Posts have been a little thin on the ground, my time and attention having been taken up with a trip down under.

It was a family roots thing. My great-grandfather was an Irishman who immigrated to Australia in the gold rush in 1851. His daughter became a rather well known authoress (writing under the name of Henry Handel Richardson) and each year they have a celebration of her birthday on January 3^rd at this dinky-di little place called Chiltern in up state Victoria where the family lived - you know, two intersecting streets and a lot of pubs (or hotels as the Australians call them).

This time of introspection into the family made me realize there are definitely some genetic diseases handed down. Great-grandpappa was a doctor, so was my dad, so am I (so was my grandfather - but that was on the other side). So medicine is one “disease”. Writing seems to be the other - which has penetrated as far as my eldest daughter.

More sinister is that there seems to be some kind of dementia. Several family members have gone a little gaga, and I wonder about my generation - though I always claim my sister has it worse than me (ha ha, no just kidding - incidentally she came from England to this birthday knees up with her old man and friend Claire).

But some cad has suggested that the dementia that our great-grandfather suffered from was GPI.

GPI stands for “General Paralysis (or paresis) of the Insane” and is the tertiary stage of Syphilis, where your nervous system gradually gets eaten up by spirochetes - particularly the frontal lobes effecting the “highest and most recently acquired attributes of man, the moral sense and self control”  - causing also sorts of difficult behavioral problems and the sine qua non of “delusions of grandeur”.

In the course of the get together, I gave a little talk - partly focusing on what was the type of dementia great-grandfather had (maybe trying to redeem the family honor, though the majority opinion seems to be that he did have GPI - there was a lot of syphilis around in those wild Australian gold fields).

One of the features of tertiary syphilis I remember learning about in medical school, all those years ago, was Argyll-Robertson pupils - which are pupils that are irregular and dilate and contract in response to looking near and far, but not in the normal way to light. This has prompted one of those “school boy howler” type medical jokes that medical students in particular like so much. They are nick named “prostitutes pupils” after the characteristic of the ladies, who were a principal vector of the disease - because, like them, they accommodate but don’t react.

My audience of respectable Victorian country folk did not exactly fall about at this little witticism.

We spent two days in Chiltern, being lauded like two rock stars (my sister and I being the nearest living relatives of Henry Handel Richardson) and a lot of discussion of not just great-grandfathers dementia but a lot about the psychopathology of the family in general and the relationship between HHR and her sister Lil’ (our grandmother - who’s claim to fame was co-founding Summerhill school with her second Husband A.S.Neill). This seemed to be verging on pathological.

From there we moved on to the seaside resort of Queenscliffe. Here our great-grandmother would take her two daughters in the withering heat of summer, while husband Walter stayed on at the ‘Lakeview’ house in Chiltern and try to keep his practice alive as he rapidly demented (described graphically in the trilogy HHR wrote about her farther ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney’, where she calls the town Barambogie rather than Chiltern).

You can still sense the Victorian seaside ambiance at Queenscliffe and envisage Mary and the two girls promenading. From there to great-grandfathers first stop, and epicenter of the gold mining explosion in Victoria, Ballarat.

Probably far more people went broke, or died, than boomed, but a description I found of “a round-the-clock orgy. In the hotels and grog shops lining the city’s jam-packed muddy streets, the diggers were drinking their gold away. Intoxicated miners with their pockets bulging with gold dust lurched from bar to bar lighting their pipes with £5 notes festooning their girls with jewellery, who were known as Biddies and were unattached young women looking for diggers to marry” sounds like the kind of place that a lot of syphilis was spread around.

So this has taken my time and my energy - not to mention waiting fro my brain to catch up with there being an 18 hour time difference to adjust to (and disorientating phenomena like you leave at 2pm on a Friday, travel for 21 hours and then it’s Sunday morning).

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