Please remember this is in note form and is mainly for my extended family who often, through no fault of their own, often just don't know what the hell we're on about:

- it is a quick note which continues past this first batch of photos, and will bore everyone else but myself stupid on what we decided to do between two of Dad's chemotherapy sessions, including visits with friends and a great time (largely unphotographed) in Basel... [clicking upon a picture will give the individual image and the backspace key should return a visitor here. However, these images have all been condensed to various extents.] The picture of me bumping down the steps on my bum outside the Galerie de Paleontologie et d'Anatomie Comparee means pretty much everything to me - being such an old teaching museum where Lamarck, Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy St Hillaire all held positions. There really was only time to let my jaw drop about being there - it was too much to take in! Geoffroy's ideas about form are scoffed at through the most coarse of modern materialist and empiricist lenses prevalent today, but can still be instructional to biology, once the excesses of his day have been appropriated. There's more to what the French did, but this gets overshadowed by how much Lamarck had wrong.






Mum wishes we took photos at the Eiffel Tower, but I think not having pictures of us in the Parthenon room of the British Museum was a bit more remiss. We have pictures of the Sri Lankan, Indian, Mesoptamian, Assyrian, Persian, Mayan and Aztec collection I've seen at the Louvre and British Museums combined, but not really of the Roman and Greek sculpture and vases I saw, and the Cycladic pieces, which were all just divine. The galleries set out at the BM were such that these aided in understanding the different Greek periods and contact which shaped and changed all involved, affecting how all those peoples explained and interpreted their worlds. Rather than complaining of so much pottery, their variation really did dipict what I guess some individuals saw as relevant through stages in time. The Mary Anning Room of the British Natural History Museum floored me as like a "Parthenon of natural history". I've also tried to briefly allude over the page to how Richard Owen wanted to set his museum up like a Gothic church to glorify his "Creator", but the Darth Vada-like statue of him was kind of replaced by another statue of someone, who incidentally, also loved visiting a young ape at London Zoo...

Current debates in evolutionary theory today, however, shouldn't still be so reduced down to the pretty absurd parlour game over what happened at whoever says was year dot. I refer to an old polarity which isn't at all where the focus needs to be anywhere near anymore for those who are trying to understand evolutionary dynamics everyday. The museums are still a bit guilty of orientating themselves about what practicing biologists have largely moved on from to more interesting lines of inquiry. The banality is something to do with our bloody mainstream society that we all keep dipping in and out of, and to do with just the nature of how some things are always referenced in some heads. I would urge people to get over that! I write this page for many different people just in passing, to save myself time with letter-writing, but am familiar with some absurd commentary that just comes out of nowhere on what others have actually spent their lifetimes researching the particulars of. Please note my own note-like form. I'm keen to pick up on the momentum from this adventure, and just to keep prepared to follow where it takes me.

As an idealistic undergrad much more than a decade ago, I personally was a very devout follower of what I guess I'll call neodarwinian orthodoxy, and how that explained my world ; but that changed after I studied what the French also brought to the table in evolutionary theory just before Darwin's time. Personally again, I really celebrated with myself at how I could have left a view I had cherished so dearly in favour of a broader understanding in evolutionary theory. I revelled in what to me back then seemed an independence of mind, and according to Darwin himself, a brilliant trait for a young scientist... but, then I went skew whiff... anyway, that's the academic side to what happened to me that I just let everyone laugh at. I got to that museum years later, at any rate, with two of my most crucial colleagues (the other main one back then was a dog, a brilliant research assistant - we'd have never got her through customs for just a three week jaunt anyway...).

The train from Paris to Basel was to go onto Zurich. I worried a bit when it seemed to occur to Dad that I had better know the exact name of our hotel just in case he and Mum couldn't get me off at our stop in time once they got my chair and luggage off first! I came home and wrote jet-lagged gibberish for two days on a website concerning how we managed with my wheelchair on the trip, because I wanted to get writing on other things, then we all collapsed with head colds from hell.


In the Mary Anning Room

During our trip, I was reading Deborah Cadbury's "The Dinosaur Hunters", as well as reminding myself of the first chapter in Stephen Jay Gould's "Ontogeny and Phylogeny" and a lot of Robert Richard's "The Meaning of Evolution", for what had gone on in France. I also read John Lechte's reader, "From Structuralism to Postmodernism". We primarily went to Europe for a conference in Basel on carved figures from Nukuoro, a Polynesian settlement in the Caroline Islands Group, to try and gather the information known on the pieces. Therefore, bringing back a little colonist boy from Petone who mucked around at the meatworks in the holidays, and keeping in mind all he's done about patronage, collections for big institutions, and their interpretations, along with the reasons for our trip, and seeing for myself some of the effects of the past competition between the French and British institutions, just did not escape me. Neither could I forget Mum trying to offer advice, later on in London, to a gardener from Kew on how to get fruit from a mango tree! It was planted in a temporary garden based on what one would find in India, outside the BM. We were in 30degC heat, had just walked to the BM from our hotel in Paddington, and there in front of the BM, the museum where my father once declined an appointment, was also a banyan tree. My mother was born under one up behind her village of Magiagi in Samoa, and one of her names that didn't get recorded properly in that funny little book Palagis like to hand over at borders, refers to that tree. It meant a lot for her to see it, so far from home.

I guess I'm waiting for the BM Maori catalogue to be published soon, and was thrilled to be so welcomed by those who take care of that collection still.

Mum is always so ever patient with all the involved interests that Dad and I have indulged wholeheartedly in. I hope seeing us all so thrilled and happy, makes up a bit for the times I wish I could explain better as to how much I know her mental toughness and intellect is really what I've drawn upon, in ways where my life has truly been enriched. Neither does that come across at all when I feel the need to express to others how much I could use opportunities coming my way. But - I think we've ended up thriving anyway - on mangoes and bananas back in the hotel rooms, quite often! What also kept us grounded on the trip, was also the love and company of friends, who always made sure we were well accomodated, spoilt with meals, and who got us to locations which would not have been possible without them. With them, our time was all the more special.

I still haven't mentioned the fantastic collections we saw at the Quai Branly in Paris which extended on the Oceanic gallery in the Louvre, and the tremendous mix of ethnic, modern and impressionist art at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, where the conference was held on these very stylistic Nukuoro figures. Please note that I'm just a very ignorant and dumb student biologist... The figures were part of a wider exhibition just coming to close which included a wonderful Monet, some Picasso, brilliant pieces from New Ireland, and the best cubist painting I've seen. I didn't realise it was cubist - I just liked it!


A friend sent us this wonderful picture of my parents and I, that she took at the Fondation Beyeler


There were no photographs taken of us outside Notre Dame - I wondered why Dad was so determined in wanting us to see a church. He did talk beforehand about going to see it if we had time to go sightseeing one day, but once beside the Seine and all those cafes, people and markets, and coming to realise that even the Romans were around when Paris was, I thought that was more than enough. I went into the church matter-of-factly, but then was absolutely blown away by the incredible manifestation of dedication that people can have towards their faith. The woodcarvings on the side of the altar were a detail we noted, apart from the overall building and stained glass. We were overwhelmed, and I couldn't help but think of all the similar manifestations of love and support we had been given along the way, and for all our lives, too. People's thoughts and such kind intentions, have always been with us, especially recently in helping us deal with Dad's treatments. It was beyond words and our dreams to find ourselves, still intact & together, in Europe... with some tools, I guess, to really get something out of what we had traveled to see. I don't think in religious or supernaturalist terms, but in recognition of all the humanity behind what had been invested in that building, I was also thinking of those we've lost, and those we have personally lost contact with. Indeed, it does take a village... it did take one, in order to get to where I am in my life. Without the conceptual tools I draw upon, as well as consciously knowing that the ways in which we see can always become hinderances, I hate to think how little I could take in of what I hope I do now.

If you really want to read some of the more immediate and jet-lagged gibberish I belted out in an attempt to report back about how wheelchair accessible travel to Paris was, please see Red's "Walking is Overrated" site, where I kind of sabbotaged a subject down to the 16th entry, oops. I think Red is having a blast with his own travels as well. I'd like to add a disclaimer too about the ground staff that I think a group of airlines must contract out at Heathrow, so much of it was like what we found at Dubai. Dad and I were laughing over some mannerisms, straight-jacket uniforms and padded walls that I really can't describe well enough. "All those going to Mumbai, stand up", - um, we were in the special assistance room where some of us just couldn't... I think we were all just a bit punch-drunk from travelling, and it was all a bit too funny to be shocked. Going via Dubai made our much-appreciated resources go so much further.

Dad reckons I did overdose him once on his pills, when I got my days all mixed up. But I think it's kinda the thing to do in hotel rooms while on tour, besides ensuring that we kept gorging on fresh fruit...!

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