I did not sleep again during the night. The heavenly sunset of last evening had transformed into a hellfire night The mob violence escalated once again, as the night went on. A father had been charging around wielding a machete at anybody who got in his way. The problem had fired up from a feud with his son in law. More serious still, The police had also found an Aboriginal youngster unconscious and close to death this morning - he had been repeatedly cracked over the head with a shovel according to bystanders' reports. But unfortunately, the police find themselves unable to turn up until the next day , usually long after the incident has abated. Wise policy, given that there are only 12 of them stationed on this island to fend off a potential maximum of 900 aggressors on any one occasion ! When the police used to turn up it simply inflamed the situation - the officers just ended up being subjected to a totally uninhibited full frontal assault ; involving a diverse armoury of spears , machetes, gunfire and hatchets !
The miners had told me that if you intervene - much as I had felt compelled to do the other night - you get attacked yourself; not only by the aggressors but by those you are trying to protect. The well travelled Missionary's son, Craig, and his wife Linda, courageously live in a house in the middle of Angurugu . I find it unbelievable that they can carry on living here, incarcerating themselves behind a dense fortification of six tier barbed wire interwoven through chain link ; the perimeter being manned by skulking dobermanns 24 hours a day . Craig told me that Aboriginal communities are reputedly mildly aggressive, but that Angurugu is exclusively excessively aggressive. It demonstrates by far the most violent community in the whole of Australia; per violent incident per head of population. And furthermore, the type of violence here could be classed as a form of psychopathic insanity, particularly when it is exacerbated by alcoholic consumption. "Its explosive" said Craig, only just twenty but built like a tank. "Your country got into all that namby-pamby, politically-correct judgemental criticism over the Duke of Edinburgh associating spears with Aboriginees, etc, but he was bloody right. I get a spear tossed at me once a week. You Pommies haven't got a clue. Its frontier stuff out here, buddy " I feel that the unique exposure of this village population to an environment that probably carries the highest levels of manganese in the world ( 500,000 ppm in the manganese bedrock top soils) has a major part to play in the psychotic behaviour patterns of this community. Post mortems of the brains of miners who have died of chronic manganese induced neurodegenerative disorders have revealed widespread loss of serotonin receptors. Lack of serotonin has been well connected to the cause of bouts of impulsive,criminally insane, aggressive behaviour - an archetypal symptom of the manganese madness syndrome seen in miners the world over. Alcoholic consumption is also well known to trigger off unprovoked aggression / rage in those who are genetically predisposed to low serotonin turnover, thereby illustrating the devastating synergistic scenario once chronic manganese and alcoholic exposure are simultaneously unleashed. Since serotonin levels are under circadian regulation via the pineal gland , the characteristic drop in serotonin levels during nightime in relation to day , probably explains the somewhat unique cycle of nightime violence and daytime peace in this village. These eco-toxicological problems are further inflamed by the sheer multicomplexity of the subjective, political and vested interest pressures operating in the heartbeat of this community. They are so sensitively interwoven, that the overall position adopted - or lack of position -is highly insensitve to the health and well being of its people. Any resolutions to the problems have been stalemated by these conflicting interests, enabling the psycho-neuro problems of Angurugu to escalate to virtual crisis proportions. The village could suicide itself in the end. The stalwart presence of the Anglicare mission is the only oasis of hope and light. But a more objective third party needs to step in, to take the reins from the subtle autocracy of the mining corporation that has insidiously taken over from the vacuum of endemic Aboriginal anarchy that has long overuled this island. Whilst many of the Corporation's efforts to integrate with the Aboriginal community are highly admirable and unique as far as mining company trackrecords go - such as their immediate reafforestation of mined land with indigenous saplings - they are not equipped or indeed suitably skilled to deal with the escalating problems. Furthermore, would the Corporation ever be prepared to accept the responsibility for the health effects, which, at the very least, may well have been exacerbated by their very own mining activities - eg manganese dust storms across Angurugu during the cyclone season; when the winds whip up the storage heaps of manganese and tailings waste ? Or the impact of shock waves from the blasting of explosives on the blood brain barrier of Angurugu residents ? But there is an increasing reluctance amidst the Aboriginal community - as well as the miners - to publically admit to the escalating levels of psychotic violence in this community. Furthermore there is an outright denial of any association between the violence and the hefty levels of manganese that have been repeatedly recorded in the soil and atmospheres. The denial also extends to any association between Groote syndrome and manganese exposure - apart from the poor victims themselves, who seem intuitively connected to the true cause of their disease. The problem lies with the fact that the one and only economic pillar of this village is cemented together by the massive royalties that the Aboriginal community reap from the mining corporation for the mining of their land. In this respect, it has becoming increasingly convenient for both the mining communities and the Aboriginal authorities to sadly scapegoat the blame of the uncomfortable psycho-neuro problems of their community onto the vagaries of some genetic-cum-alcoholic abuse causal theory. Some Aboriginees put it down to Karmic curses on the particular families affected - sadly ironic, given that the particular line of Lalaras embroiled in this disease are perhaps the most respected within the clan. All studies funded by the Mining corporation into the health problems of Angurugu have also adopted a judicious selection of the various factors at work in the aetiological interplay. Instead of assessing the overall multifactorial causal jigsaw, the conclusions of these studies have invariably misattributed the blame onto the 'half truths' of the whole story - eg; prerequisites such as genetical susceptibility and alcoholic abuse have been greatly overstated; ideal scapegoats considering the commercial interests of the mining corporation Dennis's pick up truck pulled up in front of the Mission. Many of the Groote syndrome victims, who were already parked outside in their wheel chairs on the veranda of the Mission, recognised him from their days of employment at the mine. You could see some of the early stage victims still manage to pull a smile as Dennis walked onto the platform. He was going to take me for another sampling spree out to the local salt marsh lagoons ; vast expanses of shallows that indent inland from the coastline, penetrating at times into the depths of the rainforest. Still on the manganese bedrock, It was here that the Angurugu Aboriginees collect their giant mudcrabs and mussels. We followed what seemed to be a tank track through the forest - a well rutted legacy resulting from too many trucks traversing during the rainy season. But it was well sunbaked now and the truck gripped well. Whisps of stringy back and vines caught across the windscreen, and I saw the brilliant green flashes of parrots in fright - the flamboyant meteorites of the forest. When the salt marsh opened out, It was a curious ecology. The salt cake crust left by some rather exceptional high tides had presumably killed the last stand of bush vegetation along the frontline of the forest. This had left a rather impressive array of sculptured skeletal structures - the branchwork of dead mangrove bushes that had clearly bore the full force of seasonal cyclonic rhythmns; those abrasive sand and saltstorms over the years. As we dug the samples, Dennis chatted on about the mining corporation misappropriating this whole health problem on genetics, in that it was largely only the Lalara family who were experiencing the neurological problems. But Dennis pointed out how his maps depicting the original territories of the different Aboriginal clans clearly indicated how it was the territory of the Lalara clan which precisely encompassed the manganese enriched Eastern area of Groote Eylandt. So even during nomadic times. the Lalara clan would have been hunter - gathering food that was grown off the high manganese soils and sea bed. Even the crabs and turtles that were intensively consumed lived directly within the holes and crevices of the manganese laterite platform along the seashore . I was dropped back at the Mission with my samples, to hear the sad news that Ernie lalara had just died of Groote syndrome in Darwin Hospital. The place was being rapidly evacuated because Aboriginal people do not believe in occupying the final home of a person who has just died. They have to smoke out the spirit before they can return. This is conducted as a ceremony where the deceased's home is surrounded by a ring of dead vegetation, and then set alight to smoulder. I had to rush to get Warren Lalara, and wheel him off the Mission premises fast. I had to get him to his surviving sisters house so he could join in the mourning. Warren looked mortified. His eyes were lifeless in glazed, vacant stare. I did not know how to console the poor guy over the death of his uncle. I felt sure that Warren was also reflecting on how he would be next to go; victim to this slowly encroaching grotesque condition. I left him at the front gate of his sister Gayangwa's house. She had come out to take him on the last stretch to the front door. During the mourning session , it can get extreme. The women can smash themselves with stones, often drawing blood . Back at the Mission building there was a strange silence - no longer the patter of kiddies feet across the floor boards of the veranda. No longer the bouts of screams and cries wafting over from the village. I spent the rest of the day in the forest picking / digging samples of the indigenous fruit such as yam, pandanus and cycad which the Angurugu people had been consuming for years. Cycads are rather prity, symmetrical, squat palm-like trees - often known as false palms. Their fruit was just forming in a neat circle, the brown spherical nuts attached directly onto the crown of the stunted trunk of the tree - nestling like eggs. The fronds of the trees were silvering themselves in the late afternoon sun. Intriguingly, these cycads were virtually growing out of soil crevices cut down amidst the pure manganese bedrock . My survey of the victims had shown that every person who had contracted this disease had eaten cycad at some stage of their lives. After cleansing the nuts of a natural poison by caging them into a fast flowing stream , the Aboriginees then ground the nuts down to flour for making a kind of dough bread. But , interestingly, at one time the unusual custom of cycad consumption had also been implicated as part of the cause of the Guam, Kii peninsular, West New Quinea clusters of neurodegenerative diseases. The native people had also ate cycad in those regions too. The finger was initially pointed at a naturally occurring excitatory amino acid in cycads as the causal agent. But after exhaustive tests, this theory was dropped ; although feeding of the cycads to misfortunate laboratory animals DID produce neurodegenerative disease. A secondary theory then developed which implicated the fact that the indigenous people of these regions had also been eating bats which had been feeding off the cycad fruit - in this way, the people were indirectly eating the toxic ingredient which the bats had obviously failed to filter out for themselves. Bats had obviously adapted their metabolism to handle the poison. Interestingly, the victims' relatives who I had questioned here on Groote had also indicated that the victims of groote syndrome had all consumed bats and wallabies which also consumed the uncleansed cycad. Considering that all of the Guam/kii cluster areas shared the same high manganese / aluminium, low magnesium / calcium with Groote Eylandt, I was beginning to wonder whether cycads are simply highly efficient bioconcentrators of these metals, and it was the metal constitution of this fruit that was the problem all along - a problem which the early researchers had overlooked . After labelling up my samples, I went to bed. A manganese moon hung over the rainforest; If only for a moment, I felt the multiple moons of a lifetime merge, the timeless eternity to which Ernie had returned .
