Johnny Young has died at 79 from pancreatic cancer, and Australian pop music has lost another of its multifaceted creatives of the ‘60s and '70s.

While there may be different assessments of Young’s legacy, it’s undeniable he made a major impact on this country’s musical and television landscape.

John de Jong was Dutch-born and raised in Kalamanda, in the hills of Perth. As a pop singer he was an early beneficiary of the generosity of the first wave of Australia’s international pop sensations: the Easybeats’ George Young and Stevie Wright wrote him a hit single, Step Back.

But Barry Gibb taught the man to fish.

Young had paid for Gibb to fly from Brisbane to Sydney for a television appearance, in the days when the Bee Gees were one more struggling pop band dying for a break.

In London, in 1967, Young was poised to enter the British hit parade with covers of the Bee Gees’ Craise Finton Kirk and Every Christian Lion Hearted Man.

They didn’t chart, but Gibb took Young under his wing and gave him some tuition on songwriting. Young was not only an eager student, he applied his learning quickly with enormous success.

He penned The Real Thing, which famously became a number one for Russell Morris. Embellished as it was with Molly Meldrum’s overblown psychedelia, is surely Young’s best known song.

The story of Meldrum wrestling the demo of The Real Thing (originally intended for Ronnie Burns) from Young to turn it into the debut solo record for Morris, his protege, is as legendary as the story of Meldrum soundlessly gesturing to backing band, The Groop, in the studio to keep playing the rudimentary track for minutes beyond the time they’d rehearsed.

Meldrum would go on to augment The Real Thing with Hitler speeches, choirs and the atom bomb to make what could either have been an iconic masterpiece or an embarrassing, costly folly. Luckily, it was the former.

Crafting the hits

Young’s masterpiece was Smiley, written about Normie Rowe’s induction into the army to serve in Vietnam, and recorded by Ronnie Burns.

Part of the skill of Smiley was that, while it did not bludgeon the listener with an anti-war message, nor did it leave anyone in doubt about how to feel: neither Rowe, or any other young Australian man, should have been fighting in the “Asian war”.

Three more chart-toppers marked Young as a songwriter to rival the best of his era.

Ross D. Wyllie’s exceptional The Star was a tale of loneliness-at-the-top as old as fame itself. It was also recorded by Herman’s Hermits in an inferior version which, nonetheless, made the UK Top 40.

Young wrote a jaunty country ditty, I Thank You, to order for Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose: it made the top 20 in early 1970.

Young also wrote and produced the magnificent Hello for Normie Rowe: a love song that, in the hands of this great pop performer, ranked with the best “sunshine pop” of the period.

A ‘quiet, caressing sincerity’

That Young essentially stopped writing songs and, therefore, making hit records, in the early 70s is mysterious.

Certainly he never gave the impression of a writer with a burning passion to express himself, notwithstanding the “issues” aspect of songs like Smiley and the pseudo-mysticism of the album he wrote for Burns, Virgo.

He did bring many of his own compositions (not The Real Thing) together on one tepid LP, The Young Man and His Music, in 1973, and performed them in a way that suggested he found them foreign and absurd.

After that, if he performed at all, he seemed content to take on others’ compositions (most famously, a ballad arrangement of the Beatles’ All My Loving, which he first released in 1967).

As a songwriter he could have gone from strength to strength, but writing was just one of the strings on his bow. He was a journalist, of sorts, writing a gossipy music column for the “teen and twenties paper” Go-Set; he was a radio DJ, in Melbourne and later in life in Perth; a TV host (starting with Club 17 and The Go!! Show) and he moved into television production with Kevin Lewis in the early 70s, beginning with the pop show Happening ‘70.

Debuting in 1971, another Lewis–Young production, Young Talent Time was a brilliant format, combining a talent show with elements of 1960s pre-music video programs like Uptight and Bandstand: the stars you loved performed the hits you knew.

John Pinkney, writing in the Melbourne Age on the program’s launch described Young’s compere approach as embodying “quiet, caressing sincerity”.

A cavalcade of up-and-comers cut their teeth on the program, many of whom continue to be household names. “YTT” was, much like Countdown, derided by many and watched by millions – and you knew there was a crossover between those two groups. The show lasted 18 years.

Young returned to Perth in the 21st century for a long and successful career as a radio announcer on a range of stations.

While he was known for his integrity and honesty, one statement Johnny Young made well into the flush of his pop success is easily challenged. In 1968, he told Go-Set: “I was not talented, just fortunate”.

Perhaps his self-effacing nature goes some way to providing the key to this unusual, talented, fortunate man.

David Nichols, Professor of Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne

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In 1825, English artist George Chinnery left Calcutta for Macau, chased away by his disgruntled wife Marianne and his creditors. He’d been based in India for the past 23 years, having previously lived in Hyderabad and Dacca.

Besides running a debt of around 30,000 rupees (£232 today), Chinnery was, according to one Dictionary of National Biography, a “penniless fornicator” and “begetter of an uncertain number of illegitimate Chinnerys white, brown and yellow”.

While he became famous as a portraitist, Indian landscapes also take pride of place in Chinnery’s legacy. His vision of an early morning in the Bengal countryside projects an image of peace and harmony far removed from the realities of colonial India under the British Empire.

From the 1760s, a number of British artists arrived in India. These men were motivated both by the economic prospects of catering to expatriate communities and portraying unique subject matter for those back home. In so doing, these artists presented India not as it was, but remade it into an exotic land ripe for colonial rule.

In their artistic representations, India was dangerous but also a place of opportunities. Travelling across provinces, artists’ visual documentation helped claim and appropriate Indian landscapes. As these spaces were endowed with new meanings, in turn, the question of imperial authority’s legitimacy became entangled with art.

Indian picturesque: a blot on the landscape

Besides just a few unkempt and passive human figures, the foregrounding of decayed buildings in Chinnery’s painting speaks directly to the picturesque aesthetic that rose to prominence in the late 18th century. This style focuses on asymmetrical compositions, dramatic chiaroscuro (light and shadow), rugged textures and landscapes with classical ruins and rustic life. In this, picturesque artists turned rural England into a national ideal.

The picturesque style occurred in a time when the process of enclosure was increasing. This involved taking commonly used land and dividing it into privately owned fields to the benefit of wealthy landowners, while limiting poorer people’s access to land. The picturesque helped justify social inequalities by presenting wealthy landowners and their estates as natural and idyllic parts of the landscape.

In a similar way, as wealthy imperial officers returned to Britain and invested their money in land, the picturesque also helped present Britain’s colonial power as taming and improving foreign lands.

In India, artists were using the picturesque to reshape colonial landscapes according to British ideas of progress and civilisation and to tell stories that celebrated colonial power.

In their painting of India, the British fascination with ruins became a visual trope to signify Indians’ political decadence and loss of connection with their histories and heritage. Take Thomas Daniell’s 1795 depiction of an ancient building near Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi (above). This image fed into wider commentary on the gradual decline of Delhi as the seat of the Mughal empire.

The building is reduced to a shadow of its former eminence, the limited life in its surroundings generating an impression of neglect that might be solved by British intervention. The new colonial masters were celebrated as harbingers of modernity. Through depictions like this, travelling artists, though attracted for mercenary reasons, became a mouthpiece for burgeoning imperial power.

How a monument became a cliché

Such picturesque visions enabled Britons to understand India on their terms and it was ultimately a process of objectification. Pre-colonial cultural and religious references came to be relegated to the background.

Take the Taj Mahal in Charles Ramus Forrest’s 1824 painting (below), which is divested of political metaphors central to how the Mughal Empire presented its identity and power.

The garden complex of the Taj is based on a quadrilateral plan, in the Mughal Charbagh style, replicating the four gardens of paradise mentioned in the Quran, symbolising divine grace and approbation. The architecture drew on Timurid traditions (1370 to 1507), as Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, was proud of his lineage and sought to actively revive the legacy of his ancestor, Timur (Tamerlane). The building is believed by certain scholars to be a replica of the throne of God on the Day of Judgement in Islam, which consists of Allah’s throne (the Arsh) and the gardens of Paradise.

Simplifying these architectural complexities, however, Forrest reduces the Taj to an ornamental delight to be enjoyed by a European audience during their boat rides along the river Yamuna, pictured in the foreground.

Memorialisation of conquest

While visual imagery of travel made it possible for the British to control the interpretation of India’s past and insert themselves, it also facilitated the creation of imperial mythologies.

Commemorating sites of war played an important role. During the Third Anglo-Mysore war (1790 to 1792), successes against the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, led the British to envision themselves as the incumbent power. Destruction cleared the path for occupation as territories were laid bare for takeover, as evident in Robert Home’s 1794 depiction of Tipu’s gardens in Bangalore (below).

Devoid of its vegetation and former grandeur in wartime, the once beautifully ordered landscape is turned into a picturesque scene. This ruggedness is romanticised as the remnant of a bygone era, to be discarded in favour of a new beginning.

Mysore soon evolved into a site of British personal and collective memories, embedding sacrifices for imperial cause as a matter of national pride. Previously, more tragic sites had served this memorial purpose. For instance, The Black Hole of Calcutta, a small, cramped dungeon at Fort William, where supposedly more than a hundred imprisoned Britons suffocated in 1756.

It is telling that, by the 19th century, British tourism was built around and reinforced the idea that Britain’s empire and territorial conquests were things to be proud of.

Tourists often fail to appreciate the experience of ordinary Indian people, which has influenced how destinations are marketed. These 18th-century western artists wandering across South Asia, their fortunes and, above all, their art, can tell us how this perspective surfaced.

As a place bereft of its own political identity by conquest, India was ripe for romantic projections of western might. In our age of travel, we must question these ways of seeing.

Apurba Chatterjee, Visiting Research Fellow Department of History, University of Reading

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Current therapies for Parkinson’s disease and related conditions primarily treat symptoms but don’t stop the underlying process causing the disease.

Increasing evidence suggests that toxic clumps of proteins called alpha-synuclein are among the primary drivers of damage to neurons. My team and I developed a synthetic molecule that can block these proteins from clumping and spreading in the brains of mice, ultimately reducing symptoms of disease.

This molecule, called SK-129, acts like a molecular brace: It binds to several parts of alpha-synuclein and holds the protein in a shape that makes it less likely to stick to other ones. It binds especially strongly to early forms of these toxic clumps, preventing them from growing and forming new ones.

Why it matters

Beyond SK-129, our research highlights the broader potential of the class of molecules to which it belongs: foldamers.

Foldamers are laboratory-designed molecules that fold into predictable shapes, much like natural proteins. Because they’re so stable, scientists can tailor them to recognize and bind to specific biological targets.

This versatility is particularly important, because many proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases have long been considered “undruggable.” Unlike other disease proteins with pockets that conventional drugs can bind to, proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases, such as alpha-synuclein, are highly flexible and lack well-defined binding sites. Synthetic foldamers offer larger surfaces that can engage these difficult targets and disrupt the abnormal protein interactions that lead to toxic aggregation.

Foldamers could open new treatment avenues not only for Parkinson’s disease, but also for other neurodegenerative disorders driven by toxic protein aggregation, including Alzheimer’s disease and ALS.

What still isn’t known

Although SK-129 showed strong promise in its ability to target Parkinson’s in cell and animal models, we have yet to test its effectiveness in people.

Important questions remain regarding its long-term safety, optimal dosing and how it travels through and interacts with the human body. Additional studies are needed to understand how the molecule works and how to further optimize it to stop or slow Parkinson’s disease from worsening in people.

More broadly, researchers are still working to fully understand how different forms of alpha-synuclein drive neurodegeneration and disease spread. My team is also investigating how selectively targeting these toxic protein clumps influences their spread, inflammation in the nervous system and brain cell survival across different brain regions.

What other research is being done

Researchers are actively developing other therapies that target the toxic alpha-synuclein clumps that cause Parkinson’s and related diseases.

These approaches include molecules designed to clear these protein clumps or reduce their production, as well as molecules that can stop them from aggregating. Several of these strategies have advanced into clinical trials.

Each major approach to treatment has important limitations. Some struggle to selectively bind to the toxic proteins, while others are unable to penetrate the brain.

Through the collaboration of neuroscientists, biophysicists, clinicians and translational researchers, researchers like me hope to develop new ways to treat diseases that conventional drugs haven’t been able to before.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

Sunil Kumar, Associate Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.