Simple Prejudice. Or not.

Pete, a true HK urbanite, is moving out to live in Hong Kong's New Territories. It's a surprise, definitely, but what's most surprising is just how surprised everyone is, as though HKNT is so outside the scope of anyone's idea of possible places to live that it's almost as if it isn't possible for anyone we actually know to live there.

Do you know New Territories at all?  If we're not talking about the various islands - which we and this blog have been to many times - I certainly don't. That swathe of land beyond Kowloon all the way up to Mainland China is something I've only passed through on the train to Shenzhen. Keith's been several times, sure, taken by his Parents and Teachers Association, but that's the extent of our NT jaunts.

No, wait, I once went on HK Historian Jason Wordie's amazing World War II Tour, to see what happened where during HK's Japanese Invasion but that was before I started this blog and so I don't have a record of it ... although I may still have the photos.

Yes, found one:

 

The wonderful Jason Wordie

on his magnificent WWII tour

although here we haven't yet reached

the New Territories which we can see 

off in the distance.

Here we're overlooking the spot where the

invading Japanese crossed over

to Hong Kong Island and 

standing right where the Allies

tried to hold them off.

So that's it, the scope of my NT experiences, although Sai Kung is in NT so that isn't quite true because I've been - and taken this blog - to Sai Kung many times. And I find the jewelry stores in Ap Lui Street  up there in Sham Shui Po irresistible, and Dragon Lee Gardens, and the Tang Ancestral Village and and ... oh, so perhaps I've spent more time in NT than I actually realised.

But anyway, Pete announces he's moving to NT to live and everyone is immediately stunned, and then the jokes started:

"Don't forget you have to illegally dam your local creek." and "You need to start exercising your traditional right of access by blocking the local road off from anyone who doesn't share your Clan surname." "And don't forget that you can key (scratch with your car keys) any car which is parked in the village and owned by a non-villager."  "And later make sure you demand a parking "fee"."

And  "Start collecting a pack of feral dogs." and "Always remember to stick a toothpick in the side of your mouth." and "Build an illegal structure on your roof.", "Practise your banjo day and night.", "Hire out your back garden for crate storage, and don't ask any questions about what is in them!" and "Don't forget that you can legally set off fireworks during CNY.", " Yeah, and don't forget to have your feral dogs yelping and barking all day and night" "Especially after you set off those fireworks during CNY."

And "Get yourself the Hakka granny hat." "Yeah, don't forget the Hakka granny hat. You'll need it when you're pretending you don't see the convoy of dump trucks flytipping construction site debris over into your garden." "Yeah, that garden where you're growing "herbs".

And "Don't forget about demanding your hereditary village plot rights, which you will then sell on to the highest bidder at grossly inflated prices before moaning about the loss of your traditional way of life in the face of an onslaught of outsiders."   

Also  "More importantly, don't forget that the plot of land at the bottom of your garden can be rented out to those who want to build a columbarium so they can milk the poor folk who want to house their dead relative's ashes or a memorial plaque." and "Have you signed up for banjo lessons?" and "Can you ask the Heung Yee Kuk offer any loyalty programs say for Frequent Intimidation?"

And Pete's reply to all this, apart from "Time, gentleman, please." was "The first thing on my agenda is to build an illegal extra storey on top of my house, and then, to defend my traditional rights, I plan to lead an unruly mob through the streets of the town and set fire to the local government offices." which got the reply along the lines of "Unfortunately, those unruly mobs don't speak English so good luck with organising them."

Anyway, good luck to you Pete. You're a better man than I am.  And don't forget you'll have to write a book about your adventures up there in NT so we'll all know if  if our simple-minded prejudices about the place have the slightest validity.

The Witchdoctor Will See You Now!

Have you seen this new TV show?



It's only just started showing here in HK but already I'm loving it because I believe in this, I really do, and not just because our gardener during my childhood, Iferami, was the local Bete - Fijian for witchdoctor - and I knew him to be a really lovely old man with a real gift for understanding trees and plants.

It's more that I often think Western Medicine is so arrogant believing it has all the answers because you only have to scratch through that voodoo "Trust me, I'm a doctor" surface to realise it certainly doesn't, and, in all honesty, I think my mother was right and that most western medicines have the wrong Ph balance for the body and really - "like a bad motor mechanic" was the phrase she used - taking western drugs just sets you up for a new batch of problems down the line.  Mum may have been a nurse trained in western medical techniques but, from her experiences, ended up very anti-doctor, despite marrying one, and very anti-western-medicine too, and my father eventually came to agree with her.  My dad even started saying shortly before he died "After practicing medicine for 50 years, I came to the realisation that western medicine is all about science and not at all about healing, so, if you want to heal, you really don't need doctors."

My brother, also a doctor, agreed with mum and during the decades he worked around the Third World always made a point of paying courtesy calls to the local witchdoctor at his latest appointment, to get to know him/her and, if he considered him/her/them competent - and they always were - to find out how they could best work in conjunction with each other. And also, after they became friends, to discover what these witchdoctors knew and how they treated certain ailments, and frequently discovered that certain 'voodoo' therapies were vastly superior to the ones he himself learned in medical school. Good stuff like a sharp blow to the side of the head, in a certain spot, cures tintinitus. Western Medicine tries to cure it with antibiotics.  Say wot???

These days he also teaches some of these techniques at a medical school in Victoria and I got a huge laugh watching "House" recently when Taub mentioned a certain healing therapy that Big Brother himself brought out of the deep jungle in Borneo.

I think there's so much reason for respecting what we're taught to think of as "voodoo". I've already mentioned in here about visiting a local healer in Laos who, within seconds, treated me for a strange patch of numbness on my foot which had my regular doctor convinced I had MS ... however I refused to take the batch of expensive tests needed to confirm his diagnosis because I'm not a Viking and have, as far as I know, no Viking ancestry and knew that the gene for MS traveled on the Viking haplotype, and so this was definitely a crock.  And the diagnosis from my healer in Laos? That I should stop hooking one leg around the other when watching TV.

And I've also told you how I was so impressed with him that when I came down with that mystery ailment in Luang Prabang (most likely that new strain of dengue fever) I immediately went to see him and he gave me a healing massage and mixed me up a rather nasty herbal tisane and told me, in sign language, to go home to sleep, and I slept for 14 hours straight and woke up right as rain.

Truly he was a truly miraculous old man.

We really should be considering this 'voodoo' stuff, you know.  The Chinese are already taking it seriously. Natasha, a friend up in Guangzhou, is currently studying "What Asian Witchdoctors Know." at university in Southern China.  Apparently this is a HUGE subject up there. Natasha started out studying western medicine but gave up when she realised "it's all about selling drugs for the big drug companies." so turned to Chinese medicine but gave that up when she decided there wasn't enough science involved, but then she came across the subject of Asian Witchdoctor Medicine and enrolled and discovered it's all about discovering the chemistry of Witchdoctor tisanes and cures, and has been so enamored of the learning that she's stuck with it for the past few years.  Go Natasha!

And there's also Maryanne in Innisfail who makes up Australian Aboriginal Witchdoctor Cures and sends them off to a friend in C.S.I.R.O who is always amazed at the chemistry involved, with the batches always turning up amazing amounts of various whatevers normally associated with healing.

And we should never forget that the two first gentlemen who circumnavigated the world - Sir Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan - had two very different outcomes with their treatment of scurvy. Sir Francis consulted his local witch-healer and brought along vast quantities of her recommended treatment of lemon barley water, while Ferdinand trusted the then-current medical treatment which consisted entirely of blood-letting.  And, yes, Sir Francis lost exactly no one in his crew to this killer disease, while Ferdie lost over 1300 sailors.

So I'm there! I'm really THERE with witchdoctor medicine. I think we should all follow Big Brother's example and get to know what witchdoctors know.

And let me end this by telling you a very interesting little story. I was out at dinner during a big international Medical Conference in Fiji and we were all talking about Draunikau - Fijian witchdoctor medicine - and one of the British doctors said to Big Brother "Just how scientific is draunikau?" and Big Brother, who was in tight with the local Bete, said "It's about 60% science and 40% voodoo hooha!" and the British doctor laughed and said "That's about the same as western medicine."  and then the doctors all looked at each other and laughed uproariously and said "Actually, it's better than western medicine." and that when the night degenerated into a hilarious raucous discussion on just how much better.

Fiji's Own Dodo.

 I've come across something at the Fiji Museum website that has entirely blown my mind:

 Fiji's Own Dodo.

Fiji used to have it's own dodo. No, seriously. With yet another tie-in between Fiji and Madagascar - well, Mauritius is just off the coast of Madagascar - I got all excited because I saw this as additional proof that proto-Fijians once sailed from Mad. and decided that, in addition to bringing those twelve different species of Mad. iguanas, they'd also brought along pet dodos ... and so suggested this to Fiji Museum and am now embroiled in a very pleasant stosh with them which is particularly great because I'm finding out so much about Fiji I didn't know.

Like, I'm claiming that Fiji rose out of the sea 80,000 years ago which meant there wasn't enough time to develop distinctive and endemic species, and they're claiming that the volcanos rose up around a drifted-off chunk of Gondwana Land, and that central Viti Levu is turning out to be millions of years older than previously thought.  Wow, right?

And they say that rather than bringing them to Fiji, within 50 years of First Settlement all Fiji's endemic mega-fauna was extinct. Over-hunting, it would seem. 

Anyway, I'm now trying to find out more, and here's the best I can do so far:



By MICHAEL FIELD

Picking the bones of Fiji's lost giants

AUCKLAND (AFP-Jiji) Fiji was once a land of giant fauna including a 15-kg flightless, chicken-like bird, a meter-high flightless pigeon and enormous tortoises, recent scientific discoveries reveal.
Then the first people arrived — and ate them.
The discoveries, which also included a large crocodile-like land animal, by the Fiji Museum and the Australian National University Central Pacific Colonisation project are causing excitement among experts.
"In my view this is probably the most exciting fauna left to be uncovered in the world. Most of the remote bigger other islands have already been looked at," says project palaeontologist Trevor Worthy of New Zealand.
Scientific work shows that the first Fijians who arrived around 3,000 years ago probably wiped out the giants, which had no mammalian predators before that.
Food middens of the first Fijians are sparse, but Worthy says the bones of a giant megapod had been found in an archaeological site on an island off Suva. "That is unequivocal evidence that they interacted. They survived until people came along."
The islands had a benign climate, even at the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
"People did the whole lot," says Worthy. "While the connecting evidence is yet thin, I think it almost certain that all these species were made extinct by hunting by people 3,000-2,500 years ago.
"When the first Fijians stepped ashore they were greeted by meter-high pigeons and meter-high chickens and meter-and-a-half-long iguanas, and within 50 years they were all gone."
The giants would have been very susceptible to hunting. With no mammalian predators the fauna would have been long-living and slow at reproduction.
The rats which accompanied people would have taken care of 25-cm-long frogs.
Worthy said the project had the leg bones and part of the vertebrae of the still-to-be-named megapod, or chicken-like bird, which would have built mounds on the ground and laid its eggs there.
"The one on Fiji was probably approaching a meter high. We are talking about something about 15 kilos," says Worthy. "It had a reasonably big head and a beak not like a chicken; it had a very high or deep bill, centimeters deep. It was adapted to eat very large fruit."
Nothing like it exists today
Bones of the various giant fauna have also been found in caves near Volivoli outside Sigatoka. Nearby sand dunes have already attracted international attention for signs of the earliest presence of people in Fiji. Erosion is, however, destroying the human evidence.
Worthy says his finds were made in limestone caves. In one site the evidence suggested a deposit was formed by a crocodile-like animal up to 4 meters long, whose prey included giant birds.
Between Suva and Nausori they have also located a jawbone of one of the crocodilian type animals. The project has yet to fully publish its data, but some of it was outlined early last month at the Pacific Science Congress in Sydney.

So the museum has these remains and have so far only carbon-dated a few items, saying that they don't have the equipment and expertise to do it themselves and it's proving too expensive to send everything away ...

... and so it's all just sitting there, for the past 12 years, waiting ... waiting ... waiting!

Hey, maybe we need to do a massive "Fiji's Own Dodo" fund-raising gala extravaganza to get the money to get to the bottom of this.  Anyone in?