The Incidental Tourist Read online

  You don’t have to be a professional singer, actor or musician to find yourself on-stage at the Sydney Opera House. My most recent experience was giving a book talk and participating in panel discussions at the 2015 Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Even the smaller theatres, where we ‘minor attractions’ presented, were sold out and the audiences were enthusiastic, smart and interactive. It’s always great to be around a broad spectrum of committed and interesting people. Though I’d performed there before, it was my first introduction to the ‘below stairs’ bowels of the building, following paths that allow back door access to the various stages. Familiar stuff for actors and musicians but, for an outsider like me, an education in how the sets and infrastructure necessary for the business of live entertainment and illusion are stored and organised.

  The Sydney Opera House is home to the Australian Opera Company that also plays a (generally) somewhat truncated series in Melbourne. Down south they use the elegant and modern State Theatre at the Melbourne Arts Centre, where, though it’s not a dedicated opera house, the acoustics are great and the size makes it a more appropriate venue for staging Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In 2015 we experienced the sixteen hours (over four nights) of Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfreid and Götterdämerung and, after attending excellent morning explainers by New Zealand musicologist Professor Heath Lees, got the hang of the whole thing and greatly enjoyed it.

  That hasn’t caused us to become Wagnerians, the most passionate of whom fly to every production of the Ring wherever it is staged, anywhere across the planet. And we aren’t tempted to try for a place at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the theatre built by Richard Wagner as a permanent home for his operas. Apart from the difficulty of getting a ticket, a Wagnerian friend assured us that the seats are very hard! But it’s undoubtedly the case that our musical horizons were expanded by hearing the Melbourne Ring Cycle. We now take much greater pleasure in those dramatic cadences and appreciate the enormous influence that Wagner had on, for instance, the themes we hear at the movies. Though discovery for the research scientist is all about illuminating something that nobody has ever seen before, much of the delight of discovery in day-to-day life is in encountering a vision, a narrative, an insight, some chords and signatures that have been experienced and loved by many before us.

  Some of my more memorable non-science discoveries have been associated with opera houses. In Vienna for a scientific meeting where I was a keynote speaker but somewhat of an outsider to the field, I had a solitary free evening and, strolling aimlessly around, just happened to find myself in front of the Vienna State Opera House. Walking in, the only place available (cost 12 Euro) was high in a box to one side of the stage. Most of the action could not be seen from my seat, so I stood at the back of the box to get the full experience of Giacomo Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West. I’d heard it before, but my big discovery was that the great Vienna Philharmonic plays as the opera orchestra. It was, to say the least, a very rich sound. Somewhat surprisingly, meeting by chance with friends at the end of the performance, it was hard to find a restaurant still serving dinner!

  Then, visiting our friend Rolf Zinkernagel in Switzerland, we went to the Zurich house to hear Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore. Opera plots are often pretty ridiculous, but I always think that this one ranks way up there! We found ourselves in what looked to me like a scaled-down Vienna opera. Rolf told us that the Zurich house is indeed an Austrian design and that, due to its size and acoustics, it is highly favoured by the wonderful Cecilia Bartoli. Sadly, for us, she was not singing that night. Not long after, though, we enjoyed an Australian opera production of L’Elisir d’Amore. Set in an outback town at the beginning of the First World War, it was great fun and the plot certainly seemed no sillier than it does when presented in a nineteenth century European context.

  London is the other imperial city where we’ve enjoyed opera over the years. Here our venue has been the English National Opera, where everything is sung in English. I first heard Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers there. Everyone who saw Peter Weir’s 1981 movie Gallipoli will remember the scene where the Australian country lawyer/major plays a recording of that haunting baritone duet before he joins the soldiers he commands as they go over the top to certain slaughter. I don’t recall that the Anglicised version of ‘Au fond du temple saint’ (‘At the back of the holy temple’) had any less impact in the English National Opera performance. Translation from the original language can work okay but, in Stockholm one year, hearing Donizetti’s Don Pasquale sung in Swedish (with Swedish subtitles) was a different type of experience.

  When we lived in America, we listened regularly to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Now, those Met performance can be accessed visually in different formats, including at our local movie theatre, Carlton’s Nova. Though I’ve spent a lot of time sitting on committees in New York over the years, there was always the possibility that the event could carry over into the evening, or there might be a joint dinner, so I didn’t book ahead at the Met. In retrospect, that was not so bad, as I recall several memorable evenings at the more modest New York City Opera. Defunct for a time from 2103, the City Opera is now back in business. One production I did see at the Met, Puccini’s La Bohème, suffered, I thought, from the fact that the stage was too big and the set too far back. It must be great to hear Giuseppe Verdi there, but a smaller auditorium, like the one at the Sydney Opera House, has its pluses for the more intimate productions. Any live performance of great music by accomplished professionals is a delight but, for ambience and physical location, nothing beats it!

  Like science, the music culture is global and scientific meetings often feature musical events of one type or another. These range from a dance band at a conference dinner to local, traditional performances and/or pieces from the standard classical repertoire. The performers are often conservatory students who can use the money, and it’s also been an unexpected delight to hear stars like violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter play at major conferences.

  Building a research department in Memphis, a useful recruitment technique for promising job candidates, or entertainment for visiting speakers from anywhere across the world, was to visit Beale Street and hear, for instance, the late, great blues singer Ruby Wilson or the frenetic piano player Jason D Williams. The next big town east of Memphis is Nashville, the home of the Grand Ole Opry and the US country music industry, which, through their organisation Country Cares, raises a lot of money to help the sick kids at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Country Cares meets annually at the hospital in Memphis, and there’s always a great evening when the singers and/or songwriters perform at a dinner. Country music is all about being flawed and human, and a particular plus is that it’s usually possible to understand the words.

  Both science and music probe universal themes. Though the language of science can be much harder to access, it’s not unusual for talented scientists to be competent, at times outstanding, musicians. They don’t necessarily go together but, for those of us who aren’t tone-deaf, surprise encounters with music can be both a delight and a coping mechanisms that (once any capacity to write or think is exhausted) helps the peripatetic researcher deal with long hours on international jets. Of course, we aren’t alone in that.

  An intriguing, recent experience on a flight from Dubai to Sydney was spotting a substantially built fellow traveller blowing soundlessly into what looked vaguely like a children’s recorder. Having lived in Scotland, my alternative speculation was a bagpipe chanter. When we chatted later, that second guess was confirmed. Listening via earphones, he’d spent much of the ten plus-hour trip playing his electronic bagpipes! Such is the marvel that can result from bringing science/technology and traditional music together! Vocal practice en route for an opera singer would be a bit more challenging, though I guess that, reprising the deaf Beethoven, the performer can ‘hear the music’ while studying the score. At the same time, might they also hold a mental image of the condu
ctor, orchestra and audience as part of their musical synthesis? Interpreting an aria via the prism of the mind is, no doubt, a quite different experience from blowing down a pipe to hear the immediacy of an electronically generated bagpipe sound.

  It’s no secret that the skirl of the pipes is a celestial sound to some and just a horrible noise to others. For me, having lived for five years in Edinburgh, hearing and seeing the televised lone bagpiper high on the castle wall at the conclusion of the annual Military Tattoo brings back a spectrum of memories. Those unique registers and background drone always stir my Celtic soul – you don’t need Celtic ancestry to qualify! – but there are also vivid memories of being colder than expected, along with a (sometimes wet and slippery, sometimes crisp and clear) progress in the departing crowd as it moves down Edinburgh High Street, followed by a left turn to the steep slope of The Mound, left again for a flat walk along Princes Street, then across the Dean Bridge, to finally arrive home, climb the stairs at 1 South Learmonth Gardens and sip an Islay malt in a seemingly (by comparison with the street outside) much warmer than usual living room.

  The Tattoo is always in August, but Edinburgh is at the same latitude as Moscow, so it can be chilly on the tiers of benches that line the castle forecourt. Though I’m glad to have had that first-hand, repeat experience, watching now on TV leaves me with no great sense of actually wanting to be there. And I’m also certain that part of the above memory is false. We couldn’t afford good malt whisky at that stage of our lives, so it would have been some pretty basic blend!

  And so it is with the tourist experience. Each and every one of us travels differently in one sense or other. And we don’t need Einsteinian thinking about the space/time continuum to tell us that repeat visits to the same place will never be quite the same. Depending on who we are, why we are travelling and how we see the world as a consequence of upbringing, training and culture, we inevitably apply different filters, both at the time and later when we view the photographs we’ve taken, then check this or that ‘fact’ in a retained guide book, or the internet. This contributes to our enduring music of the mind, the images we evoke and, inevitably, embellish when we recall being in a particular place at a particular time. Inevitably, the retrospective often improves on the reality!

  All travel writing is based as much in the imagination and insight as in any verifiable truth. The helpful Lonely Planet or Fodor guides are at the practical end of that spectrum, while the satisfaction of settling in with the latest Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux reflects their capacity to intrigue and entertain. Reading books like The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific we get the sense that, variously engaged and appalled by his different encounters, Theroux greatly enjoyed both the experience of the travel and the synthesis of the writing.

  As a first-timer, it’s been fun to grapple with this genre and, reading into the background, to be surprised by one or other unexpected insight that has emerged. Writing is always a voyage of discovery. An inevitable element of travel writing is in rediscovering, even reinventing the voyage! In the end, though, especially for anyone who values complexity, the basic theme of the finished product will likely echo ‘Satchmo’ (the trumpeter Louis Armstrong) as he sings, ‘What a Wonderful World’.

  Sources

  THIS BOOK RELIES SUBSTANTIALLY on personal recollections and should in no sense be regarded as authoritative. Memory is notoriously flawed. Since the 1996 award of the Nobel Prize, we have kept some fairly comprehensive records, cumulated and curated by my wife Penny, who trained first as a scientist, then as a librarian and information specialist. Prior to that, apart from what we can collectively recall, any description may rely on pamphlets from museums that we’ve just happened to have kept, old guidebooks and random photographs.

  Some of the chapters relate to trips made as recently as 2015, others go back to the 1970s. Much of the more detailed information has been reinforced and/or discovered and illuminated from checking online sources. Of course, Wikipedia is always a good place to start and, where possible, I’ve cross-checked as widely as I can, at times, going back to original sources.

  There’s also some overlap here with topics I’ve written about earlier at greater length:

  The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize, MUP, 2005.

  A Light History of Hot Air, MUP, 2007.

  Sentinel Chickens: What birds tell us about our health and our world, MUP, 2012 (published in the United States as Their Fate is Our Fate: How birds foretell threats to our health and our world, 2013, The Experiment, New York).

  Pandemics: What everyone needs to know, Oxford University Press, New York, 2013.

  The Knowledge Wars, MUP, 2015.

  The following are references to particular online sources:

  www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3621290/The-nightmarish-flights-London-Qantas-established-Kangaroo-Route-1930s.html – A very nicely illustrated account of the history of Qantas flights, including the ‘celebrity’ part played by Lady Edwina Mountbatten, between the United Kingdom and Australia (see chapter 1, ‘The Incidental Tourist’).

  www.abc.net.au/rn/legacy/programs/lifeandtimes/stories/2009/2774645.htm – For Robyn Williams interview with Sir Mark Oliphant (see chapter 1, ‘The incidental tourist’).

  Australian Journal of Physics, vol. 37, pp. 137–56, 1984 – Contains early account of the tokamak by Mike Bell and can be downloaded from the internet (see chapter 1, ‘The incidental tourist’).

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_excitation_microscopy – Explains the new technique of two-photon microscopy (see chapter 4, ‘Octopus on the beach’), which allows us to ‘see’ through the skin to a depth of about 1 millimetre.

  asiasociety.org/hong-kong – The Asia Society Hong Kong website (see chapter 7, ‘Vertical city’).

  unhabitat.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02-old/Slum%20Almanac%202015-2016_EN.pdf – The site for UN Habitat Slum Almanac 2015/2016 (see chapter 13, ‘Informal settlements’).

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfFZ2-Am-Zk – Clearly illustrates the way that jet reversers work (see chapter 17, ‘Ups and downs’).

  upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Mississippirivernew-01.png – A great depiction of how the mighty Mississippi has changed its course (see chapter 18, ‘Sea to shining sea’) over the centuries.

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAgAvnvXF9U – Here you can hear the early, disruptive Bob Dylan (see chapter 19, ‘Up to date in Kansas City’).

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPG9GcykPIY – Watch the young Lotte Lenya (see chapter 22, ‘Walled city’) singing the original, German version of ‘Mack the Knife’.

  www.synagogues360.org/synagogues.php?ident=hungary_002 – Details the story of the Szeged Synagogue (see chapter 24, ‘The synagogue’).

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miners_(poem) – Quotes this key poem by Wilfred Owen (Chapter 25, ‘Cats of consequence’).

  www.poetrynook.com/poem/waltz-4 – To read ‘Waltz’ by Dame Edith Sitwell (see chapter 25, ‘Cats of consequences’).

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=21LGv8Cf0us – To hear Louis Armstrong singing ‘What a Wonderful World’ (see chapter 27, ‘Hearing the music’).

  Index

  air travel

  on-board experiences 5, 6, 35–6, 126, 207

  classes 5–6

  early days 2–3, 4, 35–6

  and infections 10–13

  aircraft

  flying boats 35–6

  incidents on 10, 127–8, 129

  landings 90–1, 124–5, 128

  take offs 126

  types of 5–6, 33–4, 37, 82, 126–7

  views from 82–3, 114, 132–5, 202–3

  airfares 78–9, 85

  airports

  Art Deco 35, 36–8

  locations 125–6

  and security 56–8

  Alabama (ship) 199

  Allison, Jim 27

  American Civil War 199

  Anne, Princess Royal 204

  Archerfield Airport, Brisbane 37–8

 
; Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), US 152

  art 140–1

  Art Deco 33–5, 36–8, 164

  Asia Society Hong Kong (ASHK) 50–1

  Association of Veterinary Teachers and Research Workers (AVTRW) 187, 189

  AstraZeneca 100, 102

  Auschwitz 177

  Australia, aerial views 132, 133, 135, 202–3

  Australian Ambassadors 77–9

  Australian Embassy, Japan 77, 78

  Australian National University 3, 4, 101

  Australian Opera Company 204, 205

  autoimmune diseases 26

  autoimmunity 27

  Auyang, Evan 51

  Avignon 106

  Axel, Richard 156

  bacteria 10, 56

  bagpipes 207–8

  Baltimore, David 149

  Bangalore, India 98–9, 100

  Bangalore Palace, India 102–3

  Barber, Ben 52

  Barlow, Dick 186, 187

  Bartolomeo Colleoni (cruiser) 21

  Bell, Mike 3

  Bergamo, Italy 18–20, 21–2

  BergamoScienza 16, 21, 22

  Berlin, Germany 160–6

  Bernhard, Silke 161

  Bin Laden, Osama 153

  BioVision 106, 110, 111