Rhapsody in Australia

John Williams 

Surprise of the week for me was finding out that John Williams is Australian! He lives in London (has done since he moved there with his family when he was 10), but has a beautiful property just outside Melbourne which he visits when on tour in Australia. He has collaborated with Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and has some of his guitars made by Greg Smallwood, who lives in a remote, barely accessible place in the outback. I learnt all this watching a Film Profile on a DVD which also contains the Seville Concert performed at the Royal Alcazar Palace in Seville. Read more about him here.

What a pleasant surprise also to find out that, belying appearances, Williams is extremely affable, down to earth and delightfully modest, always seeking out others' opinions when he feels he can learn from them. So, for example, if he wants to convey a particularly flamenco feel in a dance piece, he pops in to see his friend Paco Pena. Handy having the world's best flamenco guitar player living just down the road!

This attitude has probably led him into many of his forays slightly off the mainstream classical track, most famously with the group Sky, but also with his many contemporary renditions of modern popular pieces.

But I'm off to buy what sounds like a very intriguing collection called Magic Box, consisting of tracks recorded in Africa with the collaboration of African musicians.

 

Tropical Paradise

Lamai Beach, Koh Samui 

Imagine waking to the sound of the surf just metres from your chalet, sipping your morning coffee on the terrace right next to the pristine white sand and walking along the edge of the Gulf of Thailand with the sun climbing slowly up into a perfect blue sky. Ah yes, another day dawns in Paradise.

OK, so in reality it was the rooster that woke us all at 5 am, followed closely by the cats yowling outside the chalets, but at least we all slept soundly (in airconditioned comfort!) away from the traffic that we had to endure at the more popular Chaweng Beach.

We all liked Lamai much better. The sea was clearer, the beach much less crowded and the sea clear and devoid of the jet skis that buzz continuously over the water in Chaweng. And it was half the price, if you are willing to stay in simpler lodgings. Ours were new, clean and roomy and cost around S$35 a night. Their food was also better than resort type food and they let us bring in our daily dose of simply incomparably delicious durian every day. It is called Mira Mare if you ever have a chance to go there.

We took a day trip out to Koh Tao for a bit of snorkelling, which wasn't fantastic - at least not compared to Pulau Redang off the east coast of Malaysia - but it was ok. For 1250 baht (about S$52) you get picked up from your chalet, taken to the jetty where you are given a quick breakfast, and then a catamaran takes around an hour or so to get to Koh Tao. It's a marine park so no plastic bottles or bags are allowed on the island (how refreshing!). Whoever manages the restaurant/resort has done a great job. And the lunch they served was excellent.

Koh Samui  attracts a lot of Europeans who seem to spend weeks, rather than days, there. They're sun worshippers par excellence - obviously quite oblivious to the warnings about skin cancer - lying out on the beach like slabs of meat sizzling to the required shade of golden brown. I suppose I can't be too critical as I ventured out on my first day without a hat, had a mild case of heat stroke and when I woke up the next day I looked like I'd been dipped in war paint!

A small price to pay for a few days in Utopia!

Good-to-have mutant gene

There I was believing all I was led to believe about the Black Death and the Bubonic Plague being one and the same thing, and it turns out that it may not have been the case at all. The spread of the Black Death was just too fast - and present in too many climates unfriendly to the black rat carrying those nasty fleas - for it to have been the plague.

Scientists now think that it was a combination of both the Bubonic Plague and something else - probably a viral haemorrhagic fever, something like today's ebola virus, quite possibly small pox in fact - that wiped out a staggering third (25 million people) of Europe's population in just four years (1348 to 1352).

The spread of the disease was about 2 miles a day - in other words, the distance a person could walk. Now, taking into consideration how far you can travel today in just 24 hours and you can understand why health ministries from Vietnam to Canada implemented such strict measures during the SARS alert.

But that is not the most interesting thing about the whole Black Death/Bubonic Plague story. A most extraordinary thing happened in a small town in England's Peak District, a mining community called Eyam. After it was virtually cut off from the rest of the region, most would have expected all the inhabitants to have been wiped out. However, a year later it was discovered that half had survived, and 700 years later scientists are beginning to understand why.

It seems that they had developed a mutant gene - CCR5 Delta 32. In fact of the surviving populations in Europe, about 14% had the gene. This compares to about 0-2% of African and Asian populations with the gene - because they had never had the Black Death in their communities.

And even more amazing is that those with the mutant gene are also almost always immune to the HIV virus. No wonder AIDS is so virulent among African and Asian populations.

The report here gives more of the story and so does this one .

We are all Africans under the skin

San Bushmen, Kalahari Desert, Namibia 

In these faces lies the secret of all our origins, if you believe geneticist Spencer Wells. It all sounds extremely plausible to me.

Wells spent 10 years, and studied 50 groups of people, trying to trace a genetic "spelling mistake" or marker in various groups of peoples, and hypothesises that a group of the San Bushmen left Africa around 50,000 years ago and followed the coastlines all the way around the Middle East, India, South East Asia and across the final stretch of water by boat to Australia. The marker was found in Australian Aborigines, as well as in the Dravidians of India.

It was probably drought that led the Bushmen to leave in the first place, and the ice age in Europe - where his Indian descendants had migrated - that led them across the great continent of Asia, crossing the iced-over Bering Straits into the two continents of America.

Wells' theory has its fair share of detractors, but it does show that we are now able to use much more sophisticated technology in the service of discovering more about our origins. In fact, there is a powerful case for a multi-disciplinary approach to the whole thorny question of the origin of homo sapiens involving the paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists and historians. You can read more in his book, "The Journey of Man" and an interview.

The attractive thing for me about Wells' theories is the belief that we are all the same underneath. Now we have scientific proof that links all races and colours.

As Wells says, "We are all much closely related than we ever expected. Racism is not only socially divisive, but also scientifically incorrect. We are all descendants of people who lived in Africa recently. We are all Africans under the skin."