To the Ends of the Earth - Mark Purdey

Thanks to a welcome donation of £500 from a Canadian reader of BD now, I was able to raise the money for the airfare to launch my long awaited investigation  into the origins of a mystery cluster of neuro-degenerative disease that had erupted in a remote Aboriginal outback of the Northern Australian territoriories.

I had arrived to stay with the Lalara family in Darwin - an Aboriginal family who used to live on Groote Eylandt - a one time enchanted tropical island in the Gulf of Carpentaria where bush ands and forests of stringy backed eucalypts, pandanus and cypress pine hosted  ideal nomadic hunter /gatherer grounds for  several Aboriginal clans.

When I first set eyes on Warren  Lalara, I instantly comprehended why he had left his former island home . His grotesque condition also confirmed my reasons for coming all this way.

 In trying to greet me, Warren was unable to rise from the tiled floor. I could sense that the once upon a time fit and healthy mineworker and father of two felt humiliated ; his legs were sprawled out , pathetically kicking like a frog on ice.  Every muscle and bone in his body were shrunk and wasted back to child size – half the size of his 17 year old  stout son standing right over him .

Warren had been outcast  by the medics, bracketed off as one of those suffering from Groote Eylandt syndrome, a supposedly incurable, progressive wasting disease that had officially only afflicted those of a single Aboriginal clan who were specifically residing in the village of Angurugu on Groote – some years after the missionaries had persuaded them to drop their nomadic way of life and settle down to a more ‘civilized’ western lifestyle.

A growing cliche of expert geneticists are rapidly laying claim to full ownership and academic rights over this new disease. They have coined the classy name ‘Machado-Josephs disease’, and run a host of sharp-suited symposiums set  in expensive Florida Hotels thousands of miles adrift from Angurugu – the hotbed of the real problem. And a  rainforest’s worth of  condescending letters have been written to the Aboriginal elders urging them to join up with the belief system that  the Aboriginal “drunken walking” problems are purely to blame on their “seed”. This alleged weak gene was supposedly introduced by visiting Macassan sailors who had occasionally interbred with Aboriginal women on the shores of Groote about 300 years ago.

 But this theory leaves many blatant questions unanswered surrounding the origins of the condition. Why has Groote Eylandt syndrome only recently emerged since the 1970s when the hypothetical interbreeding took place up to 300 years ago ? Why has the disease occasionally affected the Caucasian residents on Groote too – albeit only one or two to date? Why has the disease largely only affected one village region, yet failed to erupt in the myriad of other global populations where the Macassans have sailed and interbred ?

This evening  I wheeled Warren in his chair to the aeroplane bound for Groote. After much difficulties manhandling Warren up the steep steps to the plane, the hostess and I got him belted in. Warren  was going to take me back to his former island home of Angurugu and  introduce me to the surviving members of his clan – those still living right amidst the hotspot of this cluster zone of  mystery neuro-degenerative disease.

The aeroplane contained a strange incongruous mix of western mining tycoons, an Anglican priest and a pair of first time aboriginal mothers bringing their newborn babies home after a “hygienic” hospital birth .

As the plane began its descent to the island, Warren croaked at me – because he could no longer talk – frantically stubbing at the window with the butt of his clawed back hand as we passed over the  lights of  the mine’s crusher where he and his neighbours had worked since the early 1960s. A slight shiver numbed my enthusiasm for our imminent investigation, as I remembered Warren’s partner’s horror stories about the dramatic changes to Aboriginal life since western culture had imposed its stranglehold of controls – one such legacy involved an upsurge in extreme violence and deviant behavioural psychoses. 

This seems to have run in tandem with the emergence of Groote Eylandt syndrome. For instance when first light broke one morning last week, everyone awoke in the village to witness two mercy killings where young lads had macheted two people to pieces . And then when we got to the Mission’s day care house where Warren and I were staying, the missionary informed us that there were currently a record 30 people now suffering from Groote syndrome , so issues of lack of future space in their temporary hospital were of pressing importance .

I write this alone, as I prepare to go to sleep in the ‘dying house’. Outside in the mordant blackness of the night,  I sense the restless ghosts of a community at breaking point. I can hear a crocodile down by the creek, a gunshot from an Aboriginal ghetto across the track, and the fidgeting of the fruit bats in the pandanus trees. I think of Warren’s inescapable isolation. His helpless vacant stare, his ego and life force totally shot out of him.

I draw some comfort from an invite to go “yamming” in the rainforest tomorrow with Warren’s only surviving sister who has not got the disease.     

I awoke to the sound of the Missionary woman’s keys opening up the health centre for a new day. I stepped out of my room to find the planked veranda of the mission virtually carpeted in mattresses; some of which were already occupied by the frail skeletal figures of those in advanced stages of Groote syndrome. There was even a beautiful looking young baby in a dilapidated pushchair  who – according to the carer – was suffering from some ‘undefined’ neurological  disorder. She was apparently born with the condition. A girl, just nineteen,  skulked off with an ataxic wobble, shock tremors breaking out in waves along her limbs as I appeared. I also heard about the case of a pair of twins who had been born with it.

Despite the peace of the morning sunlight fluttering in the cycad leaves around the Mission, there was an atmosphere of panic. Their worst case victim, Ernie Lalara, had taken a turn for the worst and was shortly to be rushed to the aeroplane bound for Darwin for hospitalisation. His muscle spasms were becoming so permanent  that he could no longer keep his head forwards or draw breath. All night he had been crying out like a wild animal in acute agony.

My anger surged to the extent that I could hardly eat breakfast. These formerly healthy Aboriginal communities were suddenly blighted with a grotesque new disease which first emerged after they had been coerced by the early missionaries to abandon their ‘savage’ nomadic lifestyle and take up permanent residence in the village of Angurugu. Yet, the corporation controlled “experts” had made certain that this whole problem had been misappropriated onto genetics.  

But was was the real cause of this problem? For a short period, the missionaries had housed the Aboriginee community at the Emerald river mission site.  But the construction of a secret RAF refuelling base in that part of the rainforest during world war two had caused  the mission to move a few miles north to what was to become the present day Angurugu village . The missionaries had feared that the airmen would mess around with ‘their’ aboriginal girls.

It was interesting that Angurugu was constructed directly on the pure manganese oxide bedrock – a phenomena that was unique to this area of the island. The mission set about clearing and cultivating a fifty acre field in order to make the village self sufficient in vegetables. So the new Aboriginal residents found themselves permanently dependent upon a food  and water supply that demonstrated some of the highest levels of the metal manganese in the world. After the mining company set up next to Angurugu in 1962  - where the Aborigines were recruited to work - the surrounding atmospheres of  the village commonly clouded up in a fine black manganese oxide dust. With the trees felled, the dust storms frequently blew up to storm force, coating up the  inside of their open houses with black dust.

 It was obvious to me that those people who were sprawled out on the mattresses in front of me at the Mission were all suffering from some form of manganese intoxication. They closely resembled the patient photos in a raft of neurological publications which I was carrying in my files. Their symptoms were identical. So I slapped these papers down on the mission table,  showing the Aboriginal nursing staff  the photos of the sick manganese mine workers from India , Chile, Morocco, Guam. Having been convinced by the experts that this disease was due to their “seed”, they were amazed to see the words of manganese intoxication enshrined beneath these photos – photos which displayed the exact same mystery condition of the patients they were nursing .

I was also further concerned that these Aborigine victims were suffering from a form of prion disease – better known as CJD. The victims so closely resembled the cases of variant CJD that have blighted young teenagers in the Uk – their stick-like, shrunken bodies, claw-like hands and howling animal cries all combined to give me a grotesque reminder of the vCJD condition. In this respect , it is perhaps no surprise to learn that the Groote Eylandt manganese mines – who supply 25% of the total global manganese demand –  supplied a highly concentrated manganese oxide to the livestock feed market in the UK from the early 1980s onwards – immediately prior to the emergence of BSE in the UK

 Considering my published findings of  high manganese in the ecosystems of all clusters of prion disease analysed to date, plus the fact that Cambridge University trials have produced the abnormal spongiform prion after addition of manganese to nerve cell cultures, then one is  forced to consider the possibility that the use of this high concentration manganese compound in calf milk substitute/mineral licks in UK cattle (and later Europe wide) was responsible for BSE.

I also had caught sight of  the report of some slide sections of the brain taken at the post mortem of Warren’s brother – who had also died of Groote syndrome. Two of the slides had demonstrated the presence of fibriliary features – fibrils being unique to the brain pathology of all those who have died of spongiform disease. I want to acquire these slides to determine if these fibrils are composed of prions.

I met with the Aboriginal elder and Warren Lalara’s  surviving sister at the table outside, and I began the task of running through my questionnaires for each case of Groote syndrome. A common pattern soon emerged from my interviews. The victims had all originated from Angurugu and therefore had endured maximum exposure to manganese . Most had also worked in the mines. From my studies of previous mineral analyses projects carried out on the soils, foods and water in this village, I had also gleened that another consistent abnormal feature of the mineral profile in this region involved very low magnesium and calcium levels. I was therefore interested in the Aboriginal fetish for excessively high levels of salt in the diet. They literally pour it across every meal, depleting their serum magnesium levels even further.

It is well known that manganese will often compete for crucial enzyme activation sites with magnesium. So if magnesium is in short supply, manganese can substitute for magnesium at the active site but fail to catalyse the enzyme activation that is required for healthy metabolism. Such is the case for glutamine synthetase, a crucial enzyme activity that causes the breakdown of glutamate into glutamine in the brain. If the enzyme fails due to high manganese/low magnesium in the tissues, then highly neuro-toxic levels of glutamate will accumulate in the brain leading to a progressive neuro-degeneration – a pathogenic acceleration of the aging process  which lies at the heart of so many neuro-degenerative conditions such as Motor Neurone disease, Alzheimers disease and Parkinsons disease, CJD. – where individual genetic susceptibility factors dictate the class of disease which you get at the end of the day.

Interestingly, the exact same High Mn / low Mg  mineral profile characterised the three main cluster ecosystems in the South Pacific- Guam, West New Quinea and the Kii peninsular in Japan – where self sufficient populations had been going down with all of these neuro-degenerative diseases at a 50 fold higher incidence rate than average global rates. And now it seems that Groote Eylandt can be added to the list of cluster regions.

It is also well recognised that High levels of  Mn combined with  low levels of Mg will lead to mutations of genetic material in cells –  where the Mn substitution has caused an expansion of the DNA amino acid chain due to its inactivation of  Mg deprived ribosomal enzymes. This is probably what has happened in the victims at Groote, where a manganese induced mutation has been misappropriated by the “experts” as an inherited mutation that is specific to this Aboriginal clan. This explains the increasing number of young children and babies which are being born with this disease.

That night I wheeled Warren Lalara back to his room, manouvering him into his bed for the night. When I went to bed myself a few hours later, the nightly rioting of youngsters in the village had just begun. At one time, I could hear the Aboriginal kids surrounding the hut house I was in, even clambering beneath the raised floor. This went on all night – a common occurrence I was told – with violent fighting breaking out on several occasions.

 The Missionaries had told me stories about hatchets being driven into the brains of  “pay back victims”,  spear fights, child torture and women being stripped naked and gutted alive with machettes. The village doctor has confirmed these stories to me. I have also been told that this kind of  insane behaviour was unique to Angurugu. This was unheard of during former nomadic days.

As I lay awake, I remembered the mineral analysis study that was carried out on the brains of those impulsive mass murderers who had been electrocuted to death on death row. Their brains showed a hundred fold higher level of manganese than the levels found in the brains of those who had died of natural causes.  

The screaming and abuse went on until four in the morning. At one time I was convinced that a young girl was being  murdered. Each time I attempted to get to sleep, images of Bosch paintings burst out of  my subconscious. This was truly a hell on earth.  I felt compelled to intervene, but instinct told me to keep out of it; I am a father to eight children back in the UK.

The next morning the veranda was packing up tight  with the usual bustle of ataxic victims, care workers or simply aboriginal kiddies homing in to the centre for a focal place to gather at that time of day.

A monster of a pick up truck pulled up in front of the Mission, and out stepped Dennis,  a goliath-like, “Apocalypse-now” type  of  character who introduced himself as head of the local mineworker’s Union. He was the sort of guy you’d  expect to see bouncing at an LA night club rather than cruising around in this sort of outback terrain. But Dennis, had come to take me on a tour of the mines and surrounding area  so I could get a broader range of soil and vegetation samples, etc, in areas other than just Angurugu. His interests lay with the fact that some of his white mining colleagues had also died of similar wasting type neuro-degenerative diseases, or were just beginning to show the first symptoms of what they had considered to be manganese intoxication.

Dennis himself was off work due to problems with gout and cardiac arrhythmias. Gout is caused by a build up of urates in the system which commonly results from a breakdown in the enzymic regulation of  the urea cycle and nitrogen metabolism. Interestingly, chronic manganese intoxication interferes with the enzyme arginase which plays a crucial role in this cycle, but since arginase is an enzyme that is normally activated by the manganese 2+ form, problems can still occur when a manganese intoxication  involves a transformation of manganese 2+ into its 3+ form – a valency of manganese which fails to activate arginase into its fully fledged operational state. This can occur when those who have been intoxicated by manganese are concurrently exposed to devices that emit low frequencies of radiation – such a  frequency  being absorbed by the manganese which consequently oxidizes the metal into its 3+ reactive form. Dennis not only lived adjoining a low frequency radio emitting facility, but he also sat next door to a low frequency radio phone system hooked up in his work cab.

Intriguingly, Rudolf Steiner had proposed that the ox is driven mad when its brain is overloaded with urates! The visionary had obviously focused into one of  the metabolic derangements that was later to become part of the causal pathway in the pathogenesis of mad cow disease. I would totally agree with Steiner’s insight that the build up of urates – one of several side effects resulting from manganese and oxidant intoxication – can induce a major facet of the pathogenesis of spongiform and other degenerative diseases.

Dennis was no time waster, and I quickly found myself whisked away in his pick up truck into the remote out-backs of the rainforest. After a detour inspecting some aboriginal handprint rock art cast across the face of sandstone outcrops in the middle of the forest, we came to the sight of the former Emerald river mission. The old RAF runway was barely visible – a mere straight track of crumbling concrete  that was becoming increasingly encroached by the stringy back tea-tree boughs. 

I pondered on some of the tense wartime dramas that must have occupied this space at one time, but it was too long gone now - the last ghosts of the dogfights fought with the Japanese over the New Quinea jungle were long suffocated beneath the dense barricades of cycad and prickly pandanus leaves retrieving their native terrain.

I stuck my sampling trowel into the former gardens of the Emerald mission – now a patch of rejuvenated forest. I was relieved  that this ground was not such tough ground as that which I had sampled  back at the Angurugu Mission gardens -  where I had experienced great difficulty getting the trowel to penetrate the sharp topsoil that was intensively concentrated in manganese pesolites (pebbles). I also noticed that these samples were much lighter than the soil which I had drawn at Angurugu, again indicating the lower concentration of manganese metal in the soil. The analyses of these samples would no doubt confirm my suspicion that the neurological problems first began once these Aboriginal clans had  moved  from the Emerald River Mission into permanent residence at the most intensive manganese hotspot region of Groote - Angurugu.

As we drove on to get to Mud Cod Bay – an area of seacoast that lay on the manganese bedrock platform – Dennis really started opening up about his interests in my whole investigation. He started talking about the strange psychiatric and neurological demise of some of his co workers in the mine. A guy called “Monkey”  had started to experience completely unprovoked rage and aggression, as well as insomnia, tremors, depression, fatigue, cramps and unmotivated crying fits – the text book symptoms of manganese intoxication. Monkey had been invited to meet me at a party in the mining town of Alyangula that night. He had some interesting analytical data collected from some sampling of his blood, where manganese was over the excessive limit and magnesium was in the low range. I later found a lot more white mine workers who had discovered the exact same mineral profile in their blood.

A huge lorry “train” of manganese passed us on the dirt road. Dennis broke off to tell me that there was “a 150 tons of manganese shit in there”. He then moved into the realms of another strange story about a worker at the mine called Walter – a German character who went around in Bavarian leather shorts [lederhosen?] all the time. 

Walter had suddenly started to fall asleep whilst drilling the hole for the explosives or  driving a 150 ton train. Other stories from Alyangula reported how he would fall asleep whilst peddling  his three wheeled push bike, where there were constant sightings of him climbing a hill only to start descending again backwards after he had fallen asleep!

 In fact it seems that Walter had developed other psychiatric traits of manganese intoxication, such as paranoid delusions, whilst he was working in the mine. He had apparently fortified his caravan dwelling house in Alyangula, putting up surveillance cameras too, etc,  because he felt convinced that everyone was about to launch an attack on him. In the event of such an assault, Walter had rigged  up an illegal high tech radio mast to guarantee a totally independent means of  contacting his relatives back in Germany. The radio was so high tech that he got into serious trouble one day after accidentally intercepting and screwing up air traffic control at Darwin international airport 500 miles away.

When the full force of neurological symptoms kicked in, Walter left the mines and was last heard of at his death bed in hospital down in Southern Australia somewhere. Dennis desperately tried to acquire his medical records from the local Groote health centre, but they had gone mysteriously missing.

Interestingly, most of these miners who had become neurologically crippled were also involved with the drilling and detonation of explosives, as well as the handling of manganese. Perhaps the well known association between the physical force of explosive shock waves and its traumatic impact on the blood brain barrier had disrupted the body’s best line of defence against excess manganese entering  the brain? Maybe this was a further facet of the causal jigsaw?

Furthermore, all of victims in the Aboriginal stronghold of Angurugu – whether they worked in the mine or not - had also been exposed to the full force of  explosive blasting. For the mine had been operating as close as half a kilometre from the village boundary. One noted ‘explosive’ occasion entailed an accidental over blast by the mine’s former explosive technician, George Baker. He had plugged too much nitro-glycerine in to a bore shaft in order to deal with an extra hard vein of  manganese. The resulting detonation blew Jesus Christ off the crucifix in the Angurugu Mission church! The few upmarket householders in the village who had glass windows had got fed up with replacing them.

We eventually reached Mud Cod Bay where I drew some samples from the manganese tainted mud. It was this stretch of coastline where the Angurugu Aboriginal folk had habitually visited to spear their crabs and turtles for food. The strong sunlight highlighted some attractive chunks of coral and shells that lay along the top end of the littoral line. As we drove off, Dennis introduced me to every detail of this unique ecology of rush grasses, orchids  and  rhodedendron which spanned the last stand of land that met the sea. We crossed a few crocodile tracks too, but unfortunately did not see any of the mean beasts hulking their way across the sand to reach the swamps along the forest edge.

Although slightly confused at first, It was clear to me now that Dennis was channelling the ‘Bouncer’ like macho energies which he projected into the positive perspectives of life. His ego was more preoccupied with exerting a genuine desire to preserve the natural environment than many of the most ardent environmentalists that you meet. He knew every bird in the rainforest, every fish in the sea, the location of every geological vein on the island. His deep rooted concern for the health of his co-workers was also admirable.

That evening I attended the miner’s party where anyone and everyone had been rustled up who had had any connections to neurological disease and manganese on the island. I met Kandy who was the first to e-mail me in the UK after my BBC film had been broadcast on ABC Four Corners in Australia one year ago. She had alerted me to this problem on Groote, specifically informing me of  the case of a girl called Maxine who had once worked in the lab at the mine where she was analysing the fine samples of black manganese oxide dust . She had died in her thirties of  a neurological disease which everyone, except the research scientists, had sworn was the same as the Aboriginal Groote syndrome.

That evening I had also got to hear about the abortive attempt of an ABC film news crew to arrive on the island. The Miner’s Union had contacted them about what they considered to be an abuse of safety issue at work, only to find that the Mining  Corporation had prevented the aircraft transporting the film crew from landing at the airport. The Corporation, which owned virtually every facility and service on the entire island, had debarred them from landing on ‘their’ airport – the only airport on the island. The Union hit the roof.

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 dobermans 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 Aborigines, 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 neuro-degenerative 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 night time violence and daytime peace in this village.

These eco-toxicological  problems are further inflamed by the sheer multi complexity 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 insensitive 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 over-ruled 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 re-aforestation 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 publicly 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 multi-factorial causal jigsaw, the conclusions of these studies have invariably mis-attributed the blame onto the 'half truths' of the whole story - eg; prerequisites such as genetic 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 Aborigines collect their giant mud crabs 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 sun-baked now and the truck gripped well.  Wisps 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 branch-work of dead  mangrove bushes that had clearly borne the full force of seasonal cyclonic rhythms; those abrasive sand and salt storms 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 pretty, 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 Aborigines 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 neuro-degenerative 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 neuro-degenerative 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 un-cleansed 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 bio-concentrators 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 .

That morning, Kandy came to pick me up from the Mission. Former health officer on the miners' union, she had been emailing me for ages since my BBC film about Manganese and mad cow was shown on ABC Four Corners. Kandy had lived on Groote with her husband for twenty years, having done the hippy  trail around the world back in the 1970s. Both of them had been employed in the mines, and she had become concerned since her own blood tests had shown high manganese and low magnesium.

Kandy  took me to meet a group of concerned woman in the local hall of the mining village at Alyangula, many of whom had young children and were connected to the mine in some way.

This seemed a good opportunity for promoting the importance of magnesium supplementation as a prevention against some forms of  manganese intoxication. Particularly important in any children who are concieved on this island. For when magnesium is low and manganese is high, manganese can substitute itself into vacant sites on magnesium activated enzymes, with disastrous repercussions causing total  inactivation of those enzymes as I have mentioned previously.

What needs to be of the greatest concern to pregnant women, is the fact that manganese can induce mutations in genetic material when high manganese / low magnesium circumstances cause an  inactivation of  the magnesium ribosomal enzymes - producing the genetic problem of Groote syndrome that is so widely seen in the Aboriginal community down the road at Angurugu. Whilst Aboriginals are no doubt more susceptible to this specific mutation for dietary and genetic reasons, the Caucasian miners could well start developing these and other types of mutations in their offspring. 

Amazingly, the potential of  high Manganese  to invoke mutations is ironically being exploited in pharmacology  to positive uses in the fight to  suppress the AIDS syndrome. Manganese can inactivate the magnesium activated enzyme, reverse transcriptase, once the manganese to magnesium ration gets too high in cells . This deprives the HIV virus of its ability to make multiple copies of itself ; thereby severely suppressing the development of the AIDS disease process.

Kandy then took  me up to the headquarters of the mine, where I had been scheduled for a tour and then a meeting with the big brother of the company !! One of the Union bosses then drove me around the different mine sites to view the techniques of open cast mining - felling the forest, blasting, stripping off the upper crust of laterites, mining the black manganese dioxide ore bed, backfilling, then replanting.

I must say that  I was highly impressed with the replanted rainforest after the mining operations had been  completed. Indigenous saplings had been utilized, managed and maintained by Aboriginal labour until it was certain that the trees had taken root. I honestly could not distinguish between original rainforest and replanted - save the height of the trees. It was overtly apparent that this mining corporation was not operating like some of the more dubious operations at work in S America and New Quinea.

In the worker's canteen I met one of the miners who was pleased to meet with me. He had been bereaved and left with two young children a few years earlier after his wife had died of a motor neurone type disease identical to that of the Aboriginal's Groote syndrome. Maxine had worked in the laboratory at the mine where I was guided to next. I met the chief chemist in the lab who showed me the black samples of manganese dioxide - referred to as the black magic metal back in Byzantine times -which they spent all day analysing .

Whilst it was reasonably apparent that the mining company had been doing a highly impressive job regarding the preservation of the environment and safeguarding some of the socio-economic interests of the Aboriginal community, I did however feel that there could have been an insidious problem with the issue of airborne manganese being kicked up by the dust factor. Although the mine had been attempting to dampen down the dust from time to time with water, there were storage heaps and tailings heaps of manganese very close to the village of Angurugu ( just a few hundred metres from some houses ) and storage heaps around the jetty very close to the mining village of Alyangula. All residents had been complaining of black dust settling inside their houses - even the houses that had air conditioning.

It did seem to me that the problems of this community were fundamentally based upon the high manganese bedrock so close to the surface - with all local water and home grown food supplies being contaminated. But the dust from the mining operation had considerably exacerbated the problem. It should be remembered that once manganese is inhaled - like aluminium and silver, etc - it does not need to travel to the lungs and cross into the blood,  etc; it can be absorbed directly into the brain via the nasal-olfactory tract.

I was then ushered into the manager's office who seemed more interested in tape recording every thing that I was up to for an hour whilst failing to divulge anything that they were up to - I could not even extract a map of the main manganese outcrops on Groote from them !! Nonetheless, he seemed a nice straight forward guy who was fresh to the job and genuinely interested in environmental issues surrounding metals when his company hat was off.

The manager was also keen to continually direct me onto the mining company funded work at the Menzies School of Medicine in Darwin which had concluded that Groote Syndrome was solely a disease linked to the genetics of a specific aboriginal clan which had interbred with the Macassan sailors who used to visit for trepang three hundred years ago.  So why did'nt the disease strike many years ago, and, furthermore,  amongst all of those other races around the world where the Macassans had interbred ?

But I kept on reminding myself of Gayangwa Lalara's  words of local wisdom on the first cases of Groote Syndrome. She categorically says that there was no Groote syndrome around  when she was a child. The first case struck her father which happened after they had settled full time at Angurugu and after the initial mining explorations had just began. The Aboriginal Elder of Angurugu confirmed this to me. In fact, the only people who have stated otherwise were the 'expert' authors of a spate of publications on studies at the Menzies school of  Medicine that had been funded by the mining corporation itself. They had alleged that the aboriginees had stated that Groote syndrome existed in the 18th century.  I know whose observations  I can trust !!

I returned back to Angurugu little the wiser. Much of the manganese dioxide was going from this mine for incorporation into products that were being manufactured all over the world - bricks, steel, aluminium / uranium alloys, dyes, batteries, paint pigments,  animal minerals and fertilisers - other industries whose workforces have been associated with a raft of high incidence clusters of  these same classes of neuro-degenerative disease.
 
In the afternoon , we went out yamming. This entails parties of woman working the woodlands to track down the particular species of vine that nourishes the edible yam .I felt honoured to be able to push Roseanne out to the woods in her wheelchair -  a skeletal  33 year old victim with a stunningly beautiful face. Like all Aboriginal people, she just accepts her fate. No self pity, just a buddist way of living with her condition.  I secretly wanted to steal her back to the UK and somehow get her right again ! I could feel her pain, a few faded traces of red nail varnish still smudged across her nails, as though she had just about given up her final hopes of getting married and  living some semblance of a normal Aboriginal lifestyle.  

The other women brought the crowbars, hatchets, and spades for digging and extracting the yams; whilst Gayangwa's 9 year old grandson was monkey-ing around through the mangroves with his machete, pairing back spearheads from the saplings and then giving a poor tree snake hell - the one I had just seen coiled up a tree..

It was like a spiritual ceremony working with these people. Gayangwa walking around the forest forever staring upwards, surveying the canopy of the forest in order to pinpoint any tell tale signs of  the edible yam. I began to wonder how she was not hypnotised by the bright sunlight strobe-scoping its way down the stringy backs to the forest floor. Where was that withered vine that bore the crisp, heart shaped leaves of the edible yam ? The breeze caught the leaves, their flipsides fluttering out a kind of mantra of the forest floor. Every so often Gayangwa had to break off her concentration to scold her grandson  who was tarzaning across our tracks on the vines .

After about half an hour, one of the girls called across in Aboriginal language. I soon got the gist that she had found one; a scorched up vine which trailed downwards, going earthbound beside the roots of  a mangrove trunk. After alternate digging with the crowbar and then scratching the soil out with our bare hands, we eventually uncovered the first sightings of the yam - laid out right across the backbone of the manganese bedrock.. As we dug around the rest of it, I got embarrassed when I realised that I had  ineptly dug the spade straight through the middle of it, its sap already exuding from the bruising! 

I was interested in yams, because all of the victims who I had interviewed had consumed them in high quantities. And  analytical tests already conducted had revealed manganese at excessive levels of 1000 ppm in the yam roots. The women were telling me that the yams made you itch all over if you ate them uncooked, which made me wonder what other toxic substances could be lurking in their tissues - some allergic photosensitising  agent perhaps? My  enthusiasm and  desire to investigate this further immediately reminded me of my total lack of funding resources and inability to take this whole research any further forwards - until I had some firm offer of funding. This was very frustrating.

As we left, I could see the poor helpless Roseanne waiting back at the trackside for us in her wheelchair - in desperate need for some line of hope. God, at her age, she deserves it, surely. My anger surged again , as I remembered the absurd , irrational and totally unscientific reasoning behind the British Ministry of Agriculture's rejection of my proposal for a three year grant funding project - which their minister had invited me to submit  in the public forum of a BBC film. This project could have advanced some major discoveries, developments into the causes and prevention of these diseases - for a minute percentage of the two million pound award that went to various conventionally acceptable professors for re-assessing  quess-timates of the future incidence dynamics of the vCJD epidemic - an epidemic which never really came !

One of the reviewers of my proposal  had misread the number of samples that I had proposed for each cluster location - by twenty fold less - and accused me of proposing too few samples per cluster location to be scientifically valid. If this were the case, you could just increase the number of samples to be taken, surely ? But despite my pointing this major error out to the Ministry, they  heralded this up as the key criticism, later promoting that reviewer to their expert panel for assessing  BSE research. Their appraisal got worse still; splitting hairs over the fact that I had used the term "slice" of soil when referring to the section of soil that is dug out with my sampling trowel ! One of  the reviewers actually asked what  the word "slice" meant, despite widespread use of this term in the 'gospel' of soil sampling guidelines decreed in the Natural Resources Management Ltd instruction book . NRM are the most reputable sampling lab in the UK !! Having been falsely accused of not  including soil pH, redox potential in my analyses,  the Ministry also disapproved of my intention to use small cardboard boxes for holding the soil samples - the very boxes supplied by the NRM !! 

Well, I suppose I should have learnt the lesson by now that the Ministries and their global corporations like to hide their mega manganese or organo phosphate interests behind farcical disputes over the suitability of cardboard  boxes  or the terminological confusion surrounding  soil slices.  But how do they have the heart to place these fastidious nit-pickings in front of this crippled young girl? Don't they have children themselves? As my anger eventually drained itself out in the afternoon heat, I stopped myself short of  getting into imaginary spear and machete attacks on the Ministry of Agriculture's offices in London! Was the manganese beginning to get to my very own serotonin receptors by now, I wondered?

The Final Instalment

I got up at 5am to be certain of getting all the baggage plus Warren, to the aeroplane in time. In the half light, I found Warren trying to crawl across the veranda of the Lalara's family home like an injured animal. He was trying to get to his wheelchair.

The final hour on the island had come. We were returning back to Darwin. Despite some indirect encounters with the extreme violence of this community, I was still feeling gutted at having to leave some of my newly made friends .

The airport terminal was just an open sided hut of a building - I was pleased to find out that security wasn't quite as tight as at Washington Dulles post Sept 11th!  Some of the Missionaries and the Aboriginal communities had already gathered to say goodbye. 

I was hoping that they were  not all building up too many false hopes in relation to possible outcomes stemming from my visit - cures, etc  After all, I had not as yet been able to secure access to post mortem brain material from any victim who had died of Groote syndrome. 

The ball was in the court of the Aboriginal community here, for it is imperative that they waiver some of their beliefs over the sanctity of the body after death in order to permit the release of some brain sections - tissues which urgently need to be analysed for levels/valencies of metals, antioxidant enzymes, ataxin 2 protein/prion protein status in order to advance this whole research programme.

If you can get evidence of cause, then you can devise controls, prevention and cures of this horrendous disease. But up until present day, all post mortem tissues have been under the reductionist control of the genetic-only brigade (funded by the mine corporation!) who are only really interested in viewing the brain material so they can confirm the diagnosis of the so called exotic  "Machado-Josephs disease" mutation, and no further; eg: for academic prestige.

Much as the dysfunction of the prion protein lies at the heart of the CJD disease and the dysfunction of the beta amyloid protein lies at the heart of Alzheimers disease, so the dysfunction of another metallo protein called ataxin 2 , lies at the  heart of Groote syndrome. In order to work out a possible means of restoring the metal balance in respect of the correct folding and functioning of ataxin 2, then it is imperative to gain access to post mortem brain material.

Despite this indirect monopoly of the mining corporation over all current research into Groote disease, zero progress has been made from the victims' perspective.  Groote syndrome is increasing at an unprecedented rate. After an initial consultation, the victims are just sent home to endure a protracted, humiliating slow death. They are told that there is no cure.  They have been abandoned full stop. If it was not for the Anglicare Mission in Angurugu, the Aboriginal community would be left with no one other than themselves to care for the victims' interests.

But I have managed to line up two of the best metal and prion analytical labs in the world who are more than happy to look at brain material from deceased victims, thereby  making it more possible to unravel the causal riddle of this mystery disease. Given that a victim of  Groote syndrome has just died, it is imperative that the Aboriginal community authorise release of this material in order to accelerate a resolution to their escalating health crises. The researchers concerned are perfectly willing to return all tissues after microscopic  surveillance/analyses has been carried out. 

After the farewells and the usual hilarious problems manhandling Warren up the steps into the plane, we took off from the island. I saw the goliath shaped  ore crusher at the mine, and the black oceans of manganese oxide scarred right back to the frontline of the rainforest - the dozers had been rapidly advancing to meet the recent increased orders for manganese dioxide from the western world. 

At the same time I thought of the rising incidence rate of neuro-degenerative diseases around manganese processing industries in the West, as well as the ever increasing rates of mad cow disease in European cattle who were being fed exceptionally high concentrations of this mineral at an early age. Did the fruits of this island sow the seeds of madness in our cats and cows, our deer and elk, our mink and goats, and more importantly, in our death row murderers or our innocent teenagers who contracted vCJD, etc ?

At Darwin I handed back Warren to his partner Jenny, and then took my return flight to the UK. At the x rays barriers, I cracked a few jokes about my metallic samples of manganese rich rock sending off the alarms. The officers were not too impressed with my humour, since manganese oxide is a component of some explosives!

When passing the customs barriers, I took the opportunity of getting the officers to confirm or refute several reports that had come my way nearly two years back. These reports had stemmed from UK farmers and vets visiting Australiasia up to six months prior to the official announcement of the UK outbreak of foot and mouth disease. All had claimed that they had been exclusively subjected to a thorough disinfection/cleansing treatment when visiting Australasia at that time. Some had questioned the reasons for the cleansing, and one farmer was told how UK livestock farming was sitting on a time-bomb which Australia wanted to avoid. But no more clues were given.

To my surprise,  the customs lady answered me openly, saying that they had known full well about the foot and mouth disease problem brewing in the UK well in advance of the official announcement. She could clearly remember the UK's briefing to them during the autumn of 2000. "The pommy government has always been really good over informing us about impending crises in good time. It is the Chinese lot who never bother!".

As I walked onto the plane I wondered why the British government had not told their own livestock farmers before anybody else! This would have enabled us all to work cooperatively to prevent the spread of the disease five months sooner than we actually did. and then I wondered whether this revelation from my Aussie customs informant betrayed the fact that the pommy government  had no real intention of halting the spread of the foot and mouth disease. Their negligent inaction confirms this suspicion! Furthermore, their deliberate failure to address the true cause of BSE  - since Cambridge University studies in 2000 showed that manganese can cause the prion protein to transform into its BSE causing form - is equally negligent.

But I suppose the deviant and delinquent behaviour of the UK government towards their own people's interests is all part and parcel of the global and European (agenda 2000,etc) totalitarian diktats to reduce livestock numbers at whatever cost - to make way for the increased consumption of multinational controlled GM soya sources of protein, I guess.

Mark Purdey - May 2002