The Russians seem to have a knack of making things that might work well, but look as though they’re forty years out of date and that was the case with the Cossack. It wasn’t pre-war, but looked it. And I racked up a lot of kilometres on it, commuting from Darwin to Sydney for my medical course, across the Plenty Highway, and coming down through Queensland and South Australia, and along the Birdsville on a number of occasions. It performed much better on the open road than in town, and it worked best with the sidecar, especially when I had a genuine Russian one imported and fitted for me by a dodgy neo-Nazi bike shop that used to be on Parramatta Road, just out past Leichhardt.
I decided to attend the fortieth anniversary of the 1966 walk-off from Wave Hill Station in August 2006. ABC TV’s Aboriginal current affairs program, Message Stick, had contacted me to say they were making a documentary called ‘Ripples from Wave Hill’.1 They knew of my involvement and wanted some film of me going back for the reunion. I liked that idea and thought I’d take my old Toyota, which had first taken me out there in 1973 and had become well known during my time there. I had kept it registered over all the years, and had run it intermittently, but it needed a lot of work. When I pulled the engine down I found the head was badly cracked; it couldn’t be welded and I couldn’t get a replacement in time. So we decided to travel by motorbike to the reunion.
The ABC filmed me on the motorbike as a sort of mock-up of my original journey to Wave Hill, although, of course, it hadn’t been anything like that. Fiona and I went down with our camping gear strapped on at the back of the sidecar. The weekend was structured with various activities, including a procession and a re-enactment of the walk-off. There were a lot of emotional moments. Kev Carmody was there and he sang ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, and I was able to talk with Hoppy Mick Rangiari. It was the last time I saw Hoppy Mick, who died not long after. He was the last of the active members of the strike. I recognised a few people around who were just kids when I was first there decades earlier.
Gabi Hollows, Fred’s widow, and Peter Garrett attended, each surrounded by a large entourage. David Quinn, who I barely recognised, was also there. It was the first time I’d seen him since our fight at Top Springs Pub some thirty-five years earlier. We talked briefly, without hostility. I also met Tom Uren, a minister in the Whitlam government. I’d admired him for a long time and he had been a friend and boxing opponent of my old boss in Parks and Wildlife, Bob Darken. He said some nice things about my work
There were very strict rules about camping at the site, so I did as I always had and rode a few kilometres down the track to camp off in the bush. It felt good to go back. I couldn’t get to the forty-fifth anniversary in 2011, and had to watch it on television. I’m determined to be there for the fiftieth.
* * *
In 2006 Fiona and I took a long overdue holiday together. We planned a motorbike trip from Sydney to the Territory. But there is a preamble to this story.
During my medical studies in the 1980s I would travel back to Alice Springs at every opportunity. It was on one of these visits that I was browsing some old books of my father’s, including one called The Red Heart by Frank Clune. It was a collection of short non-fiction stories and one story was about Ellis Bankin, a schoolteacher from Glenroy, in Melbourne, who rode his 350cc Triumph motorbike to all kinds of places across Australia in his school holidays in the 1930s. During the summer holidays in 1936, he attempted to become the first to ever ride by motorbike to Uluru, but he didn’t make it. Instead, Bankin lost his way, ran out of fuel and died of dehydration under a mulga tree near Mount Conner, about a hundred kilometres east of the Rock. The motorbike was found intact when a search party finally located his body, and he was buried where he lay. The owner of the old Lynda Vale station, only 16 kilometres from where Ellis died, put up a headstone and erected a post-and-rail fence around the grave.
I was intrigued by this story. This was in 1985, and I realised that the fiftieth anniversary of Ellis’s death was approaching. I wanted to find out more and started by ringing all people with the name Bankin who lived in Victoria. Quite quickly I located Frank, Ellis Bankin’s brother, who was then living in the Dandenongs, to Melbourne’s east. He said I was the second person who had recently inquired about Ellis. The other person had been Dick Duckworth, a motorcycle enthusiast and amateur historian, who lived in Yarraville. I met up with Dick and the idea of marking the fiftieth anniversary of Ellis Bankin’s tragic journey was formed. We both thought the grave might become a significant destination for adventurous motorcyclists to visit.
The grave is on the Curtin Springs station and, as it happened, I knew Peter Severin, the station owner, from my time as a ranger, and made contact. I’d arranged for some pre-publicity in an article published in Motorcycle News magazine and on a hot January evening in 1986, on the anniversary of Bankin’s death, Dick and I and a dozen or so people—some local pastoralists, some motor-cycle enthusiasts from Alice Springs—held a small ceremony at pretty much the exact time Bankin was thought to have died.2 The headstone and the post-and-rail fence were still there, although the worse for wear after fifty years. I had a brass plaque made up in Sydney to commemorate the anniversary, and we bolted this onto one of the posts to mark the event. Dave Richardson, a journalist from the Centralian Advocate, also came and recorded the event in a double-page spread in his paper. I was pleased that this indomitable character, who wasn’t as widely known as he deserved to be, finally had some recognition. Dick Duckworth self-published a book on Bankin in 1977, called Ellis Matthewman Bankin: Outback Motorcyclist Who Perished: A Biography, and it includes a photograph of my motorbike sitting there on a sand dune.
The year 2006 would be the seventieth anniversary of Bankin’s death and I thought, Why not make it our holiday to go to the gravesite by motorbike? Fiona liked the idea. I had the bike trucked from Darwin to Sydney and we left from Kings Cross, going up over the Blue Mountains to Bathurst, west to Broken Hill and Yunta. The plan was to go through the north Flinders Ranges, up to Oodnadatta and on to Finke, then to turn off towards Mount Conner and the gravesite. We would then finish the holiday heading up to Alice and on to Darwin, camping all the way. We were carrying food, water and plenty of extra fuel.
All went well until, while we were camping north of Oodnadatta on the Finke road, Fiona discovered she’d lost her bag and some precious photographs. There was no option. The next day we rode back to Oodnadatta and spoke to the police. There had been a crowd of locals looking at the bike when we were refuelling and we thought the bag must have been stolen. Just as the interrogation of the locals was about to start, a truck driver radioed through to the Pink Roadhouse saying that he’d seen the bag lying by the side of the road and that it could now be collected up the track at Hamilton Station. We were to pay for this delay. As we left Oodnadatta, reports were coming in of heavy rain in the area, and we were advised to get back to the bitumen before the storm stuck. We did make the main Oodnadatta–Marla road, which was better, but still not sealed. That night the storm hit; first the swirling dust and sand, then sheet after sheet of rain until everything was flooded. We would spend the next two days struggling to get the bike unbogged from one spot, only to see the wheels sink down a few metres further along the road. I had to deflate the tyres to get some traction, and then pump them up again with a hand pump, only to make about 50 metres before again sinking into the mud. This was done over and over, until we were both exhausted and it was clear that we couldn’t go on; we would just have to wait the weather out. There was no traffic and we knew the road had been closed. Our sleeping gear and everything else was drenched, everything except a precious box of matches. We’d also run out of coffee and beer, but surrounded by water and with plenty of flour, it was clear we’d survive.
The following morning, a light plane flew over and Fiona started marking out a giant ‘HELP’ sign on the road, and running round trying to use her reflective helmet visor to attract th
e pilot’s attention. I thought this was a little over the top. We weren’t in any real danger. Uncomfortable yes, but we could have safely sat there for a fortnight. Hard, I thought, explaining a giant ‘HELP’ sign on the road. In any event, the plane flew on, and we sat for another day and another night. On day three, a four-wheel drive appeared in the distance and slowly crawled its way through the mud to our campsite.
The driver of the Toyota was Doug Lillecrapp of Todmorden Station and pilot of the light plane that had previously flown over. He had driven out from the station to see what damage the rain had caused, and offered to help us get back to the bitumen at Marla. Our gear was moved from the bike to his truck, and Fiona rode in the front seat. The sun had emerged and the road was starting to dry out, and with an unloaded bike and an empty sidecar, we finally made it to Marla. From there, we had to abandon any hopes of getting to the Bankin grave; we had simply run out of time. Instead, we travelled south to Coober Pedy. Fiona booked into a motel, and I flew out to Perth for two days to launch the election campaign for Steve Walker, an independent standing in the coming West Australian state election.
That was the end of the Outback trek. It was certainly a break from work and it provided us with some great moments. We still laugh about the fact that even though the Exit staff all noticed we were missing, none of them thought there was any point in contacting the police. We may just have needed that giant ‘HELP’ sign after all.
EIGHTEEN
Day by day
We don’t sit around talking about death and dying all the time.
Philip Nitschke, 2008
My days are busy, damn busy, and have been for years. But it was entrepreneur Dick Smith, at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, who made me take a step back. After our joint panel presentation, Dick asked me casually, ‘How do you make your living?’ My standard response to this question goes something like, ‘Oh, people who like what I do make donations; it’s hand-to-mouth, but we get by.’
This is an automatic response developed over many years, the aim of which is to keep the conversation short. But, in truth, making a living as a voluntary euthanasia activist is a hell of a lot harder than this makes it sound. The task is twofold. First, voluntary euthanasia must be kept on the public agenda; the principal way of doing this is via the media. Second, I have to pay the bills. When I gave up a full-time medical practice in the late 1990s I took a considerable pay cut. This didn’t matter—I’ve never been driven by the dollar. But, these days, I have an organisation that needs funds to undertake its activities and I have a small staff who need to be paid. My waking hours are spent managing these two driving factors. I need constantly to devise new ways of encouraging the public to show their support by becoming members of Exit International, or by paying to come to a workshop, which is the fee-for-service side. Donations are a bonus that help keep Exit afloat financially and allow me to continue.
These financial needs of running an organisation are balanced every day against our political aims of promoting a law reform agenda and ensuring those who seek end-of-life options are well serviced. Most of the time, these two goals are compatible. For example, exposure in the media not only brings new members (and sells more books) but it ensures that voluntary euthanasia remains in the public’s eye, and may even prompt a politician or two to change their position.
As I explained earlier, working with the media is relentless, delicate and time consuming. Not only do we need Exit members, or other members of the public, to tell their stories and share their lives, often at a time of incredible stress and anxiety, but this also needs to fit in the media’s interest in covering the issue. It does occasionally happen, when the needs of Exit and the media coincide, but it is a bit like the alignment of the planets. It’s naïve to expect a newspaper to run a story on voluntary euthanasia every week and they’re the first to remind you that they are not your gun for hire. The media will only cover a story on some aspect of voluntary euthanasia or interview a suffering person seeking help when it suits them, and there’s usually nothing I can do to make them change their minds. Commonly, though, I spend my days talking to, cajoling and sometimes even fighting off journalists. Like them, I often feel as though I am only as good as my next story.
And then there are the subjects. Most people who are dying want their privacy, and don’t want what’s left of their lives talked about and publicised. Even if the family are committed voluntary euthanasia supporters and don’t want the death of their loved one to be in vain, they don’t necessarily want to be dragged into the spotlight. It is a very special person and a special family who will trust their cape and take the leap. This can be extremely frustrating, as I see opportunities for social and legislative change pass by, all because this or that person won’t talk to the media. While I try to be sympathetic, I am also often very frustrated that a refusal to speak often means that the big picture remains unchallenged and unchanged. When a person gets their Nembutal and has their options settled they are often overjoyed, and keen to withdraw from the issue, but this doesn’t help others. In the long run, change is needed. Every day I see people quietly using their drugs and leaving the planet. It is good that they have that choice, but I just wish they’d spoken out before they went; the activist in me can be hard-hearted at times.
Working with and trying to use the media this way may sound like prostitution and, yes, I have been accused more than once of being a media slut. But, as Fairfax journalist Gay Alcorn once pointed out, my living and my organisation now depend on it; no longer can I rely on the sheltered medical workshop available to all Australian doctors. If voluntary euthanasia fades from the national agenda, there will be even less hope of change. And, if people don’t support my work, Exit’s bills will not get paid. Unlike others in the non-profit sector, we have no government grants to fall back on. Each dollar that comes our way is as much a product of strategic planning and hard work as it is a vote of confidence in who we are and what we stand for.
Taking a step back from media, we are always looking for an innovative strategy to highlight the issue. One recent opportunity that presented itself was the chance to run a test case on voluntary euthanasia, in particular looking at the argument that the seriously ill are discriminated against by current law, because they have lost the ability to suicide. It is a rights issue, and we have been in talks with a leading law firm that is interested in running a test case on this issue. While they are offering their services pro bono, finding the right person and family to base it on, and then finding the exact legal hook to hang the whole project on, is a major challenge. If this gets off the ground, it will be the product of a huge amount of background work, but a positive declaration on a legal question such as this would have immense value and could well precipitate action.
On a week-to-week basis, my time is divided between being on the road and holding workshops and public meetings in Australia, Europe, North America and New Zealand, or the respite times between. When I’m not travelling, I start the day with jogging, which I find is as good for my head as for my heart. This is a daily indulgence that I try never to sacrifice. Once back home and in the office, however, the best-planned day can develop a mind of its own as I troubleshoot from one thing to the next. On bad days, I find myself running in circles and having very little to show for it. On other days, visible leaps forward are made. The trick to survival is an ability to multi-task and to manage time. And, since our small core of five staff all work from home across three countries, it can be challenging. My long-time business manager in Queensland has long since learned to read my mind.
Quite often, Exit will have a number of important issues or projects on the go at any one time—we have to—and we must carefully ration the projects we embrace, prioritising them depending on their importance, cost and time needed to develop them. The limiting factor is usually money. When Exit’s fortunes improve, with a bequest for example, the number of projects w
e undertake increases. Any one week could involve the scheduling of, and doing the mailing out for, workshops in the US, dealing with programs such as 60 Minutes in Australia, ensuring the next shipment of Max Dog nitrogen is on its way to those who have ordered it, talking to and counselling terminally ill patients who call in and who would like a face-to-face visit, speaking at public debates and conferences (events that are as often overseas), preparing and publishing updates to our online Peaceful Pill eHandbook, which is still produced in the US and, related to this, updating the online Peaceful Pill forums (which have more than three thousand active members worldwide), staying up until the early morning to join an Exit webinar in the UK, or research and experimental work in my laboratory and learning how to use Exit’s newest piece of laboratory equipment. Time for reflection fits somewhere in between and there are rarely enough hours in the day. I can’t describe how much I look forward to my quiet beer and the chance to relax each night.
But would I change this life? Not likely. Like others who are self-employed, I treasure being my own boss, deciding what issues to pursue, and having a work life that is so varied. While I have a board of directors at Exit, the day-to-day running of it is at my discretion. Of course the down side of this is that when our Exit members are unhappy, or feel that their needs have been ignored or overlooked, then the responsibility is mine, and with no one else to blame, I have to take their criticisms on board; it is a foolish person who does not listen to the complaints and advice of others. But, no, despite the frantic rate at which I often have to travel, I would not change this life.
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