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Trail:

To the Ends of the Earth

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It seems that Walter had also developed other psychiatric traits of manganese intoxication, such as paranoid delusions, whilst he was working in the mine. He had apparently fortified his caravan dwelling house in Alyangula, putting up surveillance cameras, etc. He felt convinced that everyone was about to launch an attack on him. In readiness for such a siege, Walter had rigged up an illegal high tech radio mast to guarantee a totally independent means of contacting his relatives back in Germany should the great day come. The radio was so high tech that he got into serious trouble one day after accidentally intercepting and screwing up air traffic control at Darwin international airport 500 miles away.

When the full force of neurological symptoms kicked in , Walter left the mines. The last reports from the poor guy had trickled back from his death bed in some hospital down in Southern Australia. Dennis had tried hard to acquire Walter’s medical records from the local Groote health clinic, but they had apparently gone mysteriously missing.

Interestingly, most of the miners who had become neurologically crippled were not only occupationally exposed to the high levels of manganese ore itself, but were also involved with the drilling and detonation of explosives. Perhaps the well known association between the physical impact of explosive shock waves and its traumatic impact on the blood brain barrier had disrupted the body’s homeostatic regulation; thereby enabling an excessive uptake of manganese and other metals into the brain ?

Furthermore, Manganese is a metal that is well recognised to absorb and form stable bonds with phonons - the units of sound energy. The intensity of sound energy that emanates from explosions is probably sufficient to initiate an actual metamorphosis of the atomic structure of manganese, causing a change in the magnetic capacity of the metal in such a way that the atoms become permanently magnetised (ferromagnetic) after exposure to external magnetic fields. Normally manganese can only be temporarily magnetised (paramagnetic); e.g. it will loose its magnetic charge after it has been removed from the magnetic field.

So once we get contaminated by this freaky, ferromagnetic strain of manganese, our brains could become like a solar charged battery on continuous charge; where the incoming flow of environmental electromagnetic energy, like ultra violet radiation, accumulates to explosive levels in the manganese instead of being conducted along the body’s electro pathways for our own vital, balanced metabolic needs.

Maybe this additional ‘quantum’ factor of combined exposure to both phonon energy and manganese explains a further facet of the causal jigsaw of Groote syndrome?

Furthermore, my questionnaire had demonstrated that all of victims in the Aboriginal stronghold of Angurugu - whether they worked in the mine or not - had also been exposed to the full force of explosive blasting. For the mine had been operating as close as half a kilometre from the village boundary in the past. One notable ‘explosive’ event entailed an accidental over blast by the mine’s former explosive technician, George Baker. He had plugged too much nitro-glycerine into a bore shaft in order to deal with an extra hard vein of manganese. The resulting detonation blew Jesus Christ off the crucifix in the Angurugu Mission church ! The few upmarket Angurugu householders who had glass windows in their houses had got fed up with replacing them.

We eventually reached Mud Cod Bay; a silvery seascape where a platform of manganese bedrock stretches some way out beneath the shallow seas. I drew some samples from the manganese tainted mud; a curious salinated, sandy matrix where centuries of rising and falling tides have oxidized and reduced the manganese ores backwards and forwards, distilling all down to a seabed of pleasant pearl blue. I was sampling here, because it was this stretch of coastline where the Angurugu Aboriginal folk habitually visit to spear their crabs and turtles for food. My eyes were straining and hard to keep open at times, since the strong noon sunlight was glaring back up at us, reflecting from the fine crystalline quartz and silica sand. Every few feet the sun highlighted some attractive chunks of coral and conch shells that lay along the top end of the littoral line.

As we drove off, Dennis enthusiastically introduced me to every detail of this unique ecology of rush grasses , orchids and rhododendron which spanned this last stand of land between the forest and sea. We crossed a few crocodile tracks too, but unfortunately did not see any of the mean beasts hulking their way across the sand spits to reach the swamps along the forest edge.

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Last updated 09-Feb-2007