Hearing, healing and Havana

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis. Let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

We're at the University of Melbourne Student Union International’s Festival of Nations: it’s an annual celebration of multiculturalism and diversity through food, music and dance here at the university. We’re here to speak to Associate Professor of Anthropology and keen drummer Adrian Hearn, from the School of Languages and Linguistics and his band, the Suns of Mercury. The atmosphere is buzzing and of course the students are loving all the delicious food and drink.

Being foodies and music lovers, our reporters, Dr Andi Horvath and Claudia Hooper, took the opportunity to join in the festivities and find out a little bit more about Adrian Hearn, the band and his work.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
So how important is music in creating connections?

ADRIAN HEARN
Well, the importance of music in creating connections I think is evident just with the three of us standing here. I’m Adrian and I’ve grown up all over the world. Panga is from Cuba, Ting is from China, and if it wasn’t for music we wouldn’t be standing here working together. So just in our group, Suns of Mercury, I think what we’re trying to do is show those connections. At a time when there’s so much talk about how cultural differences can mean complications in a society, we’re trying to show how they actually can bridge divides and bring people together. So, I’d say music and connections go pretty well together.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Where did the name Suns of Mercury come from?

ADRIAN HEARN
The name Suns of Mercury comes from an ancient tradition, the tradition of Mercury, which you probably know is the Roman version of the Greek god, Hermes. In the philosophy of Hermes, the messenger goes between different dimensions and different worlds to try to build an understanding between those different worlds. So that’s what Suns of Mercury is all about. The Mercury symbol is one that lives in Cuba with the figure Elegua. It’s a god, a tradition of spirituality, which also is a messenger, that travels and goes between dimensions. So - and similarly in China, the traditions that Ting spoke about on stage across time and space, and here he is as a person who’s come to live in Australia from China and it’s music that’s brought him here. So, Suns of Mercury tries to reflect that idea of movement and the passage of ideas as they cross borders.

CHRIS HATZIS
Of course as Associate Professor of Anthropology, Adrian can't spend all his time on stage, so we joined him in his office in the School of Languages and Linguistics aptly-named "Babel" building to continue our chat.

ANDI HORVATH
So, as a professor of anthropology, what part of culture do you explore?

ADRIAN HEARN
I’m interested in the intersections between music, medicine and organic food. You might think of the three of them as connected through the word healing, really traditional remedies and ways to improve livelihoods.

ANDI HORVATH
So join the dots for us. Wellbeing is often experienced through music, so how does it connect to food and healing?

ADRIAN HEARN
Some years ago when I did my PhD studies I had the good fortune to go and live in Cuba for about three years all up, so that was partly as the PhD study and then a post-doc as well. When I was in Cuba, that’s when I saw this intersection come together for the first time. This was a result of really traditional healing ceremonies where people with physical problems, psychological problems, sometimes even social or political problems including, for instance, being sentenced to go to jail, even something like that, would go to perform a kind of traditional healing ceremony to try and improve their situation in some way.

Now, this fascinated me and I got to talking with the people who run those types of occasions and ceremonies, and they explained to me that the medicinal side of it comes in through the natural herbs and plants that are used, sometimes with proven pharmaceutical properties, other times not yet proven. What they explained to me is that the music energises the situation. It brings what they call a vibration to the context and that vibration activates the healing properties of the plants and really brings everybody onto the same wavelength. They do discuss it in terms of wavelength, frequency and vibration. So that’s how the three, you might say, come together.

ANDI HORVATH
A lot of people listening to this will be nodding and going, yes, music, food. Shakespeare had a lot to say about it as well. It is the essence of being alive. But how does your research actually apply to the modern western setting?

ADRIAN HEARN
Well, what we’re doing at the moment in a team that I work with is working with councils around Melbourne, around the Melbourne metropolitan area, the 30 councils, and state government, to formulate plans for improved food systems. So, we - at this point we’re calling it food systems because the concept of food systems is useful for bringing in a range of factors around the production and consumption of food. So that work draws on the experience of team members who have worked in China, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Latin America like myself, and what we’re trying to do is formulate some best practices that seem to be working across different cities that we work in. Then we formulate policy. We just recently formulated a policy position paper that’s gone out to all of the councils to try to engage with them in their own formulations of improved health and wellbeing, especially around food systems.

ANDI HORVATH
It’s funny, it’s almost like the wisdom of history and certain cultures needs to be now made governance in local councils. There’s an oddness about that.

ADRIAN HEARN
I think that’s a good word for it, oddness. The reason I think that’s a good word is that I think we can all sort of say intuitively, yes, there are lessons in the past that could be revived, but on the other hand, what often happens is that lessons from the past are kind of co-opted and given sort of symbolic lip service, but really the messages around those lessons are lost. I’ll give you an example. Organic food production, small-scale urban agriculture, this is something that’s gone on for 5000 years or more.

Now, if you look at Melbourne real estate and the growing number of apartment blocks, and many of them with small community gardens in them, they say on the websites and the marketing for these places that this is going to allow people to get in touch with nature, to revive a sense of connection with the earth, for example. Now, are they really going to experience some sort of wide, broad connection with the earth and are the larger challenges around food sustainability, around land use, going to be resolved by tiny urban plots inside an apartment block? Well, no, they’re not. So, this is one of the ways that history is co-opted and then kind of recycled and, in my sense, really kind of abused.

ANDI HORVATH
What are some of the misconceptions that the public have about anthropology, or your particular field?

ADRIAN HEARN
Well, the question I get a lot, and I think anthropologists the world over get this, is, so, what kind of dinosaurs do you dig up? They’re not wrong actually, because there are three branches of anthropology and one of them deals - one of them is called archaeology and deals with exactly that. So, they’re not wrong that anthropologists do do that stuff. But there’s also biological anthropology that looks at evolution of the human species especially, and also cultural or social anthropologists, and that’s what I do.

ANDI HORVATH
There are some Cuban drums in your office here. Why have you got Cuban drums in your office?

ADRIAN HEARN
You sound like my supervisor asking me, what am I really doing? Well, these drums are made by actually somebody who lives in or close to Brisbane, actually in Coffs Harbour, someone who’s studied the fabrication of Cuban drums and then has created these, sort of, wooden versions of them. You’ll notice that they have no skins. There’s six heads, drum heads, but they’re made of wood. So, these are a model of drums which normally would have skins on them and they produce a different sound for that reason. He was going for something original. Now, why are they in my office? Because part of what I do is bring together cultural groups and music groups. We use these drums to practise. When we perform, we use those ones in the picture over there. So, it’s kind of convenient to have them here, since we often practise on campus.

ANDI HORVATH
Right. Go ahead, practise.

ADRIAN HEARN
Sure. Well, I’ll play a rhythm. This is a rhythm for a principal, some people would say a deity, called Elegua. Elegua is a deity of beginnings and endings, so usually when these drums are played this is the first rhythm that gets played.

[Music plays]

ANDI HORVATH
Tell us about your Cuban drums.

ADRIAN HEARN
Sure. Well, for me, doing the PhD on religion in Cuba and the relationship of religion to the government, politics, in a Communist - nominally Communist - country meant that I had to find an in and, being a musician, drumming was the best way into religious practice. So as part of that experience of integrating myself over years into those communities, I learned the drums and about their history. What I learned is that these are not just drums. These are for the communities that practise them in Cuba - they’re really a system of conveying values. You can kind of see that in the structure of them. There are three of them there. These are called bata drums and they’re from Nigeria in West Africa.

You might know that about 12 million people were brought forcibly from West Africa to Latin America and North America, mainly between 1750 and 1850, and two million of them went to Cuba, were brought to Cuba. They brought these drums with them from Nigeria. So, in that process they used the drums, not just for having fun, but really for maintaining identity, culture, and a set of values, as I say. So, the structure of these drums, there are three of them, and they relate to each other as a family unit. The biggest drum is called the iya, which means mother in Yoruba. The second biggest drum there is called itotele, which means he who follows, so it’s the son that follows the instructions of the mother, or it’s supposed to follow them and can correspond, can have a conversation with the mother. Then on top of those is the small drum, the okonkolo, or some people call it omele. Omele means he or she who cries out above the others, and it’s like a baby in any family. You’ve got the mother and the son arguing and you’ve got the baby crying on top. It’s a similar thing.

So, when I was learning these, you have to learn how to respond to the mother. That’s the process. My teacher taught me for many months and then sat me down one day and said, I’m going to test you. So, we sat down and he said, take the itotele, the one who responds, I’ll take the iya and you respond to me. So, I did just as he’d taught me for months and I thought I did it quite well, but he looked disappointed and put the drum on the floor and sort of shook his head and said: “Adrian, haven’t you learned anything? Don’t you know that you shouldn’t reply to your mother until she’s finished talking?”. So, he was still doing his call to me when I sort of spoke over him. I realised then that this wasn’t just about music. This is a whole set of values that are bound up in these drums. There are many other stories and lessons around them that kind of reflect similar social values.

So, it was - that’s something that’s very much alive today in Cuba. It’s a tradition from West Africa that’s centuries old and it’s - you walk down the streets of Havana or Santiago, Cuba today, the two biggest cities and you hear the drums coming out of family windows, out of - you hear them echoing in the streets. This is a big part of contemporary Cuban identity.

ANDI HORVATH
So music really is a metaphor for being human.

ADRIAN HEARN
Well, I think the connections between music and medicine, like we were talking about before, I think that really reflects a concern with human wellbeing. Yeah, so I think those connections are really what present as well an opportunity for some quite profound learning and, you might say, research into how we might, here in Melbourne, try to take a more holistic perspective to our food systems, to our medicine systems, and maybe to music.

ANDI HORVATH
Professor Adrian, tell us about your Cuban project and DFAT.

ADRIAN HEARN
DFAT means The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which is the branch of Australian Government that deals with our nation’s international relations. Since I’ve worked in Cuba I’ve been fortunate that they’ve often called me when Cuba issues come up and DFAT’s looking to engage Cuba in one way or another. So, there are two projects that probably stand out in the Cuba work. One was a medicine project in the Pacific Islands. This was back when - towards the end of Stephen Smith’s tenure as foreign minister. He went to Cuba and made a sort of informal agreement that Australia and Cuba should work together in the Pacific Islands. Now, the reason for that was that there were and are a number of Cuban doctors, quite a large number, working there already as part of Cuba’s foreign policy. They send doctors around the world. Furthermore, there are a large number of Pacific Island students that go to study medicine in Cuba, because they get free scholarships to do that. Then they come back and hopefully integrate into their work forces.

Now, what we found, or what DFAT found - this time it was AusAID actually, which is now within DFAT - AusAID found that there wasn’t a lot of preparation for those doctors, newly trained, when they arrived back, kind of trainee doctors. They wanted to become doctors, they wanted to practise, but there was no clear pathway for them to get their credentials recognised, to get internships, to go on and specialise. So, a team was brought together to work with the Government of Cuba to do visits to those islands and formulate a plan. I still look at that project as something I’m really proud of, because we did formulate a plan. Not all of it was taken up, but some of it was. For example, we got an internship program up and running on the island of Kiribati, which is in the news now, because of course the water levels are rising and people are having to be evacuated from parts of Kiribati.

But that is now a hub for training of doctors that come back to the Pacific Islands from Cuba and they need to go through kind of local reintegration, having spent sometimes five, six, seven years in Cuba. They speak Spanish now, they know the Cuban medical system, they’re very well trained, but they don’t know their own local situation. So that’s what the internship program does. We did that together with the Fiji School of Medicine, that’s now running that program. So that was something that I’m really proud of, that we achieved that.

More recently we did a trip to Cuba with the - well, the former Minister of Trade and Investment, Andrew Robb. This was, I think, last year, where we went to look for ways that Australia could engage. Now, the emphasis there was largely around kind of foreign investment and agribusiness, some mining, that kind of thing. I personally was much more interested in the organic food space and particularly because horticulture in Australia is a very strong industry and it just seemed to me that production of fresh food and - fruit and vegetables - not just commodity crops, right, but locally produced for the local market, that that’s a sector that really could benefit from engagement in both directions between Australia and Cuba. So that’s how that DFAT then went on to fund my current project in Cuba to compare Melbourne and Havana, and our food systems.

ANDI HORVATH
So tell us about your band.

ADRIAN HEARN
Sure. Well, this - I run a project called Suns of Mercury - S-U-N-S - Suns of Mercury, and the purpose of that project is to bring together different cultural traditions and try to build some sort of musical collaboration. I should mention that the Faculty of Arts and the School have supported this project and we’re building towards a collaboration with the Arts Centre Melbourne, which they’re creating something very interesting called the Australian Music Vault. Now that project already has some great material on European migration to Australia and how it has influenced Australian music, but they don’t have, or didn’t have, that much on more recent migration from developing countries. So, we’re working with them on that part through the Suns of Mercury project.

CHRIS HATZIS
After talking with Adrian, we were keen to get some insights from some of the other Suns of Mercury back at the festival.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
So I was wondering what it means for you to be able to play traditional music here in Australia.

RODOLFO HECHAVARRÍA "EL PANGA"
Oh, to play traditional music here in Australia, that’s made me happy. I’m proud, because Cuba is a small island and have a big sound. Just 11 million people there and little bit island. So, in Australia the people know about Cuban tradition and Cuban music through the Buena Vista Social Club. Buena Vista Social Club was the [unclear] the Cuban - traditional Cuban music. So, by the way music is connect to the people, because Adrian explain to you before, he from China, I’m from Cuba. If not for the music, he cannot join.

I put it by example, my first time when I went to Japan I went for workshop. So, I’ll say how I can communicate with them? I’m a Spanish speaker, an English speaker. There they haven’t speak English and even Spanish. So, I went in, so all the studio waiting for me, just the sound, music’s their only language, universe. You can join the people. Doesn’t matter which country you’re coming from, just the G minor, you get the G minor then as well, like me. Or you hit the congas, I’ll hit the conga as well. You hit the drum, the same. So, we have something in common, even we don’t know, that’s just the first time we know each other and we just on the same side, because we giving some sharing something to the world. That’s beautiful. That’s the main thing, I think.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Can you tell me what it means to you to be able to share these instruments?

WANG ZHENG-TING
I think - I was born in China. I love music, so I learned the traditional Chinese music. So, after I migrated to Australia I think I should share my culture with the people here. So, which were right, acting as a bridge, bring the people from a different nation. Because if I don’t understand the language from Cuba and he probably don’t understand the Chinese, but we can communicate really easily through the music. We know each other and now I’m more interested in the Cuba music probably through my involvement with the band. He probably more interested in the Chinese music. So that’s the connection. I think it’s very good. So, I think we try to do that, do more. We should…

RODOLFO HECHAVARRÍA "EL PANGA"
Yeah, do more.
[Over speaking]

WANG ZHENG-TING
…in Cuba, then China.

RODOLFO HECHAVARRÍA "EL PANGA"
Yeah, that’s the way.
[Over speaking]

WANG ZHENG-TING
…in China for you.

RODOLFO HECHAVARRÍA "EL PANGA"
Yeah.

WANG ZHENG-TING
Yeah.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thanks to University of Melbourne Student Union International, Associate Professor Adrian Hearn, and Rodolfo Hechavarría "El Panga" and Wang Zheng-Ting from Suns of Mercury. And thanks to our reporters Andi Horvath and Claudia Hooper.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on October 4th and 25th, 2017. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by Arch Cuthbertson, co-production by Dr Andi Horvath and Claudia Hooper. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2017, the University of Melbourne. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.