Then I began building little cannons and working out some way of firing the gunpowder using electrical detonation. My best friend at the time was Phillip Lange, who grew up on a farm and spent most of his time playing sport, but was quite intrigued by the idea of manufacturing explosives. We built a small bomb and put it under the water in the local creek, the Broughton River. We’d rigged up the electrical detonation and, when we pressed the plunger we’d made, it blew up impressively underwater. We thought that was fantastic.
Then I became even more ambitious. I started to read and think about more sophisticated explosives, like nitro-glycerine, and thought if I could just make this, that would have an impact. I had become a trusted member of the science class at school, as one of the few people interested in chemistry. Tom Bowden was the science master there and he used to give me free rein of the laboratory, in return for helping out and cleaning up. Although I did pay my dues. I remember one time when the class was doing an experiment to demonstrate the enzymatic dissolving of starch with saliva, Bowden said to me, ‘You’re the science monitor, you can collect the class sample.’ So, with my beaker, I had to go around to all the students asking them to spit into it, and, of course, two or three of those bastards deliberately spat onto my hand.
‘Oh, sorry.’
But, as I say, I was trusted, and I got access to the chemicals and was allowed to take the odd thing home, including the necessary nitric acid. I had a little laboratory set up in the back yard and was sitting there, gingerly pouring my nitric acid into the glycerine. When I look back at it … well, people lose their hands and their heads. It’s dangerous stuff, and my experiments with it didn’t work, but I was lucky I didn’t lose a limb, or worse.
My parents were vaguely aware of my experiments but not too concerned about them. They thought it was very good that I was taking an interest in these kinds of academic pursuits. My father became annoyed once, though, when I fired one of the cannons I’d made. There was a large explosion and it shot a steel projectile—a bolt about half an inch in diameter—straight through the wall of his galvanised iron shed and out the other side.
Related to this kind of mischief was an incident that got me the only caning I ever received at school. I was having a conflict with another person: my friend Phillip Lange. We’d built these home-made pistols that fired starting-pistol caps. Philip was annoying me, so I took his poetry book out of his locker and fired the pistol straight at it. The cover and the first ten pages disintegrated, and quite a bit of smoke and a stench came out of the locker room.
It was reported to the headmaster, Mr Slee, and Lange and I, and another bloke who just happened to be there, were hauled up before the head to explain. I was the guilty one but the other two wouldn’t dob me in. Slee said, ‘You’re all going to get caned’, and we did. I was the bus prefect, with the job of getting everyone into the vehicle for the 18-kilometre trip from Koolunga to the school at Brinkworth, and everyone was impressed by the livid welts I had for the next day or two, and my hand swelled up quite badly.
Then we all got mad keen on model aeroplanes with small internal combustion motors, and Slee, probably trying to steer me towards more peaceful pursuits, gave me a plane of his that had a solid main wing, in contrast to the hollow tissue and balsa ones we were building. It had a big, by our standards, engine: a 5.0-cubic-centimetre glow-plug motor. We spent a lot of time—Lange, me and a couple of others—playing around with model aeroplanes. We were building them and flying them, and using those motors for other things, such as putting them in boats that we raced up and down in the waterholes in the Broughton.
My father and my brother hunted—kangaroos—with .303 rifles. Sensibly, my father forbade me to have a rifle until I was well into my high-school years. In fact, I got into trouble for stealing his .303 and firing it into a tree when I was eleven or twelve. Eventually I saved enough money from part-time jobs to buy a .22 rifle. With this I hunted rabbits and foxes. I also had a hunting knife. Questionable now, I know, but I’ve been around firearms all my life. A knife and a gun were to play unusual roles in my life.
It wasn’t all explosions and engines. For instance, I saw a unicyclist at a circus and thought, I’d like to do that. I built a unicycle out of spare parts and set about learning to ride it, which I became able to do quite well. It cost me skin and gave me bruises, and it took persistence, but that’s an attribute I have.
Religion played no role in my family’s life. I was dragged off to church when we visited the Richardsons at Christmas but it made so little impact on me I don’t even remember its denomination, though it was probably C of E. I was more exposed to religion in the later stages of my secondary schooling. My mother wanted me to go to university and I’d need solid school results to make it. And as my school at the time, Brinkworth Area School, only went as far as third-year high school, my father decided I should go to Concordia College, a private Lutheran boarding school in Adelaide, which my older brother had also attended.
One snag was that it was an intensely religious institution, and it insisted that all students be confirmed in the Lutheran religion. Somehow, my father knew that an unconfirmed student would certainly receive a large dose of prayer and scripture, something he also knew I wouldn’t take kindly to, so he arranged for me to get some instruction in Lutheranism in the local Brinkworth church. This instruction was minimal and uninteresting, but it enabled me to present at the school with my shonky certificate attesting I was a confirmed Lutheran. When I saw the drills the unconfirmed students were subjected to, I was grateful for my father’s foresight.
Nevertheless, I was herded with the other boys into chapel every morning. There were prayers at night and on Sundays, with two long church services that were torture. The school aimed to train boys for the ministry, and stressed scripture and Greek and Latin, none of which appealed to me. I wanted to do science, which wasn’t held in high esteem, and may even have been viewed with suspicion. I found the school’s atmosphere and culture stifling, and begged my parents to put me back in the state system.
I did my final school year at Henley High in Adelaide. That suited me much better but I ran into serious trouble. I was fourteen, not turning fifteen until the August of that year, and 100 kilometres from home—pretty young to be boarding in a strange place with people I didn’t know. Not to mince matters, the man in whose house I was boarding was feeling me up whenever he got the chance. This was done in the guise of getting close to me and helping me with my schoolwork—but it was help I didn’t need.
You hear a lot about this kind of sexual harassment now, but it was an undiscussed subject back then. Like many people who’ve had this experience, I didn’t know what to do and was frightened. I felt trapped. I’d argued so strongly with my parents to get me out of the Lutheran boarding school and I’d thought the new situation was going to be great, only to find it was worse. As a way of escaping from an intolerable situation, of making a cry for help that couldn’t be ignored, I killed the family’s pet with my hunting knife.
In any event, I was lucky and unlucky. Lucky, in that my father realised quickly that using a knife to kill a pet dog was unacceptable and dangerous and took me to a psychiatrist to have me psychologically assessed. He knew I would then have a better chance of escaping any kind of juvenile criminal penalty, which is exactly what happened. I was unlucky, in that The Advertiser picked up the story. As something indelibly on the public record, this story has been used ever since by those opposed to my work as a campaigner for voluntary euthanasia.
It isn’t argument, it’s mud-slinging, but it can be effective. Related to this are the slurs that have been levelled at me because of my name: so German-sounding, so like that of the philosopher Nietzsche, so suggestive of Nazism. I’d have avoided much of this if I’d been a Richardson like my mum.
As a result of starting school early and keeping pace with the older students, I was qualified t
o enter university when I was not yet sixteen. Under the old South Australian system—modelled, I think, on an aspect of English school arrangements (South Australia being a very Anglophile society then)—you could qualify for university entrance after your fourth year of high school. So I’d made it, made university, on the basis of my year at Concordia, despite my problems with the boarding school. My year at Henley High was the one called ‘Leaving Honours’ and my earlier results stood, despite the disruption caused by killing the dog.
Quite early in my school career, it was obvious that maths and science subjects were where I performed best. My matriculation results—mostly As and a few more Bs—were good enough to get me a Commonwealth scholarship, which paid the university fees and included a small living allowance.
A little naïve perhaps, but not as green as some of those around me, I prepared for university in January 1964. I’d had to deal with a lot of dislocation and a trauma as I moved through adolescence. And, on the positive side, I’d had my first sexual experience with a girl named Trenna when I was thirteen and still at high school in the country and had, at least technically, lost my virginity. Farm girls knew a lot about sex. I felt I was ready for what university had to offer.
THREE
In Adelaide—stormy weather
I soon chose to study physics, the subject I was best at. I did not study hard …
Philip Nitschke, 2004
Photographs from the 1960s show me with very long hair and a hippie look, a typical left-leaning university student. In those days, my black beret gave me the highly fashionable Che Guevara look. I was never much of a general reader—images interested me more than the written word. As a kid, I was more likely to read comics than books, apart from ones about science. Just as some people have a knack for languages or music, I have a talent, or a knack, for maths and physics, particularly of the more hands-on, experimental variety.
I passed science exams with ease, which is not to say that I found exams easy. I was always anxious, and those three-hour sit-ins when you have to perform under pressure, and your future depends on your performance, stressed me, causing me sleepless nights.
There were ups and downs in my undergraduate years. I was living away from home most of the time, sharing flats and houses with other students. I had jobs in the holidays, of which more later, and I had a car. I also had a girlfriend named Margaret, who was the sister of a friend from university, and I remember a torrid night at the Murray Bridge drive-in watching Elvis in Love Me Tender, when we weren’t doing other things.
I’d go back to Murray Bridge every weekend and meet up with Margaret, and we’d go to coffee lounges and spend time in the back seat of the car, parked at her parents’ house. We used to write to each other every second day. I was sixteen and she was fourteen, and her parents put a stop to things, saying she was not old enough for such a serious relationship. Suddenly I got a letter from her saying she couldn’t have anything more to do with me because her parents said she was too young.
This was in the final term of that first year of university and I was terribly upset. I reacted by piling up all her letters and burning them in the incinerator at the back of the boarding house I was then living in. I threw myself into my studies, which was unusual, and with such enthusiasm that I did very well—I topped the year in mathematics and got distinctions in everything I sat for. Being dumped was part of that—it was the spur.
Then, in the holidays, I started to search furiously for a replacement for Margaret and I went to a dance at Norwood with a couple of friends. I met Jenny there and was completely captivated by her. She was an apprentice hairdresser, and was very fashionably dressed and very beautiful. I’d never met anyone like her. This was not only because she was so good looking but because she was at ease in any company. I was shy—I still am, and have to push myself in social situations. Just being with her boosted my confidence and helped me to cope socially; she was so attractive, and her prestige rubbed off on me. We were together through the holidays and the following year, and stayed together for the best part of a decade.
I was never quite sure what attracted Jenny to me. She was gregarious and adventurous. I’d describe her as someone who would go to the moon, who was ready for anything, so, I suppose, there was a wild streak in me that must have appealed to her, at least for a time.
I attracted the attention of the media again in my second year at university. One night, my precious portable transistor radio was stolen from my car when it was parked outside the St Clair Recreation Centre in Woodville. The thing to do every Saturday night was go there to a dance, to meet people—girls, in particular. I reported the theft to the police, and the officer at the desk—who was quite nice, in fact—told me bluntly that I’d be unlikely to see it again and said there was little the police would be able do about it. I carried on a bit, but he told me to be realistic, that it wasn’t the greatest crime in the world.
I was angry and I wasn’t accepting that, so I borrowed my father’s car and put an imitation radio on its dashboard, leaving the window down slightly. I got my friend Jim Thomson, a fellow physics student, to drive the car to much the same place it had been parked in before. I stayed in the boot with my rifle, while Jim and Jenny went in to the dance. I had the boot not quite closed, so when I heard two people mumbling, and felt the car lurch, I threw open the lid. One ran, but I stuck the rifle in the other one’s face and told him he was under a citizen’s arrest.
As this was well before mobile phones, I marched him, with his hands up, to the nearest house, knocked on the door and asked the man who answered to ring the police. There was a bit of pandemonium, because it must have looked like a hold-up to him, but he rang the police, and they showed up very quickly.
The guy I’d bailed up said, ‘Look, I was just walking down the street and this crazy jumps out of a car, with a gun.’
One of the police said to me, ‘What’s your side of the story?’
I convinced them that I was telling the truth. They took the bloke across the road to where it was dark, pushed him over roughly, picked him up and then did it again. That was an eye-opener. One of them came back to where I was and told me the guy had confirmed my story.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘that gun isn’t loaded, is it?’
I said it wasn’t, but it was. He left and went on with the ‘interrogation’ over the road, and I was sitting there, getting bullets out of the rifle as fast as I could and spilling them all over the place. The policeman returned, saw what was happening and chose not to notice, but told me I’d come close to being in very serious trouble and never to do anything like that again.
The police went to the suspect’s place and found it stacked with stolen goods. I got my transistor back but it never worked as well as it had, and it was covered in Port Adelaide Football Club stickers—and I hated Port Adelaide.
Somehow, word got around about my citizen’s arrest and the story appeared on the front page of The Advertiser. A television station asked me to give them an interview. I did (my first), and a picture of me holding the gun was shown. I gave them chapter and verse on how the police had said there was nothing they could do. Soon after that, a police inspector came visiting.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘that constable you named on television is now in quite a bit of trouble. We’re not supposed to tell the public there’s nothing the police can do.’
He produced a statement for me to sign that, in more diplomatic language, had me admitting that what I’d said was bullshit. I remembered the desk constable as being a nice bloke and the inspector spoke well of him, so I thought, What the hell, and signed the statement. About two months later, I got a letter from the Commissioner of Police commending me as a model citizen. So for lying I got a commendation. There was a lesson in that: organisations are not always what they seem and don’t always do what they say. The two newsworthy events I was involved in also taugh
t me that solving your own problems can cast you as a hero or a villain, depending on the perspective.
The rifle itself was a Browning .22 automatic my father had given me. I liked it—it had an eight-round stock magazine, and broke in the middle and folded down to a very compact size. I waited until the very last day to surrender it under John Howard’s gun buyback that was passed after the Port Arthur massacre. I happened to be in Victoria, and Bendigo was the nearest place where guns could be handed in. I had tears in my eyes when I brought it in. I said I was planning to go sailing and it would be a good idea to have a gun. The sergeant said, ‘You can have a gun, but you can’t have an automatic like this one.’ But he took pity on me, saying something like, ‘Got sentimental value, has it, son?’ I said it had been my father’s, and he let me go in to where they had the guillotine, and I watched silently as it destroyed the rifle.
* * *
I always worked in the holidays. I did fruit picking at the end of my last school year and, after my first year at university, I got a job at the James Hardie factory in Adelaide. I was dealing with tyres but there was the odd brush with asbestos, which I don’t like thinking about. The next year I thought, I’m not going back to that place, because, god, it was hard work lugging tyres around. So, in 1966, I got a job at the Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury. It was established, as I understand it, to facilitate the Woomera rocket program, and a lot of the peripheral scientific equipment needed was developed there, so, in the holidays, they were taking on university science students to assist with various projects. The first year I was with an electronic development unit, and things went well; in the second year I got a really interesting project in night vision. They were investigating whether the Australian Army should spend money on purchasing expensive new night-vision glasses that had been developed in America or whether they should just issue everyone with good binoculars. I found myself sitting in a totally dark room for the first three hours of the day, getting dark adapted, and then going into a test tunnel to look at low-illuminated targets at certain distances, and using image intensifiers and binoculars to see how they compared. I enjoyed the work. I had to be careful, though, wearing red goggles so that I didn’t lose my dark adaption when I left the tunnel. I’d be sitting in the cafeteria at lunchtime with my bright red goggles on. People found that intriguing.
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