he was a small boy. 

With Etem driving, we headed south out of Istanbul on the expressway that leads to the border with Bulgaria, then cut across yet another mountain range to the road that runs beside the Sea of Marmara, and made our way by lunch time to Gelibolu which we call Gallipoli, a fishing village and small seaport at the inner end of the Dardanelles.  Seeing that rugged terrain close up made me realize even before we reached the landing beaches that the plan to invade and conquer the Ottoman Empire by seizing the peninsula at the European end of the Dardanelles was one of the most extraordinary acts of stupidity of all the many perpetrated by the military planners in the 1914-1918 blood bath that irrevocably wounded European civilization.  The landing places and especially Anzac Cove, could not have been more ill-chosen, on a steeply shelving beach where the sea is two meters or more deep less than two meters from the shore, the beach itself is very narrow, the sand soft, and the crumbling sandstone cliffs are up to 20-30 meters high and nearly vertical.  The Turks were forewarned and were well dug in with machine gun emplacements all along the tops of the cliffs. Wendy’s father and several of my uncles went ashore there in 1915, and one of my uncles is buried there. A huge diorama in the Ataturk Museum in Ankara helps to show why so many died. It is sacred ground now to Turks as well as to Anzacs, Brits, French, Indians. The toll of dead and wounded was about 250,000 Turkish defenders (mostly in naval bombardments) and about 215,000 on ‘our’ side.  The former battle ground is dotted with many small graveyards rather than with a few large ones as in France – most of the dead are buried where they fell.  So on the green lawn of Anzac Cove, in Shrapnel Valley, and several other places where we stopped to look, there are little neat rows of headstones.  Interestingly, no distinctions of national origins are made in the Allied graveyards – Brits, Anzacs, French, Indians lie side by side. I was more moved – as much by anger at the stupidity of it all, as by sorrow – than at Gettysburg, Monte Casino, or the Somme and other battlefields of Northern France.    

 Crossing the Hellaspont

After a good look at these battlefields and the impressive Turkish memorials, a short ferry ride took us across the narrow seas of the Dardanelles (the Hellaspont) to Çanakkale, a city on the Asian shore near the bottom end of the Dardanelles. We used a new five-star tourist hotel in Çanakkale as base to visit some of the archeological sites on the Asian side of the northern Aegean.  The first of these and by far the most interesting, much more so than Gallipoli, was Troy.  All who read Homer want to see Troy. It’s over 2000 years older than the city for which Priam, Hector, Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others waged the 10-year war Homer described. That took place about 800 BCE. Heinrich Schliemann did much damage with his ignorant digging in the 1880s but more carefully trained archeologists since then have unraveled the nine layers, dating back to 2500 BCE and earlier. We had a long, leisurely look on a hot sunny day, and I would have been happy to spend much longer. This was obviously a great city several thousand years ago. The original harbour has long since silted up and is now a fertile plain several Km from the open sea, but it’s easy to recognize the strategic importance of this place in and before Homer’s time. We visited several other sites that day, most memorably a hazardous climb to the remains of a Temple of Athene on the top of a spectacular akropolis at Ossos overlooking the Aegean and the island of Lesbos, home of the Greek lyric poet Sappho whose reputed sexual orientation gave us the word lesbian. 

 Wendy on Balcony, University Residence; bridge to Asia crossing Bosphorus

Bosphorus and Bridge to Asia from Istanbul University residence

On October 27 we flew from Istanbul to Ankara, where another of Çagatay Guler’s colleagues met us at the airport to drive us straight to Cappadocia, where we hired a professional guide.  I am so glad we did this, because Cappadocia is a unique and fascinating place and our guide explained it all to us clearly.  It is geologically weird, a large region of pointed sandstone pinnacles often capped by hard basalt rock of a darker colour, formed in ancient eruptions of volcanoes in the Caucasus and eroded over the millennia by wind and water.  About 2000 years ago, the local people began to hollow out the insides of these sandstone pinnacles to live inside them, and in about 200 CE, very early Christians who were escaping from persecution by the Romans, found refuge here and established the churches that were the first fixed settings for Christian religious worship.  They painted frescos on the walls and some of these survive more or less intact.  This is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and there is a large open-air museum. We had a fascinating day here, ending as our Turkish tour days often did, with a visit to a carpet factory.  It was another perfect warm and sunny day, but next morning when we had already decided we needed a day off back in Ankara before I started working, it was pouring with a soaking rain, so we asked to go straight back to Ankara. 

 Coffee with Osman Hayran, overlooking Bosphorus

In Ankara we had two more sightseeing days, both memorable.  The first, with Çagatay Guler, was a visit to the world-renowned Museum of Anatolian Civilization.  Since the looting and scattering of the Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad that the Americans allowed to happen after they invaded Iraq, this is the only extant collection of artifacts from prehistory and early historical times of that part of the world.  Anatolia was the region of the bronze age Hittites, a bread-basket of early agricultural settlements, a region fought over by many warring factions for thousands of years, Hittites, Greeks and Persians, Romans, Seljuks, the country Xenophon crossed when he led the March to the Sea of the Ten Thousand Greeks who survived defeat by the Persians early in the 4^th century BCE, the penultimate segment of the Silk Route from China to Byzantium, the heartland from which Kemal Attaturk launched the creation of modern Turkey in the early 1920s.  This museum was another place where I could have spent days.  The following day, my last day before starting my talks, Hikmet Pekcan, a distinguished professor in the department of public health at Hacettepe and another delightful, civilized man, took us to the Attaturk mausoleum and museum which we found very impressive, then to lunch at a superb restaurant in a very old house from early Ottoman times, perched on the hillside just below the Roman and Crusader castle at the top, overlooking all of Ankara. This is a famous place whose recent patrons include Hillary Clinton.  We didn’t see the menu – Hikmet Pekcan chose our dishes – but the prices were probably astronomical, although I thought the meal, and the ambience of the old building, made it worth whatever it cost. 

                                                                                             

I am sorry all the work was compressed into such a brief time frame, because I met and would very much have liked to see more of several very impressive staff members of the department of public health at Hacettepe University and at least one very impressive young women graduate from there, now working at Duzce Medical School on the Black Sea.  As a youngster fresh out of medical school she was at the epicentre of a terrible earthquake that ravaged Turkey several years ago.  She took leadership in setting up emergency triage services and acquitted herself with distinction.  She is a talented amateur artist, and next day at lunch she presented me with a pastel she had painted the previous evening after listening to my first talk.  She’d framed it herself, and gave it to us to bring home. I packed it carefully in the middle of our large suitcase, and got it home intact. It is now on our living-room wall.  It is a lovely painting, impressionist in style, showing me, white beard and all, seated high with a pupil (her, I think) beside me, above a field of flowers.  I’ve received many awards, distinctions and honours in the past few years, but this unexpected tribute touched me more than most others.

The US presidential election took place on the day I gave my first talk and the results were known by the second day, our last in Turkey.  We’d picked up signals everywhere we went confirming press reports that 80% or more of the population of Europe (and maybe 98-99% of the Muslim world) would vote for John Kerry if they had a vote, so everyone was appalled at the outcome, apprehensive about what it might portend for the rest of the world.  I came home overnight then went off to Washington to the American Public Health Association annual meeting, where I got another award.  The British historian Simon Schama had an article in The Guardian on November 5 about the Divided States of America and others have referred to the Terrified States of America and the Paranoid States of America.  I thought, on the basis of my brief visit, as brief as I could  make it, that ‘terrified’ and ‘paranoid’ captured the prevailing mood rather well.  Everyone seemed apprehensive, as if expecting terrorists to attack them at any moment. The USA has sunk deeply into one of its bouts of periodic madness, worse, more dangerous than the Civil War, or Prohibition, or the McCarthy paranoia.  There is no trace of that mood in Turkey where until recently and perhaps even now, the Kurdish separatists, the PKK, were using terror as a weapon. Occasionally bombs go off in Istanbul and Ankara as they have done for years.  There is plenty of visible security on the streets and at airports, and there is in Greece too, as elsewhere throughout Europe. But there’s none of the fear and paranoia that seem to have gripped the American people. I think we’ll be staying away from the USA until this mood subsides, and so, I think, will a great many others.  The fear and paranoia in the USA, not to mention the xenophobia (directed broadly at anyone from outside the USA) make for unease.  I’d prefer to live in Turkey now, rather than the USA. 

Political preference and brain function

In my last post I mentioned some distinctions between otherwise similar people whose political leanings are sharply different.   There are anatomical and presumably neuropsychological differences in the brain between people whose political preferences are, loosely speaking, left or right. A relevant item appeared in Online Science Daily on April 7, 2011. You can read it at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110407121337.htm and I quote from it here:

Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say.
"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Ryota Kanai of University College London. "Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."
Kanai said his study was prompted by reports from others showing greater anterior cingulate cortex response to conflicting information among liberals. "That was the first neuroscientific evidence for biological differences between liberals and conservatives," he explained.
There had also been many prior psychological reports showing that conservatives are more sensitive to threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty, while liberals tend to be more open to new experiences. Kanai's team suspected that such fundamental differences in personality might show up in the brain.
And, indeed, that's exactly what they found. Kanai says they can't yet say for sure which came first. It's possible that brain structure isn't set in early life, but rather can be shaped over time by our experiences. And, of course, some people have been known to change their views over the course of a lifetime.
It's also true that our political persuasions can fall into many more categories than liberal and conservative. "In principle, our research method can be applied to find brain structure differences in political dimensions other than the simplistic left- versus right-wingers," Kanai said. Perhaps differences in the brain explain why some people really have no interest in politics at all or why some people line up for Macs while others stick with their PCs. All of these tendencies may be related in interesting ways to the peculiarities of our personalities and in turn to the way our brains are put together.

This is a whole new area of scientific study to me, but I’m not surprised to learn about the findings of this work. It makes sense to me that such differences should exist. Sometimes people’s opinions or values are demonstrated by the kind of car they drive: Urban dwellers who drive large gas guzzling cars are telling us they are unconcerned about the environmental impact of their preference.   Conversation often reveals the twisted logic used to justify choice of a large gas guzzler.

The current Canadian government demonstrates is extreme right-wing proclivities in several consistent ways, particularly by its venomous hostility to environmental causes that question the way they support and subsidize the Alberta tar sands. One specific aspect of the present government’s policy that often troubles me is its hostility to scientific observations at odds with its ideology. Facts must not be allowed to get in the way of ideological decisions, for instance about harsh prison sentences for actions that should not even be criminal conduct, i.e. possession of small amounts of marijuana, or provision of safe injection sites for drug users. Woe betide government scientists who make decisions on scientific grounds, when the government wants different decisions. The scientist responsible for safety of the Chalk River Nuclear Research Reactor – an apolitical career scientist who occupied a senior advisory position – was summarily dismissed when the government decided to act in defiance of her recommendations. Up to a dozen other loyal, dedicated Canadian public servants have met similar fates in departments of the environment, resources, foreign services, etc. Government scientists must get clearance from political appointees before speaking, even in discussions at scientific meetings. Mostly they are forbidden to speak at all. 

One current example of anti-science action that deeply troubles me is closing and dismantling of the environmental observation station in the high Arctic. As far as it’s possible to unravel reasons for this, the government seems to be upset mainly because this observation station is monitoring ultraviolet radiation flux, which is increasing to dangerous levels because the protective stratospheric ozone layer is attenuated by ozone-destroying substances. The government is extremely hostile to the concept of climate change: it’s not happening, and if it is, this has nothing to do with combustion of carbon-based fuels. Years ago when the prime minister was head of a right-wing citizens’ coalition opposed to taxation, he stated that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was a socialist plot. Now any proposed action to mitigate or adapt to climate change is a plot by radical environmentalists. Environmentalists are ‘enemies of Canada’ – seditious traitors.  Recent government statements about stratospheric ozone and increased UV radiation reveal worse than profound ignorance, inability to distinguish climate change from stratospheric ozone depletion. I suppose this isn’t surprising from a government that doesn’t contain a single cabinet member with scientific qualifications; but it’s indicative of a cabinet that lacks or doesn’t listen to scientific advisers.  The Online Science report suggests that politically right-leaning people are sensitive to threats in the face of uncertainty. I wonder how they are when faced with certain threats like the very real threat to human, animal and plant life from elevated UV radiation levels in the biosphere.  

The Better Angels of our Nature

In 1984 I read with great interest and pleasure Steven Pinker's book,  The Language Instinct. Pinker presented evidence that language is an instinct unique to humans. He described and discussed how and why humans differ qualitatively in communication skills from other highly developed species. For instance we possess the ability to communicate emotions and abstract concepts – pleasure, distress, danger, esthetic satisfaction, love, etc –more efficiently and in more dimensions than any other kind of living creature. We comprehend speech, emotive poetry and prose, mathematical symbols, music, visual and performing arts, religious imagery, philosophical discourse, and much more. The Language Instinct displayed the breadth and depth of scholarship that have distinguished all of Pinker’s books. He is a renaissance man, a polymath, a rigorous scientist capable of presenting ideas and information from a wide range of scholarly disciplines to support his arguments. Pinker is Canadian, a graduate of McGill University in Montreal, and holds an endowed chair at Harvard. He is probably best described as an evolutionary psychologist. In a series of brilliant, beautifully written and richly referenced books, he has explored several aspects of how the human mind works, approaching this tantalizing question from a historical, developmental, and evolutionary perspective.  Now, several books and 18 years after The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker has delivered The Better Angels of our Nature, a masterly work of major importance to all scholars who are interested in the human condition. The first fundamental fact presented in this important book is the abundant evidence that violence has declined dramatically over the past several hundred years. Pinker presents evidence on all forms of violence – interpersonal, domestic, criminal, state-administered, war-related, etc. At first glance evidence for a decline in violence seems false and the very notion seems counter-intuitive. Surely the industrial scale of death, permanent disability, material, economic and cultural loss caused by violence in the global, regional and local wars of the 20^th century far exceeds comparable events in all previous centuries. Over 100 million people died in the wars and genocides in the first half of the 20^th century, the number permanently maimed or disabled was several times larger. The scale of the slaughter continued throughout the second half of the 20^th century and in the first decade of the 21^st century.  Surely this exceeds any previous blood baths. No, not so if expressed as rates or proportions rather than only in absolute numbers, which is how such data are almost always displayed. There is room for argument about the basis for the rates and proportions: for instance, what denominator should be used for death rates in the two “world” wars of the first half of the 20^th century? What should be the denominators for the genocides: the Armenian genocide of 1915, Stalin's genocide of the Ukrainians in the 1930s, the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews of Europe, the Rwandan genocide and the "ethnic cleansing" conducted by the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia? What about the uncomfortable relationship of religion and violence? Faith-based and culturally based violence still flare up occasionally, for instance in conflicts between Christians and Moslems in Nigeria, in acid attacks on women by men they have spurned in Pakistan and Bangladesh, stoning to death of adulterers in Afghanistan, etc, lynching (often preceded by castration and horrific torture) in backward regions of the USA, etc. until about the 1950s and family murder-suicides here in Canada and elsewhere? Yes, all these occurred and some still do, but the numbers are tiny, rates are miniscule, compared to death rates in the Thirty Years War, medieval witch burnings, torture by the Spanish inquisition, and other old-time atrocities.  State-administered violence, e.g. executions, flogging, use of stocks and pillory, were formerly public spectacles, but began to disappear behind closed doors, then to diminish in number and now have disappeared in all civilized societies, persist only in a few backward US states and nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China. Culturally related interpersonal violence, notably slavery and child labour, have virtually disappeared except in isolated settings. Although human trafficking still exists, the numbers, let alone rates, are tiny compared for instance to the African slave trade which carried an estimated 36 million Africans to the Americas until the slave trade was finally abolished in the middle of the 19th century. Pinker demonstrates to my satisfaction that all the existing forms of violence are numerically small when accurately presented in the form of rates or proportions as they always should be if we seek to make valid comparisons. Raw numbers may look dramatic but are often misleading.

Pinker goes on to present his reasoned arguments about why violence has declined. Part of the reason for the widespread perception that violence is pervasive and increasing rather than decreasing  is the publicity we give it in the media  -“ If it bleeds, it leads” as a noted journalist once said. Moreover, and more important, the media present the evidence in a way that makes us feel sorry for the victims. Pinker’s hypothesis is that violence has declined largely because of this rise of empathy. 

Why has empathy risen?  Pinker may be less persuasive on this question, which is exceedingly complex. It has a lot to do with values, for instance with the way we identify with, feel empathy for Shakespeare’s “good” women (Portia, Cordelia) rather than the “bad” ones (Lady Macbeth, Regan, Goneril). The rise of literacy and perhaps of cultural sensibility therefore presumably has something to do with the observed fact of declining violence. I'm less satisfied than I'd like to be about Pinker's explanation of reasons for the decline of violence.He's right, I'm sure, as far as he goes. I am not convinced that he goes deeply enough.

I believe, however, that differing values among seemingly very similar members of modern organized societies are more difficult to explain than in this rather simplistic way. The fact that values differ is unarguable. An obvious value difference is demonstrated in political preferences. People who believe in social justice and equity, that all people in society deserve an equal chance, people who believe humans and other living creatures are interdependent, are predominantly liberal, left-leaning politically. People who believe that  some are inherently superior to others, and who believe humans have an inherent right to exploit nature’s bounty  for their own benefit, are ‘conservative’ (in the political, not ecological sense of this word!) and are usually right-leaning politically. There has lately been a little discussion and description in scientific circles of the relationship (if any) between brain function and political preferences and convictions. I hope for more work at this interesting frontier of knowledge. It would be a fascinating and challenging topic for Steven Pinker’s next book.

Across the Pacific to Panama Canal and USA

This post is excerpted from memoirs written in the early 1990s, illustrated with some photos.

Three youthful sailors on the Port Alfred

On January 3, 1964, we left Sydney on a refrigerator ship, the Port Alfred, called in Brisbane to top off the cargo. We carried 12 passengers and about 30,000 tons of frozen meat across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, Vera Cruz, Mexico, and on up the eastern seaboard of the United States. I had free passage as ship’s surgeon, Wendy was charged half the regular fare and our three kids were carried at about a quarter of the adult fare. It was luxury travel in a spacious stateroom on a ship in which our quarters were air conditioned. I had a separate cabin, the ship’s surgeon’s quarters, but seldom slept there, preferring to cuddle with Wendy. There was a huge amount of deck space for the kids to play, and a swimming pool. This way to travel is far superior to travel on a cruise ship with thousands of passengers. Without doubt, this 5-6 week voyage was one of the highlights of our lives. We’ve always felt sorry the children were too young to appreciate or even to remember much about it.   

 Rebecca chatting to the First Mate of the Port Alfred

The voyage across the Pacific was one of the high points of my life because I love the sea so much. Wendy, Rebecca and David thoroughly enjoyed it too. Jonathan slept most of the time, days as well as nights. We had a pleasant ship’s company, the captain, deck officers, engineer officers, and refrigerator engineers were splendid people with whom we could socialize comfortably. As I got to know the officers, I recognized personality characteristics that made them select themselves for life at sea, away from family with whom constant contact would be emotionally intolerable, whereas occasional home leave was a time for rejoicing and revelry. The radio officer was type-cast, a reclusive, solitary individual, like most who work for the Marconi Corporation. One of my statistical tasks at the Social Medicine Research Unit had been analyses of sickness and death rates in occupational groups insured by the Prudential Life Assurance Company.  Maritime radio operators employed by the Marconi Corporation (which had a monopoly covering most European merchant fleets) were well outside the continuum for “normal” mental and emotional states. Psychiatric disturbances including obsessive disorders and depression were very common, associated with preference for solitude. Marconi Corporation radio operators had by far the highest suicide rates of any occupational group.   I have only vague memories of the other passengers. There was an American oil man with his wife and small child, and an Australian girl who was clearly his mistress as well as the nanny to the little boy; there were only two or three others (twelve passengers in all). None made any impact on my memory comparable to that of Captain Barlow, Bob MacDonald, the big, red-bearded second engineer, and several other officers who were all very pleasant company. My duties as ship’s surgeon were undemanding: I hardly ever had to do anything other than the daily inspection with the captain, first officer and chief steward. I had to suture a laceration, render a little psychotherapy when two gay stewards had a lover’s quarrel, provide ointment for skin rashes, etc. Fortunately there were no surgical or medical emergencies.

 Wendy in Port Alfred's swimming pool with Rebecca and David, midway across the Pacific

A few days out from Brisbane we ran head-on into a powerful storm, almost a hurricane, and for 3 days battered our way into the teeth of fierce winds and huge seas. This was a much stronger storm than the one I had experienced in the Southern Ocean in 1954, enough to clear the dining saloon of all but three or four of us when it was at its height. The dining saloon faced aft on the Port Alfred. The best vantage point to view the stormy sea was the bridge, to which I had access as a member of the crew, the ship's doctor. I spent many hours on the bridge discretely out of the way aft of the wheel and the instruments that told us how this storm was slowing our way through the ocean. It was fascinating to see huge waves breaking over the bows and surging back, with the wind helping them gather force before they crashed into the superstructure, making the ship, sometimes those watching too, tremble. The open decks were dangerous, and if I ventured out the spray hit my face with the force of shots from a gun. I felt then the full power of the sea. The dining saloon for officers and passengers thinned out during those days, the table cloths were dampened to stop plates sliding about, the fiddles were raised and our heavy chairs firmly fixed to the deck. 

 When the storm passed and the sea was calm again, we could see the ocean all around us ablaze with ghostly light on moonless nights from myriads of tiny phosphorescent plants and animals. If you flush a ship's toilet in the dark at such a time, it’s a dramatic sight - ship's toilets use sea water so the luminescent little creatures can be seen there too as well as in the wake and all around the ship. There were many tropical nights when the phosphorescence in the wake was bright enough almost to read by, many nights when the stars seemed close enough to touch. One night when Wendy and I were strolling on the deck after bedding down the children, the first officer called out to us from the bridge, drawing our attention to a satellite crossing the sky; in those days, satellites were still uncommon enough to be noteworthy. We saw little other shipping apart from a few Japanese fishing trawlers and only a few islands, low atolls where palm trees seemed suspended in the sea, and one high volcanic peak on the horizon in the Society Islands group.

Gatun Lock, the highest point on Panama Canal

The Panama Canal was fascinating with its locks that lifted and then lowered the great ship. 

Then we were in the Caribbean. We were berthed in Kingston for a week unloading some of our cargo of frozen meat – frozen goat carcases; goat meat is popular in Jamaica. We went most days to the swimming pool at the Myrtle Bank Hotel (made famous just before this in a James Bond novel and movie). We saw the city of Kingston and the Botanical Gardens and had a brief excursion to the Blue Mountains. We often left Jonathan who slept almost all the time, in air-conditioned comfort in our cabin.

I went sailing across the harbour to the old buccaneer haven of Port Royal, now a few feet under water because of an earthquake 300 years ago, with Jim McKenzie, the refrigerator engineer, who had a tiny yacht on board. Sailing to Port Royal was great, with a light breeze that carried us along, the sail gently filling with wind. At Port Royal a party of fat tourists off a cruise ship included the brother of the medical school dean at the University of Vermont (I forget how we learnt   this but it led to some worth-while conversation). Getting back safely from Port Royal was a different matter. The trade wind had freshened into a gale and it was all we could do to prevent capsizing when we were caught in the wake of a large tanker, and we were well aware that the harbour contained man-eating sharks.

Jonathan with Bob MacDonald and Captain Barlow

Wendy and I had a wedding anniversary in Kingston and spent the evening at the Bamboo Club, a raucous night spot where we watched highly sexed scantily clad Jamaican girls writhing and gyrating on a small dance-floor. We didn’t know it when a party of ship’s officers invited us to join them but the Bamboo Club was a well known brothel. It was an excellent place to celebrate a wedding anniversary, one of several memorable wedding anniversaries we have had in exotic places. I remember that evening with much pleasure.

Wendy with Second Engineer Bob MacDonald

Our first US landfall was at Charleston, South Carolina, a picturesque old city where the Civil War started when the confederate army bombarded Fort Sumter located in the harbour. As the Port Alfred moved up the river, I was struck by shanty-town settlements of poor blacks that we passed before we saw the affluent mansions of the well-to-do whites. I had never before seen such blatant contrasts of wealth and poverty nor the contrasting lives of blacks and whites; it was a foretaste of much that would follow about the American way of life. Another foretaste was a gun-shop window with rows of ugly, heavy automatic pistols and revolvers on display. We were in the land where people had the right to bear arms, a right as important to many as freedom of religion.  Like the lovingly preserved slave auction market with the auction block and signs displaying prices, this was an eloquent reminder that we had come to a violent nation with a brutal and violent past. In other ways Charleston was a good place to be introduced to the USA. It is a graceful old city with many very beautiful ante-bellum mansions, boasting lovely wrought iron balconies, pillared porches and porticoes, white clapboard or red brick sides. There was a feeling that these people cared about the past and about their history. The fact that some of the past was brutal and the history was violent didn’t seem to trouble them.

We went on around Cape Hattaras to Norfolk, Virginia, then Philadelphia, another historically interesting city that it was good to see at the beginning of life in America. I left the ship in Philadelphia and flew to Burlington, Vermont, via New York. It was a heavily overcast day as the plane from Philadelphia touched down at Newark, and the connecting flight to Burlington had been cancelled. I was taken by bus from Newark through the Holland Tunnel, across Manhattan Island, past the Empire State Building, out the Midtown tunnel, and across Brooklyn to Kennedy Airport where I waited a few hours for the flight to Burlington. Those airport arrivals and departures at two of New York’s airports were harbingers of many similar experiences stretching over all the years since that day in February 1964. Our life in the New World had begun.

Renewed Uncertainty and an Enticing Invitation

My encounter with the aggressive bureaucrats from the Commonwealth Department of Health had a very unsettling effect.  Based on a handshake agreement I had been appointed as a ‘lecturer’ in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney, but my salary was paid by the Commonwealth of Australia Department of Health and my contract identified me as a Commonwealth civil servant, not as a staff member of the University of Sydney. When I had mentioned ‘academic freedom’ in that unpleasant encounter, one of the bureaucrats had uttered an obscenity laden rebuttal of the notion. As far as he was concerned, there was no such thing – I certainly had no academic freedom as he saw it. For several weeks I felt badly shaken and very insecure, although I carried on as best I could, trying to put the incident behind me. I immersed myself in my interesting projects on weekdays and in family life at weekends.  

Then, out of the blue it seemed at the time though the chain of causation soon became clear, I had a letter from Kerr White, MD, Chairman of the newly established department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont. The letter was an invitation to me to join the team he was building. I had never met Kerr White but had heard a lot about him. He had been my predecessor as visiting fellow at the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit, and while I was working there a year after he had been there, he had published a paper on the ‘Ecology of medical care’ that had been much discussed. Kerr’s paper was the other side of the coin, so to say, of my ‘Iceberg’ article. He and several colleagues had calculated where and how a hypothetical 1000 people in America got their medical care. Kerr was originally Canadian, a McGill medical graduate trained in internal medicine and – much like me – had been attracted to epidemiology.  In early 1963, Kerr had returned to the UK from the USA on a brief head-hunting expedition, seeking  to recruit an experienced family physician trained in epidemiology, able to apply epidemiological methods in health care research. My friends at the SMRU had given him my name. At that time, experienced family doctors with training in epidemiology were very rare, I was one of a very small select group, and the demand in universities far exceeded the supply. Kerr White offered to pay my fare and my family’s fare from Adelaide to Burlington, Vermont, and offered me a key position on his research team, where I would lead several research projects for which he had secured funds.

This invitation led to much soul-searching discussion between Wendy and me, and thence to a decision and subsequent events that changed the course of our lives once again. We realized immediately how life-changing this decision would be, and the enormity of what we faced gave us considerable pause. We had just made a down payment on our first home, begun to put down roots for the first time in our married life. If I accepted Kerr White’s invitation, we would have to uproot and resettle as immigrants in the USA – this was not an exchange fellowship but a long-term perhaps permanent move away from Australia to a new life in a new country.  We would be in a similar situation to some of the immigrant patients whose lives and health problems had interested me so much when I had been in general practice. Wendy and I thought about and talked about Kerr White’s invitation for several weeks before deciding what to do.  This most certainly would truly be a life-altering decision. We could see that it would ultimately involve a decision about giving up our nationality and citizenship and becoming American. We loved our homelands enough to face this prospect with many misgivings.  Having delayed as long as I decently could, I wrote back to Kerr White, accepting his invitation.  I described this in my memoirs, composed about 20 years ago, and what follows is edited from these memoirs:

Wendy and I knew that the decision to emigrate from Australia would be life-changing, even though at the time I was uncertain whether we would be leaving for an interlude of a few years or for life. We hoped it would be just for a few years. For many weeks we weighed the pros and cons. We were in the situation, not for the first or the last time, in Robert Frost’s poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;  

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,  

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.  

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and

I — I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.  

Our choice surely made all the difference in our lives. The roads before us led in two entirely different directions. One road was slow and unexciting, secure if I conformed to the conventions. The other was hazardous, vague, unknowable - but adventurous. Wendy loved adventure if anything more even than I did. We had mixed and confusing images of the United States, of American academia, and of Kerr White, who had invited me to join his team. Complex and lengthy procedures involving much paperwork were required to get the necessary documents to enter the USA as immigrants and a work permit for me. I wrote the examination that would confer eligibility to write state certifying examinations to get a licence that would enable me to practice medicine in the state of my choice. I passed this easily despite encountering incomprehensible questions on new realms of biochemistry and pharmacology that had materialized since I last thought about these subjects. Meanwhile, I had disturbing thoughts about my reckless improvidence and the culturally disruptive act we were committing. Yet as I dipped into books and magazine articles that provided glimpses of many and varied aspects of American customs and culture, I began to feel a little bit of its magnetic appeal. Not much, just a touch.

I had some insight into the psycho-social aspects of migration, having begun to study the process as a family doctor and as a graduate student (my dissertation for the DPH dealt with some health implications of cultural differences between migrants and Australian-born citizens). I understood a little of what was involved in uprooting ourselves from Australia where four out of five of us had been born and where I had been raised. My own roots were shallow in some ways, quite deep in others, especially when it came to family ties. I felt no pull from Australian traditions and customs.  Indeed I wondered if there were any, though once removed from the land  of my birth and upbringing I began to perceive with nostalgic force some Australian traditions and customs, most of which I miss much more now than when we set off for America.

As we prepared to leave Australia perhaps for ever, we cut some ties. Helen, my dachshund bitch, was among the first of these. She was aging and ailing with some canine gynecological disorder that made her a low-slung nymphomaniac, perpetually in season. One morning we awoke to barking and other doggy noises, and saw on the terraces of our hillside garden in Cremorne a parade of dogs of every description, each waiting his turn to mount and impregnate her. The honour, we decided, went to an elderly and rheumaticky bitser from along the road, who snuck into the house itself when our backs were turned. The pups were born looking deformed and went into a bucket of water. Helen soon after that accompanied me on her last walk. With heavy heart I took her to see a friend at the University of Sydney who gave her a lethal injection. Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being hadn’t been written then, but he captured in his poignant account of the last moments of “Karenin” something of what I felt as I walked Helen into the School of Public Health to meet her humane dispatcher.  Soon after that we held what would nowadays be called a garage sale, disposing at sacrifice prices of some family treasures, my golf clubs, sundry household impedimenta (we had a Royal Doulton chamberpot that we sold for pennies, perhaps worth a fortune as an antique; other antiques we didn’t recognize no doubt went too). I gave many books to our neighbour and baby-sitter Richard Sweet and was happy to see most of them, old friends, safe on his shelves when I stayed with him and his wife Patsy years later at their home on the edge of Sydney Harbour in Kirribilli. Other items went into store to be sent for later or disposed of when our future became clearer. It was the first of several times we thinned out possessions, each time inadvertently parting from treasures we later missed, things we had thought were of no account that could have been meaningful, useful or both.

Our drive across Australia from Sydney back to Adelaide for the Christmas of 1963 gave me an opportunity to immerse myself for what I knew might be the last time in familiar sights and sounds, the clear blue sky,  warbling magpies, bleating sheep, the dust and heat of the inland.

We went through sleepy little country towns and stayed briefly on a farm near Bordertown, South Australia with our friends Jan and Allan Fry.

 We had a slightly melancholy sixth birthday party for Rebecca in the east parklands on the edge of the city where there was a jungle gym shaped like an elephant, and a small tribe of little children wearing paper hats sat around a picnic table eating cakes and drinking lemonade. 

Then we said farewell to my mother and other family, flew back to Sydney and after a night at a hotel beside the Harbour at Neutral Bay, we went aboard the Port Alfred, a well-appointed passenger carrying refrigerator ship on which I had free passage as the ship’s surgeon, with Wendy and the children traveling at peppercorn rates as passengers. That voyage was interesting enough to be the subject of another post on this blog.

The Riverkeeper

Inukshuks in Ottawa River, 2008

Speakers at the Friday Lunch Discussion Club at the Ottawa Y are always interesting.  The most recent was the most interesting and worth while talk I’ve heard since I was invited to join this club. Meredith Brown is a very impressive, articulate young woman, qualified in engineering and biological sciences. She is the executive director of the NGO called the Ottawa Riverkeeper. Her aim is to ensure that the Ottawa River water is drinkable, swimmable and fishable – in other words, to do whatever is necessary to maintain the integrity of the Ottawa River catchment area ecosystem. She described what she does in one of the best talks I’ve heard for several years. The Ottawa River is a very large fresh water ecosystem with a catchment area about the size of Western Europe; the river water is used for drinking, sanitation, hydro-electric power generation, cleansing, nourishing vegetation, recreation (swimming, fishing, white water rafting,ski-ing, snow-shoeing, etc) by 90 municipalities, the largest of course being the conurbation of Ottawa-Gatineau with a population of over one and a quarter million.  Some, but by no means all municipalities give a little money to the Ottawa Riverkeeper NGO. Additional but very modest support comes from federal and provincial governments, a few corporations and private donors. Collectively it’s just enough to pay modest salaries to the Riverkeeper and a very small staff. This handful of dedicated staff measures and monitors the quality, quantity, uses and misuses of the river water, engages in advocacy, education and interaction with concerned agencies, interest groups and individuals at federal, provincial and local level. There is a huge amount of work to be done. As an example, Meredith Brown told the sad story of fresh water eels, which mature upstream in the headwaters of rivers, return to the oceans to breed – reversing the migrations of salmon, for instance. These eels are extinct in the Ottawa River system because their migratory route is blocked by numerous dams and hydroelectric power plants. All that would be required for their survival is a series of fish ladders to enable them to get past these obstructions. Fish ladders are ridiculously cheap, just a few thousand dollars each.  I was more than usually interested. I was hoping to hear some clues about her perspectives on the interactions of ecosystem health and human health. Predictably, I didn’t hear a lot on this important but tantalizing issue.  Intuitively we would all like to believe there is a close correlation between ecosystem health and human health but sometimes it can be very difficult to demonstrate.  Swamps, flood plain lagoons and tidal wetlands can be healthy ecosystems, but if they are havens for insect vectors like mosquitoes that carry malaria, dengue or viral encephalitis, they can be serious or even grave dangers to health. On the other hand, a wetland can be so heavily polluted with petrochemicals, heavy metals or other toxic substances that wildlife, migratory birds, endangered species, are exterminated for ever, while people in adjoining cities remain healthy. After listening to Meredith Brown, the Ottawa Riverkeeper, I cheerfully donated to her NGO, and would be happy to bounce a few ideas around with her about ways to explore further the fascinating, sometimes perplexing relationship of human and ecosystem health. Incidentally, that term 'Riverkeeper' is perfect. At first glance there may be a warm and fuzzy impression, but on reflection, I find the notion of keeping the river, keeping its integrity intact, a powerful symbol of care for essential life-sustaining ecosystems.