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Trail:

To the Ends of the Earth

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I found myself incarcerated for fifteen hours in the glass terminal building of Dar Es Salam airport at Brunei. It was a greenhouse experience. Unable to leave, I could do little more than use up several abortive hours in the airport’s internet café kiosk. After failing to read my Emails on every single monitor along a row of make-shift computers, I eventually threw up the towel. I was horrified to be asked to foot the bill by the junior attendant. When I protested, he threatened to call the police and abruptly scuttled off, entering into a series of protracted telephone exchanges with his boss which, as I later found out, was to get the final authoritative word to write off my bill.

I spent my remaining hours at Dar Es Salam staring through the glass walls of the terminal. All the while I was aware of the mounting storm clouds of dirty looks drifting across from the staff of the internet kiosk - may be the young lad had lost his commission for the afternoon, I don’t know ?

I craved to be able to escape to the shade on the opposite bank outside; to sprawl myself out beneath that canopy of palms. A mind bending wave of jet lag suddenly overcame me; this time that melatonin ‘crash out’ took me to more pleasant dimensions - the image of the palms in front of me was suddenly metamorphosed into multiple mirages of silvery fronds fanning the humid summer air.

On the final four hour bout of the flight to Darwin, my illusion of the virtual ‘clone-like’ beauty of the ‘Royal Brunei’ hostesses was rapidly shattered when one of them walked up the aisle spraying canisters of pyrethroid insecticide into the intakes of the air circulation system. Within minutes, the whole fuselage was transformed into a gas chamber of toxic insecticide. There was no escape. Despite being assured of the compliance of these chemicals with the World Health Organisation’s safety standards, I had perhaps gleaned an explanation for reasons why travel on long haul flights represents one common predisposing factor for the clinical onset of certain modern diseases such as post viral fatigue (ME), sudden infant death syndrome, etc. I spent the rest of the flight pondering on the possible connection between the aetiology of these diseases and the compulsory subjection to such invasive modes of spray treatment.

At 4 am on that early summer morning, I arrived in the half light at the front gates of the Lalara family home in Darwin; The Lalaras were a half Aboriginal family who used to live and work fulltime on Groote Eylandt. Their son, Daniel, emerged out of their bungalow garden to greet me - the first friendly warmth that I had encountered since leaving my family home in Somerset. Then all I can remember was the whirring of the air conditioning fan as I slept for two days in a pathetic state of semi-comatose, jet lagged haze. The bedroom was blackened out, save a few slits of laser sunlight that projected my first glimpses of Australia across the wall .

Jenny, the Caucasian mother of the Lalara family, was struggling to hold down her teaching job whilst keeping her invalid husband and adolescent family together. Jenny’s persistent stream of Emails had been instrumental in convincing me over the seriousness of the mounting neurological crises on Groote, and, more importantly, the need to understand the root cause of this disease. If you can understand the cause, you are in a better position to deduce a cure, as well as the long term prevention of the disease.

Jenny had enlightened me over that very real and urgent human suffering facets of Groote Syndrome; which served as a kind of trigger to activate the brilliant academic potential tied up in Susannah’s thesis; The combination of perspectives had coerced me into travelling all this way to Australia.

When I first set eyes upon the debilitated body condition of Warren Lalara, I was instantly reassured that my reasons for coming were well grounded. I could see why he had been forced to leave his ancestral island home for the more sophisticated care facilities on the mainland, here at Darwin.

In trying to greet me, Warren was unable to rise from the tiled floor. I could sense that the ‘once upon a time’ fit and healthy mineworker and father of two felt humiliated after my arrival into the room ; his legs were sprawled out, pathetically kicking like a frog on ice. Every muscle and bone in his body were shrunk and wasted back to child size - less than his 17 year old stout son standing right over him .

Warren had been outcast by the medics, bracketed off as one of those suffering from Groote Eylandt syndrome, a supposedly incurable, progressive wasting disease that had officially afflicted those of a single Aboriginal clan who were exclusively residing in the village of Angurugu on Groote. The disease had purportedly first erupted some years after the missionaries had persuaded them to drop their nomadic way of life and settle down to a more ‘civilized’ western lifestyle.

But a growing clique of "expert" geneticists are rapidly laying claim to the full ownership and academic rights over this new disease. They have coined the classy name ‘Machado-Josephs disease’, and run a host of sharp-suited symposiums set in expensive Floridian Hotels thousands of miles adrift from Groote island - the hotbed of the real problem. Meanwhile, a rainforest’s worth of condescending letters and documentation has been sent to the Aboriginal elders and Missionary bodies urging them to join up with the belief system that the Aboriginal "drunken walking" problems are purely to blame on their "seed". The alleged weak gene was supposedly first introduced by visiting Macassan sailors who had occasionally interbred with Aboriginal women on the shores of Groote about 300 years ago.

But this theory leaves many blatant questions surrounding the origins of the condition unanswered. Why has Groote syndrome only recently emerged since the 1960s when the hypothetical ‘orgies’ of interbreeding took place as long as 300 years ago? Why have some strains of this neuro-degenerative syndrome also ended up affecting white Caucasian residents on Groote too - albeit only two or three to date? Why has the disease largely only affected one village community, yet failed to erupt in the myriad of other global populations where the Macassans have also sailed and interbred?

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Last updated 09-Feb-2007