The Incidental Tourist Read online

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2018

  Text © Peter Doherty, 2018

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Cover image courtesy of Peter Doherty

  Typeset by Sonya Murphy, Typeskill

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  ISBN 9780522871722 (paperback)

  ISBN 9780522871739 (ebook)

  Contents

  Experiments, data and connections

  1 The incidental tourist

  2 Bugs in space

  3 Italy, off the beaten track

  4 Octopus on the beach

  5 Aerial art deco

  6 Retracing the knights

  7 Vertical city

  8 Beware the sparkler

  9 The practiced traveller

  10 The Tea Horse Road

  11 United we stand

  12 Up for a spin

  13 Informal settlements

  14 Missing the vultures

  15 Meeting of the rivers

  16 Steely resolve

  17 Ups and downs

  18 Sea to shining sea

  19 Up to date in Kansas City

  20 Snowed inn

  21 Biting the big apple

  22 Walled city

  23 The coalmine

  24 The synagogue

  25 Cats of consequence

  26 Ports to new worlds

  27 Hearing the music

  Sources

  Index

  Experiments, data and connections

  ANYONE LIKE ME, BORN during the Second World War in Australia, has lived through a time of massive change. Compared with our parents and grandparents we enjoy longer, healthier and more pain-free lives. Food is readily available, with ‘fresh’ produce being easily imported from distant countries rather than being seasonally dependent. We communicate online with friends and colleagues thousands of kilometres from us, seeing their faces in real time on the screen as we do. Flying across the oceans for work or vacations is now routine and unremarkable. All this, though, has only happened within the last fifty years.

  These transformations are a direct consequence of scientific discoveries and technological advances that have revolutionised the ways we connect and communicate. Scientists who have always lived with the consciousness of probing universal truths were, for obvious reasons, early adopters of both international air travel and web-based communication. I’ve been a frequent flyer throughout most of the jet age.

  My wife Penny and I (the ‘we’ in this book) have lived in Edinburgh (1967–71), Canberra (1972–75 and 1982–88), Philadelphia (1975–81), Memphis (1988–2017) and Melbourne (1998–present). The overlap in dates reflects that, after I was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996 and Australian of the Year in 1997, we commuted between the United States and Australia. Until mid 2002, I spent 75 per cent of my year working at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. That profile then reversed when I took up an appointment at the University of Melbourne Medical School and we made our primary home in the adjacent area of South Parkville.

  Living in different societies has been a great experience, but the primary reason we moved around was career choices. Biomedical researchers interrogate nature by doing experiments, collecting data and connecting the dots. Such science is expensive and Australia, with a relatively small population, can only excel in a limited number of areas. The best opportunities are often elsewhere.

  Although this book uses the substrate of travel related to my job as a scientist, it isn’t a science book. The ‘experiments’ discussed here have resulted from spending just a little time in different places, some familiar, some obscure. The ‘data’ is what we saw and experienced and at least some of the ‘connections’ have come from another personal obsession: a fascination with history and how/why things happened. Of course, such storytelling rates neither as science nor history or travel. It’s, sort of, memoir.

  Each of the chapters is a separate entity, and they have been organised in no particular sequence of time or place. Much of what I’ve written is from memory, and memory is notoriously flawed. Hopefully, though, in seeking to extract hints of meaning, some small insights have emerged that are of interest.

  The popularity of TV programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and websites like Ancestry.com make it obvious that there’s an underlying need to place our lives in some bigger, yet personal, historical context. As I’ve written about different cities and cultures across the planet, it’s been particularly intriguing to develop unexpected linkages to the Australian experience. What’s the connection between CATS and Captain Cook? (Hint: It’s not to do with either felines or Andrew Lloyd Webber!) Were you aware that the American Civil War helped to populate Queensland? What’s the deeper story behind those big guns we see frequently in the main streets of Australian country towns? Some of these discoveries surprised me when I stumbled on the information. Perhaps my journey of discovery will intrigue you, too!

  CHAPTER 1

  The incidental tourist

  INCIDENTAL TOURISM (AS DISTINCT from travelling while being on a vacation) is primarily a consequence of the truncated time-frames enabled by rapid international jet travel. As we all know, the realities of our world are vastly different from anything that has gone before. It once was a very big deal for a leading Australian researcher (like 1960 Nobelist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the virologist/immunologist) to attend an international conference. Back then, junior Australian medicos would have to defray the cost of taking up (for further certification) a hospital job back ‘home’ (Britain) by signing on for an extended trip as a ship’s doctor. As late as the 1950s, all but the wealthiest (and most adventurous) Antipodean business leaders, marketers, commercial buyers and the like spent weeks at sea as they headed to the major centres of wealth and power in the Northern Hemisphere.

  Crime and romance novels set on ocean liners in those more leisured years depended in part on the reality that such languid voyages led even the most dedicated professional to morph into a less critically minded, more relaxed mode. Fuelled by alcohol and boredom, with diverse company and hours to kill, there was time for contemplation, talking with strangers from different cultures and reading about ultimate destinations. Being on the deep blue seas for days provided ample scope for literary seduction and murder.

  The first hint of change for the Australian, well-to-do, long-distance traveller was in 1935, when Qantas Empire Airways (as it was called from 1934–67) partnered with Imperial Airways (the precursor of British Airways) to launch a pioneering service to Britain. With thirty-one stops over twelve days, the initial legs from Australia to Singapore were on a DH86, the two-engined De Havilland Dragon biplane that would see extensive use with Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service. On board this first version of the ‘Kangaroo route’ was Lady Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last Viceroy of India. No doubt, an early example of celebrity advertising.

  Then, not long after the Second World War, eminent p
hysicist (later Sir) Mark Oliphant, a significant player in the Manhattan Project (at the University of Birmingham and University of California, Berkeley) that produced the first atomic bombs, was recruited from the United Kingdom to direct one of the research schools at the new Australian National University. As he related in an interview with ABC science communicator Robyn Williams, Adelaide-born Oliphant and his wife Rosa returned to Australia on a converted Second World War Lancaster bomber (carrying one flight attendant and six passengers and with flat beds), a trip that took only sixty hours. Flying at about 2500 metres, the view of the landscapes that passed below was evidently unforgettable. Sir Mark also recalled that he could rest his back on one side of the fuselage and brace his legs on the other. Now that’s a narrow body! Peer up-close into the ‘Lanc’ preserved at the Imperial War Museum, London, or inspect ‘G-for George’ at the Australian War Memorial, and it is obvious these planes were designed for war, not peace.

  Oliphant, who was later Governor of South Australia, is the only veteran of the Manhattan Project I ever met. The massive magnet of the homopolar generator (HPG) he built at the Australian National University now stands as a sculpture outside the university’s Research School of Physics. The story is that, when they turned the HPG on, the drawdown on electricity was such that the lights dimmed all over Canberra! Rather than being hooked to a synchrotron (the original intent), the HPG found a role powering a local precursor of Princeton’s ‘big science’ LT-4 Tokomak (see chapter 16, ‘Steely resolve’).

  Recruited from the ANU Research School of Physics about the time that Oliphant retired (1976), a physicist friend, Mike Bell, saw out his career working with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. So far, though, harvesting the sun’s energy by solar panels or solar furnaces has worked better than trying to capture the plasma from nuclear fusion and, in effect, harnessing the power of a small, controllable sun on Earth! But, if that tokamak strategy ultimately succeeds in ways that are both scalable and commercially viable, the world’s energy problems will be solved!

  Travelling today from Sydney to London in less than twenty-four hours (with one stop) on a quiet, smooth-riding A380 Airbus is a very different experience from spending four-plus relaxing weeks on a fast ship like the P&O’s SS Himalaya, or two to twelve days being shaken about on a noisy, vibrating, piston-engined propeller plane. Even Agatha Christie would find it hard to get much complex plot development into an A380 Melbourne to Dubai leg. Such short timeframes require a very different narrative. Maybe that’s part of the reason that the novella is making a comeback. Jet travel has changed the world.

  Science has always thrived on the free exchange of ideas and discoveries across national and continental boundaries. As a consequence, like most of my successful (particularly Australian) colleagues, work-related commitments have taken me regularly across the world’s great oceans and landmasses. Along the way, I’ve become what I think of as an incidental tourist. That does not, of course, mean that Penny and I have failed to take relaxing vacations with only the anticipation of seeing new places in mind. But what I’m writing about here are those surprising intrusions that inform, enlighten and even delight when we are travelling for other reasons. That’s Incidental Tourism.

  My first long-distance air itinerary was when we, along with our two small Scottish-born boys, returned home after spending almost five years in that centre of eighteenth century enlightenment, the delightful city of Edinburgh. Penny had previously flown from Britain to Australia on one of the improved (that is, a plane that no longer broke up mid-air due to structural failure) De Havilland Comets, the pioneering all-jet international airliner. This time, hopping via Beirut to Athens, then on to Hong Kong, we visited friends before completing the final leg to Brisbane on a Qantas Boeing 707. This trip was my first experience of pure jet travel, though I’d flown earlier on Vickers Viscount, Vanguard and Lockheed Electra turboprops. The Vickers planes are long gone, but a military version of the Electra, the Orion AWAC, is still in use around the world.

  Living in Canberra and working at the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research, visiting Swiss scientist Rolf Zinkernagel and I discovered (in 1973), and then developed our ideas about, how the body’s immune cells protect against viruses, which led to our being recognised by the 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine. The Swedes may have taken a couple of decades to come to their decision but the immediate effect was that, from 1974, I emerged from total obscurity in my field to being in demand on the international immunology circuit, and I was flying a great deal. Penny and I then spent the next decades living between the United States and Australia.

  Too late for the era of the inter-continental, piston-engined planes like the Lockheed Constellation, I flew many miles on the narrow-bodied, single-aisle Boeing 707s and Douglas DC8s. As a basic biomedical scientist who was in no way involved with the pharmaceutical industry, and who had no access to the ‘private practice funds’ available to many MD researchers, my flying experience was always in economy class – back of the bus. Scientists tend to live relatively modest lives. That remained the case as the international routes were taken over by the two-aisle wide bodies (Boeing 747, McDonnell Douglas DC10, Lockheed L1011) – with a capacity to seat so many more people, tourist air travel then took off in a big way.

  The jumbos had dominated the scene by the mid 1980s when I became a board member for an international research institute in Africa. At least for those trips, I was promoted to first or business class – international bureaucrats don’t fly economy, so they could hardly demand that of senior scientist board members. This was before the lying-flat bed era, but the bigger business-class seats did recline more and more as time went on and, as a friend discovered, if there was no one next door it was possible to lift out the central armrest in a KLM DC10 (a preferred carrier from Nairobi to Europe) and dump it on the floor to gain more space. Otherwise, the majority of my flight time was still back in steerage. Planes were less likely to be full than they are today and, especially midweek across the Pacific, you’d occasionally get lucky and be able to stretch out across the five economy class seats in the centre section of a Boeing 747. What a delight, especially on the long haul after the plane left Hawaii.

  From 1997 the Nobel Prize gave us a permanent international upgrade to, at least, business class. One way to minimise the demand on me to travel so I could continue to do some real work in my home institution was to insist that meeting organisers provide at least a business-class ticket. This would not, however, be my demand if the invitation was to speak at a conference organised by a financially challenged scientific (versus clinical medicine) society but, with so many invitations, I could generally combine several different commitments and split the cost. The consequence was a lot of round-the-world flights as, no more expensive than a direct international return, circling the globe allowed me to set up a sequence of talks in Asia, North America and Europe.

  Then the equipment improved again with the advent of the super jumbos, like the A380. With more fuel-efficient engines, these current generation planes, including the later 747s and the twin-engine Boeing 777s and carbon-fibre 787s, bypassed Hawaii to fly direct from Los Angeles to Sydney and Melbourne, or make one (versus two) stops from Melbourne to London. Qantas will evidently begin a new 787–9 direct service direct from Perth to London in 2018, and (presumably with a next-generation plane) non-stops from East Coast Australia to both Heathrow and JFK in New York are planned for 2022.

  The on-board experience has changed in many other ways. Now we carry our whole professional life on a laptop computer backed up to a USB or the mysterious cloud. The leather (later canvas) briefcase stuffed with manuscript drafts is as historic as the fountain pen. For frequent flyers, paperback books for distraction after any capacity to write or to think is exhausted on a long-haul flight have been replaced with a library on an iPad or Kindle. Travelling in any class, you now also have a chance to catch up on the movies you’ve not seen (likely ne
ver wanted to see) on your own video monitor. There can be some great surprises! Cabin baggage has wheels, and nobody boards a plane without having been bombarded with some sort of irradiation, or patted down if there are medical (or personal) issues. What may once have been a relatively short stroll to the boarding gate has been reconfigured, forcing everyone to negotiate seeming kilometres of upmarket shops.

  Busy with our commitments, few scientists take the time to read up on the town or city hosting the event that they’re attending and there’s plenty of scope for unexpected encounters and experiences. Scientific meetings are often in places that are way off any normal tourist agenda and local university colleagues, who are proud of where they live, often take a bit of time out to show us around. Sharing our evidence-based view of the world, and with inside knowledge and contacts, they can provide a somewhat different perspective to the spiel of an informed tour guide. That’s what is at the heart of the travelling scientist experience. If we’re lucky, we get to see even the familiar through an alternative filter, the differently focused lens of the incidental tourist!

  CHAPTER 2

  Bugs in space

  MY RESEARCH FIELD IS infection and immunity so, before we start in too seriously on my personal experiences as an Incidental Tourist, bear with me for a bit while I make a couple of points about how to avoid one travel experience you definitely don’t need: contracting a horrible infection. This is important because, when you board an international flight in Melbourne, London, Dubai or Singapore, your fellow passengers could be travelling from anywhere on Earth. Maybe they’ve been holidaying in a tented enclosure on an African game park, or on a bus tour in India. And it’s possible they’ve picked up some ‘little passengers’ along the way.

  In order of ascending bug dimensions and complexity, you might think about viruses (Zika, Chikungunya, dengue, flu, measles, hepatitis A), bacteria (cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis), protozoa (malaria, sleeping sickness) or worms (tape, round, elephantiasis). If the person sitting next to you looks a bit peaky, they could be suffering from just about anything. Should they go the whole way and conk out on the way home, the dear departed is usually just covered with a blanket, remaining in their seat – the only airline that I know of with a place to put the poor unfortunate is Singapore Airlines, which has a special closet for this. In passenger ships for tourists, of course, the crew can just stick those who have passed over in the chiller, hopefully not next to tomorrow’s lunch! But rest assured, having flown millions of miles, I’ve never had the experience of being seated alongside anyone who was quite that unresponsive, though I have given lectures to audiences where it seemed everyone was catatonic – my fault, no doubt! But how likely is it that you will contract some bad infection while sitting on a plane?