On hearing of this letter, Bob told me to cease working. ‘If any of that is true,’ he said, ‘I want you off my park.’ When he found that I wasn’t allowed even to see the letter, or to be given any real chance to counter it, his sense of fair play was offended and he swung back to my side and stayed there.
It wasn’t always overt, but it was always there—that underlying fear that the advancement of Aboriginal rights would ultimately override white control of life in the Territory. Judging by Reed, this view could fester for years.
And the mud stuck. Over the next few years, I wasn’t given promotions I was in line for and my Parks and Wildlife career was stymied. Meanwhile, Mike Reed moved steadily up through the ranks and became the director of the service. He was being groomed for a political career and eventually became Deputy Chief Minister under Marshall Perron. I would encounter Reed again ten years later, when I returned to the Territory as a junior doctor. I would see him in a very different context but, in a way, nothing had changed: he still represented the most reactionary elements of Northern Territory politics and society.
During these rangering years, I joined in the protest activities against the Pine Gap base, 18 kilometres from Alice Springs. With lawyer John Reeves (now a judge of the Federal Court), I founded the group Concerned Citizens of Alice Springs and began publishing a regular newsletter critical of the American presence there. With others, I occasionally camped outside Pine Gap and probed the perimeter, and we constantly voiced our concern about the secrecy of the installation. It was different sides of the same triangle, as far as I was concerned—weapons development, uranium mining, foreign military bases and, later, nuclear submarines were all symbols of American imperialism, all obstacles to a peaceful and just world.
* * *
Looking for other satisfactions while my rangering career was in the doldrums, I joined the army reserve. This involved two three-week semi-military assignments a year, mostly out in the bush, learning new skills. You got double pay if you were working for the government, which I welcomed because the Parks and Wildlife pay was low. After one of these operations—an advanced four-wheel-drive training course in Arnhem Land—I arrived back at the Larrakeyah barracks in Darwin. We were preparing to celebrate what had been an interesting ten days, and I was sitting on a large Esky on the back of a stationary army International 4WD truck, looking forward to a few beers. Suddenly, the truck started up, turned abruptly and I was thrown off. I got hit over the head by the aforementioned full Esky of beer and landed badly on the kerb; my right heel broke away from my foot and my lower leg was a bloody mess.
I was taken to what was then Darwin Hospital at Myilly Point, only a few hundred metres from the barracks. I remember asking the admitting doctor whether I’d broken my leg.
‘You’ll wish you had,’ he said.
He was right. It took three operations to repair the injury, which was to the joint that controls the lateral movement of the foot. Normally, your ankle bends when you walk but you need lateral movement for stability when your foot strikes uneven ground. Many people who have suffered the same injury experience constant pain when walking on rough ground. My pain comes and goes, but of course the injury put an immediate end to rangering, as walking in rough country is a big part of the job.
I was in Darwin Hospital for some time, and then in a little RAAF hospital in Darwin before I was flown down to Alice Springs Hospital. I was finally released on crutches and spent weeks slowly doing weight-bearing exercises. After each operation, I would be back on crutches, wearing special boots to shift the weight up my foot. I was surprised at how slow the recovery was. I went to the Alice Springs swimming pool twice a day; I would hobble across it, taking advantage of the buoyancy, trying to avoid the lap swimmers. Then I’d be off to physio at the hospital. It was months before I could put my whole weight on my right foot. More than thirty years later, I still walk with a limp and my foot always gives me trouble if I walk too much.
It wasn’t exactly a mid-life crisis—or certainly not a psychological one—but it was clear I would need a new and less physical occupation.
SEVEN
Medicine in the Big City
The ‘e’ word had never been mentioned at Sydney Medical School …
Philip Nitschke, 2011
I’d never lost interest in the idea of a career in medicine. Now, laid up, recovering from my accident, I thought I should finally apply. I sent off applications to every medical school in the country. I believed my best chance would be at Newcastle, where they had a new and innovative admission policy, based more on a person’s character and experience, and so more suitable for a ‘mature age’ applicant such as myself. I was surprised to be offered places, for the academic year starting 1982, at Sydney, Monash and Adelaide; Newcastle ignored me.
A few months before, I’d met Marlies as I was limping about Alice Springs after one of my foot operations. German-born Marlies had come to Australia, some years earlier, to work as a nurse. She was in Alice Springs on a working holiday for several months, doing shifts at the hospital, and we met at an anti-Pine Gap rally. She was very much the new girl in town. At the time we met, she had a partner, Henry, in Melbourne and I was just about to leave Alice and go to medical school. We went out camping, which she loved, and a relationship started that was to last another ten years. When we left Alice, we planned to take the very long route across the Tanami, through Gurindji country to Katherine and down to Sydney. It was to be a great trip but, after a week of being flood-bound on the Tanami Track, we were forced back to the Stuart Highway. After a tearful farewell in Sydney, Marlies continued on to Melbourne and, soon after that, left for a long-planned year overseas with Henry. We stayed in contact for the whole twelve months she was away, with letters and phone calls to and from Sydney and Germany. Her absence would make first-year medicine particularly difficult for me, but with her return to Sydney in early 1983, as I started my second year, our relationship became firmly established.
I’d never lived in Sydney before, and the idea of starting something completely new in a new city quite appealed to me. Also, the Sydney Medical School course took five years, while all the others were six, and at my age—thirty-five—six years would have felt like a big piece out of my life. I was lucky with timing, in that I undertook medicine when university courses were still free, but I knew I’d have to work, as my PhD made me ineligible for any government living allowance. By this time, I’d begun a compensation case against the army, and had hopes of a settlement that would help get me through medical school and into this new career.
It was standard practice then for medical courses to have basic physics and chemistry units in their first year. I applied for exemption from physics and was refused. This was the first time I struck against an attitude at Sydney that would increasingly irritate me: that their medical degree was so prestigious that no outside qualifications could be of any consequence. I applied for a part-time tutorship in the School of Physics and, with my PhD in hand, was duly appointed. When the student tutorial lists went up, however, I found I was rostered as a student in my own tutorial. I took this information to the Dean of the Medical Faculty and finally they deigned to grant me an exemption from first-year physics.
My biggest stroke of luck during medical school was getting virtually free accommodation. Sydney is, and was, an expensive place to live and I was going to be on a very tight budget. Before I left the Territory, I met Gil Scrine, who was making his award-winning film Home on the Range, about the Pine Gap base. I got to know him quite well and he told me that if I were ever in Sydney, I could use the houseboat he had moored at Balmain, as he was going to be off filming somewhere. I took him up on this and stayed in that rather nice setting for a while. Rowing out at night, studying by kerosene light, living illegally on Sydney Harbour. He also gave me the use of his VW Beetle so I could commute to the university. It was a pleasant, but imprac
tical way to live, and when in the middle of my first year the offer of a place in a Camperdown squat came up, I jumped at the chance.
I had met up with another Alice Springs connection, Des Carne, who was squatting in the unoccupied South Sydney Women’s Hospital. It was perfect: in Camperdown, walking distance to the university, and free. I stayed there for a year, and had a huge space, one of the old operating theatres, all to myself. When it was finally sold at the end of my first year, the new owners decided to demolish it, and a number of us simply moved across the street, to what had been the nurses’ quarters. With the power and water connected, and with the cooperation of the owner, a church affiliate of some kind, we were well set up. Vandals had caused damage, and had stripped some of the lead and other things of value, so we were welcomed as rent-free caretakers. I stayed there for the next three years and Marlies moved in.
Still, I can’t say I was altogether happy doing medicine at Sydney. My friendships with my fellow students weren’t close ones. At thirty-five years of age I didn’t have much in common with them, most of whom, I thought, had had pretty sheltered lives. I also found the rote learning of medical facts boring, but I still sweated over the exams, even though they were mostly multiple-choice, tick-the-boxes style.
That said, the actual content of the course was everything I’d hoped for, especially in the first few years. Like many doctors, I’m fascinated by the complexities of the human body and especially its interaction with the environment. I was, and am, particularly interested in the history and philosophy of medicine, topics that continue to be highly relevant to my work today.
Living in Sydney I missed the Territory, though. At one point, the city overwhelmed me and I took off to go bush, about as far as you can go. The Gibson Desert is a remote area of about 15 million hectares on the Western Australia–Northern Territory border. I’d always wanted to go there and it provided the perfect antidote to Sydney. I went out to Jupiter Well, a dot on the map of the Gibson, and didn’t see anyone or talk to anyone for over a month. I didn’t go out of my way to avoid people; it was just that no one came along. I’d get up every day at sunrise and clamber up the sand dune nearest the camp, and could see the whole 360 degrees of the horizon. It was an amazing and humbling experience.
For a period of about four days, I could see smoke on the horizon and it moved a little to the east each day. That meant there were people still out there, although the last of the traditional Pintupi people had supposedly walked out of the desert into Aboriginal communities in the mid 1960s. It pleased me to think that there were still some people out there, out of contact and unaffected by Western civilisation.
Jupiter Well was really a soak, and I dug it out so that I could get water. I also thought I should do something to mark my stay. I stamped my name and the date, and something about digging out the well, on an aluminium plate, drove a star picket into the ground and wired the plate to it. I was imitating Len Beadell, a surveyor, bushman and road builder in the years after World War II. He started out making access roads to the infamous Maralinga atomic test site, but continued to build a network of roads in central Australia. His most notable road is the Gunbarrel Highway, which runs right through the Gibson. He wrote a number of books about his experiences, telling how he’d hammered his name and other information onto metal plates, shot holes in them with his revolver, and bolted them to 44-gallon drums filled with cement.
About twenty years after my visit, I got an email from a bloke who’d recently been at Jupiter Well and had dug the well out, just as I had. He’d found the plaque I’d left, recognised the name Nitschke as associated with euthanasia and wondered if I’d had anything to do with it. He sent a photograph, and there it was—the marker I’d made, still intact. Many of Beadell’s markers have been souvenired, or acquired by museums, and there’s a plan to replace them. I wonder whether my plaque has been souvenired by now; I’d like to go back and see.
Looking back on that experience in the desert, I realise that I was looking for more than just a break from Sydney. Ever since the episodes with headaches and chest pains, and my brush with psychiatry, I’d been subject to the utter terror that goes with thinking you are dying from some terrible disease. This form of hypochondria allows you to slide down into a cycle of worry about symptoms, which allows more symptoms to develop. For me, sometimes there have been real triggers and real fears. For example, there were many lepers at Wave Hill. I’d noticed that quite a number of the people were wearing shoes, which was unusual for the Gurindji, and I wondered why. I found out that they were being treated at the East Arm Leprosarium in Darwin. With leprosy, you lose sensation in your feet and hands and so become subject to injuries like camp fire burns—you simply don’t notice them. This leaves you vulnerable to infections, and that’s when gangrene can set in.
In Alice, when I was rangering, I began noticing changes to sensation in my feet—peripheral neuropathy, which is a disturbance of the nerves and interference with normal sensation. My first thought was leprosy; the incubation period for its development seemed about right and I immediately began to panic. I then spent weeks seeing doctors with little satisfaction, until I finally found Trevor Cutler at the Aboriginal health centre, who had some experience of the condition. He examined my feet and quickly dismissed my feared diagnosis. I forget what he attributed the neuropathy to, but he told me to forget it and almost immediately the trouble went away.
Over the years, I’ve struggled with these demons and wonder occasionally, why me? What was it about my parents or upbringing that made me vulnerable? No one else I knew had this problem, and rarely was there any sympathy. In fact, when I elected to do medicine, it was at the back of my mind that I could educate myself out of my fears and phobias. Unfortunately, the plan failed spectacularly. At medical school, you learn about a whole lot of new diseases worse than any you’ve ever heard of, and what you think might be wrong with you expands exponentially. I think that by going alone out into the desert I was looking for some kind of quasi-spiritual experience to help me straighten out my thinking. It may have worked for a time but the hypochondria persists and it’s been one of the main causes of conflict in many of my relationships with women; living with someone who regularly thinks they’re dying can be intolerable.
* * *
I had to spend time in Alice Springs when the case involving my broken foot finally came to court. The process had started years earlier, when I was limping down Todd Street and ran into lawyer Peter McQueen. There’d been a small piece in the paper about my army accident, which was how he knew about it.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
I answered, ‘Not too damn well.’
‘What’re they doing for you?’
‘Oh, that’s all good. I’m getting all this medical help for free. Everything’s covered.’
‘What else are they doing?’
‘What else should they be doing?’
‘I think they’d better do more than that.’
He invited me to his office and told me I had a good torts action for negligence against the federal government. I was a bit taken aback because I thought, and still think, that people should be responsible for their own behaviours. He pointed out that my career as a ranger was finished and that I’d have ongoing medical problems. I wasn’t too worried about the future, as I believed I could find something else to do, but he persuaded me that I’d be foolish not to provide for myself. I agreed to start legal action against the army.
My lawyer friend John Reeves advised me to get a good barrister. Lew Wyvill from Brisbane, who’d just become a QC, was suggested. It was a risky business because if I lost the case, I’d have to pay his fees and the court costs. I put up my house—a very modest one I’d bought for $29 000 in The Gap, a suburb of Alice Springs—as a surety and Lew joined the team.
I was alarmed when I met him. I had expected to talk things over with him but he just gave m
e just a cursory handshake before proceeding to rip into me. He tore my account of what had happened to shreds, which left me confused, angry and upset. I remember thinking, This lawyer should have been brought into Alice in a cage.
Then his manner changed. He said, ‘This isn’t a game. It could get hard in there tomorrow and I wanted you to get the feel of just what can happen if lawyers start in on you.’
It was a good tactic and it did prepare me. Lew was friendly to me out of the court room, but ruthless in it. He hammered the army’s lawyer, who didn’t seem to have researched the matter very well, stressing the duty of care and negligence and picking holes in their defence. When the afternoon session was over, Lew came to me and told me the army was making an offer.
I said, ‘What do I do?’
He said, ‘In cases like this, I usually say if the offer is less than you expected, go on with the case; if it’s more, grab it. I have to tell you, though, that if this goes on, you’ll have to charter a plane to get me back to Brisbane, where I’ve got another trial running. I don’t know what your expectation was.’
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