The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  We were sure that this meant the end of the line for Katya and Khaled, but I hadn’t counted on how determined they both were. Or perhaps I failed to comprehend how much each of them meant to the other. I was certain that their relationship could have no future so, as much as anything else, I feared for the pain both of them would feel if they continued to ignore their families’ wishes. In retrospect, it really just shows that you can’t interfere in your kids’ lives too much because you can mess things up badly.

  The welfare of my daughters played constantly on my mind. I was aware, too, of my persisting problems in coming to terms with the premature deaths of two of my daughters. Some people had trouble understanding why I was so concerned about the physical safety of my girls. I might worry about the sort of car one of them was driving, or the kind of part-time job another of them might want to take on. Did it put them in danger? The episode when Katya was nearly hospitalised in Melbourne rattled me, which was why I flew out to spend several weeks with her at that time.

  I couldn’t bear to lose another child. I think it would have broken me.

  Of course, Patti and I were aware that we weren’t the only ones who’d lived through the deaths of our two little babies. Katya and Erica had known loss and grief from a very young age. Madeline had been spared the firsthand experience of losing a little sister but, of course, her life was also deeply affected by it. I was aware that it had left all our daughters with a similar sense of life’s impermanence and an apprehension from a tender age that babies didn’t necessarily survive. As a parent, there’s no manual on how to handle these things. You just do your best to preserve a sense of family.

  Yet that was splintering. Madeline was only twelve—and eight years younger than Erica—when Patti and I split up. Maddy stayed with her mother and our lives were becoming separate, much as I tried to keep up contact.

  That’s perhaps one reason why it was important to me to bring Erica along on the Dad trail: to travel to Shanghai to see where my father had lived as a child.

  While we were living in the UAE, Dad had passed away in Australia at the relatively young age of sixty-five. So much of what I had done was to live up to my father’s adventures. I wanted to honour his life.

  I’d always had a dream that Dad would take me back with him to China. I imagined he might show me the alleyways where he’d played, the school he’d attended and so on. That never happened and really I wonder if he could ever have overcome his awful memories and made the journey back.

  I wanted a sense of the place to match my imaginings of what life was like for Dad as a teenager in a Japanese POW camp. All I had to go on was Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation Empire of the Sun, which depicted the experiences Dad lived through, down to counting the weevils in the rice ration he was given in the camp.

  Dad had given me so little detail of where he lived, but I managed to piece it together going on a description from a good mate of his who was in Shanghai at the same time. When Erica and I visited Shanghai, I believe we located it: a big, three-storey colonial home in the French concession. Extraordinarily, it was as though Dad’s old neighbourhood was frozen in time. It was remarkably intact. Spielberg has said that when he made Empire of the Sun in the mid-1980s, he only had to cover up some advertising boards for everything to look the same as in the 1940s.

  On one side of the Huangpu River, which flows through Shanghai, is the China of the twenty-first century with its glitzy high-rise towers. Directly facing it on the other side is the old Shanghai Bund, which includes the International Settlement, unchanged from when Dad lived there as a boy. It was like stepping back into the colonial era, when Britannia ruled the waves. Grandpa’s office was still there in the building that housed the giant shipping company Swire, now trading as the China Navigation Company.

  Erica and I sought out the hotel and clubs where Dad and his family used to hang out, living the expat life of parties and big family gatherings. Dad loved the piano and one of my favourite memories is of him playing Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’. We went to a hotel where I knew Dad would have gone as a kid with his parents and asked the pianist to play it. A couple of times. Erica and I raised a glass to the father I loved and who had loved his family so much.

  But the trip to Shanghai served other purposes besides tracing Dad’s early life. I needed to check-in on progress with the Mongolian embryo transfer program and also to speak to students at the State University of Agriculture, so we tacked on a trip to dreary Ulaanbaatar for HEF Foundation business.

  Of all my girls, Erica seemed the most likely to follow in the Tinson tradition and become a vet. As a little girl on the Gold Coast she had happily tagged along on house calls with me. Growing up in Al Ain, she was both curious and fearless when it came to the snakes and lizards. She had even coped well when Boris, the fearsome camel spider, made an unscheduled appearance in her bedroom one night.

  I wanted to give Erica the opportunity to experience some of the things that life as a vet had to offer. It could mean giving the best treatment to domestic pets, or it could open up new horizons and make a difference to people’s lives. It all depends on the spirit you bring to it and the sort of person you are.

  We met up with Batsuri and made the trip out to old Poonsack’s farm. On the way we were caught in yet another unseasonal storm, though this time, thankfully, it was milder than on my first trip.

  Batsuri had made impressive progress. He had built a two-storey timber structure on the farm, with a lab occupying the bottom floor and kitchen and sleeping quarters upstairs. He had fitted out the lab with bench tops and an area to walk the camels through to make the embryo transfer process efficient. He also had a designated area for a crush to keep the camels immobilised. All in all it was a big step up from my first visit when we’d dug a hole in the ground and had the camels restrained by locals as goats wandered by. I had also sent a bunch of microchips on to Batsuri so that he could organise with his contacts at the reserve in the south-west of the country for their dozen pure bred wild camels to be tagged. For Erica’s benefit I was tempted to get Poonsack to perform the Mongolian sheep slaughter but thought better of it.

  Batsuri rolled out the red carpet this time. At the university I was given an official welcome prior to speaking to the students on reproduction techniques. Batsuri had also organised for two pure white Bactrians to be presented to Erica and me. Sadly, though, we couldn’t take them with us.

  Other young women might have found this all too tedious. But it was evident to me that Erica had the spirit of the wild.

  Twenty

  Time to go

  I loved the unpredictability of my life. Every day I had to be ready to throw away the script and take off to wherever I was needed, whether it was attending to a sick cheetah at a sheikh’s private zoo or checking out a camel for sale in Saudi Arabia or Qatar. Unpredictability had generated a lot of benefits for me, but now, after fifteen years in the UAE, it was my turn to experience its downside. I had no warning of what was coming.

  I was contacted by Sheikh Sultan and told that the Hilli centre would close. As far as our high-tech reproductive work was concerned, that was it. Staff would be redeployed elsewhere. Everything we had built up over more than a decade would be shut down, lock, stock and barrel.

  There was no official reason. The scientific work was flourishing, we had established a reputation as the leaders in reproductive technology, and our camels were winning important races. It was hard to understand.

  I was given the option to stay on and continue with routine work, like the treadmilling, and collecting and analysing blood for the trainers. I could keep being paid, but professionally my interest had always been in pushing the genetic and scientific boundaries.

  There had been an ongoing sense that the success of the embryo transfer program had bred jealousies and some resentment from local trainers. It was possible that our camels had proven a threat to the old system, whereby Sheikh Khalifa would buy promising young camels from t
he Bedouin. Now he could get superfast camels bred in the lab. So maybe there was a perception that we were interfering with the informal wealth redistribution structure. None of it was clear to me, but I was pretty sure the centre was a victim of its own success. There had always been a chance that this might happen. That was all part of being in a country where you didn’t quite belong.

  Whatever the reason for the decision, at this point I wasn’t thinking long-term. I decided to go but I didn’t want to burn my bridges, so we agreed that I would always be available to come back if there were any special projects where I was needed.

  However, before leaving the service of the sheikh, he did me a huge favour, which would come in handy in later years: he gifted me four excellent breeding camels. Here’s how it came to pass—and I must admit, it did involve a little bit of chicanery on my behalf.

  Sheikh Sultan decided that he would make a generous offer to the local Bedouin: he would give them four good camels for any four camels they brought in, whether they be good, bad or indifferent. This gesture to the Bedouin was an example of how the tribal system continues to be the social glue, despite the modernising of the Emirates. There is a social contract between the rulers and the ruled, and it is this contract that sustains the respect and support of the locals.

  Naturally, word of the sheikh’s trade-up offer spread far and wide. The very best camels from the sheikh’s herd were being reserved for the sheikhs of other local tribes, but there were still many excellent racing camels on offer.

  Of course, I had unparalleled inside knowledge, so I grabbed four young camels that I knew were well bred and good embryo transfer responders and stuck them in a corner, hoping I could somehow get in on this deal too, despite the fact that the sheikh’s offer was intended only for the locals. Every time someone arrived with their dud camels they’d see the four flash camels in the corner and ask if they could take them. I’d tell them that they were already reserved for a VIP.

  Finally the sheikh agreed that I could be part of the deal because I had been there for so many years. At that point I got hold of four run of the mill camels and exchanged them for the four really good ones I had put to one side. I was on the point of leaving Al Ain and I wasn’t sure when—or if—I would be back, so I arranged to have them kept at a camel camp near town.

  The camels were microchipped, which would be very important later on when it came to proving that they really were my camels. It’s a good thing they were, because those camels ultimately turned out to be a smart acquisition.

  I was reluctant to leave the UAE. It was home. The girls no longer lived there but it held strong memories as the place where we had raised them, and I had good friends amongst both the Emiratis and the expats. I had also come to enjoy the perks of the expat lifestyle that comes with success in the Gulf, like being able to jump on a plane to London or Paris for the weekend. And besides, there was HEF Foundation work to be done in nearby countries like India and Iran.

  Maybe because I was losing my link to the camels, I found some familiar demons gathering again. The restlessness to do more and different things returned. I had an impulse to keep moving, to make the most of every minute in case life should suddenly come to a halt. Was it driven by the sudden death of our two babies? Was it simply that I was born impulsive? Or was it the cliché midlife crisis? You wonder if there is more to life than what you have, even if what you have is pretty good. Maybe I just wanted to keep challenging myself. I’m sure there’s a psychology PhD in unravelling all that.

  I decided to stay on for a period in Dubai, the UAE city where almost anything is possible. In my optimism I rekindled some old plans for Harry the Camel, but in the end nothing came to pass and my new adventures in the world of business went down the drain. Again I found myself being ripped off by people I believed I could trust.

  The last venture to bite the dust was an antique business in Dubai in which I had a forty per cent stake. The business was a victim of trouble in the region, following on from the September 11 attacks. When President George W Bush led the ‘coalition of the willing’ into Iraq, the tourists stopped coming. They had a misguided sense that bombing Baghdad, thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the Middle East, might somehow mean carnage in the UAE. Go figure, but such is the panic that mere mention of the word ‘Arab’ can induce.

  By now I had been living in the UAE for close to fifteen years. Compared to most expats, that was a marathon stint, but it was clear that time had run out for me. I salvaged what I could from the ruin of my latest business failure, loaded up a container full of antiques and headed for the exit.

  I make quick decisions and they’re not always the best ones. But I just needed to move. I was closing in on fifty years of age and I was a man without a plan.

  Twenty-one

  The returning son

  Since leaving for Al Ain in 1988 I’d made regular trips back to Australia, but with each passing year I felt increasingly detached from where I was born and raised. At my core I remained Australian, but it felt less and less like home to me.

  It’s wonderfully liberating to live a life between two continents. In a way you feel special in both: in the land of your choosing you are a foreigner and in the land of your birth you can be the returning son, coming home temporarily from time to time with exotic tales of a faraway place.

  Coming back to Australia now, though, my wings were well and truly clipped. There was no hopping on the next plane out. After years of earning good tax-free money, my latest business exploits in the UAE had left me pretty well broke. I didn’t even have enough money to clear my container of antiques from the wharves and needed a loan from my family.

  I set up home in Wangaratta, about seventy kilometres south-west of Albury on the Hume Highway. Mum had been living there since Dad died and it was within striking distance of the old family winery. After years of living in a frontier town, where fascinating strangers might wander in from the desert, frankly it felt dull.

  I saw, too, that life was not easy for most people. There was this thing called a GST and another called income tax—all the nasty parts of life in Australia I’d forgotten about. More than I had remembered, life in Australia seemed so orderly and ordered that it sucked the life out of life. Over and above all of that, Australia felt oppressive, with rules and regulations stifling everything.

  The common stereotype is that making one mistake in a country like the UAE could be fatal, but the opposite was the truth. The important thing was to be honest with the sheikhs and to make an honest effort. I couldn’t imagine in Australia having the same opportunities I’d been given in Al Ain to experiment and perhaps fail with a big new venture.

  I was a world expert when it came to camels and had coauthored a compendium on them for the University of Sydney’s Post Graduate Foundation in Veterinary Science. This A to Z on the physiology of camels represented a decade’s knowledge gained in the camel capital of the world and became a bible for students in Australia and internationally. Want the lowdown on ampullae? There it is on page twenty-six. Curious about zoonotic diseases? There are sixteen of them, listed from pages 297 to 299.

  Back in Australia, though, this counted for little. My vet registration had lapsed, so I needed to apply again. There was no need for me to sit for an exam, but I hadn’t done work with cats and dogs for fifteen years. If somebody had turned up with a sick camel, cheetah or a timber wolf, no problem. But I mightn’t be much help if Mrs Smith’s cat had a sneeze or a wheeze.

  The practice of veterinary medicine had changed a great deal in fifteen years. There were new techniques and equipment, such as anaesthetic machines with monitors attached. So I had to bluff my way through my first few locums just to get on top of things. There was a new attitude, too. People were prepared to pay hefty sums, up to six or seven thousand dollars, for treating their pet. Fifteen years before, five hundred dollars was considered too much.

  I wasn’t being paid a huge amount as a locum and the work wasn�
�t regular—if no vets were taking any holidays then there was no work for me. I love unpredictability but this was the uncomfortable kind: where to find the next dollar. So I took locums wherever they came up, in vet clinics all over Australia—from Melbourne, across to Alice Springs and Perth. I was effectively living out of the back of a four-wheel drive, moving from one temporary job to the next. It was a good way to see Australia again, and I enjoyed the work when it came along, but in truth it was not what I was best at, and that made me feel vulnerable. Dogs and cats might not be my thing, but they deserve the best care they can get.

  My youngest, Madeline, was now living in Florida with Patti, who had remarried. On the bright side, though, I could be near Katya, who was working in Melbourne, and Erica, who was now studying at Melbourne University. She had finally come to the conclusion that she wanted to be a vet. As an alternative, she had contemplated a science degree, which sounded like a good idea to me; as a scientific researcher with a multinational company there would be the opportunity to make serious money. I cautioned Erica that as a graduate vet she’d get paid less than fifty thousand dollars a year in an intern job to begin with, and then not a whole lot more later, unless she was able to do the hard yards and set up a profitable practice, a process that can take a long time.

  Erica went ahead anyway. Maybe it had been that trip to Mongolia. Maybe it was growing up surrounded by exotic and weird creatures with a mad vet as a father. Maybe it was just the power of the Tinson genes.

  I was quietly pleased with her decision. All our girls loved animals, but Erica was probably the most like me in her temperament and the way she approached an animal. The Tinson family tradition would continue.

  At the time, my decision to leave the UAE had seemed completely logical. But now I wondered what had possessed me to throw in working for one of the world’s wealthiest men with all the privileges that came with it.