The Incidental Tourist Read online

  As Rio came to an end, the travelling circus climbed into taxis and onto buses big and small and headed for the airport. Some were off for post-meeting tours, but most were too busy and glad to be heading back to their real lives. Passports were stamped, the few remaining reales were spent in the duty free or dropped in the donation box, then we boarded the Boeings and the Airbuses for the flights home. My journey was ten hours to Atlanta, then another hour to Memphis. It used to be that there were seventeen different roads to hell and they all went through Atlanta, but the airport is vastly improved since the 1996 summer Olympics.

  A colleague who took the direct Air France spent less time en route before she walked into her Paris apartment. A couple of years later, Air France flight 447, a familiar A330–200, departed Rio on 1 June 2009 to plunge without warning into the Atlantic. Nothing is without risk, but everyone made it home from our 2007 meeting.

  Arriving back at the small apartment we were then renting for our part-time life in Memphis, I bought some groceries, then settled down with the Sunday New York Times before spending a further ten working days with my lab colleagues at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Then it was off to Europe on the long way home to Australia, with stops to speak at conferences in Scotland, Oxford and Greece. My carbon footprint continues to be terrible.

  Some of us met up again in 2010 (Kobe) and 2013 (Milan), with 2016 in Melbourne being the first since 1977 (Sydney) in Australia. Big conferences fill hotels and help the tourist industry, so countries compete to host these events. The science culture is, and long has been, international. When confronted with the idea most scientists would, if pressed, identify as both national and global citizens. Those closest to us are often scattered across the planet and it’s great to see old friends, colleagues and indeed, any familiar survivor from earlier times.

  It’s also good to hear the newest synthesis and (increasingly of late) to see spectacular ‘peering into the body’ movies (made possible by new technologies like two-photon excitation microscopy) from people in related fields. Maybe we’ll discover, from a chance conversation or listening to an investigator pursuing a different approach, that an experiment we were contemplating is likely to be a waste of both time and scarce research dollars. There is also the chance that something we heard might spark an idea that leads to a vital new direction. Communication isn’t everything, but it sure helps a lot and saves both time and money when we know what’s going on.

  CHAPTER 5

  Aerial art deco

  EMBARKING FROM LONDON’S CHARING Cross station in 1872, Phileas Fogg, accompanied by valet Passepartout, clutched his red Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Steam Transit and General Guide, with its timetables showing the departure of steamers and railways. Meticulous timing, enriched by a measure of good fortune, would be essential if these heroes were to circle the globe in eighty days and win Fogg’s wager with fellow members of the Reform Club. Guided by Bradshaw, there was at least a chance they might (for instance) connect with the steamer from Suez to Bombay, then the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, and beyond.

  Most of us know the outcome from reading Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, or from seeing one of the movies, with the 1956 production starring David Niven being the more faithful to the book – Phileas builds and flies a plane in the 2004 version, which puts him way ahead of 1872! But think of the interiors Phileas knew, from his gas-lit house in Savile Row through the Italianate grandeur of the Reform Club to first-class waiting rooms, carriages and sea cabins. It brings to mind visions of imperial opulence, of heavy, dark-stained woodwork and over-stuffed, red buttoned-leather seating.

  Elements of this Victorian era remain with us, including the mainline railway stations that, with their high, arched iron and glass roofs to protect boarding passengers from soot, smoke, rain and snow, were the point of departure in this first era of mass adventure travel. But a contemporary Fogg would likely leave his ‘man’ behind as he set out from Paddington on the Heathrow express. Armed with a round-the-world ticket, his circumnavigation would take considerably less than eighty hours, not days. Passing the time before boarding he might (rather than pencilling notes in his Bradshaw) check his email in the British Airways Galleries Lounge, where the interior and furnishings are considerably plainer and more utilitarian than those in a first-class Victorian railway waiting room.

  That nineteenth century stylistic heaviness was already passing when the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight (1903) at Kitty Hawk Sands, North Carolina. In both private homes and public buildings, the ornate balustrades and dark mahogany of Victorian furniture were being replaced by the straight lines, more modest oak and built-in bookcases that we associate with the Edwardians and the Arts and Crafts movement. The Art Nouveau ornateness of William Morris wallpaper and elegant Tiffany light fittings provided a measure of decoration, but the overall effect on architecture and furniture was to emphasise simplicity and utility. First emerging in France, the next stylistic transformation was to an even lighter ‘architecture of the air’, though the full impact of Art Deco was delayed for a decade by the horror of the Great War.

  In Fogg’s England, the Edwardian era bowed out with the accession of George V, who saw during his reign (1910–36) both the accelerated evolution of the flying machine and the emergence of Art Deco silverware, including the 1935 Crown coin that bears his likeness. Airplane design advanced rapidly with the First World War, as military necessity ensured that construction dominated by wooden struts, exposed wires and fragile fabrics soon yielded to the greater use of metals, more aerodynamic designs and better protection for the pilot. The idea of individual combat high above the blood and mud of the trenches, the image of the fighting airplane flying free, burned itself into our consciousness. Many of those knights of the air burned too, as they were not given parachutes and, depending on the aircraft model, were seated right behind, or in front of, the highly flammable gas tank.

  Aerial dogfights gave way to peace, which saw the beginnings of international flight. With many stops en route, Air Force pilots Ross and Keith Smith, for example, flew a lumbering, war surplus Vickers Vimy bomber from London to Australia. Across the United States, the more adventurous paid a few dollars to take short joyrides in Curtis Jenny biplanes flown by former army pilots (barnstormers) who just couldn’t stay grounded. That same dynamic led to airmail services and the air delivery of newspapers. The first commercial passenger airlines were soon using planes specifically developed for human transport. That history is, along with pioneering aircraft from across the world, preserved in the National Air and Space Museum at Boeing Field, Seattle.

  With growing commercial pressures and the looming possibility (from 1933) of another war, the evolution of the airplane continued apace. Streamlining facilitated by metal casting became more prominent with the competitive air races that seized the post-First World War imagination. The sleek, revolutionary Supermarine S6B seaplane racer of 1931 was the prototype for the all-aluminium Supermarine Spitfire that played such a prominent part in the Battle of Britain. Streamlined elegance impacted automobile design – cars like the Ford and the Chrysler Airflow delighted the progressive imagination and horrified conservatives. Fashion decreed that even the massive, mainline steam locomotives should conceal their utilitarian, black, nineteenth century machinery of boilers, smokestacks and steam valves under a sleek, coloured metal cover. And this new elegance and economy of line spilled over into domestic and public architecture, where it was influenced by and, in turn, influenced the Art Deco movement.

  Trains and steam ships, the technological revolution of the Victorian era, are heavy and carry immense payloads. Planes are light – for early international flights, even the passengers had to step onto a scale and record their body mass. Ornate Victorian buildings are dominated by the heaviness of marble, hardwoods and iron. Art Deco features the gleam of metals (aluminium, stainless steel and chrome), straight lines and engineered curves. Stylised wing motifs are
common. A characteristic decorative signature is two or three parallel lines, perhaps with a central clock, that (coming straight at us) mimics the head-on view of the wings and metal engine cowling of a fighting Sopwith Camel biplane, or the Red Baron’s (Manfred von Richthofen) Fokker triplane. The combination of controlled curves and straight lines reminds us of an aerofoil, a tail plane, a cylindrical fuselage.

  As for any airplane, symmetry is a central feature. Architectural ornamentation uses geometric forms. The bright ornateness of Art Deco extends to moveable things – clothes, pottery and abstract paintings. We see these in galleries of modern art, together with the delicately suspended shapes of artist Alexander Calder’s mobiles, which move in the breeze to give a sense of spontaneity and lightness in air. Travel to Napier, New Zealand, which was rebuilt after the massive 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake, and you will see a town centre that is, in some senses, a living Art Deco museum.

  Most airline passengers in the 1930s were wealthy and, at least, aspired to the style and intellectual sophistication that went with high social status, a concept that has long been lost as only money speaks. As a consequence, the airline buildings of the era reflected the taste of a well-to-do avant-garde, of cultured individuals with a sufficient sense of adventure to take a risk and bypass the length of an extended sea or rail voyage. The expansion of passenger air travel saw the building of Art Deco air terminals across the world, along with (to house another marker of rapid social change) a plethora of Art Deco cinemas. Representatives of both survive today. In big cities, the remaining cinemas tend to show art (or other ‘specialist’) movies, while the intact Art Deco air terminals are mostly in regional towns serviced by commuter flights to airline hubs.

  Dating from 1930, a major exception to that small and local rule is the magnificent Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia, New York’s inner-city airport. Why marine? Reflecting the relative lack of land runways and the availability of secure harbours with well-established hotels, the most effective, ocean-spanning passenger planes of that pre-Second World War era were big, piston-engined flying boats built by the US Martin, Sikorsky and Boeing companies, Shorts of Belfast and Dornier in Germany. A few Dornier remains can be seen in the museum and harbour at Broome, Western Australia, where, loaded with men, women and children escaping the Japanese invasion of what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the flying boats were machine-gunned on the water by carrier-borne fighters as they waited to refuel and fly on to Perth. The Dutch were unlucky. Also landing at Broome in 1942, but with no loss of life, the Australian Qantas Empire flying boats saved many in the days before the ‘impregnable’ fortress of Singapore fell.

  Operated by airlines like PanAm, Imperial Airways (later BOAC, then British Airways), KLM, Lufthansa and Qantas, these were first class-only flights that offered top hotel-standard service and on-board beds, long before the lie-flat options we encounter in business class today. With many stopovers, the pre-1939 flying boat service from Sydney to London took nine days. Recently, we visited Karumba at the mouth of the Norman River, where the sprawling, white-painted residence that accommodated passengers overnight is still standing. Photographs of the flying boat interiors show high ceilings, straight lines of metal and groups of passengers seated at tables, perhaps to dine, or to play cards. Now people play solitary games on their iPads. This was a different, and largely disappeared, world.

  That era ended with the onset of the Second World War, when the flying boats were pressed into military service. Qantas continued to fly five smaller, long-distance PBY Catalinas on the secret ‘double sunrise’ service from Perth to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Painted Air Force blue, one such plane is preserved at the Qantas Founder’s Museum in Longreach. So much fuel was required for this 28-hour, 5500-kilometre journey that only three passengers could be carried, along with 69 kilograms of diplomatic and armed forces mail. In all, they made 271 flights across enemy-held territory with no loss of life. Australian and US Air Force Catalinas moved large numbers of personnel around the Pacific theatre, and flew long-distance patrols and bombing runs.

  While the Catalinas played a prominent part in the war against Japan, the combat version of the Short Empire flying boat, the Sunderland, did sterling work in anti-submarine warfare and air sea rescue in the North Atlantic, though such lumbering monsters were easy prey for long-distance fighters and the like. The losses included nineteen aircraft and 161 crew from RAAF Squadron 10, a maritime patrol unit that, UK-based, sank six German U boats and saved many sailors and downed airmen from a watery grave. At the end of hostilities, a few Sunderlands were converted for commercial use, principally for flights to tourist islands, with several surviving in airplane museums.

  Taking the Delta shuttle from Chicago or Washington lets you fly into the aforementioned LaGuardia’s Art Deco-styled Marine Air Terminal. Though small and lacking the purchasing opportunities we’ve come to associate with modern airports, you can still buy a coffee and sit awhile to admire the simple elegance associated with those early days of commercial flight. Looking up to the domed roof you will see the massive mural painted in 1940 by James Brooks as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration initiative that, together with the expansion of manufacturing as the country went on a war footing, helped pull America out of the Depression. Perhaps reflecting the hatred that US conservatives still feel for FDR, and maybe because it shows people working together, the mural was identified as ‘communist’ and painted over during the toxic nuttiness of the McCarthy era, when Senator Joseph McCarthy led the anti-communist scare campaign in the early 1950s. Restored by 1980, the mural is an important piece of the nation’s history.

  The other busy US east coast airport where you can experience at least a segment of an historic partly Art Deco air terminal is at Washington National. I first disembarked from a plane there in 1974 and still find it hard to tell a cab driver I want to go to Reagan National. Completed in 1941, it’s worth taking the time to walk through the decorative historic hall (Terminal A) that links the much more recent, and highly functional, terminals B and C. Both street side and plane side, the external appearance of Terminal A has been restored. No air-bridges here! The mind spins free, and it’s of idle interest to speculate about the power players, top-coated with hats and gloves in winter, who disembarked there en route to playing some key part in the history of the twentieth (American) century.

  I’d almost forgotten about the Art Deco main building at Brisbane’s Archerfield Airport. Standing high on the back steps of my grandparents’ house I could, as a child, see planes landing and taking off at the airport. My most vivid memories are of Tiger Moth biplanes and P51 Mustangs, the Air Force trainers and frontline fighters of their day. Australian pilots at first flew Mustangs in the Korean War (1950–53), though they would soon transfer to jet-powered, subsonic Vampires and Sabres. Long out of use as a major commercial or military field (I recall seeing lines of out-of-service Second World War bombers at Archerfield at the end of the war in the Pacific), it is now a home base for light aircraft and private pilots.

  I need to go back and look again next time I’m in the neighbourhood. The Archerfield website tells me: ‘The fully preserved Art Deco passenger terminal designed in the ’30s and built in 1941 still stands, with its oak-panelled entry and ticket desk and carpeted observation lounge much the same as it would have looked when hatted and gloved passengers passed through in flying’s glamour days.’ Also preserved as a museum but no longer in service, the original (1940) Art Deco terminal at Houston Hobby, Texas, looks to be wonderfully intact. It’s on the list as a place I want to see.

  In some senses, though, those early beginnings of passenger flight seem as remote as the era of Phileas Fogg and his Bradshaw. If we stumble across one or other early temples of mass travel in the course of some tourist or business transit, we’re much more likely to find ourselves in a classic Victorian hauptbahnhof (central train station) than in an Art Deco air terminal. And, if we should manage to
organise a flight from one of the active survivors, it might cause us to reflect for a moment that the inevitable body scan and security check would have been totally alien to those waiting to board a pre-Second World War airliner. We gain some things and lose others.

  CHAPTER 6

  Retracing the knights

  BOARDING ANY FLIGHT BACK in 2004, before Kindles and iPads became the lightweight choice for most bookish travellers, a safe prediction was that you’d spot at least one person reading a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown may not be a paragon of historical scholarship or the world’s greatest literary stylist, but he knows how to tell a ripping yarn! How could an imaginative narrator go wrong with a tome of 188,000 words that interweaves the Holy Grail, conspiracies, murderous monks, the Catholic Church, Freemasonry, a sinister Grand Master and an ancient Order of Knights?

  Over the years, we’d inadvertently visited all the main sites that feature in The Da Vinci Code, even Scotland’s mediaeval Rosslyn Chapel, where the denouement takes place. Lingering in the cool peace of such ancient churches introduced us to local barons, carved in stone with hands crossed over sword and armour, their loyal ladies arrayed modestly alongside. Then there’s been the occasional chat with some extant knight of the British realm. But, so far as we know, we’ve never encountered a living member of the Order of Solomon’s Temple or, more succinctly, the Knights Templar that feature in The Da Vinci Code. Not surprising. The Templars were brutally disbanded as a consequence of fourteenth century power plays within the Church of Rome. Or is that dissolution a maybe? Playing with the possibility of their concealed, malevolent continuance has made Dan Brown a very wealthy guy.