Damned if I Do

by Philip Nitschke

  During my last year of university, I worked at the laboratories of the Highways Department, with one of the pieces of nuclear equipment they’d just acquired. The device emitted ­radiation when placed on a newly made road, and the reflected signal gave information on the soil ­density and water content. I liked these holiday jobs; they were ­interesting and the money helped too.

  In the 1960s, as was the case with so many of my ­generation—the baby boomers—my politics moved steadily to the left. The Vietnam War was raging and I was totally opposed to it. I was just the right age to be balloted in as a conscript, which I wanted no part of. One day I watched sombrely as a gun carriage moved slowly down King William Street in Adelaide. It carried the coffin of Errol Novak, someone I’d known at boarding school, who was the first Australian conscript to be killed in Vietnam. He seemed to have missed out on many of the good things in life. At school he had often been targeted by the gangs that ruled the dormitories, and now here he was, a victim of an unjust war. Friends more courageous than me resisted the draft and spent years in hiding up in Queensland, avoiding the police. To my mind, they were the real heroes. I took the much easier course of joining the University Air Squadron, which gave me exemption in return for minimal military involvement. These days I watch with growing alarm as ­society forgets the obscenity that was Vietnam.

  Although I was excited by physics and had thoughts of a career in the field, I did regret that I hadn’t had wider ­horizons when I first enrolled at university. One day in ­first-year science, I persuaded a friend I’d met who was doing medicine to smuggle me into a dissecting session. I was intrigued, fascinated, even. I made enquiries about changing from science to medicine but was told it just wasn’t possible. Universities were rigid and inflexible, with strict protocols in place. But, there was a seed planted.

  * * *

  My childhood was littered with practical jokes and I kept them up at university. One in particular I remember playing on my friend Theo. For some reason, we had to have annual medical checks at university and you had to provide a urine sample. Theo’s appointment was after mine.

  He said, ‘How much do you have to give?’

  I said, ‘Oh, I was told what I had wasn’t enough and I had to give some more. You need a fair bit, say, a Coke-bottle full.’

  He said, ‘I can’t fill a bloody Coke bottle.’

  I told him just to take his time and he’d be all right. He eventually managed to fill the bottle, and took it in while the others were there with little containers discreetly wrapped in tissue. He handed his bottle over and the nurse looked at him as if he were mad. That was pretty funny, so I ­continued. The following week I told him that there was a message on the noticeboard that everyone had to go back in and get their containers.

  ‘I’ve come to collect my container,’ Theo announced at the desk. The nurse looked at him oddly then went off, returning with a shoe box containing many tiny ­containers, and the one large Coke bottle. Theo picked up the bottle and left. I have no idea what the nursing staff thought, but I found this very funny and still smile when I think back. My jokes weren’t malicious, but you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of them.

  Another memory from undergraduate days is of an experience that, for a short time, shook my atheism. I went into some detail about this in an interview with Scott Stephens for the ABC program Compass. He asked me if I believed in God and I said I didn’t because, as a physical scientist, I needed evidence to support my beliefs. But I admitted to having moments of questioning whether there might be a god.

  The most bizarre of these was the experience that occurred when I was in my undergraduate years at Adelaide University. I woke up one morning and had really ­swollen feet. I couldn’t stand on them; I was in a dreadful state. I couldn’t get to university and I was sitting there thinking, What the hell am I going to do? Later that morning I opened a Bible that was there in the boarding house and the first words I read were ‘King Asa was diseased in his feet, and he cursed God’. And I thought, How many references to feet are there in the Bible? What is the statistical probability of opening the Bible and reading about feet when you’ve got a problem with your own? A miracle, if you like, and I was shaken.

  Scott asked me if I’d prayed at that moment and I said that I might have, but the fleeting feeling of the existence of a god faded quickly, and my atheism reasserted itself. I now see the event as just an improbable coincidence. The problem turned out to be a case of chilblains.

  * * *

  My undergraduate career at the University of Adelaide ended not with a whimper but with a bang. As a final-year honours project, I aimed to create a hologram. It would be Australia’s first. This was ambitious; optics was not a field of physics of particular interest to the Adelaide department, which specialised in other areas like space, atmospheric and solid-state ­physics. But I was intrigued by the idea of a three-dimensional image, suspended in space, which could be captured in time and frozen as an exposure on a glass photographic plate. There were technical problems, to do with the slowness of the only available high-resolution red-sensitive film, which meant that a three-hour exposure time would be needed in conditions of utter stillness. Any movement of a millionth of a ­centimetre would destroy the process and you didn’t dare breathe while the experiment was running. The only place it could be ­conducted was in the seismic vault—a chamber built deep in the basement and specially designed for seismological measurements. I had permission to use it and the best time to do so was on a Sunday night, when traffic outside was at a minimum.

  After a good number of failures I was getting somewhere, but time was running out and the exams were ­looming. On the last Sunday night that the vault was available to me, I found the door was locked. I was alone and enraged. I was also damned if I was going to let a housekeeping glitch (and it might’ve been more than that because there were people who weren’t happy with this use of the vault) thwart my experiment.

  I gave the door a huge frustrated kick and it flew off its hinges. Surprisingly, I didn’t hurt my foot and I later reflected that this must be what happens when karate practitioners break bricks with their hand—that if what you strike gives way, you don’t feel the pain of the impact.

  The experiment was a success—the image was captured and I was briefly the hero of the department. Everybody visited the lab to view the image. There was one ­anxious moment: someone dropped the glass plate and it broke into many pieces. It didn’t matter, though—the full image remained on all the broken pieces, one of the many intriguing aspects of holography.

  Star I might have been, but I was summoned to the office of Professor Carver, the head of the department. He was sympathetic but made it clear that there would need to be disciplinary action. I was fined five dollars, to go, the letter said, towards repairing the wilful damage I’d caused to university property. But it was this experiment that probably led to me receiving a first-class honours degree in physics.

  With the first in my pocket, I got a very attractive offer from the Boeing Corporation in Seattle to work on ­acoustic physics and noise abatement, which were areas that ­interested me. I was very tempted. I was twenty and wanted see the world. However, at the Boeing interview I was alarmed to find that someone of my age coming to the US to work wasn’t necessarily exempt from service in the US military. They said they’d secured their employees a lot of exemptions, but they couldn’t guarantee it.

  This was in 1968, and the Vietnam War was escalating, my opposition to it growing harder by the day as I spent a few months deciding whether or not to take the job. Boeing even sent me a subscription to the Seattle Times to help me get a feel for life in the city, but the war news kept getting worse. I was offered a PhD scholarship at Flinders University. Boeing wasn’t interested in me obtaining a doctorate, or in holding the job open, so I opted for Flinders.

  FOUR

  Aiming higher—direction uncertai
n

  Scientists love lasers.

  Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad

  My postgraduate years were not easy, on both the personal and academic fronts, although PhD scholarships were more generous then: if you supplemented your scholarship with a bit of tutoring, you could afford to pay rent and generally have a reasonable standard of living. However, I’d been with Jenny for three years and her parents started pressuring us to get married. Her parents were very protective of her, perhaps because she was adopted.

  This was the late 1960s, when single women still had a lot of trouble getting prescriptions for the Pill. Like many at the time, we used pretty unsatisfactory methods of contraception and had quite a few scares. I remember more than one month that seemed to go on forever. I would be throwing up from sheer anxiety until Jenny would finally phone to tell me we were in the clear.

  Worrying about an unwanted pregnancy was ­probably at the heart of her parents’ enthusiasm for their daughter to be married. So we went ahead—booked the cars, arranged the reception; our parents met, and all the rest of it. Then I developed blinding headaches. They went on for weeks, while I was trying to make a start on the research for my PhD. I went to doctor after doctor, had test after test, but no cause was found. Eventually, one of the senior physicians I’d been referred to at Royal Adelaide Hospital, who knew I was about to be ­married, said he thought the wedding could have something to do with it.

  I just looked at him.

  ‘Have you thought about calling it off?’

  He wrote me a note; I suppose it was something about me having a nervous condition. Armed with this, I went to Jenny and said I couldn’t get married. She took it ­surprisingly well, then added that she had never particularly wanted to get ­married anyway.

  But when we told her parents they were horrified. Her father actually attacked me physically, throwing punches. I had to fist-fight him off. While this was going on, Jenny’s mother fell to the floor.

  She screamed, ‘I’m having a heart attack, Dick. I’m having a heart attack!’

  ‘Not now, Marj!’ he said, shaping up.

  It ended with Jenny being locked in her room. Not one to accept this, she threw what she needed into a bag and climbed out of the window. I was still scuffling with Dick when she walked past the window and waved at me to come along. I extracted myself and we took off.

  It was sad, really. She was something of an outcast after that and had to get the police to help her recover her belongings from her parents’ house. However, we would be together for another five years.

  Getting out of the wedding wasn’t the end of my ­medical problems. The doctor who’d put his finger on the cause of the headaches suggested that I have a psychiatric review; hypochondria must have crossed his mind. I did so, reporting that the headaches had gone. The next thing I knew I was in the psychiatric ward of the Royal Adelaide and they were telling me I could benefit from a period of voluntary residential care. Someone was sent to my flat and, in case I was a danger to others, confiscated the guns and knives I used for hunting. This scared the hell out of my flatmate Theo, who wondered what sort of a person he’d been living with.

  So there I was, stuck in hospital for two weeks and unable to get on with my floundering PhD work. I didn’t think their treatment was doing me any good, so to get myself out I carefully answered all the questions in the next assessment, not honestly, but in a way I felt would convince them of my sanity. It worked. The psychiatrists decided that I’d made a remarkable recovery and I was released. This left me with considerable scepticism about this field of medicine. One that remains with me.

  At Flinders I was active in the anti-Vietnam movement but also took an interest in other social issues. I took part in the protests about the Springboks playing in Adelaide, Aboriginal land rights, and was interested in emerging issues of ­feminism and the rights of gays and lesbians. These were all valid ­concerns when coming of age as a baby boomer in Adelaide. One Flinders Postgraduate Students’ Association (FPSA) lunch remains particularly memorable. The FPSA would hold regular luncheons; the sherry would be ­flowing and there would always be a guest speaker but the events were generally pretty dull. When it was announced, however, that there would be a scheduled talk by controversial psychology lecturer Dr John Court, who claimed his aversion therapy cured homosexuality, dull things were not.

  A small group of us from the physical sciences ­department walked across past the campus lake to the union building where the lunches were held; I had my prepared questions in hand. On this occasion I’d spent hours poring over the writings of philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse to get precisely the right angle to make Court squirm. We were itching for a fight on this issue. My problem on the day was that by the time question time came around, I’d drunk way too much sherry. I got up to harangue Court and slurred my words, making something of a mockery of my carefully worded question. On seeing my condition, the marshals at the event quickly moved in, with a view to removing me forcibly. As they grabbed me, I reached out for anything at hand, which happened to be the tablecloth. This led to a dramatic overturning of the table, with its cutlery and my comrades’ food and drinks. Needless to say, John Court’s hour in the spotlight came to a rapid end.

  The lunch would later be written up in Nation Review. I can’t remember who the journalist was but the opening line of the article was as fine prose as you are likely to read. It started: ‘When she arrived with two “No More Duncan” badges impaling her nipples it was clear that this was not going to be your average postgraduate students association luncheon …’ The journalist was right.

  The Duncan badge referred to the 1972 death of academic Dr George Duncan, a Cambridge graduate who had moved to Adelaide. He was an openly gay man and lectured in law part-time at the University of Adelaide. One night, he and another man were thrown into Adelaide’s Torrens River near the University footbridge, which at that time was a well-known gay beat. Duncan drowned. It was suspected that the perpetrators were three senior vice-squad police officers. The coroner returned an open finding on 5 July 1972 and the police investigation, which described the murder as a ‘high-spirited frolic gone wrong’, didn’t provide enough evidence to prosecute any of the suspects. Duncan’s death became a rallying point for the gay movement in South Australia, especially since his attackers were never brought to justice.

  Another memorable moment from my ­postgraduate days at Flinders involved the playing of one of Hitler’s speeches from the Nuremberg Rallies. Along with another ­postgraduate physics student, I built a massively powerful audio ­amplifier. By this time I had my own area in the lab, with my own office, and no one really knew when I was in the building. The laboratories at Flinders were located in the southern foothills and looked down over the suburbs of Adelaide.

  The night was quiet, still and very hot. We locked ourselves in and switched on the ‘No Entry: Laser in Use’ ­warning sign. We positioned the amplifier, put the directional speakers in the window and played Hitler’s Nuremberg speeches at an earth-shattering volume. When the university security people ­eventually worked out where the sound was coming from, they hammered on the door, used their keys to get in and quickly cut the power. With phone calls from across Adelaide to the police, radio stations and the university, and eventually, with letters of protest pouring in from the suburbs, the university went into damage control, simply announcing that the problem had been solved. They then waited as the fuss died down. We were told to report to the department head, ­lectured, and warned to stay on good behaviour.

  Quite recently, I was interested to learn that the speeches contained, among other things, many exhortations to God—which makes the whole incident even more ridiculous. Clearly, at the time I didn’t have any idea what Hitler was saying. But it didn’t really matter to me, as it wasn’t the message I was interested in. Rather, it was the sheer aural power and theatrics of the Nazi rally—the bellowin
g voices, the applause. We’d been playing around with laser lights and sound, and they just seemed to fit. What we did was not in good taste, insensitive really. But dissent was in the air and we were trying to shake some of Adelaide’s conformity and complacency. We had got the recording on loan from the Adelaide ABC. Curiously, we were never asked why we wanted it.

  * * *

  My politics (and antics) were a welcome distraction from the trouble I was having with my thesis. As anyone who has been through it will tell you, studying for a doctorate is a ­stressful and complex business. It’s make or break—success is likely to lead to a worthwhile career; failure can greatly restrict employment options. I came close to missing out on getting my PhD, but it wasn’t really my fault.

  The choice of a topic is crucial in success with a ­doctorate: it must be of sufficient weight to be likely to yield results that will merit the degree. Also critical is your relationship with your supervisor. My thesis involved the use of high-energy lasers to measure the temperature and density of plasmas (high-temperature ionised gases). Extracting energy from thermonuclear reactions is one of the holy grails of physics. The project had formidable technical problems but it was the personal ones that were really the issue.

  I was not long into the project when I had a falling-out with my supervisor. We didn’t get on well for some reason and this would be compounded when I found out more about his background. Perhaps because I’d moved around rural South Australia so much, I’d become interested in the vast, little-travelled space to the north—the Northern Territory. In 1970 I came across a book by Eric Baume ­entitled Tragedy Track, which had been published in 1933. It is the story of the hardships experienced by people working on the Tanami goldfield in Central Australia and contained accounts of the last ­massacre of Aborigines in Australia, known as the Coniston massacre. This was the revenge killing of an estimated 170 people of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye tribes, over the death of a white dingo trapper. The turn-off to Coniston is on the Stuart Highway, about 150 ­kilometres north of Alice Springs. I can’t go past it without thinking of the barbaric events that took place there. Extracts from the Royal Commission report into the massacre mentioned the name of the Northern Territory policeman who instigated the massacre. I happened to ask my supervisor about his background and he told me that during the war he’d come down to Adelaide for school from the Territory. His father had been a policeman up there. Same name, same bloke.