Damned if I Do

by Philip Nitschke

  ‘I was hoping for something like ten thousand dollars,’ I said.

  ‘The offer’s a hundred thousand and they’ll meet the costs.’

  That made for an easy decision.

  I’d accumulated debts over my three years of medicine, and was able to clear them and have a good sum of money left over to get me through my degree. However, on getting my payout, I found I couldn’t resist the appeal of having a long break from medicine. I decided to defer, which surprised a lot of people and, even more surprisingly, I then spent most of the remaining money buying a sailing boat named Squizz, a cutter-rigged steel sloop. Marlies was keen. Having come with me on trips back to the Territory, she had also accompanied me on one where we drove my old army 4WD truck from Alice, across the Gibson and down the Canning Stock Route, to Perth. We did a sailing course in Fremantle but couldn’t find the right yacht there or in Adelaide. Eventually, we bought Squizz in Melbourne.

  With medicine temporarily deferred, I threw myself into learning how to sail on Port Phillip Bay. I started slowly, with a series of small trips, and then around the Bass Strait islands and on to Tasmania. Marlies came along some of the time. What I hadn’t known when I bought the boat, however, was just how seasick I’d get in rough weather. Once, I became trapped at Lady Barron on Flinders Island. The Squizz couldn’t perform upwind, and I made three attempts to sail west out of Franklin Sound but made almost no headway. I talked to some of the local sailors and they thought the Squizz could make it through the notorious Pot Boil to the east, but only if I picked the right time and right conditions, and that’s what I did.

  I had some magical moments sailing, such as finding a safe anchorage at an island, rowing ashore and taking in the unspoiled beauty around me. It was something like being in the desert, although if I had to choose, the desert would win.

  Before the year was out, I was taking a break in Hobart, moored at Constitution Dock, when I got a radiophone call. Sydney University was threatening to cancel my course unless I immediately returned to complete the degree. I’d deferred and deferred, and now they’d run out of patience. Having little choice, I sailed back up Australia’s east coast and found an anchorage in Botany Bay.

  The final year of a medical course is mostly spent in ­hospitals and there was intense competition to get allocated an inner-city hospital, so as not to have to spend hours commuting to and from places like Westmead and Concord in Sydney’s west. I was lucky and assigned to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown. That final year I remember having lectures on ophthalmology from Fred Hollows, who was well on his way to becoming the legend he is now.

  The squat had gone by that stage, but I had another stroke of luck when I met up with yet another Territory contact. He was something of an intellectual but with a dubious past and about to serve a period in prison for his white-collar crime. He was the only person I’ve ever met who has written a regular newspaper column about the game of chess. Anyway, he was off to prison, but had a place in Bellevue Hill that needed house-sitting, and was I interested? I was and moved in.

  I went back to Alice as often as I could. Whenever there was a break, I’d be down at Central Station, waving my half-price student ticket and going Sydney–Melbourne, Melbourne–Adelaide, Adelaide–Alice. I even made one memorable trip hidden in the back of a friend’s car. It was summer and I was particularly broke and needed to get back to Sydney. So I convinced a mate who was taking his car on the Ghan from Alice to Adelaide to let me stow away. I climbed into the car in mid afternoon, just before it was to be loaded, and lay concealed under a blanket in the back seat. As sweat dripped from every pore, I seriously thought I’d have to give in, reveal myself and confess. Finally, at dusk, I felt movement and within minutes the train pulled out of Alice Springs and we were away. Thank Christ. I’d had the wherewithal to bring a six-pack and a cooked chicken with me, not to mention a few litres of water, most of which I’d drunk while under the blanket. The sunset that night was breathtaking, as was the following morning’s sunrise. A 360-degree view of the Outback, the ranges, the immense vastness. One of life’s unforgettable moments.

  With medicine now almost finished, the issue of organising an internship came up. I wanted to get out of New South Wales and back to the Territory, so applied for the Alice Springs Hospital, but was knocked back; this wasn’t because of any earlier troubles but because this hospital was too small to take any interns. Instead, I got a placement at Royal Darwin.

  EIGHT

  The Top End

  I head a little further north each year

  Leave the cities behind, out of sight, out of mind

  Graeme Connors, ‘A Little Further North’

  I’m keen on country music, so, at the beginning of 1989 as I drove north to start my new life at Royal Darwin Hospital, I had the gentle lilt of Graeme Connors’ ‘A Little Further North’ echoing through my old Toyota Landcruiser. I was simply so pleased to be going back to where I felt I belonged—albeit 1500 kilometres further north, up the track.

  When I started work in the hospital, I was one of fourteen interns from different medical schools all over Australia. Sydney University’s claim to be ‘the best’ was quickly shown to be rubbish—some of the new doctors seemed as well trained as Sydney graduates, and quite a few were better.

  As an intern, you’re very low in any hospital’s pecking order, and some of the medical and nursing staff will take any opportunity to show you up for all you don’t know. You usually start off in the general fields of surgery or medicine and then move into more specialised areas. For some reason, in Darwin I was thrown straight into orthopaedics, about which I knew bugger all. Steve Baddeley (the surgeon who had operated on my heel many years earlier) was the head of the section, and as intern, I had to trail around after him and the other orthopaedic registrars and resident medical ­officers (RMOs), picking up what I could. On day three, the ­section’s senior registrar, Robin Cripps, told me to see a certain patient, and take blood so his electrolytes could be determined. I could see that the patient had little time left; I tried to talk to him but he was almost comatose.

  I would have had to use a needle to get blood from his veins and I asked the sister what the point of this was.

  ‘Because Robin wants it,’ was the answer.

  I thought, I’m not going to do this, and I went back to Cripps and said it was a waste of time.

  He said, ‘You’re a fucking intern and you’ll do what you’re fucking told.’

  Baddeley was present and he just nodded; I was being shown how the system works and where the power lies. So I had to rush off and stick a needle into this dying patient.

  In that orthopaedic world, Steve Baddeley was god. He drove around in a sports car, and ruled. He set the agenda, and had us all working at weekends, doing ward rounds. He’d put us under the microscope: ‘What’s your view of so and so? Have you done this, have you done that?’ I found him hard going at times but gradually our relationship improved, and he was to be very important years later, when the euthanasia issue broke.

  Boxing—amateur and some professional—was ­important in Darwin and I got involved in a roundabout way. I took a phone call one day when working in the accident and emergency section, from Boyd Scully at the Territory Boxing Association. He asked if there was a doctor willing to be present at a few forthcoming fights, as the law required. Apparently, the doctor who usually officiated wasn’t ­available. I asked the medicos if anyone was interested, but got a storm of censure back, with the registrar saying, ‘Boxing’s not a sport; you set out to do injury. It’s against AMA policy, you know.’ This annoyed me. These people (mostly Aboriginal) were trying to stage a popular event and they’d have to call it off if a doctor wouldn’t stand in. So I agreed to do it.

  I found it fascinating as I learnt the rules and regulations about how the fights were to be conducted. I had to ­examine the boxers before the bouts, to ensur
e they were fit to fight and, during the bouts, check on any developing medical problems—cuts, blood in the eyes, severe bruising. The amateurs fought three three-minute rounds and wore headgear, and the trainers and referees kept a close eye on them. The fights were stopped if a boxer got into trouble and I thought it generally ran well. One of my jobs was to help rule exactly when a fight should be stopped.

  Things were rougher in the professional fights, which went on for much longer: up to twelve rounds; as well, there was no headgear and there was always money involved. I remember one fight, at the Nightcliff pub, where things got ugly. One of the boxers was clearly outclassed and the referee stopped the fight. I agreed with him, but the crowd had other ideas and erupted, throwing chairs and whatever else they could lay their hands on. I was glad I wasn’t the one who’d had to announce the decision.

  Most of the fighters were black and the people associated with boxing weren’t from the middle-class, so I was brought into contact with a different segment of society. On occasion, when I was out of my depth with some problems concerning the fighters, I would ring doctors down south who’d had years of experience in the field, and was never let down. My involvement with Northern Territory boxing is one of my happier Darwin memories.

  A spin-off from my involvement in boxing was winning, in 1990, a thousand-dollar prize in a competition the hospital ran, in which interns and junior doctors were invited to put up research proposals. The results were presented at a dinner, to which everyone was invited. After doing a lot of reading on the subject—and this was typical of me; I’ll read a lot about things I’m interested in, but not much for ­recreation—I built a small accelerometer (a device that can measure force) to be positioned inside a boxer’s headgear to measure the speed and intensity of blows to the head. The real-time results were radio-linked to a ringside ­computer, which would record each punch, its time and force, as a blip on the screen. The device was designed to help with the scoring system used in boxing, as it’s often hard for the naked eye to accurately judge scoring punches. It worked pretty well. I tried to interest Arthur Tunstall, the head of the Australian Amateur Boxing Association, in it, but he showed little interest in this new technology.

  Anyway, I won the prize, but in medical circles some people did not view the project favourably. There is a lot of hypocrisy in medicine. If you’re opposed to the idea of people punching each other as sport, say so, but don’t dress up your objections as being a medical matter, which many doctors did. The evidence regarding physical damage from amateur boxing is far from clear, and it needs to be compared with injury from other contact sports such as rugby, for a specific case to be made against it.

  That year, I also officiated as boxing doctor at the first Arafura Games, a week-long sporting event held in Darwin every second year, and did so until recently. The games began in 1991, and, apart from their cancellation in 2003 because of the Asian bird flu, had run regularly, attracting competitors from more than thirty countries, playing a range of sports. In 2012 the CLP Territory government announced that the games would be cancelled because of the cost. Their future is now uncertain.

  At the end of that second year at Royal Darwin, I decided to bring the Squizz to Darwin. She’d been slopping around in Botany Bay and Marlies, who was completing her naturopathy course in Sydney, would row out from time to time to do some maintenance. It’s hard enough looking after a boat when you’re nearby, but a real pain when you’re not. The plan was for Marlies and me to sail her up the coast, through the Torres Strait, to Darwin. We got to Byron Bay and anchored. Reports of bad weather ahead started to come in, but I’d been through rough weather in Bass Strait and didn’t take it seriously enough. We went ashore and climbed up to the lighthouse to see the view. When we got back to the boat, the radio weather reports were even worse and, later that night, we started to drag the anchor.

  I thought, Bloody hell, we’d better get out of here. With onshore winds, we were likely to be driven ashore. It was about 2 a.m., conditions were dreadful, and after an immense struggle we finally managed to get the anchor up. I thought it would be impossible to tack upwind to get out of the bay; I’d have to motor out. And then I made one of my worst mistakes, one you read about in all the books: I managed to get the anchor trip line caught in the propeller. That finished the motor as soon as it started up. The only thing left was to tack, tack, tack, slowed down by the trapped anchor held under the hull, to fight our way out of the bay. We spent the whole night, in drenching rain, slowly making headway till finally Byron Bay was cleared and we could move north up the coast.

  Battling along through the next day, I thought, We’ll stop as soon as we can to sort things out, but all the ports were closed due to the weather. I radioed that we were in trouble, that we couldn’t anchor effectively because my large anchor was out of action and the emergency one wouldn’t do. As we crossed the Queensland border, the coastguard at Point Danger suggested we come in to the lee of the point, that there was a bit of protection there and they could take us off the boat. They reckoned they could also help us by bringing out a 75-kg anchor on a jet ski. It was getting dark and we were both exhausted. I put my goggles on one last time, and went down, cut the trip-line free and released our trapped anchor. We were taken to the Rainbow Bay Lifesaving Club, and I thought that finally things were improving and the boat was safe. We were now in Queensland and a photographer from the Gold Coast Bulletin took a picture to illustrate the drama that was going on. Two boats were lost at sea that day: the Rockin’ Robin, whose four crew had been seen getting into a life raft that had been dropped from a rescue aircraft, but then never seen again; and the Banshee, carrying two women who were sailing to New Zealand—they lost their boat, but were rescued by a Taiwanese freighter.

  Marlies and I were put up in the lifesaving club and given bunks to sleep in. It was a great relief after twenty-four sleepless hours, with me being seasick the whole time. I got up in the morning and thought I’d have a look at how the boat was doing. It was gone. I couldn’t believe it. Marlies came out to find me staring out to sea. We ran to the coastguard office and broke the news, then sat around for about five hours, waiting. I was convinced the boat had gone to the bottom. Finally, search and rescue found it, way out to sea, still floating but dismasted. It must have rolled over, torn free of the big anchor, and lost its mast and all the rigging. A tremendous amount of damage. I was amazed that the Squizz hadn’t been washed ashore but strange things happen at sea. The coastguard went out, hooked it up, and towed it in to the Southport Yacht Club.

  It stayed there, a bedraggled-looking wreck and source of great interest, amongst the millionaires’ yachts. For some weeks we lived in a Gold Coast motel and tried to get some basic repairs done; eventually some insurance money came in and Squizz was moved to where proper repairs could be carried out. The upshot was that, instead of the romantic adventure of sailing through Torres Strait to Darwin, I sold the boat and flew on to Darwin while Marlies returned to Sydney. Eventually I used what was left of the insurance money to buy another yacht, a 10-metre steel sloop Nullagai—a much better one, which had already been around the world.

  Later, I saw a photograph of Squizz in a magazine that advertises boats for sale, and I once even saw her afloat in a Queensland marina. Now, though, I had dreams of sailing my new yacht, Nullagai, to foreign ports. I lived on the boat for a time in Darwin and sailed it occasionally on the harbour, but as my interests changed and the euthanasia issue descended upon me, I couldn’t devote the time needed to maintain it properly. Eventually, it became derelict and it now sits, rusting and decaying in the jungle on my rural property at Darwin. I call it a ‘monument to my failed dreams’ and feel guilty about it because the previous owner and builder of this yacht took great pride in the boat. It deserved a better fate.

  * * *

  At the end of my intern year at Darwin hospital, Marlies and I went to Germany to spend Christmas with her family. Marlies ha
d continued to live in Sydney, finishing a naturopathy course. During that time while I was alone in Darwin, I became involved with the visiting ophthalmology ­registrar, Kate. As a result, the trip to Germany did not go well. When Marlies and I returned to Australia after the holiday, the loose plan was that I would go straight back to Darwin and she would join me a few months later. However, torn as I was at having to make a choice, Kate won out. On Marlies’ arrival north, I had to tell her of the dilemma. To her credit, she was having none of it and left on the next bus back to Sydney. Despite the rather shameful way I treated her in the final stages of our relationship we remain friends. She is a woman of incredible inner strength and integrity, one of the few people I’ve met that I would trust with my life.

  The relationship with Kate was never going to work. It was another Darwin romance, an infatuation, something the hospital was renowned for. Seconded staff were often miles away from their southern homes, trapped in the staff village and surrounded by the sensory beauty of the tropics. Intense, but transitory, the relationship finally floundered after a few months as the pre-Wet build-up put everyone on edge. Kate moved back to Sydney.

  Not long after this, a young paediatric registrar would appear on the scene. Like Jenny, Paddy and Marlies, Tristan would remain an integral part of my life for the next decade. As a junior hospital doctor, you don’t forget some of the nicer, more experienced doctors who help you along the way—Tristan was one. We met while I was working in ­casualty. When seriously ill children were brought in, as a senior paediatric registrar Tristan was often called in for emergencies: a young child may have nearly drowned in a pool or be near to death from severe dehydration. What impressed me about Tristan was the utter calm with which she approached these chaotic medical situations where life and death were in the balance. Her ability to instil order and exude authority and assurance as the rest of us ran around in a panic was greatly admired by the casualty staff. Our professional relationship quickly became a personal one, as is so common in Darwin. Although from very different backgrounds, and of almost opposite temperaments, our relationship worked very well for a number of years.