The Best Australian Essays 2015 (4 page)

Vrasidas spent seven years of the '90s visiting Mr Manoly Lascaris, Patrick White's long-time partner. They met several years after White's death. Vrasidas had recently arrived in Australia, was translating
Voss
, and wanted to find out all he could about White. Mr Manoly Lascaris – this is how he insisted on being called; everything else was an insult – was in his mid-eighties. His pre-White life was spent between Cairo, Alexandria and Athens but he had lived in Australia since 1949 and was known to the world exclusively as White's other, private half. To Vrasidas, it soon became obvious that Lascaris was an intellectual of the first order. In Greek – they spoke only Greek – Lascaris was formidable: his range was dazzling, as was his knowledge of history, literature (Chekhov was a favourite) and mythology, plus he had a phenomenal memory, electrifying insights into White's writing, and he could be wicked and admonishing. His exquisite puns in Greek drove Vrasidas wild. When Lascaris died Vrasidas wrote a book about their conversations,
Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris
, hoping to save Lascaris from being remembered as a shadow of White.

Well, here is a question: how is it that Mr Manoly Lascaris could not find any space to express his gifts? Another question. Did he feel compelled to hide the immensity of his intellect? ‘The dilemma of a diasporic intellectual,' Vrasidas tells me, ‘is that you are already on the outside but you need to be doubly on the outside to retain your integrity.' Lascaris' problem, in other words, was not that he got lost between Greek and Australian cultures but that in standing apart from both he was rendered invisible. (And then he was rendered invisible one more time by his relationship with White.) Every bit of this is unsettling. Far more comforting to imagine that the big-thinking women and men coming to Australia from other nations, who could have made a massive contribution to this country but did not, were essentially victims of bifurcation, all torn up and culture-shocked, struggling to adjust and never the same after their immigration ordeal. Boo hoo. It's much harder to contemplate that many of these women and men, whatever their misgivings, were dying to offer the insides of their heads to this country. And no one was interested.

Ouyang Yu says to me, ‘Look into the history of Archibald Prizes. Look at the Miles Franklin Award. Who are the winners? The first winner ever was Patrick White. The name is significant. White. Not Patrick Yellow. Not Patrick Black. It's a determining name.' It's not only Nobel Prize winners that Ouyang likes to have fun with. In an essay in
Peril
, an Asian–Australian arts and culture magazine, he has a go at the seldom-questioned emphasis on revising – all writing is rewriting! – in creative writing courses, calling it a ‘petty bourgeois obsession with perfection' and asking, ‘if you keep refining shit, would it become non-shit?'

I first came across Ouyang at an awards ceremony in 2011. His book was nominated for fiction and mine for non-fiction at the New South Wales Premier's Awards, and both our books were shortlisted in a separate category – ‘Community Relations' – which Ouyang, with his novel
The English Class
, won. The fiction prize went to Alex Miller, a close friend and supporter of Ouyang's, whose work Ouyang has translated into Chinese. I can't recall what Ouyang said when accepting his prize. I do remember wondering how was it possible that I knew nothing about this guy. People around me did not seem to know anything about him either.

Listen to this. His body of work is, so far, stupendous: he has published seventy-something books in English and Chinese. Fiction, non-fiction, literary translation (Greer, Malouf, Miller, Stead and Hughes) and literary criticism. He also edits Australia's only Chinese literary journal,
Otherland
. The guy is some kind of giant. Probably we should put him on bank notes, and, well, failing that, he should have a big job at one of the country's leading universities (he could, for starters, single-handedly take care of a department's publications targets).

You see where I'm going here, right? Twenty years ago Ouyang finished his PhD. In 2004, on turning fifty, he came to the conclusion that, as he puts it, ‘In this country it was not going to happen for me.' Back to China he went. There he was swiftly made a professor by one of the universities. He now lives between China and Australia. Every year he goes to China twice: for spring and autumn terms. Australia is a sort of holiday.

One night in 2011 he found himself at a dinner party in China with a number of Chinese writers. They wanted to know about the prize he had just won in New South Wales. He did his best to translate ‘Community Relations'. It wasn't easy. But he got there. ‘It doesn't sound,' they said, ‘like it is a prize for a work of literature.'

Ouyang doesn't care about prizes that much nor consider them anything like a true measure of a work's artistic quality or worth. A prize ‘is a sign of encouragement'. It is a message being sent out, never explicit. If the message is that non-white artists may be dutifully shortlisted for the big prizes but won't win then the message, essentially, is don't bother. Ouyang says there is a hidden contempt among this country's intellectuals for first-generation migrants commenting on Australia and Australians. What, goes the thinking, would they know? On precisely what basis are they speaking? Any critique will likely be seen as an attack. Ouyang has been called angry a lot (in China, too). ‘Well-intentioned criticism,' he says, ‘is surely a sign of goodwill. Without this kind of criticism nothing happens.'

An example: the matter of a nineteenth-century head tax on Chinese immigrants used by the governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States to deter Chinese people from entering. Canada and New Zealand apologised some years ago. Australia has not. Ouyang drafted a piece demanding an apology from the Australian government, sent it to the
Sydney Morning Herald
and other places. The idea was to publish it on a mainstream media platform, get the country debating this apology alongside other momentous recent apologies. No one wanted to touch it.

‘An Asian scholar or intellectual in this country,' Ouyang says, ‘is only able to talk about certain kinds of things.' Ethnic things: racism, human rights (maybe), refugee policy. ‘Why,' is what Ouyang Yu wants to know, ‘can't we talk about literature, language, love, society, history?'

*

Of course you and I (and Ouyang too, if he was that way inclined) can dig and strain and find examples of first-generation migrants who broke through. And you and I can paint, with words elegiac and rousing, portraits of these half-forgotten trailblazers. No, fuck it. The fact is that for the vast majority, if you come from another place but do not identify yourself with it, and if you aspire to not be a professional Greek, Somali or Chinese but to be an intellectual, the owner of a non-ethno-specific voice that can take on politics, love, art, mortality, good and evil, the state of science or of the universities and do so in a critical, questioning, public way, well, mate, you're dreaming. Migrant, for god's sake, know thy place. Your children can, and will, do it, just not you.

It's different for those who immigrate as children, teenagers – for the first generation that is not, quite, adult on arrival. They can absorb the new country's ways through their breathable frog skin, adjust without breaking their brains. At least theoretically. I was sixteen when we immigrated. And though for a long while I did feel like a mermaid coming ashore, every step a knife through muscle and bone, over time I've mutated enough for the pain to mellow. I have become a new kind of creature; most fully formed, mutation-resistant adults can't do that. They are already fundamentally who they are.

Omar Farah notes the Vice-President of the International Court of Justice is from Somalia. Born, bred, educated there; migrated to Europe fairly late. In Australia we do not have any of that. It's startling to Omar, the number of Africans taking up important positions in the institutions of Europe and America. ‘My question, always, is why are those who migrated to Europe and North America so sophisticated? Engineers, judges, architects, doctors …' Australia must be getting a really bad batch.

So to see Berhan Ahmed, an Eritrean-born agricultural scientist (who doesn't hide his PhD), run as an independent at a 2012 Victorian by-election, then build his own party – ‘Voice for the West' – in time for last year's state election, is an almighty shock. He came to Australia as a refugee via Sudan and Egypt in the late 1980s. He is thick-accented. You'd call him ‘an African community leader', right, only despite decades spent working with communities from Africa he is not interested in being called that. He is determined to be part of this country's political process, to contribute to Australia's social and political life. He tried Labor. Tried Greens (‘too busy moralising and scolding instead of working on the fundamentals') and being an independent. Now his own party is his passion. He is unperturbed by results: ‘Election is not about winning but about sharpening the mind.'

I listen to an ABC radio interview. Berhan is explaining how his new party is seeking to redress the woeful neglect of the western suburbs (fastest growing, highest unemployment, longest hospital queues, no infrastructure or good schools) of Melbourne. The journalist smells the familiar odour of a refugee banging on about not having enough resources for this or that. ‘So,' she says, ‘it's all about money.' Berhan is completely taken aback. ‘No,' he says. He tries to explain further: as someone who came here with nothing, he says, he believes in education, in opportunities, in creative ideas, in giving people ways of participating. The journalist pushes along, impatient, audibly uninterested. I cringe.

‘As an intellectual,' Berhan tells me, ‘you have got a moral responsibility to your profession. But sometimes you have to deal with a force of morality to be an intellectual far beyond your territory.' It's not a choice. You have to do it.

If I can, just for a moment, play amateur psychoanalyst to our fine nation: could I suggest that some of the problems herein aired might come from our need to see migrants as children? To accept them as adults is to accept them talking back. It is to accept them mirroring us back to ourselves. Migrants who cannot be babied – e.g. intellectuals – often elicit the harshest or the most bewildered response. Anyway, write me letters and tell me what you think.

I find a column in Brisbane's
Sunday Mail
circa 1954 – ‘Professor Murdoch Answers'. Professor Murdoch is Walter Murdoch, great uncle of Rupert, whose widely read and syndicated weekly column ran for nearly twenty years. That week Professor Murdoch was answering a letter from a migrant with a Swiss university degree who wanted to be employed in his profession, rather than as a lavatory cleaner, street sweeper or car painter, which had been the man's job trajectory in Australia up to that point. ‘What you should have been told,' writes Murdoch, ‘was that the chief opportunity proffered by this country to its migrants is an opportunity for patience.' And then, he continues, ‘You may reply that years is long enough to exhaust the patience of Job.'

Ouyang Yu tells me he is turning sixty in a month. In Chinese terms, he says, it is a cycle. After sixty years you are born anew. ‘I will declare that I haven't written a single book and will start again,' he says.

This breaks my heart. All of it.

My beloved first-generation friends from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bosnia, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, with brains as big as the world itself, struggling, forever struggling, to find a place for themselves, saying yes to the worst jobs at the smallest universities and colleges, retraining, giving up, making yourself tiny and inoffensive, sliding into obscurity, hopeful – hopeful still? – that one day, in this country, you could be at least 10 per cent of who you are. Don't you give up, please.

As to you, Dad, I know it's too late. You are a pensioner, that's how you describe yourself, not a scientist anymore. I don't believe it for a moment – a scientist is always a scientist – but I know you do. You have tried for long enough. I want to say I am devastated and ashamed that you couldn't find a place for yourself and your knowledge in this country you brought me to. But you will not appreciate me saying it: you love this country more than I do. If I say that your not being able to pass on your experience is a tragedy, you will not let me get away with that either. It'll feel too hyperbolic.

And, yes, compared to the great injustices of the world, it's not that big a deal, but it is a tragedy nonetheless, Dad. I am sure of it.

Right Now

How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines

Tim Flannery

In 1609 Galileo Galilei turned his gaze, magnified twentyfold by lenses of Dutch design, toward the heavens, touching off a revolution in human thought. A decade later those same lenses delivered the possibility of a second revolution, when Galileo discovered that by inverting their order he could magnify the very small. For the first time in human history, it lay in our power to see the building blocks of bodies, the causes of diseases and the mechanism of reproduction.

Yet according to Paul Falkowski's
Life's Engines
: ‘Galileo did not seem to have much interest in what he saw with his inverted telescope. He appears to have made little attempt to understand, let alone interpret, the smallest objects he could observe.' Bewitched by the moons of Saturn and their challenge to the heliocentric model of the universe, Galileo ignored the possibility that the magnified fleas he drew might have anything to do with the plague then ravaging Italy. And so for three centuries more, one of the cruellest of human afflictions would rage on, misunderstood and thus unpreventable, taking the lives of countless millions.

Perhaps it's fundamentally human both to be awed by the things we look up to and to pass over those we look down on. If so, it's a tendency that has repeatedly frustrated human progress. Half a century after Galileo looked into his ‘inverted telescope', the pioneers of microscopy Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke revealed that a Lilliputian universe existed all around and even inside us. But neither of them had students, and their researches ended in another false dawn for microscopy. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when German manufacturers began producing superior instruments, that the discovery of the very small began to alter science in fundamental ways.

Today, driven by ongoing technological innovations, the exploration of the ‘nanoverse', as the realm of the minuscule is often termed, continues to gather pace. One of the field's greatest pioneers is Paul Falkowski, a biological oceanographer who has spent much of his scientific career working at the intersection of physics, chemistry and biology. His book
Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable
focuses on one of the most astonishing discoveries of the twentieth century – that our cells are comprised of a series of highly sophisticated ‘little engines' or nanomachines that carry out life's vital functions. It is a work full of surprises, arguing for example that all of life's most important innovations were in existence by around 3.5 billion years ago – less than a billion years after Earth formed, and a period at which our planet was largely hostile to living things. How such mind-bending complexity could have evolved at such an early stage, and in such a hostile environment, has forced a fundamental reconsideration of the origins of life itself.

At a personal level, Falkowski's work is also challenging. We are used to thinking of ourselves as composed of billions of cells, but Falkowski points out that we also consist of trillions of electrochemical machines that somehow co-ordinate their intricate activities in ways that allow our bodies and minds to function with the required reliability and precision. As we contemplate the evolution and maintenance of this complexity, wonder grows to near incredulity.

*

One of the most ancient of Falkowski's biological machines is the ribosome, a combination of proteins and nucleic acids that causes protein synthesis. It is an entity so tiny that even with an electron microscope, it is hard to see it. As many as 400 million ribosomes could fit in a single period at the end of a sentence printed in the
New York Review
. Only with the advent of synchrotrons – machines that accelerate the movements of particles, and can be used to create very powerful X-rays – have its workings been revealed. Ribosomes use the instructions embedded in our genetic code to make complex proteins such as those found in our muscles and other organs. The manufacture of these proteins is not a straightforward process. The ribosomes have no direct contact with our DNA, so must act by reading messenger RNA, molecules that convey genetic information from the DNA. Ribosomes consist of two major complexes that work like a pair of gears: they move over the RNA and attach amino acids to the emerging protein.

All ribosomes – whether in the most humble bacteria or in human bodies – operate at the same rate, adding just ten to twenty amino acids per second to the growing protein string. And so are our bodies built up by tiny mechanistic operations, one protein at a time, until that stupendous entity we call a human being is complete. All living things possess ribosomes, so these complex micromachines must have existed in the common ancestor of all life. Perhaps their development marks the spark of life itself. But just when they first evolved, and how they came into being, remain two of the great mysteries of science.

All machines require a source of energy to operate, and the energy to run not only ribosomes but all cellular functions comes from the same source – a universal ‘energy currency' molecule known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). In animals and plants ATP is manufactured in special cellular structures known as mitochondria. The nanomachines that operate within the mitochondria are minute biological electrical motors that, in a striking parallel with their mechanical counterparts, possess rotors, stators and rotating catalytic heads.

The ATP nanomachine is the means by which life uses electrical gradients, or the difference in ion concentration and electrical potential from one point to another, to create energy. The nanomachine is located in a membrane that separates a region of the cell with a high density of protons (hydrogen ions) from an area with a lower density. Just as in a battery, the protons pass from the area of high density into the area of lower density. But in order to do so in the cell, they must pass through the ATP nanomachine, and their flow through the minute electric motor turns its rotor counter-clockwise. For every 360-degree turn the rotor makes, three molecules of ATP are created.

Living things use a great many primary energy sources to create ATP. The most primitive living entities are known as archaea. Though bacteria-like, they are a distinct group whose various members seem to have exploited almost every energy source available on the early Earth. Some, known as methanogens, cause carbon dioxide to react with hydrogen to create the electrochemical gradient required to make ATP, producing methane as a by-product. Others use ammonia, metal ions or hydrogen gas to create the electrochemical gradient. Bacteria also use a variety of energy sources, but at some point a group of bacteria started to use sunlight to power photosynthesis. This process yielded vastly more energy than other sources, giving its possessors a huge evolutionary advantage. Falkowski has spent most of his career unravelling the deep mystery of photosynthesis and how it changed the world.

He calls the photosynthetic process ‘almost magical'. His description gives a flavour of the magic involved: ‘When one, very specific chlorophyll molecule embedded in a reaction center absorbs the energy from a photon, the energy of the light particle can push an electron off the chlorophyll molecule. For about a billionth of a second, the chlorophyll molecule becomes positively charged.' The electron ‘hole' in the chlorophyll molecule is in turn filled by an electron from ‘a quartet of manganese [the chemical element] atoms held in a special arrangement on one side of a membrane'. The electron ‘hole' thus formed in the manganese quartet is filled with electrons from a water molecule. This causes the water molecule to fall apart, creating free oxygen.

Photosynthesis permits a local and temporary reversal of the second law of thermodynamics – the creation of order out of disorder. Magical indeed, but in early 2014 photosynthesis was revealed to be even more magical than Falkowski's book allows. Physicists based in the United Kingdom demonstrated that quantum mechanics plays a vital part in the photosynthetic process, by helping to transport the energy it captures efficiently, in a wavelike manner.
¹

*

If chemistry is not your cup of tea, Falkowski offers an alternative way of thinking about how photosynthesis works – as a microscopic sound and light show. The light is of course the photon that energises the performance, while the sound is provided by the chlorophyll molecule, which flexes with an audible ‘pop' when it loses its electron. The phenomenon was discovered by Alexander Graham Bell, who in 1880 used what he called the ‘photoacoustic effect' to make a device he named the photophone. Bell used the photophone to transmit a wireless voice telephone message 700 feet, and considered it to be his greatest invention. And perhaps it was, since it was the precursor of fibre optic communication.

The way that the sophisticated nanomachines Falkowski describes became incorporated into a single complex cell, such as those our bodies consist of, is so incredible that it reads like a fairytale. Using a system known as ‘quorum sensing', microbes can communicate, and they use this ability to switch on and off various functions within their own populations and within ecosystems composed of different microbe species. Quorum sensing can even operate when one microbe swallows another, as happened over a billion years ago when a larger cell began to communicate with a smaller one that it had ingested. Quorum sensing permitted the potential food item to live inside its host instead of being digested. Then it allowed genes to switch on and off in ways that benefited the new chimeric, or genetically mixed, entity. The two genomes co-existing in the chimera even managed to exchange some genes, further enabling it to operate as a competent whole. As a result of these changes, the organism that was swallowed was transformed into a mitochondria, and began supplying ATP to the first eukaryotic cell – that is, a cell containing a nucleus and other complicated structures.

As impossible as this process sounds, it was followed by an even more outlandish occurrence. Somehow the newly created binary organism swallowed yet another entity – a kind of bacteria that could photosynthesise. Again the ingested entity lived on inside the cell, using quorum sensing to somehow synchronise its ‘almost magical' nanomachinery with those of the binary organism. This newly constituted ‘trinity organism' became the photosynthetic ancestor of every plant on earth.

Microbes control the Earth, Falkowski tells us. They created it in its present form, and maintain it in its current state by creating a global electron marketplace that we call the biosphere. Falkowski argues that we can conceive of our world as a great, unitary electrical device, driven by the myriad tiny electric motors and the other electrochemical nanomachinery of cells. Viewing the world this way reveals hitherto unappreciated dangers in some modern science.

Some molecular biologists are doing research on ways of inserting genes into microorganisms in order to create new kinds of life that have never previously existed. Others are busy working out whether the cellular nanomachinery itself might be improved. Falkowski recommends that ‘rather than tinker with organisms that we can't reverse engineer, a much better use of our intellectual abilities and technological capabilities would be to better understand how the core nanomachines evolved and how these machines spread across the planet to become the engines of life.'

*

Just how far we are from obtaining an understanding of the evolution of the nanomachines is conveyed in Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink's latest book,
A New History of Life
. Both authors are iconoclasts, and their book is at times breathtakingly unorthodox. Yet their ideas are at the cutting edge of many debates about the evolution of life, making their book challenging and rewarding. The work of the paleontologist is like that of a restorer of ancient mosaics: the further we go back in time, the fewer tesserae, or mosaic components, we have. Those seeking to understand the origin of the nanomachines have to work with the equivalent of just half a dozen pieces from a picture comprising tens of thousands. Time and our restless Earth have destroyed the remainder. Despite this awesome handicap, Ward and Kirschvink are convinced that, owing to the new technologies, we are at last asking the right questions.

We have a reasonably concise date for the formation of Earth – 4560 million years ago, give or take 10 million years. The half a billion years that followed, known as the Hadean Eon, were momentous. A huge asteroid slammed into the planet, forming the moon and transforming Earth into a ball of molten rock. As Earth cooled, the progenitors of the modern core and crust were formed. Earth's oldest rocks – tiny, 4.4-billion-year-old zircon crystals from Western Australia – are the only physical evidence we have of this period. Chemical analysis reveals that they formed where ocean water was being sucked down into the mantle – the layer of the earth between the crust and the core. So we can surmise that Earth cooled quickly after the asteroid collision, and that at an early stage it had oceans.

Despite the presence of oceans, Earth was almost certainly hostile to life in the Hadean Eon. Asteroid impacts repeatedly shook the planet, boiling its oceans and changing the atmosphere. But by four billion years ago, things had begun to settle down. The 1.5-billion-year-long Archean Eon had begun, and it was over the first third of this period that the nanomachines either evolved or, as Ward and Kirschvink argue, colonised Earth from elsewhere.

As we ponder life's origins, Ward and Kirschvink warn against thinking in simplistic terms like life and death, instead encouraging us to consider the ‘newly discovered place in between'. Life's most distant origins lie in the nonliving precursor molecules for RNA, organic compounds known as amino acids. They have been found in meteorites, are presumed to be widespread in the universe, and their origins must greatly predate Earth's origins. The nanomachines possess attributes of life, and when brought together in a cell they clearly cross the threshold into the self-regulating, replicating entity that we recognise as a living thing.