Stories from A Lifetime by RJP

Stories  from a Lifetime

Bob Payten proof copy

Stories  from a Lifetime

Bob Payten

Foreward

I have often thought how interesting it would be if autobiographies written by my grandparents were available for me to read today. They would have extended from the time of the American Civil War into the 20th century and would have covered the inventions of the light bulb, the telephone, the wireless, moving pictures, the motor car and the aeroplane.

With this in mind, I imagine that my grandchildren, when they are middle aged or older, might find these memories of mine just a bit interesting, covering the advent of TV, jet engines, a man on the moon, computers, the mobile phone, the internet and wi-fi.

My story begins growing up at Kaloola, a property in the Lachlan River valley, with my parents Jack and Emilie, sisters Helen, Jan, Kathie and Marianne, and my brother David. It progresses from a one room single teacher Payten’s Bridge Public School, to gaining a Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, England and becoming an ENT Surgeon in Sydney.

I realize how lucky I was to have such good parents who provided a loving home life and sacrificed much to send us all to boarding school and University, and that all six of us siblings have stayed very close for all of our lives.

I have also been the luckiest man alive to have had the love of Mairi over what is almost sixty years of marriage, the love of our children Caroline, Emma, James and Iain, and now of nine grandchildren too.

My career as a Doctor has been rewarding, especially when one considers the trust people put in you to operate on them or their children.

In the COVID19 lockdowns of March 2020 and July 2021, during which we were not allowed to go more than five kilometers from home, I found myself with plenty of time on my hands, and finally got around to recording a few memorable stories.

To begin with I might never have been born at all!

Two years before I was born, my father Jack Payten became very ill and was admitted to Forbes Hospital with pneumonia. This was a common form of death in that pre-antibiotic era and he was delirious, with a very high fever, and things did not look at all good.

My mother Emilie was also in Forbes hospital, having given birth to my sister Kathie on 22 July, 1937. My sisters Helen and Jan, then five and two, can remember staying in the Albion Hotel with Nanna (Mum’s mother) who had come up from Sydney to lend a hand. Jan says that her earliest memory is being looked after by the kitchen staff while Nanna was off visiting Mum in the obstetric hospital, with Daddy in the general hospital.

Poor Mum must have been very worried about being a widow with three children under the age of five. At the time my uncle Bayly Payten was Sydney’s leading trainer and was training a horse for Dr Leo Flynn, a physician at St Vincent’s and Lewisham Hospitals.

Uncle Bayly and Daddy with their father, trainer Tom Payten, about 1911.

Uncle Bayly, who won seven Trainers’ Premierships between 1940–1948.

After contacting Leo about my father’s illness, Dr. Flynn told Bayly that they were having success in treating pneumonia with a new medication called sulphonamide (penicillin was not yet around), and sent some up overnight on the Forbes mail train.

Daddy responded quickly and regained full health. And so, I was born two years later, thanks to the sulphonamides that had saved my father’s life!

Helen recalls the story of how a thoroughbred had escaped from our front paddock and made it all the way up to Tom Cutcliffe’s, about seven miles away on the Forbes Road. Daddy set off on horseback to retrieve the racehorse, (which perhaps was one that Uncle Bayly had sent up for a spell). By the time he got home it was quite late and he had become quite chilled, and this he blamed on how he caught pneumonia, (a common belief at the time). To a certain extent he was right, as cold air decreases the mucosal resistance to organisms. Thereafter he always wore a woollen singlet except in the warm weather.

In my first year at Lewisham Hospital in 1964, aged twenty-four, I worked for Dr. Leo Flynn. He was a nice old fellow and we often had a bit of a chat. Apparently, in the pre WWll and pre-antibiotic period the hospital wards were full of people with pneumonia, and they very often did not survive.

Leo had looked after my uncle Bayly Payten when he was very ill. He told me that Bayly’s heart was beating very rapidly, and the few medications that were available at the time could not slow it down, (those we have today would). Dr. Leo Flynn had saved my father’s life in 1937, but he sadly could not do the same for my Uncle Bayly eleven years later. Uncle Bayly died in 1948, aged only fifty-two years old.

Early Memories & Stories

My parents, Jack Payten and Emilie Dwyer, were married at Randwick church in 1930, and made a home at “Kaloola”, a property in the Lachlan River valley, twenty-five miles from Forbes on the Cowra Road. They had both grown up in the city, and it must have taken them a while to adjust to living in the bush without electricity, no radio and a very basic telephone party line – especially Mum, who was almost thirty by the time she married and began life as a farmer’s wife. The twelve mile trip to the closest little town of Gooloogong took a good hour in a horse and sulky, and it took even longer to visit Dad’s older brother Leo at ‘Alfalfa’, on the Canowindra road.

Jack and Emilie had seven children: Helen (1932), Jean (1934, cot death), Jan (1935), Kathie (1937), Robert/Bob (1939), David (1942), Marianne (1944 – 2023).

I know I was born on a Saturday evening, because Daddy had been sent off to the Forbes picture theatre after dropping Mum off at the hospital. When he came back at half time, I was already born.

My earliest memory is from the age of two years and ten months old. I can distinctly remember David as a baby coming home from Forbes Hospital with Mum and Daddy in KB491, our sky blue 1939 Chevrolet. KB491 could be very hard to start, especially on a cold winter morning, and such was the case early on the morning of 17 August 1942. Racing to the hospital after a delayed start, David was born on the back seat on the outskirts of Forbes. As Daddy drove off the main road, down along a side track leading to Chislett’s vegetable garden and orchard, the car leaned a bit to the right. The newborn David fell off the back seat onto the floor – such was his introduction to life!

In the Kaloola front garden as a baby, and again a bit older, with Mum & my older sisters Helen, Jan & Kathie.

Example of a ‘39 Chevrolet.

Off to school in the cart pulled by Penny.

Riding aged four, before I became allergic to horses.

I had been staying next door at “Woodbine” with Uncle Joe (my father’s brother) and Margie, distant cousin and housekeeper, and was picked up as Daddy brought Mum and David home. My earliest memory is of standing on the hump in the floor of the back of KB491, looking over the bench seat. All I could see was a bundle totally wrapped up in a white shawl. “Where’s the baby?” I asked, and I remember Mum and Daddy both laughing!

We had the Chevrolet until 1950, and in its later years, the back door would suddenly open. On one occasion, Kathie fell out of the crowded back seat onto long green grass by the side of the road just before we reached the first ramp. Daddy always drove very slowly, so on that road was probably only going 20 mph and fortunately no harm was done!

As we grew up, whenever we called into Chislett’s to do the vegetable shopping, Mrs Chislett would pay David a great deal of attention in her Yorkshire accent:“Ullo and how’s our David today”. I always wondered why it was that I was never even acknowledged! Years later, when I was told the story, it all made sense

Growing up at Kaloola was a very happy time. As a young child I was often going out in the paddocks with Daddy in the horse and cart or riding on the tractor. Horses were a big part of our life – all learned to ride at a young age and they were essential for farm work.

In 1942, my elder two sisters Helen and Jan, aged nine and six, would ride their horses Patch and Penny three and a half miles to Payten’s Bridge School. Penny was a very spirited small edition of a racehorse, and some said she had a touch of Timor pony. She would spend the school day in the small horse paddock on the river side of the school yard.

Jan, Helen & Kathie on Frisky, Patch & Penny.

When school was over, Mr Roy Newham, (who taught all six classes), would help with saddling up and hold the pony’s head while six-year-old Jan climbed aboard.

Once ready, he would let go, and Penny would bolt for home with Jan hanging on to her mane for dear life. After a mile or so, near Percy Scot’s gate, Penny would be exhausted and slow down enough for Helen to catch up on Patch. By the time Kathie started school in 1943, the three girls drove to school in a cart pulled by Penny.

The Italian Prisoners

A big thing to happen was the arrival of the Italian prisoners of war in the spring of 1942. Giovanni Marra’s name was anglicised by the Army to Johnny but Rinaldo Izzi refused to be called Ronald. He insisted, “My name is Rinaldo”. They came from Campobasso, north east of Naples, on the Volturno River, and were captured in North Africa. Rinaldo had been a professional soldier prior to WW2 and had been involved in the war in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) from 1935 to 1937.

I remember being told that Rinaldo had to be led off the ship at that time when he came home. He had become almost blind, presumably due to vitamin A deficiency, but by the time he arrived at Kaloola his vision had fully returned. These prisoners had been held in the POW camp at Cowra. All the fit young local men were away fighting the war, and so with a shortage of labour, the Italians were much sought after to work on farms. The Japanese, however, were not allowed out of the POW camp.

Kathie, five at the time and not yet at school, was taking afternoon tea down to the woolshed when she saw the Army truck driving up the main road to the house. Having been warned that these prisoners were due to arrive and to

Rinaldo doing his washing.

Johnny in his POW garb, Kathy, Helen, David, me, Jan, Rinaldo, 1944.

be careful of them, she can remember being frightened and hiding in the crop where she wouldn’t be seen.

The Italians were very hard workers, on the farm and in the house. With no electricity, no washing machine or other labour saving devices, there was a great deal of domestic work as well as farm work. Johnny was softnatured and helped Mum with all of that. My father gave them each a wrist watch and a leather working jacket to wear in the winter.

There were rabbits everywhere in the late afternoon, and you could easily see twenty to thirty around the house. Often the Italians would shoot them with a .22 rifle. We had a big fawn coloured kangaroo dog named Kanga who was half as big again as a greyhound, but much the same shape, who could run down rabbits with ease and could clear a barb wire fence at full speed.

On Sundays, Rinaldo and Johnny would take off on our children’s bikes to catch up with Italians on neighbouring farms and quite often came home laden with dead rabbits. They also sometimes kept live rabbits in the chook yard, which they had dug out of burrows, ready for some quick take-away food when needed. They lived in “the hut,” which was about a hundred metres south of the house and had a bedroom and a kitchen with a wood stove.

It was fascinating to watch them make pasta. First a big mountain of flour on the kitchen table, then crack a few eggs into a crater in the flour and mix it all up. Roll the dough on the table with a broom handle until it was nice and thin, and cut it up into fine strips, which would would then be put out on a tray in the sun to dry, often up on the tank stand. They also grew great tomatoes in our vegetable garden. So, that was our introduction to fettucine.

Rinaldo and Johnny were keen to find out where their old friend and great character Petesha was located. Eventually it was discovered that he was working for the Reymonds on a farm nearer to Forbes and they also had a vineyard. Daddy dropped the two of them off on his way to Forbes, and described the heartfelt scene of the reunion with their old friend. At the end of a poplar-fringed drive stood Petesha with arms outstretched, and at the top of the drive, Rinaldo and Johnny. They ran towards each other and embraced at halfway, like a scene from a movie.

When Daddy called in later in the day, it was difficult to get them to come home as they had been on the vineyard wine for a few hours. My father had visions of trouble with the authorities, as they wouldn’t get in the car and prisoners were not allowed off their allotted farms. Eventually they got in and had an argument all the way home, the only word understood by Daddy was “tractor”. It seems they were jealous of each other as to who drove the tractor on Kaloola as they had never driven any motor vehicles back in Italy. The next day they looked worse for wear.

Another local Italian was Caserta who worked next door for Uncle Joe and became known as Courageous Caserta. It happened like this:

During the war, it was very difficult to buy new equipment, and so good second-hand equipment was in big demand. There was a clearing sale on down towards Forbes and all the local farmers were attending, leaving the Italians to get on with the harvest.

Caserta was driving a header in a wheat crop and failed to notice that some straw had become stuck and then caught alight under the tractor. He had burnt a complete circuit of the paddock before he became aware that he was

now encircled by flames! The Italians working on adjacent properties noticed the smoke and mobilised, eventually putting out the fire. Initially, there was no sign of Caserta and they feared the worst. Finally, he burst through a wall of flames at top speed with the header intact and only some singed eyebrows to show for it.

Having seen the smoke, everyone rushed home from the clearing sale, but the fire was out and the Italians were very proud of themselves.

Daylight saving was present all year round through the war years. This meant that at bedtime during the summer, it was still very light and our beds were still hot in the western facing sleepout. David and I used to sneak out of the front door and run up to the hut. Johnny and Rinaldo would often give us a bit of chocolate from the Red Cross truck and sometimes a sip of some watered-down wine from Reymond’s vineyard.

On one occasion, we were up at the hut before our evening dinner and David must have had more than a few sips and when we returned to the kitchen, I recall that he was trying to cut up a fried egg. The egg went sideways onto the table where he chased it around trying to cut it up.

I remember thinking how funny this was and that he must have had too much to drink – but did not let on as no one else had noticed and he was only three years old.

The dust storms in the big drought of 1944 were incredible. You could see them coming and the cry would go out “Dust storm coming Mum”.

There would be a big rush to get the clothes off the line, shut all the windows and put old towels under the doors. In spite of this, I remember afterwards being able to make a finger mark in the dust on the polished dining room table.

In the Forbes park while Mum did the shopping.

Central West Dust storm, (present day, from the Forbes Advocate).

Newspaper headlines, August 6 1944; the Prisoner of War camp in Cowra

Japanese Breakout at Cowra

In the early hours of the 5th August 1944, when I was almost 5 years old, the Japanese POWs at Cowra staged a breakout from the camp which our Italians had originally come from. Eleven hundred escaped and this was the biggest breakout of any POW camp anywhere in the world during WW2. Over 200 Japanese died, many by suicide. A lot of them thought that their families would have nothing to do with them after the war because it was a great dishonour to be captured rather than fighting to the death.

That afternoon, the message came through to Kaloola about the breakout. After knocking off work, Daddy paid Rinaldo and Johnny a visit up at the hut and asked them where the rifles were. They pointed to a couple of old .22 single shot Lithgow specials which were on the top of the wardrobe and these Daddy took hold of. “What’s going on?” they asked, as the rifles had been there for ages and were used for shooting rabbits. He explained about the Japanese breakout and they thought this was very funny. “Mister frightened,” they said. He asked them whose side they would be on if the Japanese arrived to which they replied, “We give them some bread and say go some other way”.

Daddy said that wasn’t good enough, so he was going to lock them in for the night. Then Johnny asked “Is Missus frightened?” He replied “Missus very very frightened, Mrs cry,” so Johnny said “Give to me the rifle,” and he then did sentry duty around the house all night. In the sleepout, I could hear his footsteps on the gravel not far from my bed.

The Japanese did not come as far as us, but they did come to Uncle Tom’s place near Canowindra and when they knocked on the door, someone said: “The Nips are here,” so he grabbed a shotgun and fired into the air. They ran away dropping a baseball club as they went.

Some Early Mishaps

A memory associated with pain is said to be a memory that lasts, and such is the case with me. For example, I remember climbing up the stay of the gatepost for the silver gate that led to the woolshed when I was five. I slipped and impaled my upper leg deeply on the barbed wire, and couldn’t get unhooked. David was with me and tried to help, but he was too small so I told him to run for help. I can still see him in his red overalls running up past the pepper tree, through the back gate and down to the house. He would have been about two years old.

Daddy ran out and lifted me off the barbed wire, but it left deep hole which Daddy used to fill with sulphur powder every morning using a match stick. It took a few weeks to heal and the scar is still there.

I remember when I was about five years old Helen, Jan and Kathie would go out riding. I would run as fast as I could behind in my bare feet, but eventually end up far behind. On this occasion they rode out into the back paddocks and by the time I got to the “L” paddock, about a mile from home, they had already got to the other side and were going through the boundary gate into Bernie Dunn’s place.

The L paddock was full of cabbage thistles which had very sharp needles. For a while, running at speed, I was able to bound from clear ground to clear ground, dodging the thistles but eventually I landed on one and had to stop dead to remove the needle. I realised then I would have to turn back, but from a standing start I couldn’t get any momentum going and kept landing on these very sharp thistles. It must have taken me a good fifteen minutes to get back to the safety of the gilgai paddock, with lots of stopping to remove the thistles from my now bleeding feet. That was a painful ordeal!

Another time, while chasing the girls on horseback, I slipped and fell into the first ramp, straddling a cross beam – that really hurt! It was probably enough to stop me chasing the girls ever again.

I also recall at an afternoon from the summer before I started school, when I was six years old, riding the 20-inch bike down to a “learn to swim” school at a swimming spot on the Lachlan River, three and a half miles from home. It was downstream from the bridge and close to the school.

Miss Smith, who lived nearby, would put a heavy rope right across the river and the swimming lessons happened upstream from that. What I remember is the bike ride home at about two o’clock, in the hottest part of the day. I had a small bottle of water but that had become hot and undrinkable.

The final ride of almost a mile up that long hill to the house was one of those ordeals that might have toughened me up for later life. I still remember how hard it was on that day, and on other hot days on the way home from school.

Off to school on my bike out the front of Kaloola.

Summer Holiday in Manly

In early 1944, when I was almost four and a half years old, we came down to Bower Street Manly for a lovely seaside holiday. I think Kathie broke her collarbone falling down some footpath steps the evening we arrived, and I remember David aged about 18 months could escape by sliding under the front gate – so that gap had to be blocked off.

One day the girls, with me in tow, went down to Little Manly Beach, (on the harbour side), and then to the shops. Eventually I got tired and wanted to go home, so I ran away down to the end of The Corso and across the road to where two blue buses were often parked waiting for the Manly Ferry to arrive.

I knew that one bus went to Manly Hospital and the other to Bower Street, and I remember looking at the writing on the front, but not being able to read, was none the wiser. So I asked the driver if this was the bus to Bower Street, he said yes, so I hopped on and got off at the right place.

About an hour later, the poor girls arrived home in tears thinking I was lost – I don’t remember any deserved repercussions coming my way!

A Few Kaloola Recollections

My mother Emilie had perfect pitch, and could play by ear all of the modern songs on the wireless that we enjoyed as we grew up. She particularly liked the Beatles, and was also able to tune our friend Neville Vandeleur’s violin over the phone.

I can have many memories of her enjoying playing very difficult pieces by famous composers for an hour or so after lunch.

I remember a lovely evening at Kaloola when I was about five, when John Payten brought his fiancée Ailsa Finn to introduce her to our family. Mum played the piano while John and Ailsa danced, wearing pieces of an old bowler hat which had fallen apart. John was wearing the crown and Ailsa the rim, and with her curly fair hair, I thought she looked like a princess. We all had an act to do, and mine was to sing a popular song of the time, “Lay that pistol down babe”.

In about November 1945 Dad, Rinaldo and Johnny were stacking bags of grain in the grain shed. They must have stacked the back row too high, as it collapsed forward as they walked out through the doorway. Johnny was the last one out and was knocked down, badly cutting his knee on the sliding door rail. I remember visiting him soon after as he lay on his bed in the hut, and could see a big laceration below the knee cap though which was visible a white strap looking structure. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but while learning anatomy in 1958, when we came to the patella tendon, it all came back to me.

Dad bandaged his knee and two soldiers from Cowra arrived in a utility. They could have put him in the front as there was room for three on the bench seat but they put him on a few bags in the back where he would be exposed to the dust from the dirt road all the way to Cowra. Dad went really crook on the soldiers but they would not put him in the front. Standing outside the hut, we were all crying as they drove off and he waved good bye. We were very fond of Johnny who did not come back to Kaloola again. I remember we visited him and Rinaldo in the POW camp at Cowra in the year after the war ended while they were still waiting to get transport home.

The mail, newspapers and bread from Forbes were delivered to our mailbox Monday, Wednesday and Friday by Percy the mailman in his red truck.

One afternoon in 1945, Daddy sat reading the paper on the back verandah. Looking over his shoulder, I could see a big picture on the front page of what looked like the back of a woman’s head of hair and neck.

When I asked why they had put that picture there, I was told that this was a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb in Japan. I remember also having earlier seen another front page photograph of scores of dead soldiers lying all over each other, and was told that these were dead Russians.

Our telephone was a polished wooden box screwed to the wall, which had a small crank handle on one side, an earpiece with its cord on the other, and a mouthpiece on the front. We were on a party line and our number was 7OH. We responded to four rings and ignored everything else. Uncle Joe next door was 70S. The morse code for that was three short rings, so to ring him you turned the crank handle three times in quick succession.

To make a call (outside of the local party line) you turned the handle for a longish time, and that would get you onto the telephone exchange in Eugowra, where you would give the number you wanted to an operator who would then connect you.

There was nothing to stop the operator from listening into your conversation, so very private matters were better discussed by letter.

The Sydney Morning Herald announcing the end of World War II.

An antique wall crank phone, like the one at Kaloola.

Paytens Bridge School Years

Uncle Joe had been the chief lobbyist for a bridge over the Lachlan River, and when it was finally built in 1926 the bridge was named after him. The single teacher school was built nearby in 1929.

In 1946, I began First Class at Payten’s Bridge. There was no Kindy as you had to be old enough to ride a horse or a bike to school which for us was three and a half miles away. You had to know your alphabet and be able to count to 100 before starting school and I can remember Kathie giving me pre-school lessons at the kitchen table as well as teaching me to ride a bike. We had six classes in the one room with 18 pupils at the time I was there. Each of us had a small porcelain inkwell which occupied a hole in the top right corner of our wooden desk. After learning the basics of writing with a pencil we progressed to a pen with a replaceable metal nib, the tip of which we were careful to place only just into the ink and then wipe off any excess on the edge of the inkwell, so as to avoid dropping an awful inkblot all over the page.

Eventually we graduated to fountain pens which needed to be refilled about once a week from a “Quink” ink bottle. Fountain pens were very grown up as our parents wrote with their own personalized ones which had really good nibs that just glided over the paper. Biros replaced ink pens sometime in the late 1950s. There was no phone and no electricity at the school so if needed, Mr Newham would send a message to Miss Smith who lived nearby so that she could phone the parent of a child who had become unwell. It took about half an hour to ride to school on the 20” bike, but by the time I was in 4th class, I could do it in about 15 minutes on the big 28” bike and a tail wind.

Opening of Payten’s Bridge by the Minister for Works Martin Flannery in 1926, Uncle Joe third from right.

Payten’s Bridge Public School old boy on a return visit in the 1970s.

David started school when I was in 4th class, initially riding a small 16” bike. He didn’t like going to school and used to ride behind me so that every now and then, I would find that he had turned around and was riding for home. If I didn’t notice straight away, it would take me a while to head back and round him up. Once I remember he was so far back that I thought – just let him go home. I then got him riding the bigger 20” bike which was much quicker and required less effort so that he never turned back after that.

In the winter, you needed gloves and a warm beanie to cover your ears otherwise you got chilblains and I remember having fun breaking the ice with my front wheel as I rode through puddles on frosty mornings. After school, the journey home could take a lot longer, around an hour. We would often have a race along the main road with the Geoff and Peter Vandeleur and the Purvis boys John and Peter. In the lane now called Payten’s Lane, we would generally waste time, such as throwing sticks at a goanna in a tree, riding our bikes fast on a bendy track through the trees, which we called DDD, (Dreadful Dangerous Driving), and riding our bikes through a shallow excavated area near the second ramp that often held one to two feet of water. I can still hear Johnny Purvis, who was a year older than me, yelling “Give it to ‘er Dave” as David tried to ride all the way across the water half-way up his wheel. I remember having two accents, one for school and one for home!

Another hazard in getting home after school was if there were cattle in the lane that ran for half a mile from the main road to our front gate. The stock route ran past the lane, so drovers often put their stock there for the night while they slept in a covered wagon near

of

Payten’s Bridge over the Lachlan river.

A painting

the Payten’s Bridge school which I did in the 1970s.

With my brother David, doing brother stuff, and with Tip pulling the billy cart.

the entrance. Their mean-looking drover’s dogs complete with facial scars were tied up on long chains at the bottom end of the lane. So if there was a big mob and they had big horns, especially if you could see a bull, I would chicken out and ride further along the main road to the entrance to Squire’s, our next door neighbours. This would add another mile to the trip, so by the time I got home, it would be quite late in the day.

In the cold weather we wore shoes and socks, but for most of the time it was bare feet for everyone. Our main sport was a form of tip which involved lots of running and dodging but which you could not do quickly while wearing shoes. As a result, we developed very thick skin on the soles of our feet so that we could even run on the gravel path at Kaloola without discomfort. The enemy of bare feet in the school yard were very sharp thorns called cat’s eyes (or cat heads), which really hurt if you trod on one, as they made a hole in your foot. They could also puncture a bike tyre but were

kept under good control by chipping them out during our regular Wednesday afternoon gardening duties. Luckily they didn’t exist at all away from the school area.

There were three in my class: Joan Squire used to come first, I came second and Jeff Vandeleur came third. Peter Vandeleur was in David’s class and Josephine younger still. The Vandeleurs were family friends and we were often invited by them for a swim in the Lachlan at Nanima on hot summer Sunday afternoons, on a stretch of the river that had a sandy beach. Mr Vandeleur (Neville) had erected a log rail that extended from the water level at the bank to well out into the river, and we were all to stay upstream from that. In learning to swim, we were first taught to float, which involved taking a deep breath in waist high water and then floating downstream, face in the water. I recall one afternoon seeing Neville jumping up from his seat on the bank and flying into the water, as Marianne had floated right under the log rail and was proceeding downstream!

Mr Newham was a very good teacher of the 3Rs, (Readin’, Ritin’ and Rithmitic), so all the pupils seemed to be able to read and spell well and were good at their sums and mental arithmetic. Reading out loud from the Dept. of Education monthly school magazine was done outside, where I had a favourite fruit tree that I used to sit in and then read in a raised voice.

Mr Newham would appear on the verandah now and then, and call out “I can’t hear you Angus Glasson’, or “I can’t hear you Robert Payten”. We would have been instructed to underline some difficult words, which we had to learn to spell before coming back inside, and then demonstrate that we could indeed spell the words. If when in, say 4th class, you were unable to spell a word Mr Newham would say “anyone in 3rd class?” If a younger kid could do so you would try extra hard next time to avoid looking silly. As we were all in the one room you could have half an ear out on what was happening in the class above you and so in the next year you had a bit of a head start.

Friday afternoons was our introduction to public speaking as we had to recite out in front of the whole school. It didn’t seem to matter if you said the same poem each week, although now and then I learnt a new one.

One of my early ones went:

“The bush coach was ready, and Billy the bear before it departed, collected the fare. Now young Wally wombat who wanted a ride, as proud as a peacock was sitting inside. His coat was of satin, his socks were of silk And the gloves he was wearing were both white as milk,

“Fares please sir”, said Billy and Wally went red. He felt in his pockets and hung down his head. “This way sir” said Billy and pushed him outside And now Wally’s weeping, he did want a ride.

Graham Herbert not only recited the same poem each week, but had the same poem which his older brother Bruce (in Helen’s class and now in high school) also used to recite every week. It went something like this, (thanks to Helen for remembering some bits that I had forgotten).

“It’s eat up this and eat up that Cause if you don’t, you won’t get fat. It’s porridge that makes your hair all curls Like other pretty boys and girls. But porridge is all hard to swaller

Hmmph, don’t care if me legs is holler.”

By 1946, the year I started at Payten’s Bridge, Helen was a weekly boarder at Kincoppal while Jan and Kathie were both boarding at the Mercy Convent in Forbes. I can remember occasionally going to Mass in Forbes and Dad would have to do all sorts of negotiations with the difficult head nun (Sr Martina) in order to take the girls out for the day.

There was a big corrugated iron fence around the school, which you could not see over and was very off-putting. On one of the occasions that the girls were allowed out, we went for a picnic near the Lachlan River weir where Dad taught me to skip flat stones across the water which I had never seen before.

Now and again, the girls were allowed out for the weekend and caught a ride home with Bill Tremble on the milk lorry. He was a very amusing fellow who kept them entertained all the way.

Payten’s Bridge school produced quite a few University graduates, starting with Roma Herbert’s BA in 1948, then there was all six of us, graduating from uni between 1952 and 1967. Helen Newell topped the State in English and became a teacher, and Trevor Glasson became a millionaire.

Jobs Around the Farm & House

We all had our various jobs to do at Kaloola which we grew into as we got older, eventually becoming quite useful around the place.

By the time I was about eight years old, I would first thing in the morning light the fire in the kitchen stove so we could boil the kettle and cook chops and toast for breakfast. I would also separate the milk to get cream, which later we could make into butter. Making butter was something I enjoyed doing by stirring the cream for ten minutes until it “broke:” separating into butter and butter milk, (which was poured off).Then the butter was squeezed between some wooden paddles, washed with some water and squeezed again. Finally, salt was added. After getting home from school, it was time to get the milking cows in, so that the calves could be penned up overnight, then perhaps to cut some pine chips for fire lighting.

In 1948, the “Balts” arrived at Kaloola. These were displaced persons (DPs) from the Baltic states who had been languishing in camps in Germany since WW2. Marty and Keeta did not speak a word of English, but we had a German-English dictionary which we constantly referred to – ‘sprechen sie Deutch?’ was as far as I got in learning German.

I think they were peasants who had run south from Lithuania as the Germans retreated and the Russians advanced, as they would rather be prisoners of the Germans than the Russians. Keeta had split ear lobes, which was the result of her earrings being wrenched from her ears by German soldiers. She was only little and skinny, but worked twice as hard as Marty who did not seem to know the meaning of work. They would both go to milk the cows first thing in the morning, but Keeta did all

With one of the calves.

Wooden paddles like the ones we used to use to make butter.

One of the ways of lighting the rooms at Kaloola before electricity was with kerosene that would came from the cylinder on the verandah to the indoor mantle lights via small brass tubes.

The flat metal irons Mum used at Kaloola have stayed in use to this day – as doorstops.

Opposite page: During Covid lockdown Jan asked that we all write a poem: this was my contribution.

the milking, and then on the two hundred metre walk to the house Marty would have his hands in pockets, while Keeta carried two heavy buckets of milk. I can remember them out in the hot sun in the paddock sewing wheat bags, and Marty developing blisters on his soft, unaccustomed-to-work hands.

Another job was to pump up the Gloria Light cylinder on the back verandah until the pressure gauge showed high. Lighting-kerosene needed to be put in the cylinder now and then, and this was then delivered under pressure through small brass tubes that ran above the ceiling and then down to bright mantle lights in the kitchen, lounge and dining rooms.

In the bedrooms, we mostly used a flat wick kerosene lamp with a glass chimney that you could make brighter by turning a knob to push up the wick and sometimes we used candles. In the late 1940s, this gaslight was all replaced by 32 volt electricity from batteries charged by a generator and later still in the early 50s, by 240 volt electricity from the grid.

The wood burning stove made the kitchen very hot in the summer – I can recall Mum doing the ironing using a few heavy flat metal irons which were heated on the top of the wood burning stove and rotated as each one cooled. They were replaced by a spirit iron which had a small fuel tank on the back of the handle and then the 240 volt iron after the power poles and lines slowly made their way out along the Forbes road in the early 1950s.

Percy Scot who lived on a small block on the Lachlan near us and was hooked up a few weeks before we were, was telling Daddy how good it was: “Make sure you get a power point Jack – they’re marvellous things. You can run a vacuum cleaner or a toaster or an iron or a wireless off them – we got two in our house”.

Wh en The Power Came On

They had it in the cities and a lot of big towns too, But not along the Lachlan or down at Bangaroo. But it was slowly coming, we had seen big posts go up With rows of wooden crossbeams and insulators on the top.

Down along the Forbes Road, it slowly made its way, Past Wandary Lane, then up to Clare and Ray’s Along past Payten’s Bridge and Percy Scott’s as well And Percy, when asked by Dad, had quite a tale to tell.

“These lights are great, with just one flick You can see all round the joint. But there’s one thing even better Jack, And that’s our power point!

We’ve got one in the kitchen and the things that it can do, Like boiling the kettle, and you can do the ironing too. Or even buy a mixmaster to help you make a cake. “Make sure you get one Jack”, he said, “cause it’s really great!”

We weren’t disappointed, for what he said was true. So we had one in every room and in the kitchen, we had two. For our mother in the summer, no more fuel stove and heat, No more copper, no more wringer or washing board to beat.

No more layers of wet bags on the kero fridge to cool When four days into a heatwave, the butter starts to pool. Such liberating power is very hard to find, It relieved a country mother from a lot of work and grind.

But the memory of an evening bath by soft candlelight Or of the bedlamp’s ceiling shadows, spooky figures in the night, Still live with me today just as it was back then When I was just a little boy up to the age of ten.

The Arrival of Electricity

Electricity made life a lot easier for Mum. In the laundry, instead of filling the copper with water, then boiling all the clothes before putting them through a hand wringer, it was straight into the washing machine.

In the kitchen, the electric stove was a marvel, so much cooler than the fuel stove, and in the summer cooling was aided by a big wall mounted fan, (but no air conditioning in those days). The electric fridge was a huge improvement on the old kerosene one, which used give up the ghost after a few days of a heatwave, in spite of being draped in wet hessian. Eventually the nearby water bag on the back verandah was phased out.

The large kitchen at Kaloola was the social centre of the house, with a work table at one end and a table for meals at the other. Near the door was “the box” which contained a bag of sugar and a bag of flour and served as an extra seat. Daddy would usually sit here when he dropped to haver a cup of tea and a chat with Mum.

On those occasions when he had gone to town, he would come home, sit on the box and give Mum all the news of who he had talked to at the saleyards and what was happening around the district. This could lead to discussions about which family was doing what and that could include who was “drinking champagne on a beer income,” while we all listened in and absorbed the wisdom of our parents.

Once we had electricity, the battery wireless in the lounge with a wire connection to a speaker in the kitchen was replaced by a radio/ gramophone unit (radiogram) in the lounge, and Mum bought some 78” vinyl records including “Oklahoma” and “The Marriage of Figaro”. There were some small children’s records like

Tubby the Tuba and a little golden record that David was very keen on that went: “I had a dog and my dog loved me and I fed my dog under yonder tree, and the dog said woof, woof, tiddely dee,” and so on through every farm animal.

A new bakelite radio lived on top of the dresser in the kitchen to listen at lunchtime to the news, river heights, stock reports, share prices and of course the country family serial, “Blue Hills”.

Our small patch of lawn outside the kitchen was well watered and well looked after, as we used to sit or lie there on hot evenings after tea, waiting for the house to cool down. The stars were brilliant, often seeing a shooting star, and we were able to see the first satellite Sputnik in 1957.

If there was a grasshopper plague, the lawn would be covered in hessian, but if a small edge was left uncovered, that would be eaten bare in just one day. During the plagues, gauze wire was tied across the front of the car otherwise dead grasshoppers would block the radiator and make the engine boil.

One evening just after tea, I was emptying the scraps bucket for the chooks in the dark, when suddenly a white light as bright as day shone over the Weddin mountains about fifty miles south of us. I watched spellbound for about thirty seconds before racing back to the kitchen to tell everyone, but it had gone by the time I went back. It was not lightning as it lasted too long and there was no noise of thunder.

A couple of years ago, there was an astronomy expert on the radio asking people to email questions – so I did just that. He thought that this phenomonon was likely to have been a meteor, big enough to have penetrated well into the earth’s atmosphere before burning up, causing the prolonged white light.

We all slept in the ‘sleepout,’ which was an enclosed verandah – cool in the summer but pretty cold in the winter! At night, you could hear the curlew’s haunting cry from down near the woolshed and the willy wagtails with their ‘pretty little creature’ call.

Water Supply

The water supply at Kaloola was sometimes precarious in dry times as we relied on tank water off the roof for drinking, showering and washing and our hot water came from coiled pipes in the back of the fuel stove. The toilet and garden water came via a windmill pumping from a dam to a big overhead tank. In dry years, we would just wash our feet and lower legs daily in a small amount of bath water, and have a bath on Saturday night. There’s the story of one of us staying in Sydney with a relative who said it was time for a bath, to which came the reply: “But why, it’s not Saturday.”

In the 1957 drought, we carted water from Squires fresh water bore down near our front boundary, as our own wells were salty. On the back of the Bedford truck, we used to fill a couple of tanks and bring them up to the house. One, a Furphy tank, when empty gave a great echo, ideal for singing Harry Belafonte’s hit song of the day “Day – o”. It had steel ends on which was written “Good, better, best, never let it rest till your good is better and your better best”. There was also an image of a stork holding a baby under which was written “Populate or perish” – then there was some wriggly writing which Helen was able to decipher using her shorthand skills: “Water is the gift of God but beer and whisky are concoctions of the devil – come and have a drink of water”. I have learnt since that Furphy, the maker of the tank, was a strict Methodist and lay preacher in Shepparton.

A radiogram, a bakelite radio and a Furphy water tank, like those we had at Kaloola.

Little Girl “Lost”

In May 1949, while Mum and Dad were at the Cowra Picnic Races, Marianne, (aged five), was at home and decided she would walk down the road to meet David and me coming home from school, not knowing that we were coming home via our neighbour’s road. She walked and walked until an hour or more later, she reached the school, to find no one was there. Being May, sunset came early and soon Marianne was walking home in the dark.

She would hide behind a tree whenever she saw car headlights approaching on the main road, so that no ‘baddies’ could get her, and so wasn’t seen by those searching. Riding a pushbike and calling out her name, Mr Waite, who worked at Kaloola discovered her eventually.

Bill Waite was a gentle natured man, who Dad insisted we address as Mr Waite out of respect for our elders. Anyone who came to work at Kaloola, like Archie Armstrong a shearer, had to be addressed as Mister, which I think was a good lesson and has helped me in life to have respect for all manner of people. I remember mentioning Rinaldo and Johnny to Mr Waite but he became very grumpy and said “bloody Ities,” which I guess was understandable, as they were probably shooting at him in North Africa a few years beforehand.

On Anzac Day, Daddy gave Mr Waite a lift into Eugowra as he didn’t have a car. I went along and can still recall being so impressed by rows and rows of men marching in their best suits with medals attached. We were standing quite close to the park and the stone monument. on which were engraved the names of all who had served and those who were killed in both wars. I was only nine and a half at the time but old enough to realise the intense solemnity of the occasion.

Visiting Sydney

I think it was in January of 1950 that Kathie and I went to Sydney to stay with Nanna and Aunty Nell. We began in Eugowra for a two hour trip on the rail motor to Cowra, where we transferred to the steam train, the Cowra Mail, for what was my first trip on a train. It was just on dusk as we were about to enter a “dog box” (a compartment for about six people with the one exit door), when the door suddenly opened and out staggered a dishevelled drunk talking loudly to himself. It frightened the life out of me and I was more scared than I had ever been. We bolted down the platform and found a carriage with a long corridor and this looked a lot safer.

Early next morning I recall passing through the outer western suburbs looking down on the small backyards right up against the railway line, and feeling so sorry for the people who lived there.Aunty Nell met us at Central Station, as she so graciously did on the many later occasions when we came down to school.

After a week at Nanna’s in Randwick, I had a couple of weeks with the McGuinness family at Dover Heights. Aunty Eileen was Mum’s first cousin, and David and Bob were my second cousins. (In 1980, Bob McGuinness was the first Doctor in Australia to administer a newly developed anti venom, saving a child who had been bitten by a funnel web spider.)

Daddy & the six of us with a wagon load of wheaten hay, pulled by Chummy & Nellie, with Bill Waite on top.

In our Sunday best; in front of the Kaloola mailbox .

At home I had been pretty crook with asthma for a few months and had missed a lot of school in the last term of fourth class. I didn’t have enough breath to ride my bike three and a half miles to school. Eventually I couldn’t even walk far without having to pull up for a breather.

Sometimes I would have a really severe attack of asthma, usually in the middle of the night, when I would wake up hardly able to breathe. I found that if I went into the lounge room, leaned my elbows up against the fireplace and tried to relax as much as I could, eventually after half an hour or so, the attack would pass.

If it happened during the day, I would notice that the skin under my finger nails turned blue which I was later told by an asthma specialist that I was lucky to get away without passing out. There was no Ventolin puffer in those days.

When Mum and Dad came down at the end of my holiday time with the McGuiness family, away from the rye grass and other allergens, the asthma had gone, I had put on some weight and looked very healthy.

That was it, I was ten years old and the decision was made that I would have to go to school in Sydney, about which I was upset at the time. Daddy took me into DJ’s, (David Jones in the city), and I got fitted with a Waverley College uniform including a felt hat. I was to stay with Margie and her sister Syb.

Margie was a distant relative of Dad’s, who I had liked ever since I could remember as she was Uncle Joe’s housekeeper and lived at Woodbine next door to Kaloola. When Uncle Joe sold Woodbine in about 1946, Margie came to Sydney and lived with Sybella in a one bedroom unit. My bed was in a corner of the living room in this newish block of flats (Gower Galtees) near the top of Coogee Bay Road.

Waverley College & City Adventures 1950 –1951

I can remember crying about having to be sent away from home and being taken aside by Daddy who sat me on his knee explaining that sometimes you have to put up with things that don’t go your way and if you do, it will make you a better person. “Look at King Farouk,” he said, “and how badly he has turned out because he was spoilt as a child.” I knew that he was the king of Egypt who was often in the Herald because of his lavish lifestyle and who was deposed only a few years later. I felt better after getting this advice about adversity making the man, and became resigned to leaving home.

While there was a hell of a difference to living at Kaloola to having my bed in the lounge room of a one bedroom flat with a couple of old spinsters, it wasn’t all that bad. I would catch the Bondi tram that ran past the Royal Hotel at the top of Coogee Bay Road and get off at Charing Cross quite close to Waverley College.

I distinctly remember the first lunch time on the grass of Waverley Park across Birrell Street from the College. My feet were just itching to feel the grass so I took off my shoes and socks and sat under a palm tree for a while. For some weeks, the thick soles on my feet from running barefoot everywhere at home, just peeled and peeled. Margie (and Syb) would let me go anywhere I asked so long as I had a plan. I would often visit Helen who was at Sydney Uni and staying nearby with Aunty Lorna, Daddy’s eldest sister, at Kittabah, a lovely old house near the Spot in Randwick just up the road from the Ritz theatre.( Mum and her family the Dwyers had lived here and sold it to Aunty Lorna and Uncle Leo in the early 1920s).

Helen, (who was a great sister to me), introduced me to the library in the Queen Victoria Building, so about once a month I would catch a tram into the city and make my way down Market Street, and take the oldest lift in Sydney made of wrought iron up to the top floor on the northern end of the building.

Having swapped books on a Saturday morning, I always crossed the road to visit Nock and Kirby’s to listen to Joe the Gadget Man who would be standing on a ladder demonstrating in a very entertaining way, the latest potato peeler or whatever. Another port of call was the Hobby Shop in George Street down near Wynyard where you could buy thin sheets of balsa wood with stencilled shapes of a model plane etc. which you could cut out and glue together. There was also a great model train set up with trains running all over the place, in and out of tunnels in this one room and operating model steam engines driving various Meccano set ups.

From the balcony of the flat, I could see the sea at Coogee and some horses in a valley over near Clovelly or Bronte. So to get out of the flat, I would often put on my Dunlop Volley sandshoes and go wandering in that direction, taking a pencil and paper so that I could draw a map of the streets I had gone down and so retrace my steps without getting lost as I got over as far as Bronte and the Waverley cemetery a few miles away.

There were picture theatres nearby, the Ritz and the Odeon, so I would take myself off on a Saturday afternoon where I’d run into a couple of kids who were in my class. We would watch the “serials,” which were often continuing Hopalong Cassidy adventures, followed by the main picture which was usually a Western –which were all full of Cowboys and Indians.

All kitted out in my Waverley college uniform, 1950.

A toast rack tram passing up Liverpool Street, Mark Foys department store, (now the Law Courts) , in the background.

The Queen Victora Building, George Street.

Another port of call was to visit Aunty Dot, Marg and Doff at 42 Botany Street Randwick, the home and family of Daddy’s famous horse training brother Bayly who had died two years earlier. Aunty Dot made a big fuss of me and was always very welcoming with soft drink, cake etc.

During the winter, Brother Dwyer at Waverley got me playing rugby on a Saturday morning, usually boys from 4th and 5th class playing each other, and occasionally a team from another school. I remember going out to Newington one morning and playing on the main oval right in front of the school, where I watched James and Iain play 35–40 years later.

In 1951, when I was 11, I read in the paper that Australia was to play the French Rugby League team at the SCG so I caught the tram and fronted up to the ticket box only to receive the message “sorry mate, all sold out” – which in those days meant an attendance of over sixty thousand. I thought it was worth checking out the boundary fence, so I followed the high brick wall around into Cook Lane where sure enough there was an old ladder up against the wall and a few people were climbing over it.

I followed and climbed down onto some stock yard rails which were in the Showground, and then walked along behind some people. I was puzzled by the empty streets, not knowing that this was the Showground and only used at Easter. I walked up the back of a cream coloured grandstand with its clock tower, stood on the back seat and over the back had a great view of the SCG next door.

The star of the French side was fullback Puig Aubert, who could kick goals from anywhere, as he did on that day. I was so pleased for the first time to see the legendary Clive Churchill,

the Australian fullback, He was famous for introducing the fullback as an attacking position, as previously it had only been a defensive one. It was winter time and towards the end of the game the light was starting to fade. I suddenly looked around and realised I was vulnerable so I got scared and bolted, hoping no one had moved the ladder. I ran flat out but saw no one on these empty showground streets and once over the wall, felt safe again. This was quite an experience and quite a step up from being taken to the football in Eugowra on a Sunday afternoon!

At Waverley, we had a sports afternoon at Queens Park every Wednesday. One day in 1950 we were all lined up on the goal line and then raced to half way. I think I came 3rd, and as a result was in the under 11 relay team which ran in the Combined Primary Schools Competition held later at University Oval, where our relay team beat all the other schools. This is not surprising seeing our number one runner was Michael Cleary, who went on to be Australian Sprint Champion and won a Bronze Medal in the Commonweath Games 100 metres in 1967. He also played on the wing for Australia in both League and Union and later became Sports Minister in the Labor Government. Another member of the relay team was Doug Ricketson, who went on to play in a Rugby League Grand Final at the SCG as a centre. He was also very quick so no wonder we won our relay.

In 1950, 5th Class at Waverley was divided into two classes of 30 pupils each and our kind teacher never gave anyone the strap. In 1951 the two classes were combined and we had 60 in the one room with Brother Brady as our teacher who taught by fear at the end of a strap which he dished out every day.

I remember I got four strokes on the hand, which didn’t hurt all that much but I was shocked at being hit by a teacher for the first time in my school life. He was a real bully who used to especially pick on the four boarders in the class and make them cry a couple of times a week. Before class every morning he would inspect our shoes to make sure they were shiny, so to avoid being called out and castigated, I would have to bring a rag in my case to give them a last minute polish. When Daddy asked me if I would like to stay at Waverley and board in Year 7 instead of going to Riverview, I was able to immediately say that having to deal with Brother Brady after class would be a torture – so no thank you!

On coming home for holidays, I noticed on our way to Mass in Gooloogong that the “Black’s Camp” had gone. This was a group of huts on the Lachlan riverbank which were made of corrugated galvanized iron sheets patched with flattened out kerosene drums. I was told that they had all moved to houses which had been built for them at Cowra.

Being away at school, I missed out all the excitement of the recurring Lachlan River floods in the early 1950s. During the biggest flood in 1952, the water came part way up the hill to our house so the Kellers and the Vandeleurs who lived on the flats between us and the river, had to evacuate and came to Kaloola. A tiger moth aircraft with some supplies landed near our house.

When I came home for holidays soon after, I could see debris stuck high up in the branches of trees and can remember having to replace some of our fencing that had been knocked flat. On the trip into Forbes, you had to drive through flood water that was a foot or more deep in some places.

Riverview 1952 –1956

So off to Riverview it was in February 1952. They had taught us boxing at Waverley which came in handy on the very first day when I just happened to be chatting in the school yard to the Keating brothers David and John when this boy whom I had never seen before, came out of nowhere and swung a big punch at my head. I saw it coming, so ducked underneath the swinging arm and at the same time, reflexly hit him with a straight left to the eye which started to swell up almost immediately. He then wandered off still without saying a word - this was a baffling and unusual introduction to Riverview!

Another first morning experience was this bloke in the bed next to me in the open-air dormitory asking me how to tie his shoelaces! I thought to myself he probably had always worn elastic sided boots and gave him a quick lesson. He was a quick learner who got it right the next day. Much later on, well after leaving school, I learnt that this kid who became a great friend, was Tom Sloane who reminded me of the forgotten incident, telling me that he had never learnt how to tie shoe laces because he always had it done for him by an aunt who lived with them in Orange.

There were three hundred mostly country boarders and a hundred day boys at Riverview who were taught mostly by Jesuits, but there were a few lay teachers. (These days there are still about the same number of boarders but 1300 day boys).

After school, you would often see a gathering of boys in the school yard surrounding a priest or scholastic and having an animated discussion about some topic. If you were putting forth a point of view, you were often challenged by the Jesuit who would say “what evidence do

Kathie & me on a Sunday visit out of boarding school to Nanna & Aunty Nell’s place in Randwick.

St. Ignatius’ College, Riverview.

Opposite: on summer holidays at Manly about to go back to school in my Riverview summer khakis, Marianne in her Rose Bay uniform, with Kathie & Jan the university students.

you have to make you say that?” That did not happen at Waverley and the atmosphere at Riverview was also different because of the large numbers of country kids.

There was an Irish priest named Father Peyton who was nicknamed “Yak” and so I inherited this nickname which stuck with me all through school and university. He taught us science in Yr. 7 and was a great source of amusement as his classroom experiments often failed, such as one very funny occasion which involved the Magdeburgh hemispheres.

If you image a hollow steel ball (about the size of a soccer ball) that has been cut in half, you then have two hemispheres which can be reunited with a rubber seal forming an airtight bond between the metal edges. There is a nozzle through which all the air can be pumped out, forming a vacuum inside. Having done the necessary pumping, he told us that in Magdeburgh in Germany, hundreds of years ago, a team of horses attached to each hemisphere could not pull them apart, such was the force of atmospheric pressure.

“Now who is the strongest boy in the class?” he asked. We nominated Maurice McGrath, who had undergone an early growth spurt and was a good head taller than the rest of us. “Well come on out the front now Maurice and show us what you’ve got” said Father P in his broad Irish accent – and remember “teams of horses could not pull these apart”.

Maurice went out, and with one hand easily lifted off the top hemisphere chest-high with a sheepish grin. I can remember all of us convulsing with laughter at such an anticlimax!

I’ve heard it said that humour is one of the best aids to learning, as it seems to have been in this case, because seventy years later, I can still remember that name – Magdeburgh.

Another amusing and good teacher was Father Jones, for English and History, who spoke with a lisp and who used to exaggerate enormously to make his point. An example was a poem I still remember went:

“I must go down to the sea again To the lonely sea and the sky

And all I ask is a tall ship And a star to steer her by.”

“Justh imagine,” says OGPU (his nickname, how he got it I don’t know but it was the initials of the Russian Secret Police). “There we are clath, just imagine one of those big clipperths with four acres of sail, clath,” to which we would howl him down with cries of: “Bull, bull!!”

“No it’s true clath, four acres of sail and fifty miles of rope...”

More: “Bull, bull!!” would be the response. Another was Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard:

The ploughman homeward plodths his weary way...

“Justh imagine it, clath, the ploughman at dusk leading his team of Clydesdales home – hooves as big as dinner plates clath, hooves as big as dinner plates!” To which we would of course respond: “Bull, bull!”

I am sure I would not have remembered any of this I it hadn’t been so entertaining. Father Jones was very solidly built, and with the help of some strong country boys would carve out sandstone blocks to make retaining walls around the Riverview boat shed on the Lane Cove river, which are still there.

The Jesuit in charge of 3rd Division (Years 7 and 8) was Bede Lowrey, who was a scholastic (not yet ordained, which took fourteen years of

study). He was friendly, enthusiastic and always organising some sporting competition to keep us active. On the noticeboard there was a map of New South Wales showing the names of all the boarders and where they came from.

His offsider was Father Durnin who was about fifty years old, definitely odd and most definitely sadistic. His nickname was Ding Dong, I suspect because we all thought he had bats in the belfry. He taught us Latin in Year 7: amo, amas, amat (I love, you love, he/she loves etc.). I can still recall that if you couldn’t recite the declensions of various verbs, out would come the strap and you would get a couple of hits on the fingers.

We used to play Cocky Laura, also known as tag, on the 3rd Division concrete yard after dinner a night. This involved running flat out up and down the yard – but if you happened to put one foot onto the adjacent grassed area, Father Durnin would be there saying: “Out of bounds, up to my office,” where you went straight away. No long after he would arrive and give you probably only a four with the strap, as a six was for more severe offences. Sometimes he would say “Come back in the morning – it’s not cold enough now”.

When giving the strap, he would try and line you up so that he could hit you not only on the hand, but up the forearm as well. I remember seeing the red mark of the leather strap up the forearm of Terry Redden from Cooma after he was given the strap one cold morning, and his silver watch band was also broken.

The three term year meant school holidays in May and August, so I would catch the Cowra mail leaving Central at 8.30 pm. At Penrith a second steam engine was hooked up to help pull us over the mountains, which was a cold trip in August as there was no heating in

Home for the holidays, napping in the sleepout.

Helping Father Fraser in the Riverview garden, pruning a overgrown tree.

those days. Footwarmers, which were metal containers full of hot sand, were loaded on at Central, but they soon lost their heat. We all had a rug strapped to the outside of our case, so that helped a bit.

In the middle of the night I would be woken up by a train guard walking up and down the platform ringing a bell and yelling: “Wallerawang, Wallerawang, change here for the Mudgee line.”

Out the window could be seen shivering on the platform various members of the Mason families on their way home to Spicers Creek – probably my future brother-in-law Kevin Mason, who went to Waverley College, was amongst them.

Sunrise at Carcoar often revealed a thick frost, before arriving in Cowra at 7am. There was then time for a quick breakfast off some very thick Railway crockery before boarding the single carriage Rail Motor to Eugowra via Canowindra and Gooloogong. Often we would have to stop while cattle and sheep camped on the line were blasted off with the horn, finally arriving at 9.30 am after a thirteen hour trip. By about 1953 there was a daily DC3 plane flight to Parkes and then a bus to Forbes, and later on a daily flight to Cowra. These revolutionized our trips to and from Sydney.

Most of the kids in our class in 1954 went up into 2nd Division for Years 9 and 10, and then onto 1st Division for our final Year 11, (provided not too many did not come back to repeat the Leaving Certificate as there were only a fixed number of beds). I was a late grower, and was one of the smallest in Year 8 and did not go up into 2nd Division in Year 9.

This was a real punishment because it meant not being able to speak to your class mates,

who were in a separate area of the school, and it was forbidden to speak to someone in another Division. I endured this but it did take some effort.

I didn’t like to complain in my weekly letters home, as I knew that Mum would worry and it would not have made any difference anyway. In addition, I knew that she wasn’t at all well. She had developed severe acute rheumatoid arthritis of her hands, which meant that she couldn’t write, and so the much looked forward to letters from home were few and far between.

Looking back, I think I was probably a bit depressed during this time, and my school exam marks reflected that. But on the positive side, I had learnt to be independent, stand on my own two feet and not be just one of the mob.

Besides, I knew this year of semi-isolation would eventually come to an end. In those days, quite a few of the boys from the land had to go home after Year 9 to work on the family farm, so I knew I would be better off than them as I would be going through to complete the Leaving Certificate at the end of Year 11.

The last occasion that Father Durnin tried to give me the strap was for having a hand in my pocket, (a forbidden offence in his eyes). I refused to accept the strap, told him I was going to complain to the Rector about him and walked away. I wasn’t brave enough to go to the Rector, but after that he left me alone.

The next year, 1955, I went into 2nd Division rejoining my old class mates, where the strap was not used at all, as we boys were meant by then to be self-disciplined. Fortunately, I then stayed with them by going up into 1st Division in my final year after only one year in 2nd Division, and did the Leaving Certificate at the end of 1956, just after turning seventeen.

The Leaving Certificate exams were held at St Joseph’s College and we were required to take six subjects, for which you were given an A or a B. Four Bs was a Pass, with fiveBs you matriculated, allowing you to go to University. I got six Bs which was consistent with the marks I had been getting, placing me somewhere in the middle of the class.

Overall, in spite of all the various adversities, life at school was good and we had some very good teachers who encouraged us to ask ourselves: why is it so?

Sport at Riverview

Playing sport was compulsory, rugby, cricket, athletics or rowing. I was great getting out to visit the other GPS schools such as playing at Grammar’s grounds at Rushcutters Bay or Scots at Rose Bay which we reached by catching a small ferry the” La Radar” from the school jetty.

If it was cricket, we would try to get our runs quickly and get the others out and hopefully finish early before making our way home allowing us time to pay a visit to the State theatrette to see a half hour newsreel and then catch the Lane Cove tram from the underground Wynyard station.

We often hopped off at Milsons Point and paid a visit to Luna Park where there was then no entry fee so we could pay once to have a ride on the Big Dipper which was a thrilling experience as it was said to be the biggest in the world.

Then back on to the tram to the Lane Cove terminus where we would pay a visit to the café on the corner. There you could buy a big block of ice cream in a cardboard container, about the size of a house brick, which was divided

in two and served with a generous covering of chocolate sauce and malt powder. This was culinary heaven for a teenage boy.

In the winter, we might find ourselves taken by bus to Parramatta for a frosty morning start to a Rugby game against Kings School and then spend the rest of the day wandering around watching the older kids play.

In my last year at Riverview I played in the 3rd XV, taking out the premiership. I had previously played in many a losing team, but the Jesuits, (who didn’t care about sport), told us not to worry, as losing can be character building. But there was no doubt in my mind that there was no substitute for winning.

Back row: J. Renshaw, B. Sydenham, P. O’Rourke, G. Herbert, A. Clark, W. Tisdale, M. Poirrier; Middle row: R. Payten, M. Green, P. Burfitt, M. Kavanagh (C), R. Austin, J. Raper, K. Rennie; Front: G. Ireland, P. Boland.

The Melbourne Olympics

Television was introduced for the first time in 1956, just in time for the Melbourne Olympics and it was common to see people watching gathered around the windows of shops that sold TVs . Pat Hills was the Lord Mayor of Sydney and was giving his first ever speech on TV, just after receiving the “Olympic torch” on the steps of the Town Hall, having been run by relay all over Australia on its way to Melbourne. The bright TV lights were on him and he hadn’t noticed as he launched into his speech that silver paint from the torch handle was dripping on to his sleeve. Someone eventually tapped him on the shoulder to tell him that this wasn’t the real torch.

The back story to this was that the students at St John’s College at Sydney University where I was to reside the following year, had nailed a small plum pudding tin to the leg of a chair and painted the lot with silver frost.

A well known NSW athlete was running the last leg of the real torch relay over the Harbour Bridge, and had just reached York Street on the way to the Town Hall when the students made their move a couple of blocks closer to the Town Hall.

A motor bike ridden by Lloyd Hughes in his navy national service overcoat and cap, came in from the side street escorting Mick Garvey dressed in athletic shorts and singlet carrying the fake torch. Unfortunately Mick put his foot in a hole and spilled the torch. A fellow student from St John’s, Barry Larkin, rushed onto the road, picked up the torch, pushed the kerosene soaked underpants back into the tin and set

off down York Street towards the Town Hall following the motor bike and dressed in grey trousers and a white shirt. The police escort for the real torch could see something odd was happening up ahead but wasn’t able to get through as the students and the crowd on the footpath had broken through the barricades and piled out onto York Street making a wall of bodies.

Barry ran up the Town Hall steps, presented the torch, bowed to the Lord Mayor and then disappeared into the crowd, Lloyd having already made his escape on the motor bike. Eventually the real torch arrived and Pat Hills started his speech for the second time, all on live TV.

Many years later, I had a patient in my ENT practice at Miranda who told me that he had been the one who tapped Pat Hills on the shoulder and he had been appointed as the supervisor of the torch relay all around Australia, having previously been the coach of an Aussie Rules squad in Melbourne.

Barry Larkin was a Vet Science student who came from Melbourne where there was no Vet faculty and so after doing Science 1, all the students from Melbourne came to Sydney to do their Veterinary studies. Barry was a very good Aussie Rules player and was in the very same team that this patient of mine was coaching. When he saw the fake torch being carried up the stairs, he thought “what the hell is Barry Larkin doing here with that torch?” He realised what was going on, but deliberately waited until Barry had melted into the crowd. “I couldn’t alert Pat Hills until I knew Barry was safe” he

told me. I later got to know Barry very well at St John’s, where he was liked by everyone.

Back at Riverview at exam time towards the end of November, we were watching the Olympic highlights on TV every night.

Vladimir Kutz, the Russian 5 & 10kms runner, was one of the star attractions as he demolished his opposition with repeated surges of speed in what had previously been events run at even pace. He always ran in the second lane, which was where the cinders weren’t chopped up at much as on the inside lane, but he had to run furthur. Cinders was faster than grass, but not as fast as the synthetic tracks of today.

Another very memorable event was the “blood in the pool” water polo game between Russia and Hungary, which turned into a big punch up. This was because just prior to the Olympics, Russian tanks had rolled into Budapest to put down the Hungarian Revolution which had been mounted against their Soviet oppressors.

The 100m was won by a white American Bobby Morrow as this was before the days that black Americans were encouraged to compete and there were also no Kenyan or Ethiopian distance runners like there are today.

Our runner in the 100 metres was Hec Hogan, who got a bronze, having been the equal world record holder of the 100 yards at 9.3secs. Australia did well on the track thanks to the eighteen-year-old Betty Cuthbert, who won three gold medals, and we cleaned up in the swimming with gold to John Devitt (100m), Murray Rose (400m) and Dawn Fraser (100m).

Police held back the crowd as Barry Larkin approached the Town Hall with the “Olympic Torch”.

“Blood in the Pool”: when Hungary & Russia met in the Olympic Water Polo.

Programme cover from the Melbourne Olympic Games, 1956.

Of course, today I would never have got into Medicine.

Now, you need to have an HSC mark of 99.5%, and most these days pass first year. In 1957 however, six Bs was enough to start Medicine 1 – but there was a brutal 50% fail rate for first year, and another half failed second year. Of the thirty pupils in the Leaving Certificate A class at Riverview, eleven started Medicine at Sydney University, with four of us residing at St John’s College. Joe Lewis and I shared a room, while John Dunstan and David O’Dell also shared. Because there were eight hundred doing Med. 1, you had to hurry between Lecture Theatres to get a seat, otherwise you would have to sit on a step.

In the first week, one of the lecturers pointedly said: “Everyone, look to the person on your left. At the end of the year, one of you will pass and one of you will fail.” Medicine in those days was an endurance test as much as a test of intelligence. As it turned out, all but one of the boys at St John’s passed Med.1, which was a great effort. We were nearly all country kids who had gone to boarding school, and were disciplined into studying for a few hours every night. We also helped each other fill in the gaps in our lecture notes and in the third term, we did past exam papers together every Friday night until about midnight.

I suspect that without this mutual support at St John’s, I would have had trouble finishing my degree. My results came out just before Christmas, with a congratulatory phone call from Bill Cutcliffe, who lived in Eugowra and who got the paper every morning. Of the 800 who started Med.1 in 1957, about 250 graduated with me in 1963, with a lot (like me) having failed a year along the way.

Top: Sydney University Quadrangle; Bottom: St. John’s College

St John’s College & Sydney University 1957 – 1963

The Fresher System was in full swing at St John’s in my Fresher year of 1957. I suspect there was a strong hangover from the World War 2 ex-servicemen who had resided in the College from about 1947 to five years before we arrived. The idea behind “fresher bashing” was to break up any cliques from Sydney private schools and so it was, in the face of common adversity, that we became good friends with fresher year mates from Goulburn, Katoomba, Wagga, Albury etc.

Freshers had to address all the seniors as “Sir,” and had to walk on the polished floor boards in the hallways rather than on the strip of lino down the centre: “Off the lino fresher!” was a regularly heard cry.

About once a month, in the first term, on a Friday or Saturday night, we would be woken up and made to run around the University block, which was about three kms. Freshers weren’t allowed in any of the pubs around the College, (and anyway, we were under the entry age of eighteen).

In the first term, there was an event when we would be taken blindfolded at night in a car to some distant destination where we were dropped off without money, which led to a competition between the freshers from St Andrew’s and St John’s as to who got the most home in the shortest time. I was left with a couple of others at about midnight in a very wooded area near a beach. We followed the road for about an hour or so, and reached the a place I recognised to be Audley Weir. Finally we reached the Princes Highway and thumbed a ride on a night cart, all squeezed up on the front seat, as the back of the truck was full of

sewage cans, (a lot of the Sutherland Shire was not on the septic system at that time).

After being dropped off near Tom Ugly’s bridge, we thumbed another ride to Newtown and got home at about 5am. It was quite a good fun adventure, and fresher bashing was also often quite amusing. I remember I was made to get into the top of a built-in wardrobe while a senior’s card game went on down below and every fifteen minutes, the small door at the top had to be opened and I had to give the appropriate number of “cuckoos” to tell the time.

The second year college students, the sophomores, started their year about a week after us as they had all been in the Army Camp at Singleton for a couple of months during the summer Uni. break, doing compulsory National Service (Nashos), and we were a a bit apprehensive as we thought they would probably come down hard on us. They were very fit-looking with their Army style crew cuts, but as it turned out, they weren’t too much of a worry.

There were a number of Asians at the College, some part of the Colombo Plan which was a government scholarship. Michael Cheok in our year was an MBC (Malayan born Chinese), and addition there were HBCs from Hong Kong and ABCs from Australia. One of our freshers, Cam Young, was an FBC (Fijian born Chinese), and having problems with jet lag, would need a sleep in the afternoon and then couldn’t get to sleep at night. On the night the Nashos arrived back, Cam in the early hours looked out his window across St John’s oval to see a few flames near the University Army Regiment building. This was a centre where students could become Officers in the National Service and get to be in charge during the

summer camps and so, were unpopular with the rank and file students, who they bossed around. In the dark, Cam found two pennies which were necessary to operate the public ground floor phone, three floors down. Unfortunately, his call to the fire brigade didn’t get through and the phone had gobbled up his only pennies.

Coming from Fiji, he didn’t realise that all he had to do was to free dial 000 and so back up three floors to his room he went. Cam shared a room with a very quiet sleepy lad from Albury, Brian McGee who was nicknamed McGoo after a short sighted cartoon character.

“I tried to wake up McGoo – McGoo, McGoo, wake up – have you got any pennies, but McGoo just wouldn’t wake up. I felt really tired by then, lay down and went fast asleep.” John Mallon from Orange was an early riser, who looked out at about dawn, saw the Regiment well alight, and woke everyone up. When he came to wake up Cam, he was told: “I know, I know – I saw it two hours ago!”

In my second year at St John’s, when it came my turn to be a Fresher basher, I wasn’t very interested. I can only recall one occasion when I entered the room shared by my now two good friends, “Charlie” Brown and Bruce Harding, who started in 1958.

The beds had rubber mattresses so I gave the order “Freshers! Strip the bed and then put mattress into window launching position!” Then, with the mattress on its side half out the window, I gave the final order: “Freshers! Launch mattress,” causing it to fall to the ground three floors below. Being made of foam rubber, it bounced but wasn’t damaged. I thought at the time that this was hilarious, which I guess shows what an immature eighteen-year-old I was.

In 1960, one day came the message that Daddy was very sick in hospital in Orange with peritonitis due to a ruptured duodenal ulcer. He had for many years been unwell with gastric discomfort, only just being able to eat the special dishes that Mum made for him. The ulcer had been diagnosed on Barium Meal X-ray in 1957 at the time when Uncle Joe died aged only 58, leaving Daddy the only male in his family of eight still alive.

Pushing a ram though a gate, he experienced severe abdominal pain and was taken by Mum to see the GP in Eugowra. The doctor missed the diagnosis of a ruptured ulcer, (which would have been evident on a simple plain X-ray of the chest), and as a result missed the opportunity of Daddy having early surgery to close the hole and avoid the development of peritonitis.

So, he languished in Eugowra Hospital for a day or two, developed peritonitis and was then taken by ambulance to Orange, in what must have been a very painful two hour journey over that rough, winding dirt road.

He came under the care of Dr Frank Smith, a surgeon, who treated him conservatively with an intravenous antibiotic tetracycline, hoping that he would be in the 30% of patients who survived in these circumstances.

Aunty Nell and I drove up to Orange to see him about ten days later. Fortunately he had turned the corner and was much better. However, I will never forget his face when I saw him. He had the typical textbook “Hippocratic facies,” often seen in those close to death, characterised by sunken cheeks and enormous sunken eyes. After that, he had no further ulcer symptoms. Life was much happier for Daddy without the chronic dyspepsia that had bothered him for years, and he was noticeably much calmer.

Over twenty years later, two Perth pathologists received the Nobel Prize after debunking the theory that stress and lifestyle were the cause of peptic ulcer disease, and proving that ulcers were caused by a bacterium, helicobacter pylori. The infection is typically contracted in early childhood, probably from parent to child, and bacteria may then remain in the stomach for the rest of a person’s life.

Nowadays, chronic ulcers are uncommon, as the bacteria can be eradicated by a course of tetracycline, combined with a medication to inhibit acid secretion and another antibiotic. So Daddy’s prolonged treatment with tetracycline in Orange probably wiped the helicobacter and cured his ulcer symptoms for good.

We all worked very hard in 2nd Year Med in 1958, and often got together to do past papers which were freely on sale. Biochemistry was very difficult, not made any easier by the sneering attitudes of the University lecturers who sometimes seem to enjoy that we didn’t understand a particular point. The Biochemistry exam was to be a multiple choice, where you had to tick the correct box out of three or four possible.

This multiple choice had come into existence in 1957, the year before we did it, and the St John’s students got together after the exam and wrote out as many of the questions as they could remember, which was well over half. We treated these like any other past paper and checked out which were the correct answers.

When exam day came, imagine our surprise to see that the lazy examiners had not changed the questions! This gave us an advantage as it did for those two hundred repeating 2nd year who would have remembered some of the questions from the previous year. About a week after the exam, I received a notice that I should

attend for a Viva-Voce exam, which involved being quizzed by three professors from the Biochemistry School. Whether this was because I had come close to failing or whether it was a routine double check on the multiple choice, I don’t know. I handled most of the questions, until asked by Professor Pollack, (who was a kindly man compared to the other two), “What is an alpha helix?”

On page two of my lecture notes from the first lecture of the year given by Dr Pollack was a letter C shaped drawing without any written text, but labelled alpha helix with AGCT stuck around the margins of the C at a distance from each other, with 3.4 amstrong units measurement between the limbs of the C.

I had never been able to work out what this referred to – but of course it later became evident that this was a basic part of DNA. The textbook was no help, as DNA had been discovered by Watson and Crick only a few years earlier and their findings had yet to be published in a textbook.

I answered Dr Pollack therefore by saying, “Can I draw it for you?” He said yes, I drew it, he beamed, and I got away with it ... not aware that this was DNA!

I should have taken this Viva as a warning, and got hold of some 3rd year Biochem lecture notes and a text-book to take home and have a look at during the summer holidays in preparation, because I failed Biochemistry in the August of 3rd year. I had to repeat all 3rd year subjects in 1960. As it turned out, I spent too much time on Anatomy and came twelfth in the whole year – but obviously not enough time on Biochem. In addition, I had nausea and diarrhoea all through the exams, which I later knew to be Giardia which could have been easily fixed with some medication.

However in a College, there is no one keeping an eye on your health, and I was too young and silly to go to the Casualty at RPA.

I then went home to help with shearing, which Daddy always organised during August holidays so David and I could help. Following that, as was often the case in Spring, my asthma started up and become chronically bad making me short of breath even to walk.

I came down to Sydney and stayed with Marg and Doff Payten in Randwick, but after a week, was not improving much – unusual as mostly I got better within a few days of coming to Sydney. Marg and Doff’s house was fairly old, so I thought that might be the reason. I rang Aunty Nell who said, “Sure, come and stay with me,” in her new unit at Double Bay.

I’d lost over seven kilos. Aunty Nell took one look at me and said, “It’s time you saw a doctor.” So off we went to see her doctor, Rob Burns, who had a listen to my chest and said, “Here, listen to this, it’s bronchial breathing.” This is an abnormal see-saw sound which you hear with each breath, indicating an underlying area of lung consolidation, (due in my case to localised pneumonia). He gave me antibiotics and I got better very quickly. After a couple of weeks, I was back in good shape and well enough to get a job out of the newspaper as a builders labourer.

I moved out of Aunty Nell’s to share a room with a previous fellow Johnsman, Adrian, who was driving a cab on the afternoon shift. We never spoke as one or the other was always asleep in the same room. The problem with this place was that it was rat infested, and I would find they had eaten some of my weetbix or bread when I went to make breakfast. Through the Sydney University Accommodation Office, I was lucky enough

to find a room with a great landlady, Mrs Martin, in a terrace house in Fowler Street Camperdown, opposite the Oval.

There were four other students there, three doing Teachers College, one Engineering and one older permanent boarder George who worked in a warehouse. We made our own breakfast and Mrs Martin would cook us dinner at night.

I can still see her at about 2pm, cigarette hanging off her bottom lip while she chopped vegetables into a big metal pot into which would also go neck chops or other cheap cuts of meat, so that after four hours of slow cooking, we had a delicious meal. Sometimes you would hear her yell out at George who was swearing about something “George, stop that bloody blasphemin”! On Saturdays from an upstairs window you could see lots of people coming to the back yard of the house next door in order to place a bet with an illegal SP bookmaker.

Through the Sydney Uni. Employment Agency, I landed a job with a builder at Arncliffe constructing a two-story telephone exchange. He told me on the first day that he was a bit apprehensive about hiring a student, but I reassured him that I grew up on a farm, could handle tools well and would work hard.

He told me that he’d decided to employ a student, because the current two labourers had dug a big hole for a concrete foundation two feet deeper than he’d instructed, so that now he would have to fill the hole with that much more steel reinforcement and cement at extra cost.

One day we did a concrete pouring to fill these big two metre wide holes. This involved having your wheelbarrow filled with cement from a concrete truck and then wheeling it down some wooden gangplanks right up to above the edge of the hole. On the end of the planks

was bolted a big block of wood that would suddenly halt the forward movement of the rubber tyred wheel, enabling you to quickly lift the barrow handles and pour the cement. This all went well for a while, until on this one occasion when I ran my barrow onto the wooden block, it suddenly gave way, allowing the barrow to fly into the air with me hanging onto the handles. It was a good six foot drop to the top of the hole. I looked down and saw the steel spikes pointing up, so I let go the barrow handles, did a big dive and fortunately landed on the side of the hole. The barrow was a complete write-off. The boss removed the front wheel and put the rest into the rubbish.

After a month or so, the boss gave me a rise from nineteen to twenty pounds a week, (about $40), because I could read the plans to erect the scaffolding. This meant I was in charge of two other young labourers. It was important to follow the plans, otherwise the whole thing could collapse and kill someone. This was all great for my self-confidence, which had been at rock bottom after failing 3rd Year. I slowly realised that I’d been comparing myself to other Uni students, yet compared to many others outside University, I wasn’t doing too badly. The building site was right under the flight path from nearby Sydney airport, which allowed us to get a good look at the new Qantas Boeing 707, the first jet commercial aeroplane to be introduced into Australia in 1959. This could fly to England in 26 hours, compared to the 93 hour trip in the propellor driven Constellation plane.

Once I turned twenty in October, I could get my cab-driving licence and would be able to drive from January to March 1960, when Uni. started back. This was good money and popular amongst students at St John’s – but to get the licence you had to pass an exam. The

boys at St John’s had compiled a big list of the exam questions that had been asked over previous years which I had access to, so when I sat for my verbal exam, I got 95% correct.

Driving a cab began at 3.15pm and usually continued until whenever you wanted to go home, around 1am. The working class suburbs along the railway line – Lewisham, Petersham, Ashfield etc. were the best for tipping – while those in the eastern suburbs were lousy tippers!

I remember being scared late one night when a bloke got into the cab in Darlinghurst and got me to pull up and wait outside a gate in Little Riley Street through which my passenger entered and the man on the gate had a gun in his hand. This was a sly grog shop which sold alcohol after the pubs shut at 10pm, the police having being bribed no doubt.

So, back to repeat Med 3 in March, and still with Mrs Martin. I was pleased to have saved enough money to pay my University fees for 1960, having lost my Commonwealth Scholarship (which paid all Uni fees) after failing 3rd year. I regained the scholarship after passing the repeat exams.

Unfortunately Mrs Martin’s kidneys began to play up in about June, so we all had to eat out. She used to ingest quite a few Bex Powders as a pick-me-up. “A Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie down” was meant to be a cureall. They contained aspirin and phenacetin for pain relief, and caffeine, which was the stimulant that made people feel better and was slightly addictive. Sadly unknown at the time, phenacetin ruined the kidneys. It was eventually banned in about 1970.

In September 1960, I started junior 4th Year Med., which saw us for the first time in the wards and outpatients at Prince Alfred Hospital examining patients, going to operating theatres

and attending autopsies. A group of about eight students were allotted to a specialist surgeon or physician and taken around the wards over a few hours to see patients under his care. The day before, we would have been each assigned a patient and given the task of taking the patient’s history, doing a clinical examination and then, on the following day, it would be necessary to reproduce all of this information to the rest of the group. It was a great learning experience, and also very good training in public speaking to a friendly audience. We also attended the outpatients’ clinic and became shyly capable of examining, for example, a lump in the breast. Some of the students in the operating theatre would feel faint at the sight of blood, but having watched sheep being killed at Kaloola from an early age, I wasn’t in the least bit effected.

At about this time, Daddy and David came down for the wool sales at Yennora and found some Japanese wool buyers circling around one of our wool bales complaining of an awful smell. The bale was cut in half to reveal a pressed possum! There were quite a few possums who used to run around the log rafters in our shearing shed at Kaloola, where I worked as a wool presser. I must have halffilled a box of the Ferrier wool press, gone home at knock off time, come back the next morning to continue filling the boxes and then pressed the wool, not knowing that a possum had fallen in overnight. Poor possum!

The clinical years of 4th, 5th and final year were free of that awful foreboding feeling of perhaps failing exams at the end of the year, as nearly everyone passed those final three years. I still have a recurrent dream that I have an exam on the next day but I haven’t covered the course – and am so relieved when I wake up and realise that it was just a dream! I thought it was just me, but David says he has the same dream!

A copy of the alpha helix drawing that got me through the Biochem Viva-Voce exam.

The famous Bex ad of the 1950s & ‘60s.

A Ferrier wool press similar to the Kaloola press.

Sporting Life at Uni

After being indoors all day, after-hours and weekend sport played a big part in running off excess energy and maintaining sanity.

The trials for University Club Rugby selection would take place in early 1st term in March, and it became obvious that whichever of the four grades you played in during the trials, that was the grade you finished up being in for the rest of the year, unless you did something extraordinary to catch the eye of the selectors.

As a forward, it was hard to stand out, so in 1962, (while doing 5th year Med.), I bought a white headgear and arrived deliberately late after the 4th and 3rd grade trials had already played, managing to get a half game in the reserve grade trial.

There were quite a few good players in second grade who made me look good, as I could run fast enough to keep up and receive the ball from them at vital times. The white head gear

Back row: Paddy Jones, Peter Renshaw, M Hruska, Tommy Meagher, Henry To Robert

Front row: Ray Imberger, Roger O’Farrell, David Payten ,Gerry Fitzgerald, Jim Dibben, Bob Payten, Patrick Cheok

identified me doing a few good tackles etc, so after several weekends of trials, I was selected to play in University 2nds. This was more than I had hoped for, seeing as three of the forwards in the 1st grade side had played for Australia.

It was great fun playing at different grounds on Saturdays and getting away from the Camperdown environs. Playing Randwick at Coogee Oval and Norths at North Sydney Oval were my favourites, and they were also the friendliest clubs where you could enjoy a drink after the game.

I will always remember playing against Norths on Easter Saturday 1962 at North Sydney Oval when we won 22:20. It was televised for the last fifteen minutes by the ABC, who were practising for the 1st grade game. It was one of the first club games ever to be televised – only six years after the introduction of TV. I scored two tries that day, the second one only five minutes from the end, which won us the game.

Inter-collegiate Athletics 1962

At 2pm on a sunny autumn day on the picturesque University Oval, David and I lined up for the first race of the inter-collegiate athletics: the 800 metres.

The starter was Dr. Perret, an Englishman and anatomy lecturer, who sported a bright red jacket, tweed cap and a brace of duelling pistols. He was an amusing character and eased the pre-race butterflies.

St Paul’s College had a good 400m runner, so David and I had a plan to make sure he ran a fast first lap, which would hopefully mean he would be worn out for the second lap. The plan seemed to work well as predicted: the Paul’s runner led the way with me sitting just on his elbow. As we completed the first lap, the time keeper called out: “57 seconds,” a reasonably quick time. David took over soon after that with a surge that opened up quite a lead ... but eventually I was able to pass him.

In the final straight I heard footsteps behind me. Thinking it might be the Paul’s runner, I sped up – but my legs gave out.

It was David who beat me by a metre.

“Good work St John’s, good work,” effused Dr. Perret to David and me, in our green athletic singlets and St John’s crest. That set the tone for the afternoon. St John’s continued to claim a fair number of wins and places, and finally won the day by taking out the last race: the 4x100 metres relay.

St John’s College won the inter-collegiate athletics for the first time in many years, and David went on to later become the University 800 metres champion.

There were great celebrations in the Common Room that night. A keg of beer had been donated by the father of our team captain, Gerry Fitzgerald, and many Irish-themed songs that had been passed down the generations of students were sung.

It is interesting to note that at the time of the St John’s centenary in 1958 we were reminded that it was through the small donations of very many Irish Catholics, who wanted tertiary education for their children, that St John’s was built. Some of the donors could well have received only a brief education in the hedgerow schools back in Ireland.

In later years, I learnt that my wife Mairi’s grandfather, E.B. Dalton, and two of his brothers had been students at St John’s between 1887 and 1903 –grandsons of an Irish convict.

Going Home for Summer

The long University summer holidays, from early December to the end of February, were good for catching up on some much needed home life and doing some hard manual work at Kaloola. In those days, before bulk wheat carting, I remember some very hot days in the paddock sewing or pinning up wheat bags at harvest time, then teaming up with David to throw them onto the back of our Bedford truck, and cooling off on the trip into the Eugowra silo with Dad driving.

In addition, we employed a professional wheat carter, who used a hydraulic device to lift wheat bags up onto the truck, (called a G-Well loader). This was a hinged device attached to the side of the truck which, once a bag was placed on it, would swing upwards depositing the bag onto the shoulder of a man standing on the tray of the truck.

Some years earlier when I was about sixteen, I thought it looked easy enough, so asked if I could have a go. When the bag landed on my shoulder, it knocked me over! I thought that I must have mistimed it somehow, so had a second and then a third go, each time ending up flat on my side with a wheat bag on top of me – much to my embarrassment! Many years later, David was talking to Mr Stack, the owner of the truck, when he asked what had become of me since that one and only meeting – I’m not sure whether he remembered this episode because of my dogged persistence or because I was silly enough to line up to be floored three times in a row!

Daddy would also get David and I to do a lot of fencing, which mainly involved crowbar and shovel work to dig post holes under the guidance of Rinaldo, who came back from Italy to Kaloola in about 1950. We drank

frequently from the canvas water bag and became very physically fit.

Because it was so hot in the middle of the day, we would come into the house for lunch and after that have a siesta. There was no air conditioning and the coolest place in the house was the hall floor, where you would find a few bodies lined up having a quick nap, especially during heat waves. These could last for 4–5 days at 40C, and make for a very poor night’s sleep.

Some of the floor space in the hall could at times also be taken up with dress-making material and patterns. The old treadle sewing machine was put to good use, provided the bobbin or some other part wasn’t playing up, but Kathie always seemed to get it going again and actually made a two piece suit for herself, (an amazing achievement, so I have been told!)

After the evening meal the house was usually still very hot. We would sit out on the small wellwatered cool patch of lawn, looking up at the glorious dome of the night sky with its millions of bright stars, so easily visible in the darkness of the countryside, with the cloudy Milky Way band extending down towards the south.

Occasionally we would make the one-hour, dirt road drive into Forbes on a Saturday night to go to the ‘pictures’, ( “Black & White now replaced by New Technicolour!”) Very occasionally, there’d be a meal at either of the Greek restaurants, the Red Rose or the White Rose, and on the way home, we would often have a “sing-song” – which was great fun.

On Sundays we went to Mass in Gooloogong, a town of about two hundred people, almost all of whom were Catholics. Father Moore was a great orator who gave memorable sermons and was well ahead of his time, so that when Vatican II arrived in 1962, (causing alarm to some conservatives in the church),

we Gooloogong parishioners had been well prepared. There were some big changes, for instance the Latin Mass was now said in English. The Lord’s Prayer, “Pater noster, qui es in cœlis”, became, “Our Father, who art in Heaven.” Father Moore also kept us up-to-date politically. This was a time when government aid for Catholic schools had become a political issue, because prior to this there had been no financial support for Catholic schools.

The whole thing came to a head when Father Moore’s friend, Guilford Young, Bishop of the Canberra-Goulburn Diocese of which we were part, closed down a Catholic school in Goulburn and marched all the children around to the public school – at which there was no room for them. Prime Minister Menzies gave in, and this is how the current Government support for Catholic schools came about. It was good as a young adult to have this time at home to absorb even more of our parents’ values and appreciate the sacrifices they made in giving us all a good education in the city.

Meeting Mairi Bruce

In the spring of 1963, my final year in Medical School, I was invited to the 21st birthday party in Newcastle of Beverley Bruce. The party was also to be the announcement of Bev’s engagement to a friend of mine at St John’s, Algy (Bob) Smith, also doing final year Med.

I was given a lift to Newcastle by another St John’s graduate, Daryl Sullivan, who picked me up with three girls in the back seat who I didn’t know. One of them was Mairi Bruce. She was no relation to Bev, but had been her good school friend. I was in the front seat, so I didn’t get to see much of her on the trip. The party was held in the Bruce family home and was a formal black-tie affair. I recall standing

A painting I did of our huge nineteen stand woolshed, which had been the Nanima woolshed back in the 1800s.

A favourite snap of a young Mairi, used by me as a student as a bookmark in my Medical textbooks.

at the foot of the stairs when Mairi approached me, looking absolutely beautiful in a black dress with her hair up.

I was stunned – and couldn’t believe my good fortune when she came over to have a chat. We all stayed the night in the Bruce’s big house before going back to Sydney, where the girls were dropped off one by one. I remember saying to Daryl as we drove back to St John’s: “That Mairi Bruce is a very nice girl.” I must’ve got her phone number, because a week or two later I rang to ask Mairi out. She said unfortunately she had a prior commitment. Just my luck, I thought, to have met this beautiful girl who would probably already have a steady boyfriend.

However not long afterwards, old school friend and fellow med student John Dunstan invited me on a picnic in the Blue Mountains with his fiancée Jenny Johnson and a few others. “Line up a bird and come with us,” he said. So I rang Mairi – and she agreed to come along. We had a great picnic barbecue down a side track near Bilpin. Afterwards we went to the Kurrajong Heights Hotel for a few drinks in the beer garden, looking down over the Sydney Plain. “It’s easy to see you two have just met – you have so much to talk about!” said Mick Lennon.

That very day, I think, saw the meeting of minds, which led to us falling in love and getting married a couple of years later.

A week or two after the picnic, we arranged to go to the pictures at Double Bay. Mairi was sharing a flat with her cousin Sue Burrows from Orange, who had been to Kaloola many times, as she was a friend of my sister Jan’s. I remember how relaxed I felt in Mairi’s company, as we walked back up the hill to her place on Ocean Street. That calming influence has remained all these years.

Graduation

The end of the university year was approaching. Revision for the final year exams kept me fairly busy in preparation for the writtens, but then there were a couple of weeks of oral exams, for which you couldn’t really prepare. This left me with time to see more of Mairi and, (thanks to Jan who loaned me some money), we were able to go out quite a bit.

Exams over in early December, I got a lift home with Denis Rowe who lived at ‘Wilton Dale,’ just out of Cowra. (Denis had started Medicine at St John’s, but failed Biochemistry twice – like so many others– and had changed to teaching.)

The exam results would be available in the newspaper’s offices a 10pm, but because one of the St John’s students had a father who worked at The Telegraph, he would have them at 3pm. We stopped on the outskirts of Sydney so I could make a call from a public phone box – and received the good news that I had passed. Denis rang his parents to to ask for champagne to be put on ice. Daddy was there when we arrived, having driven up from Kaloola, and Mrs Rowe said that when she gave him the good news, he shed a tear. Out of the 800 who had started Medicine, only about 250 made it all the way through to graduation, so perhaps there was always some doubt that I might never succeed.

The Rowes were very generous with their congratulations, as we sat on their verandah having a drink in the late afternoon light that I recall so well. Denis, a life-long friend, went on to become a marvellous teacher, not only because of his clear thinking, but also because of his very engaging affable personality. He was one of those people who could make us all really laugh with his very funny stories.

Lewisham General Hospital (1889–1988).

The hospital was run by the Little Company of Mary, popularly known as the “Blue Nuns”. The first on the left is Sister Helen, Mum’s cousin.

The 1964 Residents, back row: A. Oxenham, P. Robertson, G. Brown, P. Coorey, M. Buchanan, E. Tsao, T. Cody, J. Lewis. Front row: R. Payten, J. Teychenne, J. Monaro, R. Redwin, J. Raftery.

Junior Resident Lewisham Hospital 1964

Before the final exams we were asked to list our preferences for hospital appointments for junior residency (internship). Like most people, I put down first the four teaching hospitals: St Vincent’s, Royal Prince Alfred, Sydney Hospital and North Shore, knowing that the students with the top results would get those appointments. Next, I put down Lewisham and The Mater Hospitals, and then numerous other less desirable positions.

I was fortunate to get to Lewisham Hospital, as most of the “Honoraries” at Lewisham were also on at St Vincent’s and were high quality people in every way, who did unpaid honorary work on Public Patients in return for being able to admit private paying patients. Lewisham was run by the Little Company of Mary nuns who gave us a great example of how to treat and respect even the most down-and-out patients that we came in contact with.

It was a friendly and fortuitous place for me to land up in. In the dining room at lunch time, I could be sitting beside and chatting away to one of the top surgeons or physicians in Sydney, unlike some other bigger top hospitals where residents and Honoraries were separated. Amongst the Resident Medical staff was my first cousin, Alan Oxenham, who was a year ahead of me, as was Barry Lum, married to my second cousin Mary Armstrong.

There was also Sister Helen, a nun, who was Mum’s first cousin and childhood friend, being one of the Armstrong clan, and her brother Tom Armstrong was an Eye Surgeon. One of the trainee nurses was Patricia Cutcliffe, daughter of Bill from Eugowra who used to ring through my exam results, and who eventually married Geoff Brown, a senior

resident a year in front of me. Two Riverview classmates were also Junior Residents: “Joe” Lewis, my old roommate from St John’s and “Chips” Raftery, while Tex Cody, a year ahead of me at Riverview, was also a senior resident.

My first term was a medical one working for various physicians, one of who was Redmond Dalton, Mairi’s uncle. At our first meeting, he asked if I was related to John and Bayly, my cousins from Canowindra, which made me feel at home. Red ran the Diabetic Outpatients clinic in a very efficient, instructive way. The Dalton family had been generous benefactors to the Little Company of Mary. One of the wards was called the Dalton Ward, and one of the young nuns was a Dalton from Griffith.

Every three months, we would rotate onto another team, such as Orthopaedics, General Surgery, Anaesthetics, ENT, Eyes, Neurology or Casualty (Accident & Emergency). We worked every second night and every third week-end in either Casualty or in the Hospital wards, learning under supervision from either the Senior Residents (one year ahead of us), the Registrars, or from the Honoraries whose team we were on. The man in charge of us was the Hospital Superintendent, a surgeon called Jim Monaro, whom I fortunately got on well with.

I recall an old lady with a heart problem in medical ward 6, who developed a painful red eye. I was alerted to this, and thinking it must be conjunctivitis gave her some antibiotic eye drops. When they made no difference a day or so later, I asked for an Eye Specialist opinion. I was summoned to the ward, there to be met by “Uncle” Tom Armstrong, who was very clearly displeased. He said sternly: “Robert, if someone has a red eye which is painful and they can’t see properly out of the eye, the diagnosis is acute glaucoma which requires

urgent medical attention to save the sight. Now don’t you forget that!”

Fifty-seven years later I haven’t forgotten that. You don’t have to be an eye specialist to know that if someone can’t see out of an eye, something is really wrong with that eye.

In early 1964, Mairi and her friend Mary Julian flew off on an overseas trip, and although I wrote regularly, I didn’t receive anything back for a few months. I was beginning to think perhaps I wasn’t so special after all. Eventually some letters from Mairi arrived by sea mail, (which was apparently because some of the Mediterranean postal workers had pinched the air mail stamps).

As the year went on, by about mid-winter I began to realise that I was starting to feel lonely. This period of six months was the longest I had ever been without going home for the usual end-of-term two week holiday break in May. On the weekends, when I wasn’t working I was usually alone, as I was the only country boy in the Residents’ Quarters and all the city boys went home. I didn’t own a car to get out about, although Mum had offered to help me buy one earlier in the year, but I felt that was too generous of her and turned down her offer.

In addition, I was increasingly really missing Mairi. There were some diversions to brighten up life a bit. I would sometimes pay Kathie a visit in her flat at Woollahra, or have a cuppa with Jan and Alan Oxenham, who were not long married and lived close by in Petersham.

I had known Jan for years before she married my cousin Alan, as the Delaneys from Cowra were family friends. It was while Alan was staying with us on a visit to Kaloola as a teenager that they first met. Her sister Robyn married my dear friend Denis Rowe.

Top

Burn

the Greyhound & an Illegal After-Hours Venue

Tex Cody was a man of the racing world, (his Dad was a barber and an SP bookie), and persuaded all of us Residents to buy a racing greyhound for £200. This meant we each had to put in £20, which was about a week’s wages, although we did get free board and food.

I made an enclosure/kennel for ‘Top Burn’ under the fire escape stairs at the back of the Residents’ Quarters, by attaching some wire netting to the railing and then anchoring it into the ground.

We had a roster to get up early to walk him at a brisk pace for an hour or so, which was all we were told he needed in the way of daily training. I often went down through Leichhardt and then along parkland near the Dobroyd Canal, and would there find other greyhound owners, often with two or three dogs on leads in both hands.

These were fairly rough-looking characters, often with a few teeth missing in old tracksuits, who I felt looked at me disdainfully as I walked my just one dog, dressed in my smart casuals.

The dog was well bred, and we all hoped for many wins. Unfortunately, at his first start at the Lithgow Dogs, he was bumped into the running rail. Though not hurt badly, that was enough for a smart dog like Top Burn to make sure that it didn’t happen again. In every race after that he ran wide towards the tail of the field.

Eventually the training was taken over by someone Tex knew called Wally, who was high up in the Communist Party and a Balmain wharfie. In those days of the Cold War, the

Communist Party had a big influence on the Trade Unions, having survived a referendum to ban the Party by the Menzies government in the early 1950s, and their newspaper the Tribune was handed out on the streets on Fridays.

We had great fun going around the various racing venues such as the Dapto Dogs and the Gosford Dogs – but the only dog that Top Burn ever beat home was Wally’s dog, so eventually he was retired from racing and given to Wally.

One Friday night, after knocking off work late, four of us decided to go to Kings Cross to have a drink in one of the many bars that traded after the legal 10pm closing time. There were lots of American R&R (Rest & Recreation) troops in Sydney on leave from the Vietnam war, and the Kellett Club was full of them.

To get in, you had to be wearing a tie and get the approval of the big bouncer on the door. We were quietly sitting at a table, when the now off-duty bouncer – with a drunk woman on his arm – went by. The woman lurched, spilling half a glass of beer down the back of Tex Cody’s neck. Tex jumped up, swearing at the woman, and her bouncer companion began to threaten Tex. I could see trouble brewing, so I got Tex to sit down, and told the bouncer that Tex was OK and, “You are too.” His reply was “Don’t you talk down to me like that – I’ll get you later.”

We didn’t stay long after that. Leaving by a big staircase which let down to a long narrow corridor out on to the street, I was the last in our line of four. Suddenly my elbows were pinioned from behind, head forced down and the punches started to rain. I counted six sets of feet and eventually began to feel very light-

headed. I knew I would be in big trouble from all those feet once I went down.

I could see a corner in the corridor not far away, so I dived into that, and with my head in the corner protected by my arms, felt a head injury was less likely. But now I was getting kicked a lot in the body and I thought any time now, it will be a ruptured spleen or kidney or a broken rib – so I put on an imitation of an epileptic fit.

This involved making a lot of jerking arm and leg movements, accompanied by repeated loud and harsh gasping noises from the throat. The kicking stopped immediately. I was dragged along the corridor out onto the street, where my friends were relieved to see me stop “fitting”.

We caught cab down to St Vincent’s, and all seemed OK. A nice old policeman on duty in Casualty was quite upset, and took Tex back with him to the Kellett Club – but of course there was no sign of the bouncer.

We then went to the Darlinghurst Police station but met a brick wall: “What were you doing in that place anyway, don’t you know it’s illegal?

Anyway Mr Taylor who owns the club is a nice man, and always comes to our Christmas party and donates the beer”.

I had to take a week off work until all the facial swelling and bruising went down. Luckily there were no permanent injuries.

One of my friends at St Vincent’s Casualty kept asking the old policeman if progress was being made in finding my assailants. My friend was told eventually that I did not want to press charges – even though this wasn’t discussed when we were at the police station.

It was obvious to anyone that the police were being paid off by those who ran these afterhours bars, casinos, illegal SP betting and brothels, and that all through the 1960’s, the chiefs of police Norman Allen and Merv Wood and the Liberal NSW Premier Robert Askin were taking bribes. Some of the well-known names of those paying off the police and politicians were Abe Saffron (“Mr Sin”), Perce Galea (the Forbes Club) and Joe Taylor (the Kellett Club and the 33 Club in Oxford Street).

There is one story of Perce Galea needing the install a new roulette wheel which was too big to fit up the stairs to the first floor of the Forbes Club. The problem was solved by police closing Forbes Street to all traffic in broad daylight, and lifting the roulette wheel through the front top window with a crane!

Perce’s son Bruce later spent a few years in Long Bay Jail because he refused to give evidence to the Royal Commission into Organised Crime in 1973–74, and judged that he would be safer in jail than risk being “dealt with” for snitching.

Abe Saffron was behind a series of arsons which burnt out those he didn’t like, the last being the “ghost train” fire at Luna Park where unfortunately there were seven deaths, six of them children and a police cover up followed. Abe finished up in jail for a couple of years for tax evasion.

As time went by with the opening of the legal Star Casino in Ultimo, with pubs allowed to open all night and the opening of legal TAB betting shops in 1965, there was less need to bribe the police so that eventually these illegal venues shut down.

At Adair for the Orange Bachelor & Spinster’s Ball.

Working at Lewisham Hospital frequently on weekends meant not spending much, so having saved up £800, (about $2000), I bought my first car in the spring of 1964, a Morris 1100 which was a big brother to the better known Mini Minor. It didn’t have air conditioning or a radio or an automatic gearbox, but held the road very well, and was great to drive on the winding Bells Line of Road over the Blue Mountains.

A month or two later, I was very happy when Mairi flew back from overseas. On the day of her arrival, she phoned to invite me to dinner with her parents whom I had not met, and her good natured brother Robert, who had been in my class at Riverview.

In the late afternoon, as I was getting changed in the Residents’ Quarters, I happened to look out across the road to see Mairi get out of a car and go into Lewisham Private Hospital, where her grandmother Jessie Dalton was a patient.

The image of her in a pale green suit remains clearly in my head to this day.

Later we all had a pleasant dinner at the charming Belvedere Hotel, tucked away in a quiet street in Darlinghurst, where Mr and Mrs Bruce always stayed. (It was later demolished for the new roadway and tunnel.)

A few weeks later, Mairi asked me to the Orange Bachelors and Spinsters Ball, so I flew up and stayed at Adair, the family property. This was a very welcoming home, not unlike Kaloola, and only about eighty miles away.

Mrs Bruce told me that her sister Ellie Dalton and my uncle Joe Payten where an item back in the 1920’s. She said that everyone had liked Joe and how disappointed she was that they didn’t become engaged.

Senior Resident Lewisham Hospital 1965

It was now our turn to teach the newly arrived Junior Residents how to do things down in Casualty, such as giving an anaesthetic to straighten a broken wrist, how to pop a dislocated shoulder back into place or how to do a cardiograph etc.

Because my cousin Alan Oxenham had glandular fever and was off work, I did two terms in a row of anaesthetics and as a result, became good at difficult intubations of the airway and cannulating narrow fragile veins.

I remember giving an anaesthetic to one little very old lady who had fallen and broken her hip, which involved checking her over beforehand to make sure she was healthy enough to stand the procedure. After the hip was pinned, she would have been kept into the anteroom to the theatre for ten minutes or so, until she was awake, and then taken back to her bed in the ward. In those days, there was no such thing as a Recovery Ward, and even Intensive Care wards were rare.

I called around to her bed soon after to make sure she was OK, and found her looking blissfully up at the nun adjusting her pillows wearing a sky blue veil. When she saw me, her face suddenly changed, and she said “Oh no, not you!” I said, “What have I done?” She replied, “I thought I’d died and was in Heaven.”

We were taught how to do simple operations such as tonsillectomy or removing an appendix, and spent a lot of time assisting in theatre by holding a retractor and observing the skill of surgeons such as Kevin Fagan of Changi fame, Eddie McMahon, whose portrait won an Archibald Prize, the most skilled neurosurgeon

Kevin Bleasel, and Bob McInerney (O&G) who was the fastest surgeon of them all.

In the days before seatbelts, there were often cases in Casualty of facial lacerations to suture on those who had gone through a windscreen. The glass would shatter into tiny pieces and cause multiple triangular cuts, which meant having to spend ages putting the skin flaps back accurately and holding them in place with very fine nylon sutures.

The reward would be in seeing the healed face, especially of a girl, at the time of suture removal. This all completely disappeared in December 1968 when it became compulsory to wear a seat belt (except for taxi drivers!)

Towards the end of my second year at Lewisham, I needed to think about either being a GP or going into a specialty. I was interested in Orthopaedics: I had good enough hand eye coordination for the carpentry involved, and all the Orthopods. at Lewisham were really good people.

On the other hand, I thought I would like to experience a wider exposure to medical life by becoming a rural GP, but for this I would need more training in Obstetrics & Paediatrics.

I was fortunate enough to line up a much sought-after six month job at the Women’s Hospital in Crown Street, followed by six months at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children at Camperdown (later transferred to Westmead Hospital).

Engaged & Married

During 1965, I was spending all my spare time with Mairi, who was living in a flat at Elizabeth Bay with her friend Mary Julian, and had started working as a medical receptionist for her uncle Redmond Dalton in Macquarie Street. In May I asked Mairi to marry me and received an immediate acceptance – as she had been wondering why I was taking so long to pop the question! We celebrated our engagement in July with a party at her flat.

Mairi and I were married at St Canice’s Church Elizabeth Bay on the 6th January 1966, with the reception at “Princes” in Martin Place in the city. It was an unforgettable and magical night.

Crown Street Hospital for Women Surry Hills

January – June 1966

Having persuaded the Superintendent at Crown Street Hospital to allow me a week off for our honeymoon, we drove north to Surfers Paradise and stayed in a swish hotel with a pool, (a rarity in those days). Our first home together was the rented front of a large house in Neutral Bay. I had to work night shift quite often starting at 8pm, so Mairi would wake me when she got home from work.

One interesting date not long after we were married, was the 14th February 1966 when Australia changed to decimal currency – this all took some getting used to. Driving over the Harbour Bridge involved stopping at the booth to pay the toll.

During this year, Daddy sold Kaloola as he was getting too old to manage the farm and run the property, but still had Gothic at Woodstock, which was a grazing property and not labour

Engagement photo at Adair; poolside on our honeymoon.

Opposite: At Princes with such a beautiful bride & happy parents, Jack & Emilie Payten, and Mairi’s parents Ian & Muriel Bruce.

Santa (me), climbing up a ladder at the Children’s Hospital in Camperdown, to deliver Christmas presents, 1966.

Crown Street Women’s Hospital was the leading women’s hospital in NSW 1893– 1983, caring for the poorest and most marginalised women in Sydney.

intensive. He and Mum planned to move into Cowra, which was especially good for Mum. She had begun playing Bridge, which she was good at, and she wasn’t as isolated.

We drove up to Kaloola for a weekend – and how sad I was, shedding a few tears as we left for the last time, saying goodbye to the home I had grown up in including all the familiar buildings, paddocks, trees and which birds lived where and so on.

Crown Street was a very busy obstetric hospital in Darlinghurst with about 3000 deliveries per year. I was on the labour ward every second week, sometimes day shift and sometimes night (8pm – 8am). The alternate week was spent doing ante and post-natal clinics, general ward duties and twice a week, staying in the Residents Quarters overnight, (just in case you were needed as back-up for Labour Ward in the event of a post-partum haemorrhage).

In that case, you would have to race upstairs, grab a vial of mother’s blood and run to the pathology, grab some blood out of the fridge and cross-match it against the vial. Once that was done, run flat-out with two bottles of blood

back to the Labour Ward. Severe post-partum haemorrhage was not common, but lifethreatening when it did occur, and enough of a risk to make home deliveries unacceptable.

In 1966, the contraceptive pill had only just been introduced, and as it was still not widely used there were many unplanned pregnancies. At Crown Street, there was accommodation for unmarried pregnant girls. They came from their suburban family homes to live there for the duration of their preganancy, and escape the shame of being single and pregnant.

From here, they would usually find employment as a domestic, and live with the family until late in the pregnancy, when they would return to the hospital and eventually give birth. They attended the antenatal outpatients clinic, where I got to know a few of these women, and saw that they tended to be mainly from the working class western suburbs. The wealthier eastern suburbs girls were probably more likely to have paid a lot of money to attend a well-known illegal Bondi abortion clinic, which probably bribed the police to stay open.

Some of the women had self-tattooed LOVE on their back of their fingers, and some were having a second baby, having already given up the first for adoption. Very few kept the baby. Having signed the adoption papers prior to the birth, a sheet was held up at the end of labour so that they could not see the baby, as it was thought by labour ward sisters that this would spare them some grief.

In my experience, the sisters were always sympathetic and did this with the best of intentions, although years later some women have come out and said how cruel it was, and how they would have at least liked to spend a short time with their baby.

The mothers were then looked after for a week in a big old home in Birrell Street Waverley overlooking the ocean, where I often visited to do some post-partum checks. Superficially at least, they seemed cheerful enough.

Adoption of course dropped dramatically in the 1970s when the Supporting Mothers Pension was introduced, abortion was more or less “legalised” by the Levine ruling and the Pill had become widely used. Crown Street Hospital was closed down in the 1980s.

Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children Camperdown

July – December 1966

In my first couple of months here I worked in Casualty (ED) full time as my “day” job, and after that, it would be back in Cas. for a couple of nights a week and every third weekend. There were a lot of coughs and colds and nappy rashes and the like in kids whose families often used Casualty as their GP, but you had to stay alert in case you missed a child with meningitis or some other severe complaint. When in doubt about meningitis, it was necessary to do a lumbar puncture under local anaesthetic, which I was good at, having learnt on adults at Lewisham Hospital.

Another common problem in small children was vomiting and diarrhoea, which after a few days can lead to severe dehydration and even death. Croup was another worry as you had to keep an eye on them long enough to be sure they didn’t have epiglottitis, which was often fatal if not recognized. It was not unusual for there to be a two hour waiting time to be seen on a weekend afternoon, so the experienced sister in charge would walk through the waiting room and pick out this or that child because they could tell, by just looking at them,

that these children were really sick – and that took real skill. We saw a lot of Italians from nearby Leichhardt. They tended to have tubby children, which made it hard to detect dehydration when doing the pinch test on the abdominal skin, indicating who would need admission for IV fluids.

When I moved on to the Neurosurgery term, I would often finish in the operating theatre around 6.30pm, have a rushed dinner before starting in Casualty at 7pm, finish at about 11.30pm and go to bed. Often through the night, the phone would ring every hour to call me downstairs, clad in my white boiler suit which doubled as pyjamas and work clothes. The last call would be about 7am, then to breakfast and to start the day’s work once more. You needed to be young and fit.

I worked in Neurosurgery for a couple of months and became proficient at drilling burr holes in the skull with a hand operated brace and bit, identical to the one I had used at Kaloola. “I like to have a big assistant,” said the small old Neurosurgeon, “so they can do the burr holes for me”. But I realised fairly soon that Neurosurgery was not for me, as it was too depressing speaking to the parents of children with incurable brain tumours. It was left to me to do that because the “boss” had run out of empathy.

I remember well one particularly sad occasion when I was asked to do a lumbar puncture on a child with headaches in one of the medical wards. This eight-year-old had been treated for leukaemia a year or two earlier with a good response, but when I inserted the needle, instead of clear watery cerebrospinal fluid dripping out, my heart sank to see milky fluid. This indicated leukaemic deposits in the brain, so I knew straight away that this poor child

would not live much longer. Unfortunately, the chemotherapy by mouth or injection available at the time could not reach the brain, as it didn’t not get across the blood/brain barrier. Just a few years later, the problem was solved by routinely giving radiotherapy to the brain, and also injecting intrathecal chemotherapy into the CSF by lumbar puncture. Combined with that, an Oncologist in the USA began to give a cocktail of different drugs all at the one time instead of giving one medication after another. As a result, instead of most dying, most survived.

When I began working at Crown Street and also at the Childrens Hospital, I was a bit apprehensive that I would be shown up by those cleverer than me who had spent two years at the elite teaching hospitals while I was at Lewisham but, I need not have worried. I could do the practical things just as well or more quickly. I suspect that having a responsible attitude to various tasks from an early age while growing up at Kaloola, combined with the very good hands-on training at Lewisham, stood me in good stead. Then there was the ability to show respect to the nursing staff, which we had learnt in dealing with the nuns at Lewisham, along with the fact that I had grown up with four sisters who would stand for no nonsense and soon pull you into line!

At the Childrens’ Hospital, it was important to get on well with the mothers and listen to what they had to say, as they could tell you very early on if their child was sicker than yesterday.

At both hospitals, I was one of the few to be invited to apply for the job as a Registrar, to become a career Obstetrician or a Paediatrician. By that time however, after working for three years in hospitals, I wanted to get out and try rural general practice.

Mairi became pregnant during 1966 and towards the end of the year, gave up working for her uncle Red Dalton. Caroline was born on the 31st January 1967 at St Margaret’s Hospital in Darlinghurst. They kept mothers in hospital for about five days in those times and the night before discharge, it was expected that the new mother would be taken out somewhere special for dinner – a nice custom. Robyn Delaney, a friend from Cowra, came as a Karitane nurse to stay with us for a week, and helped Mairi with all the skills needed for her first baby. She later married our old friend Denis Rowe which we were very happy about.

Campbelltown GP 1967

After answering an advertisement for an assistant GP, we moved to Campbelltown where I worked for the principal in the practice, Peter Parnell.

We lived in a house a few doors along from the Parnells, who used the front rooms of their large house as the surgery. Peter knew the answer to almost every question I asked him, so I continued to learn a lot as the year went on. There was no hospital in Campbelltown so this meant a fifteen minute drive to Camden Hospital to deliver a baby or do some minor surgery. I would give the anaesthetic while Peter removed an appendix, did a hernia or performed a Caesarean. Now and then, an ambulance would phone from an accident site, often from the Razorback on the Hume Highway, saying that they needed to meet me at the hospital quickly to resuscitate someone who was badly injured before taking them onto Liverpool Hospital.

Once I remember a fellow called Don, who came to our surgery saying that he had been lifting something when he felt a pain in the

Campbelltown Ambulance Station in the late ‘60s. There was no hospital at Campbelltown until 1977.

Mairi with Caroline.

lower chest or upper abdomen. I thought he might have perforated a gastric ulcer as he looked pale and unwell. I rang the ward sister in Camden hospital and asked her to do a chest X-ray on him when he arrived, as nursing staff in those days were multi skilled. She rang back to say that he was deteriorating and his chest x-ray looked very abnormal. I raced over an found him semi-conscious with blue lips.

His chest x-ray showed a collapsed left lung, with a collection of air where his lung should have been, and this was pushing his heart to the right side of his chest. This is called a tension pneumothorax and is caused by air leaking from a ruptured cyst on the surface of the lung. The treatment for this, I remembered from a textbook, was to stick a wide bore needle into the front of the chest. Once this was done there was a loud hissing noise as the air escaped. Don woke up saying, “What the hell are you doing?” and pulled the needle out – so I had to put it back in and hook him up to an underwater drain, which prevents re-entry of air with every breath. He fully recovered and this is one of the few lives that I probably saved.

Another very scary episode I remember involved the wife of Con, the local Greek café owner, who had previously given birth to several children back in Greece. The last one had been a Caesarean done by a vertical incision into the uterus, as opposed to the modern and safer horizontal incision. Pregnant again, Peter sent her initially to see a specialist obstetrician in Liverpool, because vertical scars have a risk of rupturing during labour. The specialist checked her out and thought she would be safe enough to deliver in Camden.

Just after 11pm one night, Peter rang me to say that the baby had been born but he needed me come over and give him a hand. She was

having a very heavy post-partum haemorrhage and bottles of blood were on the way from Liverpool Hospital. I raced over, crossmatched the blood and started transfusing her, while all the time she was crying out “I die, I die – get my brother-in-law, he has very good blood”. The specialist obstetrician arrived from Liverpool and soon things were set up to operate on her, with me giving the anaesthetic. Drugs used in anaesthesia can drop the blood pressure, so I was very scared that indeed she might die – especially with blood all over the floor with its overwhelming smell. It was discovered at operation that there was a small bit of placenta stuck onto the vertical uterine scar. Once this was removed, the bleeding stopped immediately.

In the week following, when I saw Con in his café. He looked absolutely worn out and hadn’t been sleeping. His wife was pretending she had suffered a stroke after the birth, and would not speak at all – but would scream at him when he tried to leave her hospital room late at night.

One morning, she suddenly spoke to me and said clearly: “I’m better and I want to go home”. She had blamed Con for getting her pregnant in the first place and for causing her to have such a frightening experience – so she felt the need to make him suffer a bit.

Another story of my time in Campbelltown is when I got a phone call one Sunday afternoon to go to a rock fall at the Valley Two underground coalmine in the Burragorang valley, the other side of The Oaks. The roof had caved in and fractured a miner’s femur. Getting down the mine in the pitch dark took about half an hour of lying flat on the back of a trolley, which was only about four feet high and just able to fit in the tunnel. There were no splints available for his bent-looking

thigh, so all I could do was to give him a big injection of morphine, lift him onto the trolley and make our way up, stopping half-way to give him another shot of morphine. When we got to the top, an experienced ambulance man had arrived with a splint. He put his foot in the poor man’s groin and pulled hard on the foot. There was a scream as the leg was straightened, but after the splint was applied the severe pain became very much less.

Family History Connections

One day, I did a house call to Menangle to see a couple of old ladies in their eighties, who were sisters. They asked me if was I related to the Menangle Paytens. After answering that I was, they were then able to tell me that as young girls they knew well my great grandmother, Mary Payten (nee Connor), and often used to drop in and visit her in the 1890s. These sisters told me that she was a real character, often be found sitting in her rocking chair on the verandah, smoking a clay pipe and making wisecracks. It was obvious that they had fond memories of her, insisting that I stay for a cup of tea.

From their house on Menangle Road just south of the Anglican church, they looked across the road onto a paddock where the Payten cottage used to be, just a couple of hundred yards away. I jumped the fence and went down the slope to a clump of trees and found the foundations still there. How amazing to talk to people who knew my great grandmother who was born 109 years before me! Mary died in 1903 aged seventy-three.

In July 1980 another connection with my great-grandparents, Martin and Mary, occurred when an patient at my Miranda ENT rooms asked me if I was related to the Paytens of Menangle.

Joseph Watson, aged 80, told me that his father Paddy Watson had been raised by Martin and Mary Payten. This was confirmed by Paddy’s obituary in the Boorowa Times of 9th January 1907, which was brought along at a subsequent visit. Joseph told me that his father Paddy, along with his brother and sister, were orphaned on the voyage to Australia in 1850. Both parents had died in an outbreak of typhus.

While researching how our great grandmother Mary Connor had travelled to Australia, Marianne, (the genealogist of the family, with the help of Jim), came across the names of three children, called Waterson or Watson. Mary was on a ship named The Emigrant, which sailed from Plymouth, England, in April 1850. These children had been orphaned on that same ship – which suggested that one of these may have been Paddy, as Joseph had claimed.

Joseph later showed me a photo of himself and his sister, Stella Barnes from Eugowra, wellknown to our family. All this was confirmed by Pat Barnes of Eugowra, Stella’s son and the grandson of Paddy, who said in conversation with Helen about this story: “Didn’t you know about this, we always knew.”

The very well-researched book; “Ship of Death, the Tragedy of the Emigrant”, by Jane Smith (2019) is dedicated not only to her own two children, but also to Mary Connor, my greatgrandmother. “The poor young, illiterate, plucky and wise Irish woman who took pity on six little orphans.” After quarantine on Stradbroke Island for three months, six orphans accompanied Mary on a paddle steamer from Brisbane to Sydney. The three Watson children were put into the Catholic Parramatta orphanage, and the three Hallets into the Protestant one. Conditions were so terrible that the two younger Watsons died

within a year. Eventually the eldest, Paddy, came down to Menangle to be with Mary and Martin, (who had married in 1852).

Mary’s obituary in the Freeman’s Journal 12 September 1903 says that she was: “A fine example of Ireland’s sterling daughters and was well-known and esteemed throughout the district. The funeral at Campbelltown was one of the largest ever seen in the district.”

What is remarkable is that as a twenty-yearold homesick girl, Mary did not catch the lice-borne typhus fever, and neither did the six orphans under her care. I wonder if it was because she washed their clothes so often that the lice eggs in the seams of their clothing never had time to hatch.

Martin and Mary are buried in the Campbelltown cemetery and their graves can be found with infant son Timothy, close to the grave of James Ruse.

It was during this year in Campbelltown that I began to realise that life as a GP was not for me. The hours were demanding and intrusive to home life. After starting at 9 am, working all day in the surgery, I’d have a brief break for dinner and then be back for an evening surgery until 8.30. The phone would often drag you out of bed in the middle of the night for a house call, and the patients were often very demanding.

After-hours calls were taken by Mairi if I was out on a call. She would advise those with minor complaints on simple measures, like keeping a child with a temperature cool and giving regular sips of flat lemonade for those with vomiting. They were asked to ring back, only if things became worse – this saved a lot of house calls. It became clear to me that this was not the life I wanted for my family.

The well-researched book about the ship on which Mary travelled to Australia.

A Stint in Cowra

In about November, in an effort to improve my increasingly low energy levels, I went for swim in the local pool – and coughed up some blood. This continued for a few days. I had a chest x-ray, which showed a lesion in my left lung. I saw Harry Windsor, a heart-lung surgeon at St Vincent’s, who said the lesion needed to be removed to obtain a diagnosis and stop further bleeding. Mairi and I had planned to go to England the following year (1968), and had already sent a trunk full of household stuff by sea, (we had to get it returned). The plan had been for me to attend the UK Royal College of Surgeons three-month course to prepare for the primary surgery exam, which was the first step to becoming a specialist surgeon. There was no course to attend in Australia –most Australians went to England, to greatly improve their chance of passing the primary exam. The pass rate here was about 15%, but was 50% in the UK.

The operation was scheduled for February 1968. In the meantime, a job came up in Cowra as a locum with Bill Muggeridge for about six weeks. This was good as we got to see a lot of Mum and Dad, in their rented home after leaving Kaloola before building a new house. I remember it was an extremely hot summer, and no air conditioning in those days.

One night I received a call at about 11pm to see a young woman who had fainted. She lived out on the Grenfell Road, about ten miles away, and when I got there, she was very pale, with low blood pressure, fast pulse, and lower abdominal pain. Also, she was two weeks overdue for her periods. This was a textbook case of a ruptured and bleeding ectopic pregnancy. I rang Bill and arranged to meet him at the Cowra Hospital, and to

At “Gothic”, the family property at Woodstock.

With Mum, Daddy & Caroline (first granddaughter), 1967.

avoid the delay of waiting half an hour for an ambulance, put the lady and her husband in the backseat of my Morris 1100. Having a notebook with everyone’s blood group, Bill rang the local butcher who had the same group as the young woman. He was a big man and able to donate two bottles of blood, (so saving a wake-up call to a second donor).

I cross-matched the blood and started transfusing her before going to theatre, where Bill asked me: “What do you want to do – the operation or the anaesthetic?” I had learnt to do the operation at Crown Street, and it was a fairly simple procedure via a horizontal supra-pubic (bikini) incision. I had to put up a saline drip on the butcher, as he felt faint when he stood up after donating so much blood. All up, it was only three and a half hours from first call to being home in bed – and this would have to be some sort of a record!

Bill Muggeridge was of a generation of country GPs who had an enormous knowledge of medicine, which included simple surgery, obstetrics and a wide range of medical conditions. The patients in Cowra were very friendly, hardly ever rang you at night unless it was really necessary, and would sometimes insert a “thank you” in the Cowra Guardian. I was therefore sorry to leave Cowra to face this operation on my lung at St Vincent’s. Had I not suffered from bad asthma in the country, I would have been more than happy to be a GP in Cowra, close to family and relatives.

Fortunately, in December 1967, I was able to line up a job as a Registrar in General Surgery at St George Hospital in Kogarah, despite not being able to start until March. I got the job mainly because of my obstetric experience which would be useful in providing a back-up to the one and only Obstets. Registrar.

Left thoracotomy

Cameron Wing, St Vincent’s Hospital

February 1968

Harry Windsor, who was my surgeon, became very well-known later for doing the first Heart Transplant in Australia. His original plan was to remove all of the left upper lobe of the lung, but I asked him to see if he could remove this fairly superficial cavity by only cutting out a wedge of lung – as I suspected in my later years, I would need every bit of lung available.

Harry agreed, and this he was fortunately able to do. There was a lot of post-operative pain for a few days as the cut extended around the rib line from front to back, and hurt from every breath, but only for a few days. I was able to go home about a week later.

The histology showed that this was a mycetoma, which is a collection of fungus balls growing in a pre-existing cavity in the lung. I was asked: where did the cavity come from, and had I ever have pneumonia? The penny dropped as I remembered Dr Rob Burns diagnosing pneumonia after I had failed my 3rd year Med. exams.

We all stayed with Mairi’s parents at Green Lane in Orange, where they now lived after leaving “Adair,” until I got strong again. We then moved to a very small rented cottage fronting on to the Georges River in Sylvania, which was only ten minutes from St George Hospital. I bought a small dinghy and often rowed it up to Tom Ugly’s bridge and back, which was great exercise for strengthening the muscles of my back and chest.

Sylvania & St George Hospital 1968

Shootings were very rare in Sydney at the time, but I came across two victims within a few months of each other. The first was a would-be bank robber who tried to rob a bank in nearby Kogarah. There were no protective counter screens in those days and bank robberies were fairly common. The bank manager was an ex-serviceman who kept his WW2 revolver in a drawer below the counter. When this bloke walked in with a rifle saying “Hands Up!” the manager, (who had survived being shot at by the Japanese), pulled out his .45 and shot him, but was surprised when instead of falling over, the man ran out the door.

An English migrant, driving his Morris Minor down the street and seeing a man with a gun run out of the bank and then hop into a car, decided to follow him. The car pulled up in a suburban street, and as the robber put his leg and gun out of the door, the Englishman drove his car into the half opened door and broke the robber’s leg. (Fortunately the rifle kept the door from fully closing, or the leg might have been cut completely off.) So when I came across this fellow in the ward later that day, he was genuinely peeved. “All I did was to try and rob a bank and look what happened – someone shot me and then someone else broke my leg!”

Fortunately the bullet had miraculously missed everything, passing just above his liver and just below the right lung, and could be felt just under the skin in the middle of a dinner plate sized bruise on his back. It was therefore a simple matter to remove the bullet through a small skin incision under local anaesthetic. He was then transferred to the medical wing of Long Bay jail.

The backyard at Sylvania: Mairi, Caroline & a dandelion; in the famous “trousseau” striped dressing-gown, faithful for many decades.

The other shooting was of a Chinese woman in her thirties, who I encountered just outside Casualty one Saturday night at about 11pm. As the surgical registrar, I was on duty for the night and was just about to go inside Casualty for a final check to see that all was well before going to bed, when a car screeched to a halt alongside me and a man said: “Quick! My wife has been shot.”

She was lying in the back seat, so I helped put her almost lifeless body on a trolley and wheeled her in. I couldn’t feel her pulse but she was breathing, though she looked very pale and had obviously lost a lot of blood. I asked her husband if he knew her blood group, and a whispered reply came from the woman: “AB negative” – which surprised me because I’d thought she was unconscious.

AB negative is the rarest blood group, so I knew we wouldn’t have any in the pathology fridge. I knew we did have some O negative blood, as I’d ordered it from the Blood Bank the night before to give to a lady with a postpartum haemorrhage, and there were a couple of bottles left over.

O neg. is the universal donor and can be given to anyone regardless of their blood group. All her veins had shut down, so I did a “cut down” which I’d done at the Kids Hospital many times. This is an incision just above the ankle bone where a vein is always found, and then be cannulated. The surgeon on call arrived, but the anaesthetist on call had left for his home in Killara just a few minutes before the lady arrived. Being a Saturday night, no other anaesthetist was at home. If only we had mobile phones at that time or even pagers that worked outside the hospital!

I therefore had to start the anaesthetic, but it all went well. The bullet had passed through

the liver without doing much damage. Kevin Orr, the surgeon, sought the advice of Wal Pullen, who had been a surgeon in WW2 and had seen this all before. He said to just put a T drain in the bile duct to prevent bile leaking from the bullet hole, and he was sure she would be OK. The next day, back in the ward, she looked fine. The bullet had finished up just beneath the skin in her back, and like the bank robber, it was a minor procedure to remove it under local a few days later.

It turned out that her husband was a diamond merchant and had a licence to carry a gun for self protection. He had arrived home late, (perhaps after spending some time with a girlfriend), his wife confronted him, there was a scuffle and the gun went off accidently.

I came across the same family about six months later, when their two-year-old boy was run over by Dad reversing down the driveway. Luckily a small section of the concrete driveway was broken and depressed on the passenger side, causing the car to tilt that way so there was very little weight on the drivers side rear wheel when it passed over the little boy’s head. I still clearly remember the tyre mark on his forehead. Miraculously he was not even knocked out, and went home a couple of days later.

The family’s run of good luck ran out eventually, as I found out only a few years ago that the lady had developed hepatitis C from the blood transfusion we gave her, as Hep. C was not tested for back in 1968. She eventually developed liver failure and so had to have a liver transplant, which fortunately was successful.

As luck would have it, the Obstets Registrar caught rubella. In the days before any vaccine, he had to be kept away from pregnant women for a couple of months, so I was kept busy doing some of the emergency work that he would have

done. I remember being called to the labour ward one afternoon to see a woman whose final stage of labour was not progressing well, and there were now signs of foetal distress. I found on examination that the baby was stuck, but not far up, so it was a simple matter to rotate the head to face down, apply some forceps and the baby popped out easily. Then it was necessary to resuscitate the baby who was floppy and blue, this being easily done by putting small tube into the trachea and blowing in some oxygen. Sure enough, the baby soon pinked up and gave some good loud cries.

I would not have even remembered this at all had it not been for a medical student looking on who said to me, “Do you realise you just saved that baby’s life?” I think I replied that it was not out of the ordinary as it was standard practice and something that any rural GP would have to do now and again. Nevertheless, because of such praise, I did for a moment silently feel quite pleased with myself.

During my year at St George, I had time to reconsider my original plan of becoming an Orthopaedic surgeon, and decided to study Ear, Nose and Throat surgery instead.

Although not so popular at the time, ENT involved very little weekend or night work. I thought that, having already had chest surgery and still not thirty years of age, it was important to look after my health, and it also seemed to be a “family-friendly” choice. Being less popular, there were fewer training to become ENT surgeons, so jobs in good hospitals would be easier to find once training had finished. (It is interesting that these days, ENT has become very popular as a specialty, one of the main reasons being “lifestyle”).

I had come to realise that whichever specialty you were involved in didn’t matter all that

much, as it was the people you encountered that made the practice of medicine fulfilling. ENT had the widest patient age range from young children and their mothers through to the elderly, and so would always be interesting.

Once more therefore, we sent off by sea a trunk of winter clothes, linen, towels etc. and prepared to fly off to London in the New Year. So it was in January 1969, that we said goodbye to family and friends and departed for England. It was particularly sad for Mairi, who was three months pregnant with Emma, to say goodbye to her mother who had been suffering from frequent angina and chronic heart failure after having a couple of heart attacks.

We knew she would not survive our planned four year time away, but nevertheless, she insisted that we should go. Interestingly, it was she who first raised the idea of me going on to become a specialist a couple of years earlier, and to spend time overseas. Unfortunately, there were no coronary artery stents or bypass surgery in those days and the medications were very limited.

Ian & Muriel Bruce, last photo before our departure for England.

In Wimbledon with Aunt Joan Bruce, Alistair & Rebecca (Anthony’s children)

Caroline at the front gate of Brockley Rise; and opposite, in the snow.

We flew to England on the Boeing 707, the first ever Qantas passenger jet.

The cost of the one-way flight was $700 each, which is about five times the adjusted cost of a flight today, but Caroline, (at two years old), was allowed to sit on our knees for no charge. At 3pm on a late January afternoon in 1969 our plane took off. By 3.15pm we were right above Orange – a four hour drive from Sydney – which gave us an idea of how far this flight was going to take us. We chased the setting sun, and four hours later crossed the tidal estuaries of the Kimberleys.

The flight involved three eight-hour legs, with one hour in Singapore and another in Bahrain, making the trip 26 hours in all. Arriving at Heathrow at 7am on a mid-winter morning, it was pitch black and very cold. Looking at the orange-coloured airport lights shining all around, I thought:“What on earth have we got ourselves in for here?”

However, it was reassuring to be met by Mairi’s Uncle George Bruce, (Ian’s youngest brother), and his son Anthony, who soon whisked us away to their warm house in Wimbledon. Anthony and his young family were also staying with Uncle George and Aunt Joan temporarily, so we were quite a crowd.

Next day, I took myself into the city to visit the British Medical Association with a letter of introduction from the AMA, as they had an accommodation service. There was a terrace house for rent near Lewisham in south-east London, so after Mairi had given it the once over, we moved in a few days later, (in spite of the frightful blue carpet throughout!)

Next, I bought a second-hand car, so within a week we were all set up. There was a dock strike on, and our trunk looked like being locked up in a warehouse on the docks for another month or more. I drove down to the East India docks on the lower Thames to see what I could do. I found a man on the gate who stopped me and asked what my business was.

When I told him that we were Australians, he went right out of his way to trace down the trunk, explaining to me that his son had recently been killed in a car accident in New Zealand and how kind everyone there had been to him. It occurred to me that this was his way of repaying some goodwill.

As we settled in to 158 Brockley Rise, Crofton Park, and tried to make ourselves feel at home, there were a few small hurdles to overcome. We had been in the habit of having an evening glass of brandy and dry, but when I asked at the local “Off Licence”, all they had was fine French brandy which cost a fortune! We made do with cheap supermarket Portuguese sherry.

Then: to rig up a shower, because few houses had a shower in the UK. I bought the necessary hoses and shower head from the ironmonger (hardware) and suspended them over the bath. This equipment came with us to all the houses we lived in in England!

We hadn’t realised how cold and dark it would be, otherwise we would have stayed in sunny Sylvania for another month as the Primary revision course at the Royal College of Surgeons did not commence until March. The thermometer on the back porch never rose above 40 deg.F (about 5C). Finally at Easter time, we heard on the radio that the temperature had “soared into the 50s (10C)!”

It was only about a forty minute drive on the South Circular Road to Wimbledon, so we were often invited to Uncle George and Aunt Joan’s for Sunday lunch – their warmth and welcome made us feel much less lonely.

I had purchased all the books that I needed for the Primary course at the College of Surgeons, and so spent all day studying them. Caroline would sometimes play with a little Irish girl across the road called Siobhan, or stand at the front gate waving to passers-by who where often Jamaicans. Where we were wasn’t the top end of town and far removed from the swinging sixties and fashion centre of Carnaby Street in central London. Mairi’s uncle from Dundee Robert Bruce, (another of Ian’s brothers), came to visit us a couple

of times while in London on business – we were well out of his way and so this was much appreciated. He would arrive in a big black chauffeur-driven car and give us a dozen mixed bottles of grog, including a bottle or two of single malt Scotch whisky which I had never tasted before, and was much smoother than Australian whisky.

Eventually the Primary course began. I caught the train in every day to Lincoln”s Inn Fields, always the same carriage with the same gentlemen in their pin-striped suits reading The Times. In that three months, I never heard them exchange a word to one another – and I wasn’t brave enough to break the silence. There were about a hundred doing the course, most of them English, and the rest from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. At the College, we had formal lectures and then tutorial groups of about eight students. Humour was a big part in helping us remember and our lecturers delivered their lines like professional actors.

In our tutorial group, our anatomy tutor had nicknames for all of us – I was” Bob from Botany Bay”, another was “John from Capetown,” and so on. When doing the movements of the ankle joint one day, he said “Bob from Botany Bay, do the cows still walk up the centre of the road in Botany Bay”? To which I replied: “Yes, I’ve had to chase up the cows many a time, and they always do that”. He explained it’s because the cow’s ankle joint only moves to and fro, as if in a vice, unlike the human ankle which moves inwards and outwards as well. This means that if a cow walks on a slope, they have to put one leg out wide to keep their balance – and a cow could never ski! Then there was a South African physiology lecturer explaining the exchange of gases from the lungs to the red cells: “The train pulls into the station, carbon dioxide hops

off, oxygen hops on, sits on the haemoglobin and the train pulls out.”

Our pathology lecturer was a real character who used to walk in with his tightly furled umbrella, bowler hat and pin striped suit. Then one morning, he started out of the blue in a loud voice: “The first war was my father’s war and the second was my war. I was stationed out in India, when a rather nasty looking dog in the compound bit someone. They were about to shoot the dog and I yelled out: “Don’t kill the dog, don’t kill the dog!”

And why was that? Because it was important to know if the dog had rabies which had sent it mad and caused it to bite someone. It was therefore important to see if the dog lived or died over the next few days – if it lived it didn’t have rabies, if it died an autopsy would reveal the presence of Negri bodies in it’s brain. in which case a vaccine could be given to the person who was bitten, and that would still stop them developing rabies.” After such a theatrical performance, I still remember that obscure name of Negri Bodies.

Our Anatomy professor was Jack Last, originally from Adelaide, who had written a book on anatomy – which if you studied it well, you would not fail. He used to put a small folded piece of paper in our top pocket with an exam question on it, and then instruct us to set an alarm clock for 30 minutes, pull out the question and start writing. We would then bring back our written answer which he would read later and usually write a reassuring note in red ink: “This would pass”.

This was a great exercise in time management for exams, usually four pages was all you could fit into thirty minutes, so you knew without looking at your watch that it was time to wind up once you got to the fourth page. I don’t

know why I hadn’t worked this out before while at Sydney University because I was always running out of time in exams.

The exams were in June and I just had to pass, because Mairi needed the small table I used as a desk as a nappy change for the baby due in midJuly. This was a very stressful period because we had been living off savings for all of this time, and had it not been for Mairi’s calming influence, I might have folded under the strain.

It was difficult for her also living away from family and friends and expecting a baby, but she was always brave and never complained. Fortunately I did get through and was able to send a telegram home with just one word: “PASSED”.

Exams passed, baby born

Baby Emma was born soon after on the 12th July at St Theresa’s, a private obstetrics Hospital in Wimbledon. Nine days later on the 21st July, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon saying: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”.

In the meantime, Mairi unfortunately developed a breast abscess for which she had to stay in St Theresa’s for another week on antibiotics and have the abscess drained.

Having passed the Primary Basic Sciences exam, which was a prerequisite to further specialist surgical training, it was then necessary to train in your chosen speciality before sitting for the second part of the FRCS which was a clinically based exam.

The NHS was a great training ground, as in the absence of any private patients, there was no obligation by the senior consultants to operate on any one in particular. Therefore they chose to do the more difficult cases and

left the ordinary cases to the junior trainees, who would progress onto to more complicated operations as time went by, under the watchful eye of a senior registrar higher up the ladder. This was in contrast to Australia where only those attending the free public outpatients clinics were operated on by those in training.

I started a six-week introductory course at the Royal National ENT Hospital at Grays Inn Road London. This was designed to prepare those who were sitting for the Diploma in Otolaryngology, which would enable those doing the course from India, Pakistan, Egypt etc. to set up as specialists back home. In addition, there were three Australians who, like me, had just passed their Primary.

It was very thorough, with daily lectures in the morning and outpatients session in the afternoon, either at Grays Inn Road or at one of the big teaching hospitals in London, including radiotherapy and radiology units.

I then landed a job as a locum at the Woolwich and East London group of hospitals, which was a contrast to the clinical excellence I had experienced while doing the DLO course. A good example of clinical incompetence was this story. One Saturday afternoon at home, I took a phone call to go see a child at the Brooke Hospital who had put a bead in his ear. Suspecting that they might not have a small right angled probe to do the job, I made one out of some copper wire from the garden shed and took it with me.

On arriving, I found a seven-year-old boy in the entry room to the operating theatre with an anaesthetist standing by. She happened to be an Australian and said: “This is the third anaesthetic I have given this boy today. The first two were in A & E, where an Indian Junior and then a Senior House Officer had

Baby Emma with big sister Caroline

Little possum and the famous striped dressing gown

tried unsuccessfully to remove the bead using forceps, which only pushed it further inwards.”

I insisted they wheel in the operating microscope, and once the boy was asleep, I was able to retrieve the bead, passing my homemade (now sterilised) probe just deep to the bead, and then pulling it out.

I could then see that the previous attempts had caused a perforation of the eardrum and dislocated the incus, which is one of the small bones in the middle ear. I made sure I wrote comprehensive notes about all this, as I didn’t want anyone later on to try and blame me for the underlying damage.

I also gave his parents instructions to attend the ENT outpatients clinic a few days later, where I was able to tell the boss all that had happened. He subsequently repaired the hole, but was not able to reconstruct the ossicular chain, so the poor kid finished up half deaf in that ear. A couple of years later, I read a report of a successful negligence case bought by the boy’s parents against the Hospital.

The smaller peripheral NHS hospitals tended to have a large number of junior staff from either India or Pakistan. There were many graduating in Medicine from those countries, from the numerous medical schools established since the British left in 1947, twenty-two years earlier. However, unfortunately, the training that doctors received there was often not quite up to standard. At the same time, there were not enough British graduates to run the NHS, which had started in 1948, and so many young medical graduates from India and Pakistan were filling the NHS jobs. I gather there are still not enough British medical graduates, and the NHS prior to Brexit relied on EU staff. I remember one morning when about to do a tonsillectomy at the Woolwich Hospital, they

wheeled in an east Londoner who was very relieved to see me, as Australian doctors had gained a reputation as top quality surgeous.

The pay at this time was pitiful and I was being charged a very high rate of emergency tax, which continued until I had a permanent job. It meant that sometimes when it came to the checkout at the supermarket, we would not have enough money and would have to put some items back on the shelves.

I did another locum for two weeks at Northhampton Hospital, where the boss, Charles Gledhill, was an Australian, and the Registrar was from Perth. I had to leave Mairi at home with Caroline and new baby Emma, which must have been difficult for her. While at Northhampton, an advertisement appeared in the British Medical Journal for a job as a Senior House Office at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where one of the senior consultants was a friend of Dr Gledhill, who encouraged me to apply, saying it would be a great training position.

And so it was that I caught the Flying Scotsman from London to Newcastle in October 1969. After staying overnight in 2-star accommodation, I presented myself for an interview at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, (the RVI). They seemed to be happy and offered me the job, there and then. My boss-to-be, Mr Dawes, (Dizzy as he was known), lined up a real estate agent. Next thing, I was being taken to inspect various places for rent, the last of which was a semi-detached house in South West Denton, a fairly new area, about four miles from the city centre and the Hospital, which was suitable for our family.

So Mairi and I packed up everything onto the roof rack of the Morris 1100, and off we went for the next two years to the north-east of England, about five hours drive away.

Lockerbie Gardens, Newcastle-on-Tyne

Nov 1969–Dec 1971

It was snowing in early November, with sunrise at 8.15am and sunset at 3.30pm, when Emma got sick with a fever and needed to see a paediatrician at the RVI, who did a lumbar puncture to exclude meningitis, and diagnosed a urinary tract infection.

On 10 December I had a phone call at the hospital from George Bruce, to say that Mairi’s mother had suddenly died. Later that evening, once the two girls were in bed, I had to tell Mairi the news. So we soldiered on as a lonely and sad Christmas approached.

During December, the nice old sister in charge of the ENT ward would get me to write a prescription every week for Newcastle Brown Ale, which was available from the Pharmacy as medication for any alcoholic that might be admitted. Then on Christmas morning, there was a very nice custom when the three consultants, their families and the junior staff would all meet up in a room off the ward for morning tea and cake and open a few bottles of Brown Ale. (This incidentally was a very strong drop with 8% alcohol compared to the usual 4% in most beers.)

Of almost equal importance to Christmas was the New Year celebration of Hogmanay. I was amazed to know that the shops were open in Edinburgh for Christmas, but they closed up for New Year. The people of Newcastle and surrounds are called Geordies, and we found them to be very friendly.

We were invited to a Hogmanay house party in our cul-de-sac of Lockerbie Gardens, where there were about twelve semi-detached houses all exactly the same. There is a local custom

Lockerbie Gardens scenes: Caroline with her neighbourhood friend, “Little Caroline”; bottom-shuffling escapee; winter sun,snow, mittens, sled.

called “First Footing,” where a stranger carrying a lump of coal has to ring the doorbell and step across the threshold immediately after 12 midnight. I was the stranger so they gave me a lump of coal (plentiful in Newcastle!) and I first footed on the 1st January 1970.

Most of our neighbours had young children who all played out on the street, so before long, Caroline had a strong Geordie accent and Emma learnt to speak with one. We found it difficult at times to understand those with strong accents, but after a while we got the hang of it.

There was a nice childrens’ ditty which I learnt and sang to Caroline and Emma:

“Sing to your Mammy, sing to your Pappy Sing to your Mammy, to your Pappy sing Who shall have the fishy in the little dishy Who shall have the fishy when the boat comes in.”

There were quite a few Danish words in everyday use such as “divven” for don’t – for example, “Divven do that”. At about 5pm, you would hear the nursing staff say, ‘Howay now, I’m gannin yem,” (I’m going home). When you said, “Hello how are you?” the answer would come back, “Why aye, I’m canny”.

We had a coke heater in the living room, which went constantly from October through to May. This heated coiled water pipes that passed through some radiators in every room and kept us reasonably warm through the long cold winters. A few of our neighbours had installed double glazing, so I got some clear plastic sheeting and thumb-tacked it on the windows downstairs. In spite of this, the temperature inside never went above 62deg.F (16C), but I suppose we just got used to it.

In about March, one day I looked out the front window and exclaimed to Mairi: “I can see the

river!” There we saw, for the first time, the Tyne river about a mile away – which previously been blanketed by smog ever since we arrived four months earlier. I remember taking the girls for a walk ‘down the dene’, and tasting the acid droplets caused by dissolved sulphur dioxide when it started to rain. Similarly, a coal smell infused the nappies if drying outside.

One day, Mairi went to the small group of shops close by and the butcher told her that an Australian lady had been into his shop – he would get her address next time she was in. And so I went one evening to the address, only one street away from us, and introduced myself to Trish Smith, who told me her husband Graham was training to be an Obstetrician.

“Did he drive a green Fiat back in Australia?” I asked. The answer was yes, which meant that I knew him, as we had been in the same clinical group in 4th Year Medicine. What are the chances?! They also had two small girls and having them close by made all the difference to our life in Newcastle. As well, there were a couple of Australians training to be Neurologists at the RVI, so we four Aussie families saw a lot of each other, going on picnics and exploring the surrounding countryside, as well as Christmas and birthdays together.

Later, Graham was front page news, because he performed an emergency Caesarean in Accident & Emergency on a woman who ten minutes earlier had been killed in a car accident while on her way to hospital to have a baby. The baby lived, and went home a week later. As Graham explained to me, a baby at term has different haemoglobin to children and adults, which allows it to tolerate low oxygen levels for some time, so he thought it was a chance worth taking. I was amazed at his quick thinking and courage.

Connecting with Australia

David and Di were married in January 1970, following which we received a cassette audio tape. No one we knew had anything to play it on, but there was one at the hospital so Mairi and I went one night to play it – and were so thrilled to hear family voices.

Following this, we bought a new-on-the-market cassette player/recorder, which we used often, and posted off messages especially from the children with their Geordie accents (– we still have the tapes!)

International phone calls were very expensive and often had to be booked in advance, and after three minutes, a voice would cut in: “Do you wish to extend?” which would cost a whole lot more. We wrote and received frequent airmail letters, but phoned only at Christmas or on special occasions.

One morning at about 7am, the phone rang and I was surprised to hear Daddy’s voice. “What’s happened?” I asked, thinking that someone must have had an accident or died. “No, all’s well, David and I were just sitting around this Saturday afternoon and decided to give you a ring just to say hello.” I was much relieved and we then had a great chat.

During the summer, Mairi joined a group which went horse riding on Saturday afternoons in the surrounding countryside. We visited some nearby places of historical interest such as Hadrian’s Wall, built in the 1st century by the Romans, running 70 miles from the east coast to the west coast.

Another amazing place close to Newcastle was Durham, with its ancient cathedral (built by the Normans in the 1100s), castle and university, and if we had visitors, we would often take them there to admire its historic beauty.

The Royal Victoria In firmary

The RVI was a teaching hospital allied to the University of Newcastle, and was accredited as a training hospital for ENT. At work, I spent my day in the operating theatre and outpatient clinic. Being the National Health Service, medical staff were on a fixed salary. With no financial incentive to work, theatres did not start till 9am, (as compared to 8am in Sydney). Likewise the outpatients clinic would all be finished an hour earlier than at home.

The waiting list for an outpatient appointment was about five months, and to get into hospital for an operation there was a wait of a further six months for simple elective procedures. I began doing easy procedures like tonsillectomies or inserting Teflon grommet tubes to treat childrens ‘glue ears’, a common cause of hearing loss. Grommets had only been used widely for about five years beforehand, so it was very gratifying to hear from the mother a few weeks later that there had been a noticeable change in the child’s behaviour now that that they had normal hearing.

The incidence of ear infections all around the world reflects the standard of living in that community, and so polluted Newcastle, with its very high unemployment and terrible climate, was high on the list. Anecdotally, a mother had brought her youngest child to the ENT outpatients for a check saying “ Eee, I divven know what’s wrong with this one – his ears aren’t runnin.”

At the other end of the age spectrum were the men who had become very deaf due to constant loud noise in the coalmines or the Tyneside shipyards over many years. They were given just one hearing aid, not two aids which is much better. A plug was made to fit the ear canal, from which ran a wire from an amplifier in

their top pocket. By today’s standards, these were very primitive aids, but for those who were very deaf, they were better than nothing.

It was always very sad to see a toddler who was not beginning to talk by two years of age. Once profound hearing loss was confirmed on a test, these children would be fitted with hearing aids and intensive education would begin but in spite of this, their speech would never be normal and their reading age would not progress beyond about eight years. Nowadays, these cases are very rare because the commonest cause, rubella during pregnancy, has been wiped out by vaccination of all high school children.

Those of genetic or other causes can now be picked up by a special hearing test within a few days of birth, which allows immediate fitting of hearing aids, then a cochlear implant at around a year old, resulting in normal speech and good academic outcomes.

This is all thanks to Professor Graham Clarke, an ENT surgeon from Melbourne who I have met, who invented the first multi-channel adult cochlear implant in 1978 and performed the first implant on a child in 1985. It is amazing that Cochlear has remained the number

An early child’s cochlear implant

one bionic ear company in the world. The Sydney-based computer scientists keep ahead of the rest by constantly updating the speech processor behind the ear, as well as improving the actual implant.

I became adept at microsurgery of the ear. A fairly routine operation was to graft a hole in the eardrum, caused usually by childhood infection. This mostly worked well even for large holes, improving the hearing considerably. Throughout my career, patients have told me that this simple operation, on very large bilateral holes present since childhood, had changed their lives.

Next in degree of difficulty was mastoid bone surgery, done with an electric drill, usually combined with a graft to the ear drum and reconstruction of the ossicular chain in the middle ear. Because the facial nerve runs through the ear, great care must be taken not to damage it with the drill to avoid a permanent paralysed face, which thankfully was never a complication which I encountered.

Another rewarding operation for deafness was a stapedectomy. An immobile stirrup bone was removed and replaced with a Teflon prosthesis, allowing the patient to throw away their hearing aid. There were no fibreoptics in the 1970s. Looking at the larynx or oesophagus under anaesthetic was done through a brass tubular scope, illuminated by a small battery driven bulb. An oesophagoscopy was a fairly common procedure that was necessary to remove a foreign body, such as a chop bone, from the oesophagus, or when a child swallowed a coin. Every now and then a man with severe breathing difficulty due to cancer of the larynx would require an emergency tracheotomy under local anaesthetic to restore the airway and allow a biopsy to be taken.

Life in Newcastle

After the long winter, in June 1970, we drove down to Mullion Cove in Cornwall for a holiday where I recall going into the surf but had to retreat because of the ice cold water. The local towns of Helford and Porthleven were very picturesque, but then a fog set in for the last few days of our planned stay. We could see on the TV that the Wimbledon tennis was being played in bright sunshine so we packed up and drove to London in a day to stay with Mairi’s Uncle George and Aunt Joan, where we managed to get some tickets to the tennis and enjoyed the day.

It was only a half day’s drive from Newcastle to Dundee via Edinburgh, so in the autumn of 1970 we went and stayed with Mairi’s other uncle, Robert, his wife Ailsa and son James, calling in to see nearby Kelly Castle where the Bruce family had lived for a while in the 1920s. Robert lived on a few acres outside Dundee and had a pet donkey, which fascinated the girls.

In early December 1970, I caught the train to Edinburgh to sit for the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons (Ed.) exams. The College is in the old town south of the Castle and not far from the Grassmarket where my very distant relative, James Renwick, the last of the Covenanters, was hung in the late 1600s. A plaque there says: “On this spot, many martyrs and Covenanters died for their Protestant faith”.

It was still half dark at 9am when our first exam began. There was a blackout, so each of us was given a candle to put on our desk until about 10am, when it became light enough to see.

The written exams went on for a few days and then we had the clinicals at the nearby Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Gathered back in the College courtyard in the afternoon twilight (4pm), we listened as a woman read out the

identification numbers of those who had passed. I listened as she read the numbers leading up to mine – but then skipped past it. I couldn’t believe it! I thought I’d done fairly well.

When she finished, I asked her to double check. A forgotten piece of paper tucked under her arm was then found, and there was my number. Those of us who had passed were then invited into a big hall in the College, where we were congratulated by the President and offered a glass of sherry.

Arriving home by train to Newcastle, I was very happy to give Mairi the good news, after so much long, hard study.

The Edinburgh Fellowship, although recognized in Australia, was considered a poor relative of the English Fellowship. So, like most Aussies in the UK, I planned to do the English FRCS. There was an exam scheduled for about nine months hence, by which time I hoped to have enough clinical experience to pass – but there was a high failure rate. Alan Curry, the Senior Registrar who had taught me so much, had failed twice. (This was mainly because Alan, the son of a local coalminer, had a chip on his shoulder when it came to upper-class London examiners, and would get into arguments with them about inconsequential matters.)

During Easter 1971, we had a few days in Scotland in beautiful sunny weather, passing just over the border through a small town called Lockerbie, where I noted “Renwick Solicitors” in the main street. It was from near here that my great-great Renwick grandparents and their ten children emigrated to Australia in 1839.

Then onto Bannockburn, and the memorial to Robert The Bruce and his cave, and from there to the formidable castle at Stirling.

In the garden at Wimbledon; Certification of admission to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons (Edinburgh).

Then we made our way along Loch Ness to Inverness. This might seem like a long drive, but it was only five hours back to Newcastle.

A memorable story I have to recount is to do with a North of England ENT meeting, held in the Wakefield Town Hall in Yorkshire, about two hours drive from Newcastle, with about a hundred surgeons from Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and the like in attendance. The Mayor gave a speech of welcome at lunchtime, and I found myself sitting alongside the Lady Mayoress, who said to me in her broad Yorkshire accent: “I suppose you’ve never heard of Wakefield where you come from?”

I replied that indeed I had, because Neil Fox comes from Wakefield and my father and I had watched him play rugby league for England at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and kick a few goals. She yelled out to her husband across the table: “Hey, Bob here knows our Neil!” So, unlikely as it was, rugby league served to break the ice with the Lady Mayoress.

As our TV satirists Roy and HG have said: “Rugby League follows the coal seams around the world,” which was the case in this area where Huddersfield, Wigan, Warrington and Castleford were all nearby coal-mining towns, with well known Rugby League teams in an otherwise soccer-mad England.

Holiday to Europe

In the summer of 1971, Mairi and I had the wonderful opportunity of taking a two-week holiday to Europe together, leaving Emma with our Australian friends, the Smiths, while Caroline stayed with neighbours. We caught the overnight car ferry from Hull to Rotterdam, then drove north to Amsterdam. While there, we visited the Rijks Museum with its famous Rembrandt paintings, especially the

wonderful Nightwatch. Amsterdam was then known as the hippie capital of Europe where marijuana was legal and readily available in the cafes, and prostitutes could be seen in the shop windows of the brothels.

From there, we made our way through Arnhem, where a great number of allied troops were killed in WWII, and on to Koblenz in the Rhine valley with its picturesque half -timbered houses. Travelling up the Rhine valley, we were amazed at the number of castles overlooking the river, built in the middle ages to protect the owners from an aggressive neighbour. South into Bavaria, a surprise awaited Mairi with the appearance of the beautiful Neuschwanstein castle as we turned a corner, and which I had found in the Michellin travel guide, not far from Innsbruck in Austria.

The most notable thing to happen in Innsbruck was how I came to demolish a restaurant’s front glass door, high up overlooking the city. When leaving after lunch, I pulled up just short of the front door, looking at the spectacular view in the distance. A minute later, forgetting about the glass door, I walked straight into it, shattering it with my forehead. A shower of sharp glass rained onto my outstretched hand, deeply cutting the back of my left index finger.

American patrons came rushing forward, “Get the man a brandy, look at all that blood,” advising us not to admit liability, as the door should have had some sort of marking across the glass. An ambulance took me down to the local hospital where the divided tendon to my index finger was expertly repaired.

Having driven south through the Brenner Pass, we came into Italy. In contrast to Germany and Austria, most buildings were in poor condition and in need of a coat of paint, but the people were much less formal and very friendly.

Beautiful Venice was our next port of call, with its majestic buildings fronting the canals and many gondolas. And on another note, I recall a fish market where live eels were beheaded at the point of sale. Catching a commuter ferry, we went out to see the glass blowing at Murano, where a salesman asked where we came from.

“Leichhardt,” I told him. “I’ve been there and stayed with my relatives!” he said – and gave us a good deal on the purchase!

Then on to Rome, where it was a jaw-dropping experience to come around a corner and see the Colosseum for the first time, and to visit St Peters and marvel at how Michelangelo was able to sculpt the Pieta from one block of marble. We then passed through Aosta to Mt Blanc and Chamonix in France.

At this stage our Morris 1100 was only going on three out of four cylinders. Worried about being able to get home, we put the car on an overnight train called a “Wagon Lit” to Paris, where we spent a couple of days including a visit of course to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa.

We nursed the car to Calais, onto the hovercraft to Dover and from there went gently home to Newcastle. This two-week holiday was for me an awesome experience, and it was so good to share all of this with Mairi.

In October 1971, I caught the train down to London and over a few days, sat for and passed the exams to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. When they finally read out the names of those who had passed in the entrance hall of the College, I remember shedding a few tears. Mairi and I had sacrificed a lot to reach this point.

Towards the end of 1971, my boss at the RVI, Desmond Dawes, contacted an old friend of his Bernard Juby, an ENT consultant at Ipswich in

Suffolk. “Dizzy” felt that I now needed a year where I could get plenty of surgical experience to consolidate on what they had already taught me in Newcastle.

It was very kind of him to arrange this – Mr Juby did need a Registrar to work with him for twelve months. and so after our third Christmas in the north, we went down to Suffolk to start work at the Ipswich Hospital.

Certification of admission to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, England.

Ipswich 1972

Fortunately, the Hospital provided free accommodation, and so we found ourselves in an apartment on the top floor of a three-story building, the middle floor fortuitously occupied by an Australian couple, Stuart and Lyn Boland, and their two children.

Stuart, who was doing General Surgery, was in David’s Fresher year at St John’s and so I knew him well. On the ground floor were a family originally from South Africa, Percy and Sandra Pease with their two children. It was really great to have these young families to share our year there.

Caroline, now five years old, started school. After her first day, I asked her how it went, to which she replied in her broad Geordie accent “Why aye – they cannet understand me!”

Our building had a big back yard where the kids played together, and we would occasionally gather in one apartment or another for a drink or to enjoy some of Sandra’s marvellous cooking.

Not long after we arrived in Ipswich, we learnt of the tragic death in Australia of Helen’s husband, Geoff Malloy, at an early age. We felt helpless that we could do nothing to be of assistance to Helen and her five small boys.

One of the first things my boss Bernard Juby told me was that having passed my exams, the next important thing that he hoped to teach me was how to pace myself and not become addicted to work. The Hospital golf day was on soon afterwards, so he arranged for me to buy a set of second hand clubs in order to take part. Later on, he arranged a few games with Stuart and me. Stuart could drive the ball 270 metres, which would result in Mr Juby calling out: “Prodigious!”

He told me that the people of East Anglia (Suffolk/Norfolk) were a “bit different.”

The joke was: that when the Angles invaded Britain, the ‘right angles’ (being very square) settled in Yorkshire; the ‘acute angles’ (being on the sharp side) went to London; while the ‘obtuse angles’ came to East Anglia and remained there – not that they were unintelligent, they simply had a different perception of the world.

During consultations in the ENT clinic, patients would often ask awkward questions about the diagnosis and treatment which were a challenge to answer.

Now free at last of the worry of exams, our stay in Ipswich during 1972 was very relaxed, and because we had ready-made babysitters in our building, we could visit some of the old restaurants in the area, where you had to bend over to get in the front door. It was an easy drive to Flatford Mill, where Constable had done many of his paintings, and so when he had visitors, we took them there for picnics.

In June 1972 we hired a campervan and drove across country to Wales, to visit Mairi’s cousin Vanessa, (George Bruce’s daughter), and her husband Peter Pearson. They lived on Thorne Island in Milford Haven, where they ran a hotel that was a converted Napoleonic fort.

From there we drove north through Wales, where I remember it was so cold that condensation on the inside of the roof rained down on me lying in the top bunk! Then onto Scotland, including catching the ferry over the sea to Skye. There’s something about the countryside in Scotland which resonated with both Mairi and I.

At the Hospital, I found Mr Juby a good boss who gave me plenty to do, and so I considered

Opposite: our Ipswich home was on the top floor

Above: our campervan holiday; leaving Thorne Island; playing on a Northumberland beach, Bamburgh Castle in the background.

that I was finishing my surgical training in the right place. A stand-out moment during that time involved a man, who one afternoon underwent yet another removal of papillomas (like warts) from his larynx. which had become very narrow as the result of scarring from many previous removals.

Later that evening, I was called to see him urgently in the ward. Due to post-operative swelling, he was having great difficulty breathing, and was blue and confused.

I grabbed a trolley and pushed him up to the operating theatre. Knowing that the anaesthetist would not be able intubate him, the only thing to do was to inject some local and do an urgent tracheotomy, through which a breathing tube could be inserted. I did this all in a few minutes. The man responded to some oxygen, and all was well – but it had been a close call.

Nowadays, the HPV vaccine given to high school children to prevent cancer of the cervix also prevents the growth of most papillomas of the larynx in adults and their children. Another vaccine against haemophilus also prevents acute epiglottitis, which used to cause airway obstruction in children, for which we were called not infrequently to perform an acute tracheotomy. Now and then, airway blockage caused by cancer of the larynx, (often due to smoking), made it necessary for us to do a tracheotomy under local. The majority of

these were men in their fifties, who had taken up smoking during the war, twenty-five years earlier.

Today, these kinds of cases requiring urgent tracheotomy that I dealt with often as a young doctor are not as commonplace.

Mairi’s Brass Rubbings

We were lucky enough to have many churches in Suffolk, with engraved sheets of brass lying over the tombs of notable persons buried beneath the floor of the church.

While I was at work and Caroline at school, Mairi and Emma often visited nearby churches to do some brass rubbing. Placing white paper over the brass plate and rubbing it with a black “heel ball” would mark the paper everywhere except for the actual engraved lines, so producing a beautiful medieval negative image art work. Black paper rubbed with a gold ball produced a positive image.

Mairi became very good at this, and created some marvellous works, one of which of Sir Robert du Bures (1302) still hangs in our hallway. Emma, aged three, meanwhile scribbled on butchers’ paper with crayons and called them “grass rubbings”.

In later years the brass plates were all taken up and hung on the walls of the church, and the general public were no longer allowed access to do original rubbings.

Opposite: Sir Robert de Bures, 1603, Acton, Suffolk; no record of little gold lady or where she was rubbed; William Style, Bayliff (Mayor) of Ipswich in 1472, died 1475, & wife Isabella, died 1490, St Nicholas Church, Ipswich, rubbed 21 July 1972, (fee 25p).

As 1972 drew to an end,

we began to make plans for our

return home.

We booked passage with the least expensive mode of transport, ‘Ship-Jet’, which involved flying from London to Singapore and then going by ship to Sydney. And so, in December, we made our farewells in Ipswich, and boarded the Scottish-owned Caledonian Airways Boeing 707 at Heathrow.

As we sped down the runway, the plane hit the brakes and came to a standstill. Then a very broad Australian accent came over the PA system: “Good afternoon laze and gems, this is your captain speaking, sorry about that, but a red light came on saying that one of the engines was on fire. But it’s probably only a faulty light.”

It soon became obvious that an engine actually was being replaced, but we had to remain on board in a cigarette smoke-filled cabin, or there would be extra charges for disembarking. (It was no surprise when I read about a year later that Caledonian Airways had gone broke).

After taking off, sometime later another message came through from our Aussie pilot: “Looking down to your right, you will see we are flying over Bulgaria…what’s that? (to his co-pilot)…ah sorry, I mean Romania. In a couple of hours, we will begin our descent into Tehran…(er what’s that?) … sorry, I mean Bahrain”.

We arrived home in Sydney Harbour on The Patris. Emma, onboard in fancy dress, ina ‘hula girl’ outfit Mairi made out of crepe paper.

Lucky we made it to Singapore, where we landed about ten hours later in heat and bright sunshine that we hadn’t seen or felt for four long years. We transferred to the “Patris,” a Greek ship, and on board was the heavy luggage we’d sent ahead about three weeks earlier. The trip down the west coast of Australia from Singapore, passing through all the tiny islands in the Java Sea to Fremantle, was most interesting and very hot. Our pale English skins suffered with sunburn, and with few cool clothes, it was a reminder that we were indeed back in an Aussie summer.

On arriving in Fremantle, we were met by Mairi’s father Ian, who had come across the Nullabor from Sydney on the new Indian Pacific railway to meet us. It was lovely to have his company onboard, across the Great Australian Bight to Melbourne, and from there up to Sydney.

An emotional experience that I will never forget was, after four years away, passing though the Heads on that mid-December day and coming down the very smooth waters of Sydney Harbour in the early morning light. Standing high up on the front of the top deck, I could look down on the lawns of Government House to the right, and across to the cranes around the not-yet-finished Opera House on the left, and then under the Bridge, before docking at No. 5 Walsh Bay. Daddy met us as we disembarked and were again on Australian ground. How good it was to be home and see all the family.

The papers were full of news of our newlyelected reforming Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, the first Labor PM since 1949.

I was very worried initially that the health system being proposed was to be the same as the National Health in the UK, with all doctors paid probably a poor salary by the government. Fortunately, after much change, Medicare, (as we know it now), came into being in the early 1980s and remains a ‘fee for service’ system for consultations and operations, but with paid sessions in the Public Hospital while operating on Public Patients who do not have private insurance.

Jan kindly let us stay in her apartment in Wollstonecraft. Mairi, who was pregnant with Alison, became unwell and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Fortunately, she responded well to antibiotics and physiotherapy. In the New Year came the task of finding somewhere to live and somewhere to earn a living as an ENT specialist. We rented a house in East Ryde and I began to get some work doing locums.

Alison

Born on 26 March at St Margaret’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, Alison was a lovely baby. I remember when she was about two months old how she wrinkled her eyebrows when you spoke to her. Alison tragically died a cot death on the 3 June. This was a very sad and hard time which took a lot of getting over, if ever one does really get over it completely, but much harder for Mairi than for me.

Our grief was repeated thirty years later when Caroline’s three-year-old India was killed in 2003 by soccer goal posts falling on her. She was a real character, with a great personality, who you could tell would have made her mark on the world as she grew up.

Alison

India

15 Coora Road at the time of leaving, January 1986.

The family on the back verandah, not long after moving in.

The Yowie Bay Years 1973–1986

A position for an ENT Honorary Medical Officer came up at Sutherland Hospital which I successfully applied for – but it was conditional on living in the Sutherland Shire.

In June 1973 we bought a red-brick house with a blue-tile roof house at 15 Coora Road Yowie Bay for $52,000, thanks to a loan of $8000 from Daddy to help pay the deposit. At that time, the average weekly wage was $100, and the population of Australia was thirteen million, compared to twenty-six million today.

The four-bedroom house was elevated, had a large, multi-level back garden, and was surrounded by bush with some water views. Today the value of that property has increased to over two million dollars.

I set up practice in an office in Westfield Tower in Miranda Fair and started to see patients referred to me by GPs in the area. I had visited and introduced myself to most of them, but it took a few years to get busy. In 1976, I joined a group of fourteen specialists to build a Medical Centre at 26 Gibbs Street Miranda. This was a very pleasant

place to work, where I remained for thirty-five years, operating at Sutherland Hospital and Kareena Private Hospital.

James was born in 1974 at St Margaret’s Hospital, and Iain in 1976 at Sutherland Hospital. Living so close to work, I was able to come home and have lunch with Mairi every day – and was often tackled to the ground by pre-school boys lying in wait for me! I built a cubby for the girls in the back yard, we put in an above ground swimming pool and improved the back area of the house with decking.

Iain learnt to talk much earlier than the others. I remember when he was about three years old announcing: “Now I know all the words.” No wonder he now writes so well in his job as a journalist and has made a very successful career of it!

James also had plenty to say. At around four years old he was going to the pre-school in a hall next to the Gymea church. At home one day he was being very annoying, so I said to him, ” James if you don’t stop that I will twist your head right off your body!” After a brief pause, he replied, “You can’t do that. Jesus wouldn’t let you.” That was the first of many arguments with James that I lost. I wasn’t surprised that he later went on to become a defence solicitor.

At the front of the house, I was able to level out an area to create a cricket pitch, which attracted many of the neighbouring boys, whom I often joined after coming home from work. Yowie Bay was a wonderful place for the children to grow up, with lots of bush for the boys to wander through with Micky our golden retriever. Both the boys played Rugby for the Sylvania Bulldogs every Saturday morning. I got roped in at various times as coach or manager. It was great fun for them and for me.

Emma with baby James; Payten family gathering; the rooms at Gibbs Street being built.

With a growing family at Coora road: joined by many for birthdays, bbqs, “performances,” swims & cricket; With James preparing the roof for the new cubby; Frank M with Emma in cast (on a lead?!), Emma & James getting the morning milk & paper; Sylvaia Bulldogs action.

Underworld Connection

In 1979, I received a phone call in the early hours from Sutherland Hospital letting me know that a man called George Freeman had been admitted under my care following a shooting, but now that his nose had stopped bleeding there was no need for me to see him until the morning.

George was a well-known crime boss and “colourful racing identity,” who lived in a big waterfront home in Yowie Bay, not far from us. Next morning, I found a police guard on the door to his hospital room. There was George, sitting on the side of his bed with two black eyes, a small .22 bullet hole high up on the left side of the neck, and a small exit hole on the right temple just in front of the hair line.

The bullet would have passed through his sphenoid sinus at the back of the nose, just missing the carotid arteries and optic nerves which lie on the lateral walls of the sinus.

He told me that he arrived home at about 2am, and in order to see better when he put the key in the front door, he’d tilted his head sideways. That tilt is what saved him. The gunman had been crouched alongside a small verandah, shooting upwards at George, and the bullet would have gone straight up and into his brain.

“I just can’t think who it could be,” said George a couple of times. I told him that whoever it was, they would be sure to have another go. I was my duty therefore to advise him on preventive medicine, which meant he should go to Perth, grow a beard, change his name and mow lawns for a living.

“You don’t understand.” said George. “In my game, when someone misses like this, the hunter becomes the hunted.”

He went home the next day, and later he would come to see me now and to deal with wax blocking his ears. The only medical problem caused by the shooting was a defect in his upper visual field when he looked along a billiard cue, indicating that the bullet must have grazed his optic nerve.

He always came to my Rooms with a bodyguard, and when my straight-laced secretary asked him for his Medicare number he replied: “I pay cash, lady.”

Out came a huge roll of bank notes wrapped tightly in a rubber band. I found him to be quite a likeable fellow who, given a better start in life, might well have been sitting where I was.

I found out from a patient, a detective in the Vice Squad, that the would-be assassin had been the jealous lover of a woman who had been having an affair with George. The man was dead a few months later, shot as he was backing his car out of his driveway.

When George and his wife planned to baptise their baby at the local ‘Star of the Sea’ church in Miranda, our much-loved Parish Priest Father Stack asked Mairi whether she thought he should or not. Mairi replied, “Of course! It’s not the baby’s fault that the father is a crook!”

So one Sunday as we came out of Mass, there, leaning against the grotto, was the big crime boss of Sydney: Lenny Macpherson, (whose picture was often in the paper).

We were goggled-eyed to see a big Rolls Royce pull up and disgorge a few young ladies, dressed for the baptism of this Freeman baby as if they were going to the races in very high heels and backless dresses. Once the ceremony, was over and they’d all left, Father Stack found that the St Vincent de Paul box had been stuffed full of banknotes!

Ear Operation on ‘Dead’ Man

In about 1975 In saw a Lebanese man with chronic ear pain and discharge, whose X-Ray showed multiple bits of shrapnel in the ear and mastoid. At operation I removed these from around his facial nerve as it ran through the ear, fortunately without giving him a facial paralysis. The hole in his eardrum was patched, the pain and discharge went and he was very happy.

I was under the impression that he received his injury in the civil war in Lebanon but when I asked him about that, he announced: “No, I was murdered and declared dead!”

The story was, that that after working on a ship for three months he was paid his wages in cash. Back at home, he had a few drinks in his back garden with a couple of old acquaintances. They all found reasons to go into the house, leaving him on his own in the garden ... Kaboom!

They’d planted some explosives under the garden table, blew him up and took his cash, leaving him for dead.

An ambulance took him to the local hospital, where he was declared dead and transferred to the morgue. An hour or so later, a hospital Pathologist came in accompanied by some medical students, and pulled him out of the refrigerator in order to do an autopsy.

One of the students spoke up: the dead body had a pulse. The man was rushed upstairs to the operating theatre, where life saving chest surgery was performed. He recovered fully and was able to identify his would-be assassins to the Police, and they were sent to jail.

Ear Surgery

From the experience I gained from my time in England, I did a lot of the microsurgery of the ear in the Sutherland Shire. One of the most demanding procedures was a stapedectomy, which involved the removal of an abnormal stirrup bone, replacing it with a 4.5mm long teflon prosthesis, mostly resulting in a big improvement in hearing.

Another common operation was on the mastoid and middle ear for chronic infection, which caused a perpetual discharge. These cases were mostly with immigrant patients, often from the North of England and Scotland, the former Yugoslavia and the Phillipines, as ear disease occurs more frequently in low economic societies. Once a good result was obtained from one particular migrant group, word would get around, and their friends with similar problems would start arriving.

I often performed th common and simple procedure of inserting grommets into the ear drums of a child with chronic hearing loss due to “glue ears”, which is a collection of sticky mucus in the middle ear. Within a few days there would be a return to normal hearing, and mostly a noticeable return of happiness in the child.

The smallest bones in the body are in the ear, known as the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup bones. These illustrations are about 5x actual size.

Valla days on the beach & the lagoon. Under the beach umbrella, with Marianne & Mairi; Being towed on tires with David– so much fun!

Family Holidays Summer at the Beach

For ten days every January from 1978 to 1986, we stayed in a lakeside cabin at Valla Park, on the north coast of New South Wales, near Nambucca Heads. The Volvo station wagon was heavily loaded up with windsurfer, (both adult and kids’ sails), surf-ski, eskies and many bags, and we would cram in for the long drive north. In the days before the nowcommon SUVs and seven-seater cars, the Volvo had a rear-facing seat in the back. (Very uncomfortable for the sitters, as their legs had to lay out straight in front of them. Arguments were had!)

Valla had the advantage of having both a surf beach and a quiet lagoon. A large group of friends from the Sutherland Shire would regularly be there in various other cabins and caravans, and we were often joined by family as well. There were tennis courts and an onsite shop for ice-creams etc. The kids would spend their days roaming around free-range.

David Payten brought his boat on occasion and the girls learnt to water-ski, and one summer it was where Iain learnt to walk. Sunburn and beach picnics, tennis and barbeques. They were wonderful holidays.

After Caroline and Emma left school and the boys got older, summer holidays were spent at both north and south Avoca Beach, about two hours north of Sydney, mostly in apartments as close as possible to the beach.

One of oour last Valla holidays, with the lagoon behind us.

Charlotte Pass Village, our lodge Snowbird circled. Opposite: meeting up with the Tynan family on our first trip to the snow, (note gumboots); in the old snowcat from Perisher to Charlotte’s; dress-up night at Snowbird; Iain & I racing.

Winter at the Snow

In the winter of 1980, encouraged by our friends Tony and Maggie Tynan, we decided to investigate holidaying on the ski slopes. For the first of what would become many trips to the snow, we stayed in a hotel in Jindabyne. Mairi sewed elasticated waterproof tops onto gumboots, (it was pointless spending money on the proper “gear” if we didn’t know whether we would like it!) That first trip was a success and the beginning of many years of very happy and fun skiing trips.

In 1982, we bought a share in Snowbird Ski Lodge at Charlotte Pass, the highest village in Australia, not far from Mt. Kosciuszko. Every August, we headed south for our ski holiday. The trip from Jindabyne to Perisher Ski Resort was very scenic. From there, the road to Charlottes was fully snowed over. In the early days, we had to pile into a rough old Korean War troop carrier with caterpillar tracks. Once in the village, we felt completely cut off from the outside world, as Snowbird had no TV.

We could ski out from the front of the Lodge down to the chairlift, and ski home through the gnarled mountain gums to the back door, all the while keeping a weather eye out for youngest Iain on the beginners’ slope.

We made many good friends who came in the same week as us each year, and enjoyed the lively annual “Talent Quest” – usually based on that year’s theme dress-up night. Super special memories!

Walgett: 1979–2016

In 1979, the NSW ENT Society called for volunteers to do clinics in various places in outback NSW, and that is how I was asked to go every two months to Walgett.

Walgett is a town of about 2000 people, half of whom are Aboriginal, 650km from Sydney.

The NSW Rural Health Department provided the flights, which departed from Mascot at 7am, usually in a six-seater unpressurised twin engine Cessna. It took about two hours, but sometimes longer if we had to drop into Dubbo to refuel. Usually on board with me were a couple of eye specialists and a paediatrician or a dermatologist.

At the Hospital, there would be a waiting room half full of people who were all told to roll up at 9am, followed by another group at 11am and another at 1.30. It was not unusual to have to send someone out in a car to pick up those who had forgotten their appointment. A lovely old aboriginal woman, Queenie, would bring a minibus full of kids with running ears from Gingie Aboriginal Reserve, about six miles out of town on the banks of the Barwon River.

The Community Nurse took me out there on a day that they had forgotten to book anyone, and I noted that although the houses looked OK, apparently there might be twenty people living in the one house. Muddy water was pumped out of the river into two big overhead tanks for chlorination, (one of the tanks had no cover and no doubt was half full of leaves). That day, there were two people from ‘Child Welfare’ taking away two primary school kids, because the parents had gone off to visit relatives in Brewarrina leaving the kids behind, as they had often done before. Apparently, neighbours had looked after them on previous occasions, but got tired of feeding them this time and rang the authorities. The other Reserve was called “The Namoi” on the outskirts of town on the Namoi River which meets the Barwon at Walgett. The standard of housing there was very poor, with a lot corrugated iron lean-to type of dwellings. I remember seeing out in the open a 44-gallon drum over an open fire which was half full of clothes in boiling water, and this was being stirred with a broomstick. Although Gingie

looked better than Namoi, Namoi was on town water and had a lower incidence of gastroenteritis and other ailments.

During the 1980s, a lot of the children had small holes in their eardrums which discharged with every cold until the age of about ten, when the holes often closed spontaneously. All you could do was to clean out their ears and give them some eardrops, which usually worked until the next cold. As time went by, largely thanks to a very good community nurse, the kids would be treated by the local GP for their respiratory infections with antibiotics and eardrops.

Eventually by the 1990s, the children had much fewer perforations but had developed the white man’s problem of “glue ears”. All this happened over a short period, thanks to educating the grandmothers, who were often only in their late thirties, and who were instructing daughters in their late teens on how to look after young children. If the holes had not healed up by the age of ten, I would repair them at Walgett Hospital, where I did an operating list about every six months.

There was one young boy, Matthew, who wasn’t learning to speak when I first saw him, aged about two. He had enormous holes in both eardrums and so had to be fitted with hearing aids. I saw him from time to time and finally was able to successfully graft new drums when he was

Ear microsurgery at Walgett Hospital, 2011

about eleven or twelve, restoring his hearing to normal. When they came to see me for the last time, Matthew’s mother gave me an emu egg that had been beautifully carved by his uncle.

The more complicated mastoid operations had to come to Sydney and initially, parents and relatives could stay in the old Nurses Home at Sutherland Hospital after it ceased accommodating nurses in the early 1980s. Eventually that closed, and they had to stay at the Caravan Park or with relatives in Redfern.

The gift from Matthew’s family: a work of art now in our living room.

I remember paying a pre-operative visit in the ward to teenager Neville, and found him being examined by a few Asian medical students who were practising listening to his heart sounds with their stethoscopes. I said, “ I hope you have shown good manners by introducing yourselves to Neville and have asked him where he comes from”. No they hadn’t, so I told them he comes from Walgett, do you know where that is? No, they didn’t.

Neville, aged about fourteen gives me that look: where did you get these idiots from? I told them where Walgett was, and that Neville was related to Ricky Walford who also came from Walgett – do you know who he is? No they didn’t know. Neville looked disgusted as Ricky Walford was the leading goal kicker in the Sydney Rugby League competition. A great example of ‘clash of cultures’!

There were quite a few aboriginals employed at Walgett Hospital. Andy and Mary were both on the front desk in the clinic where the Eye guys and I worked. They had graduated from a Nurses Aid course, and eventually were promoted to run a newly opened renal dialysis unit, which saved patients having to go and live in Dubbo. Another was handyman Tom Beale, the brother of Vic Beale whose mastoid I had operated on.

Vic worked as a teachers aide, and sang and played guitar in a band that did the rounds of Bourke and beyond. After our granddaughter India died in 2003, Vic offered me his condolences. “How did you know about that?”

I asked him, to which he replied, ‘Word gets around you know’.

As the years went on, there were more aboriginals in permanent employment, such as on the Council doing road works etc. Another

group ran a local café and another family ran a petrol station, but in spite of that, Walgett was essentially a welfare town. Some of the smarter kids or those good at sport got scholarships to board at Red Bend in Forbes or Downlands College in Toowoomba.

Andy’s son went to St Joseph’s College in Sydney and Andy told me, as his son finished Year 12, that he was interested in something in the legal area. I told him that if his son wanted to, he could ring me and I would put him in touch with the Aboriginal Legal Service where our son James had worked for years.

No call eventuated and a few years later, I asked Andy how his son was getting on. He looked downhearted and said his son and his son’s friend who had been at St Joseph’s with him, were both in Walgett, unemployed and were both fathers.

The old weatherboard Walgett Hospital was very hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I was usually in an out-building that had been previously used to isolate infectious diseases, with big sash windows that went up to the ceiling. Eventually the old hospital was eaten by white ants and was replaced by an airconditioned brick one sometime in the late 1980s.

The only problem with this new hospital was that the clinic rooms were so small, we found it very difficult to work in them. This was in spite of the eye specialists having sent the Government the architectural dimensions of what was needed. This was typical of experience elsewhere, where the needs of the working clinicians were totally ignored. I overcame my problem by moving into the operating theatre, which was rarely used and eventually was shut down for surgery altogether.

Some memorable air trips to Walgett

The pilots of the small planes contracted to fly us to Walgett, were usually owner/operators so there was always the worry that if their business was in financial trouble, the planes might not be serviced properly.

On one occasion in my early days of going to Walgett, the cabin filled with white smoke, forcing us to make an emergency landing at Coolah, about half- way. After some radio instruction, it was evident that the smoke was actually mist from a faulty air conditioner which was fixed by switching it off.

During the 1980s, we began to take off from Bankstown airport instead of Mascot and on one occasion, in this really old plane, as we went full speed down the runway about to take off, the bottom half of the back door flew open and was hanging down. Fortunately we had plenty of runway left and we then able to pull up in time and shut the door.

After this in this same plane, there was then a problem starting one of the engines but after a lot of spluttering and black smoke, we took off but were only just over Prospect Dam, a very short distance away, when then was a sudden sideways jerk and then another. The young pilot was very frightened and told us we were heading back because the left engine had stopped. I was a bit nervous as he made a wide turn, landed back at Bankstown and taxied to the service hangar where a broken crankshaft was diagnosed. We were lucky to be able land so soon after the engine failure, because the same make of Chieftain aircraft went down in Spencers Gulf (SA) at about that time with two broken crankshafts. This is because both

engines have done the same hours, and so once one engine goes, the other will follow soon after. So – that was the end of that day’s clinic in Walgett!

Two weeks later: another very old aircraft with the same young pilot took off. This time we had to turn around over Penrith because of a flat battery, which put out all the instruments and the hydraulics that put the wheels down. “No worries,” he said to me. “Just turn the crank handle between the two front seats and that will wind down the wheels.” This I did and once the control tower was able to tell us that the wheels were down, we once again taxied to the service hangar. About half an hour later, we were reassured that with a new battery and a new black box, she was “as good as new.”

So up into the air again, and we got as far as Lithgow before the battery went flat again.

Once more, manually wind down the wheels, land, and go back to the service hangar.

“We could give you another plane today of you like,” but we said, “No thanks! We’ve had enough for one day.”

There was another extra scary near-miss episode some years later, which occurred as we were close to touch down at Bankstown at dusk, when a plane from the flying school flew across just underneath us.

You might ask why the above incidents occurred in the first place. CASA, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, were terribly inefficient at that time and were often heavily criticised, so it’s no wonder those planes were allowed to continue to operate.

And so that was enough for me, and I wrote a detailed letter to the Department of Health saying I would not be going to Walgett again unless we had better aircraft.

I was surprised to get a reply informing me that from now on, we would be taken only by the Royal Flying Doctor Service aircraft with RFDS pilots who had a great reputation. From then on, we flew in the much faster and pressurized King- Air planes. These flew at 17,000 feet, well above any turbulence, making the trip much less tiring – or nerve-racking.

After thirty-seven years of trips to Walgett every two months, I stopped in 2016. The Hospital farewelled me with an afternoon tea, and presented me with a clock with an inscription thanking me for my years of service to the people of Walgett.

The ENT service continues with younger colleagues from our Family Shire ENT group in Miranda.

Bankstown Airport 7am: Bob & Eye Team off to Walgett

Northern Territory: 1990–1996

Six ENT volunteers took part in an Aboriginal Ear Health Project based out of Alice Springs, each of us visiting for a week at a time every year.

The aim of this project was to survey the incidence of eardrum perforations, and to encourage the use of syringing infected ears with a Betadine solution. This was to get rid of infected wax and rubbish that was prolonging ear discharge. Another aim was to refer older children with permanent perforations for repair to the Alice Springs ENT surgeon.

We would see the Kindy and Year 1 children. Usually about a quarter of the class during the winter had runny ears and hearing loss, with twin “white candles” of nasal mucous on the top lip. During the summer, the child would often have a small dry hole in the ear, and the mucous would be gone. By the time they were about eleven years of age, the noses had dried up and so had the ears, the small holes often healing by themselves. However, in small remote communities, schooling often did not go beyond Year 7, so hearing loss for most of primary school held back the limited education this group of children did experience.

We visited Hermannsburg, Santa Theresa, Utopia, Papunya, Haarsts Bluff, Mt. Liebig & Lake Nash. The project was run through the Department of Education, who drove us to various communities where we would stay overnight.

Hermannsburg

Hermannsburg community was originally a Lutheran Mission founded in 1877, and continued until 1982. It was the home of famous aboriginal painter Albert Namatajira, whose family still live there.

There was a very remarkable day at Hermannsburg, where I had done a clinic all day looking at childrens’ ears with a picture of the child’s eardrum coming up on a screen. All the rest of the five and six year olds gathered around and were very interested in this and enthusiastic. “My turn, my turn! Look in my ear”. The background language was all in Arrernte, not a word of English. Having finished the clinic, I then had to find myself

The Lutheran Church at Hermannsburg; looking at the ear drum on a video screen

something to buy at the store for dinner and then back to my accommodation which was a motel style room surrounded by a very high barbed wire fence and a locked gate to which I had a key.

There was a thunderstorm without much rain and soon after, a 4WD arrived at great speed with the aboriginal driver saying, “Come quick – a girl has been struck by lightning”.

Back in the clinic, I found an unconscious girl about ten years old lying on the couch. She took a deep breath now and then and I thought she might die. Although I could feel no pulse, with a stethoscope I could hear her heart racing at about 200/minute – which is as fast as a heart can go! I could not assess whether her pupils reacted to light because of the very black colour of the irises.

There were no lightning burn marks to be found on her skin or the soles of her feet, but I suspected an internal injury to account for such low blood pressure that I could not feel her pulse. I tried to put up a drip to give her some IV fluids but by now she was starting to writhe. She was still unconscious and the clinic had filled up with twenty–thirty emotional relatives and onlookers.

Her mother was crying and stroking her, causing her arm to move, but all the same, I got the needle into her one and only vein first go. However, self-congratulations were short lived, with all her writhing, the needle did not stay in long enough to get the Elastoplast on to anchor it in place. The crowd let out a murmur of disappointment when this happened. A nurse called Rod was there with me, wearing a yellow singlet and a long ponytail half-way down his back. He had been a medic in the

Vietnam war, so I asked him how good was he at putting a needle in a vein? “I’m very good,” he said, so I asked him to have a go at the one and only remaining vein on the other arm. He succeeded – this time I quickly anchored it with Elastoplast.

Though I could not understand a word of the conversation in the crowd in the clinic, I could sense their high level of emotion by the tone. They were becoming very restive when the Lutheran pastor arrived with the biggest hard backed Bible you’ve ever seen, and began to say what I later learned was the Lords Prayer.

This was in the deep sounds of the Arrernte language, one sentence at a time, repeated by the crowd. It was very moving. The crowd settled, and we then put the young girl on a trolley and pushed her through the crowd to the “ambulance,” which was a Toyota 4WD troop carrier. These have one front bench seat and two side bench seats in the back, between which was room for our stretchered patient who had started to arch her back (opisthotonos) and was still unconscious, lying between her mother and the clinic nurse.

The pastor was the driver, with me sitting alongside him, leaving room for the girl’s aunty. She was just about to get in when she suddenly received an almighty whack on the back, which felled her to the ground. The fellow who hit her was a young well-built man with a mad look on his face, making grunting noises. He just stood there while she picked herself up, hopped in, and off we went through the crowd.

“What was that all about?” I asked her, to which she replied: “Take no notice, that’s just my son who has been a petrol sniffer for years and gets excited easily.”

We had tried to get the Flying Doctor to come out from Alice Springs, but it was getting dark and the runway was unlit, so we were going to meet the ambulance from Alice halfway, which on a dirt road would take about an hour. After about fifteen minutes we were waved down by some aboriginal men standing by a Holden utility on the other side of the road.“These blokes have run out of petrol – so put up your windows and leave the talking to me,” said the Pastor. They wanted to siphon some petrol from our tank, but he told them we had a very sick girl and could not delay.

Off we went again, and he explained that if we had not stopped, a rock which one of them held behind his back would have been thrown at our windscreen. He knew that these men were grog runners who would sell alcohol in the scrub just out of Hermannsburg, which was a dry community.

Having met the ambulance from Alice, we returned home. As I walked back to my quarters, I was very upset to see some young teenagers sitting on the low wall around the cemetery sniffing out of jam tins containing petrol in order to obtain a high. The petrol, I was told, was sold to the kids in used drink bottles which had been brought out from Alice. Prolonged use results in brain damage and psychoses, and so it was very sad to see these dull-eyed kids, who might have been the older siblings of the bright young kids I had seen earlier in the day. They were starting on a downhill trajectory that could end up with them being one of the high number of suicides in the years to come. Fortunately, the new Opal petrol sold in the Northern Territory in the following years does not provide any euphoria, and so now petrol sniffing is a thing of the past.

The next morning, the good news from Alice was that the girl struck by lightning had become fully conscious overnight, was up and about and would be coming home.

I went and had a look at where the strike had happened, and was told that she was dancing on a “stage” made of a thick piece of plywood sitting over four 44-gallon drums. Only a few metres away on the ground was the branch of a small tree which had been struck by the lightning, which then must have run across the wet dirt, up the metal drums and onto the wet plywood. I concluded that the lightning must have not only shocked her brain but also caused electrical malfunction to her heart resulting in a very low blood pressure, fast heartbeat and loss of consciousness, all of which was fully reversible in time.

Utopia

Utopia is the name of a cattle station which was given back to its original aboriginal owners in the 1970s. It is about 50 miles square, 330km and half a days drive north-east from Alice Springs along the very corrugated Sandover Highway, which finishes up in Queensland. It is a dry community, but a mile or so before getting there is a tall pile of empty beer cans by the side of the road. On entering Utopia you immediately notice the knee-high spinifex grass. There were very few cattle in Utopia, but outside the boundary fence the land was totally eaten out by cattle.

Turning off the highway, you soon reach the small general store and then the main medical clinic, which included a few short stay beds. Nearby were a few sheds including a machinery shed, one to house the generator ,and another building to train aboriginal health workers.

“No hear him proper far away.”

Mosquito Bore Medical Clinic: audiologist fitting patient with a hearing aid.

“You like my humpy?” This was home to her: a tarped roof for the rare shower of rain & all her possessions in bags.

Within Utopia are scattered communities, each of about forty people, usually situated alongside a bore, which was sunk to water cattle in the old days: Soapy Bore, Kurrajong Bore, Mosquito Bore etc. Each community had about fifteen dwellings, all identical and composed of a big room on either end, each opening onto a room sized breezeway in the middle, all under the one roof. Out the front were rubber mattresses on bedframes supported by a four-gallon drum under each corner. Cooking took place over an open fire. It hardly ever rained so the dwelling was mainly for storing belongings.

In each small community there was a shipping container which was the medical clinic. It had a small square opening in the wall wide

enough to reach in and dial the phone to the doctor in the main medical clinic in case of an emergency, should the local aboriginal health worker not be around. From inside this local clinic, the health worker could provide first aid and also give out daily medications for diabetes, blood pressure etc. This model worker very well as Utopia, run by the Benevolent Society (founded in Australia in 1813, an independent, non-religious, not for profit organisation) had better health outcome figures than elsewhere in outback NT.

Vehicles would take children to a few scattered primary schools which each had about thirty pupils, two teachers and a couple of aboriginal Teachers’ Aids.

Things are not always as they seem at first sight.

My first day at Utopia was a very hot one at 44° in early December. Accompanying the audiologist and me on our visits to outlying communities was an aboriginal interpreter named Lucky, wearing a clean uniform.

At the end of the day as we drove back to the main clinic, Lucky asked me to have a look at her four year old grandson who lived nearby, so we drove along a winding track through some spindly acacia and came into a clearing. “Stop!” said Lucky, “We have arrived”.

But there were no buildings in sight, only a line of horizontally placed corrugated galvanised iron sheets jammed between some iron posts, to form a wall about five feet high. From behind these, suddenly a whole lot of people stood up and looked at us. This was Lucky’s mob.

After a quick chase, they managed to catch the four year old and bring him to me to look at his discharging ear. However he was so strong and wriggly that I could not clean his ear out, and had to let him go.

That night I stayed with the two husband and wife doctors in their house near the main clinic. She was originally from Forbes, where her father ran a trucking business, and she asked me how the day had been. I replied that it was no hotter than working out in the paddocks at Forbes during harvest, but I was surprised that Lucky’s family lived without a roof over their heads and that their rubber mattresses where lying flat on the ground. She explained to me that this group of thirty were the healthiest mob in all Utopia.

“Did the little boy have any skin sores on him?”

No.

“Was he underweight?”

No.

“Was he fit and strong?”

Very much so.

So, things are not always as they seem at first sight. Every week this mob would move camp. The sun would keep the campsite fairly sterile, and on the rare occasions that it rained, they would move into the half empty machinery shed where there was also a laundry and a shower attached, which they often used. They frequently shot a kangaroo to eat, but otherwise bought food at the local store with pension money given out every fortnight (but that tended to run out after 10 days).

Utopia society

Within Utopia, there was an elected male elder in charge of each local community and we were told that the stricter he was, the better the community.

Those who did not toe the line were kicked out and often joined other rebels at Kurrajong Bore. When we visited we noted lots of old car bodies lying around, lots of mangy dogs and lots of kids with discharging ears. So even away out in Utopia, there was a Kings Cross equivalent where the rebels tended to congregate.

We passed one group of deserted dwellings and were told that someone here had died and so the whole community had to leave for a few months to carry “sorry business,” so as to avoid the ‘evil spirit’ in that area. In this case, someone had died of cancer which was

unusual and the suspicion existed that a person who was an enemy of the deceased had cast a wicked spell that killed the person.

Soapy Bore & Mosquito Bore schools

We arrived at the Soapy Bore one room school which reminded me of Paytens Bridge school at about 8.30 and I joined some of the very friendly young kids kicking a football around the red dirt playground. There was no English to be heard at all except when talking to me “kick it to me, kick it to me”.

Later that day at Mosquito Bore, I had a good chat to a couple of older men in their 50s who had worked on Utopia as stockmen about 25 years earlier and had very good English. We were talking away and I could see that one of their sons in their 20s was having trouble following the speed of the conversation so English was obviously his second language. One of the teachers there told us that by the time they left school, the average reading age was about eight years old. Some of course went down to Alice Springs to the Lutheran boarding high school, where it would take a week to get them all cleaned up, only to return home for the school holidays to be teased by their old school mates for looking so clean and “all stuck up”.

There was a lovely young aboriginal girl about eighteen years old who was working in the main medical clinic at Utopia. She had finished high school in Alice Springs, had done the Community Nurse course at Utopia and then went down to work in Alice Springs as a health worker. She tried staying with some relatives in one of the camps on the edge of town, but was homesick – and not without cause – she felt unsafe in the camp. Now she was home again, but that was not where she wanted to be either. It was a case of being caught between cultures.

Papunya

Tim, from the Department of Education, was driving me in a Toyota 4WD early one morning to Papunya, 250 km westof Alice Springs. Travelling across country from Tilmouth Well. which is on the Tanami Track to Western Australia, we passed through ‘Central Mount Wedge,’ an abandoned cattle station given back to the Aborigines, and came across the now deserted main homestead.

Soapy Bore school and students in the classroom.

This was a substantial building with one wing which contained numerous rooms for the jackeroos opening on to a long verandah. Out the front was a waist high humpy made of corrugated iron sheets, from which emerged an aboriginal man and two women.

“It’s too cold in the house” he said.

“It’s warmer out here.” There was a fire burning slowly near the small entrance to the humpy. “I got everything I need, this place now belongs to me”. He gave us strict instructions on how to get to Papunya by making sure we took the fork to the right along the track. “Take dis one,” he said, pointing to his index finger as he made a V sign. He had a Toyota WD and otherwise had little need of material possessions, but would have probably driven down to Papunya to pick up his dole money and some provisions every two weeks.

On the road to Papunya, Mount Leibeg in the distance; Papunya clinic.

Late in the afternoon at Lake Nash, I saw the most skilful game of Aussie Rules played on the local oval, with all the bare footed players stirring up the red dust in the setting sun as they jumped, weaved and kicked so cleverly. There was no grass, so tackling was not allowed. I asked which side was in front, and was told to go down to the goal post area where a man was writing the score in the dust with a long stick.

Papunya is the place where, in 1971, an art teacher at the school persuaded the local aboriginal artists to put their ‘dot paintings’ onto canvas instead onto the sand, which is something they had always done to mark special occasions and ceremonies. Thus started an art movement that has been appreciated worldwide.

The soil is a very fine red sand here. I noticed the children I was seeing often had a dust mark on the side of their face, where they had been sleeping with their head on the ground.

Lake Nash

One of the most remote communities I visited was Lake Nash, a two-hour plane flight north of Alice Springs on the NT/Qld border, about level with Mt. Isa and on the Georgina River which flows south away down into Lake Eyre.

Lake Nash was a very tidy place, without the usual old car bodies lying around, and no plastic bags up against the bottom of fences. This is because the aboriginal man in charge had been a garbageman in Mt Isa years ago and hated untidiness. Every morning, it was compulsory to work for the dole until about 11am so public works could be carried out.

There is a saying that behind every good aboriginal community is a strong leader, and this man in charge of the 250 people at Lake Nash was certainly that. I heard the story of how he caught some grog runners red handed and so confiscated their car. Instead of selling it on behalf of the community (as he was legally entitled to do), he brought a front-end loader from the garbage tip, and before the assembled crowd in the main street, squashed the car flat.

Another memorable thing occurred in the high school, which went up to Year 10, where I saw two girls aged about fourteteen having problems operating a computer. One of them went away and returned with a boy about the same age, who gave out some brusque orders in the local language. They moved out of the way to let him sit down. In no time at all, he had the computer up and running, and then gave some strong instructions before leaving. It brought home to me how smart some of these students were, and the importance of education in this remote community where English was very much a second language.

On our flight back to Alice from Lake Nash we dropped into a very small community, (whose name I can’t recall), to check on some school children. The Medical Centre was – as usual – built of concrete blocks with a knee-high brown discolouration on the front wall from the dogs rubbing up against it.

Inside I met the two nurses who ran the clinic, and who at that time were busy looking after an aboriginal woman who had chest pain. They asked me to have a

look at her. She was overweight, complaining of severe chest pain, sweating and nauseated.

I agreed it looked like a heart attack, but they showed me her cardiograph, which to me looked normal. They had done a blood test in their small laboratory to detect heart muscle damage, and that was also normal. They faxed all this to the cardiologist in Alice Springs, who said that she was probably passing gallstones. They tried to get a plane out to pick her up without success, so they gave her some morphine and a few hours later, she was much better.

I thought that this was a great example of how well-trained dedicated nurses can run a health service in an outback isolated community and showed a true vocation to their work, living as they did in such harsh conditions.

Santa Teresa Mission

Santa Teresa is about an hour’s drive east of Alice Springs. In the 1920s, some of the Arrernte people set up camp on the edge of Alice Springs, one of the main reasons being that they were half starved on their native land because the introduced cattle were competing with kangaroos for the very scarce water and grass, and they were being hassled by the Pastoralists and Police.

The Sacred Heart priests, (one of whom was Dallas Cox, my brother-in-law Kevin Mason’s uncle), set up a mission to provide food and shelter in the back of the local presbytery in Alice in about 1935. They moved to an abandoned harsh gold mining town Arltunga, 100 kilometers east in 1942, with a final move

to better watered Santa Teresa in 1953. There is a primary and secondary school to Year 12 run by the Marist Brothers, the mission now being run by an Aboriginal Land Trust. There is a ‘work-for-the-dole’ scheme here, and everything is neat and tidy with watered lawns in front of most houses.

I was there for a couple of days, and went to early morning mass in their beautiful stone chapel built by the aboriginal people, who are very devoted. I had a long chat with Father Joe Brady, the only priest living there, who gave me this advice: “Remember when you are working towards something with aboriginal people, it takes a long time to make a small change”.

This was a place where I felt some progress was certainly being made. The in-ground swimming pool was very popular, so the kids had a good wash most days, reducing the incidence of scabies.

This can lead to rheumatic heart disease and is a common cause of premature death amongst the aboriginal population.

In recent years, I have heard Santa Teresa has a renal dialysis unit, and the sandy Aussie Rules oval has been grassed over, thanks to a Melbourne football club.

After about six years in the late 1990s, the Northern Territory Ear Health programme ran out of funds, and so was abandoned. Diabetes, renal and other more serious problems needed priority.

The Federal Government Intervention Programme

I was one of a group of ENT surgeons who volunteered to be part of a Federal Government programme involving all specialties, in response to the findings of an inquiry into child sexual abuse, and the general poor health of the aboriginal people of the Northern Territory, entitled: “The Little Children are Sacred Report.”

For me and my colleagues this involved visiting numerous Northern Territory communities, diagnosing the children that needed ear surgery, and then later at Alice Springs Hospital, repairing holes in their eardrums.

This went on for a few years, during which time I visited Ali Curung, Ti Tree and Elliot on the Stuart Highway and Maningrida in Arnhem Land on the Arafura Sea.

Ali Curung

Ali Curung is one hour’s flight north of Alice. When we arrived at about 9am, I noticed that the sister in charge of the Medical Clinic looked very tired. She told me that she had very little sleep the night before because of a brawl between two tribal groups in the town who were traditional enemies, one living on Santa Teresa Mission from the air; the church.

the east and the other on the west of the town. One of the combatants had sustained a big scalp wound after being hit by an axe, and was brought bleeding heavily to the clinic, where the sister stitched him up.

A young aboriginal policewoman, (who had just graduated from the Police Academy and belonged to the opposing tribe), demanded that the injured man be handed over to her. The sister at the clinic locked all the doors, refused to cooperate, and so remained barricaded in the clinic all night. Some police from Alice flew up early in the morning, stood the policewoman down and restored law and order.

Elliot

Further up the highway an about half way from Alice Springs to Darwin is Elliot, population 300. In such a small place, I was surprised to see a good north end of town that was tidy with well-cared-for houses and gardens, while the south end was untidy and run-down looking, with old car bodies and plastic bags everywhere. A lot of the men who did well here were stockmen on the nearby huge Newcastle Waters cattle station.

The medical clinic in north Elliot was very wellrun, as demonstrated by a long list of names on a whiteboard where alongside each name was that of an aboriginal community health worker and the job to be done, (such as an insulin injection, wound dressing or a blood test) .

I had a very pleasant 18 year old aboriginal girl sitting alongside me in the clinic typing out clinical notes I had written. She explained that these records were then available to clinics all over the NT, which made sense because aboriginal people move around so much.

I asked her how did she become so good on the computer, and she said from boarding at a high school in Darwin. She planned to go to Adelaide the following year to do nursing.

“How many of your class in Elliot went onto secondary school in Darwin?” I asked. About half she said.

“And what about the other half?” They’re not doing much she said.

Elliot was a good example of how important education and employment are to people who haven’t got much.

Maningrida

In contrast to the desert communities I had visited in central Australia, Maningrida has tropical surroundings in Arnhem Land on the Arafura Sea.

Although I was tempted to go for a swim, no one was in the water because of crocodiles.

I was told that the children that I saw in the school all spoke three distinct languages as well as English. They have a very active Arts Centre where I bought a small bark painting.

Summary

Unfortunately, the NT has its fair share of violence. A lot of the places I visited had a women’s shelter, which was usually a hut surrounded by a high fence topped by barbed wire.

When I was doing an operating list at the Alice Springs hospital, I ran into a staff specialist general surgeon who I knew from his days of training at Sutherland Hospital. He told me he had to deal with a lot of bowel injuries due to stabbing, often associated with too much grog on pension pay day.

This Federal Government Intervention Programme faded out after a several years due to a change of government.

It was directed at addressing the disproportionate levels of violence in indigenous communities in the NT as well as problems caused by economic deprivation, unemployment, inadequate housing, poor health and poor justice outcomes.

While a lot of the patients we saw had their hearing restored, once the Intervention ceased, with a new generation now requiring treatment/surgery, things have gone back to where they used to be. The prevalence of ear disease around the world is an indicator of disadvantage. Until overcrowding in housing is overcome, a better diet including fresh vegetables is available and affordable, and there is more in the way of employment, there will continue to be ear problems.

I could also see that in a lot of communities, the men were hanging around with nothing to do, so I wondered why, under the supervision of tradesmen, they couldn’t be employed in building houses. Unfortunately, not all employment suits the aboriginal temperament, as demonstrated by the failure of the Lutherans at Hermannsburg to permanently establish a farming and gardening community in spite of years of effort.

If you are interested to read a good book written about the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land which explains the complexities in all of this, I recommend you read “Why Warriors Lie Down and Die” by Richard Trudgen. Another very interesting book is “The Red Chief” by Ion Idriess, which gives an elder’s account of tribal life just prior to the arrival of the white man.

The Arrival of the Apple Mac

1984 was not only the name of George Orwell’s famous book, it was also the year that the Apple Macintosh personal computer was introduced. With its newly invented mouse it was much easier to use than the existing IBM and Apple PCs, which relied on keyboard instruction.

After considerable research, Mairi bought our first Mac, (with what was then a regarded as a ‘huge’ memory of 128KB). The cost was considerable: $3,400, (equivalent to $12,800 in 2025). She then did a course at Gymea Tech to learn how to use it. The memory was later increased to a “massive” 512KB, and we subsequently upgraded our Macs over the years as the prices became progressively cheaper and the technology improved. (The base standard memory for a Mac today is 16GB, and can be upgraded to 32GB. 1GB = over 10,000KB)

Mairi then computerised the accounting system in my rooms at the Medical Centre, where she worked one day a week, replacing the handwritten receipts and double-copy carbon paper accounting system. Later in her job at St Vincents she did much the same for the Haemotology Department there.

Ten years or so after that first Mac, modems became a household standard. Once we had search engines on the world wide web, we finally said ‘good-bye’ to the family World Book Encyclopaedia. It had been our longtrusted and beloved source of information for school projects, and heavily relied upon for general consultation – often in the middle of family discussions around the dinner table. It’s hard for younger generations to imagine how it was to be without the internet or mobile smart phones, and all of the ways that technology has changed day-to-day life.

Mairi on the trusty Mac , helping James with oa school assignment; an historic email.

120 Tunstall Avenue 1986–now

During 1985, Mairi & I began discussing the idea of moving out of Coora Road and finding a home closer to the city. It made sense, as the girls would have less travelling to University, and it would also be closer to Riverview for James and eventually Iain. We started looking around the Centennial Park area, which would be a reasonably easy drive back to Miranda, for me to continue my practice .

One Saturday later that year, I drove Emma up to play netball at Raleigh Park, (the WD&HO Wills cigarette factory which had courts for their staff). After playing, Emma was asked to referee a junior game, so I went for a walk around Kingsford, and found myself on Tunstall Avenue. I could see the Australian Golf Course in between the houses, and thought to myself: this could be a great place to live, overlooking the golf course.

The next week, Mairi rang the L J Hooker Real Estate agent at Kingsford to ask if there were any houses up for sale in Tunstall Avenue. There was one, which Mairi inspected ... and that is how we came to move into 120 Tunstall in January 1986, after purchasing for $385,000.

As we sit on the verandah at “Club Tunstall,” having a drink in the evening, watching yet again another beautiful sunset over the fairways and ducks on the golden lake, we are forever thankful for how lucky we’ve been and still are to live here – almost forty years later!

The verandah at Tunstall Avenue, before the kitchen window or pergola were added; Caroline, Steph P, Katie P, Wendy M, Iain, Mairi, John M, James; the streetfront in early days; family Christmas ‘93.

Mairi’s Second Career

Mairi replied to job vacancy advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, which Emma had found, and was successful in being appointed to St Vincent’s Hospital Haematology & Bone Marrow Transplant Department as Office Manager in May 1990. This Department looks mainly after people with leukaemia and other blood cancers.

She had been out of the official workforce for over twenty years but had many management skills gained through bringing up four children, working part time in my surgery and had numerous skills honed through time-honoured school mothers’ jobs. These included typing up the primary school weekly newsletter and producing a copy for each child, by running the original wax paper copy through the Gestetner machine, (which predated photocopying). There were also many committees covering tuckshop, library, school fetes, Year 12 balls etc. over a long period of time.

Added to this were her self-taught computer skills on one of the earliest Mac computers in the early ‘80s. These skills were recognised by one of the Haematologists, Dr Alan Concannon, who wrote a book “The Evolution of Haematology at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney 1857–2010,” in which he mentions Mairi as follows:

“Mairi Payten, who joined us in 1990, is the Haematology Office Manager and a computer whizz and she computerised the office virtually single-handedly. She was indispensable to the computer illiterates on the team (there were two of us Luddites!). Efficient and innovative, Mairi is a friend to all the Haematology staff (past and present, and not a few of the patients).”

In the personal entry section of the same book (2011), Mairi wrote the following:

“Working in the Haematology Department has been a huge part of my life. I have been so fortunate to have the friendship and companionship of so many office staff, clinical specialists, Registrars, nurses, clinical trial-data collectors and allied health staff, all working for our Haematology patients, and I value each and every one of them: they have shared my joys and sorrows and have been my second family.

“St Vincent’s Hospital has a very special ‘something’ that has kept me there, and I know will continue to inspire those who are fortunate enough to work in this wonderful Hospital”.

Mairi retired in 2014, after 24 years in the St. Vincent’s Haematology & Bone Marrow Transplant Department. At her retirement dinner, it was obvious how fond they all were of her, and how much they were going to miss her. One of the comments made was that: “she was a mother to us all”.

She still sees many of her old friends, more than ten years later, on her weekly volunteering at The Garvan Institute of Medical Research, next door to where the Haematology Department is now located in The Kinghorn Cancer Centre.

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first bone marrow transplant with colleagues in the department

James & Iain Sport

While at Riverview, James and Iain were both in that small number of pupils that made the athletic team. Every year Iain ran in the GPS competition in a wide variety of distances, from 800 metres in year 7, to 100 metres when he was older. To cap it all years later he ran in and finished the London Marathon.

James was also a sprinter, and went on to become the Champion Athlete of the College. His name is up on a board at Riverview, in the company of his uncle David and cousin Joe Payten from Alfalfa Canowindra.

Iain and his two cousins, Anthony Payten and Luke Hannan, won the Fairfax prize for the fastest schoolboy team for Year 8 in the City to Surf, and each received a medal.

There has to be some good running genes there somewhere!

Both boys played Rugby on the wing at school. James’ second XV team beat Joeys to win the competition, with James scoring the only try.

Iain, though in the first 1st XV for all the trial games, broke his collarbone in a trial and so was disappointed to miss the rest of the season.

Iain & Anthony Payten with Luke Hannan and their City to Surf medals; Iain at rugby; Iain about to lead off in the relay; James hurdling.

The Hail Storm

The big hail storm in the late afternoon of April 1999 cut a swathe through Sydney about two thousand metres wide, from Port Hacking to Sydney Harbour.

I remember hearing the sound of it coming from the South, and was just able to get the cars into the garage before it struck. Cricket ball sized hailstones driven by a strong wind broke windows on the southern side of the house, spraying glass across the floor. An electricity cable out on the street was broken and a live end of it jumped about on the hailcovered tar, creating showers of sparks.

I climbed up into the ceiling and realized we were in big trouble. There were huge holes in the tiled roof ,through which I could see the sky. Steam was rising off the ice balls that covered the lawn and the golf course in a surreal way in the late afternoon light.

Then came the rain.

It ran down the walls and off the ceilingbased light fittings. The plasterboard ceilings began to bulge, then leak, and the carpets became sodden. We took all the paintings off the walls, along with the photo albums and a few documents from the filing cabinet, and put them in the only dry place – which was in the cars. The next morning I was able to get hold of some big plastic sheets and spread them out all over the roof.

A bloke riding past on a pushbike climbed up the ladder and gave me a much-needed hand for a couple of hours. The tarpaulins were then held in place with sandbags, collected from Kensington oval.

Jacinta Tynan was a television reporter for the ABC at the time, and arrived with a cameraman to capture me climbing up the ladder with a sandbag on my shoulder.

Later that night we watched it on TV.

Cint: Does it worry you climbing around on your roof?

Me: No it doesn’t worry me – but my wife doesn’t like it much.

This was interpreted by some that I was making Mairi climb up on the roof – which was very amusing at the time.

All the carpets were ruined, and the plaster ceilings and wallpaper. We spent many months living under tarps with limited electricity. Eventually though, we got a new tiled roof, then fixed up the rest of the house.

It was quite a shock to the system, but we got over it.

Clockwise: Emma, Iain & the Giant Hail Stones; Iain on the roof with the temporary plastic sheeting; Mairi holding the ladder while I investigate the hail damage; the SES tarping the roof., and above, finally having it retiled after months of living under tarps.

Overseas Adventures

On a number of unforgettable trips between 2010–2018, Mairi’s photos captured stunning glaciers, icebergs & forests, as well as an incredible range of wildlife.

Previous pages: large pic is Peyto Lake; enjoying ourselves at Lake Louise. The vibrant turquoise of the water is due to the glacial melt from the Canadian Rockies.

This page: walking across & photographing the glaciers and icebergs of Alaska; Tracey Arm; bear, wolf & whale sightings.

Canada & Alaska 2010

In May 2010, we flew to Seattle to board a small vessel on which to travel up to Alaska through the Inside Passage to Juneau. On the way, we saw our first blue-coloured icebergs, which had carved off the many glaciers in the fiords.

Popping air bubbles can often be heard when passing by an iceberg, releasing air that may have been trapped within the parent glacier for thousands of years. As we headed north in our small ship, we could get close to the front of numerous glaciers to see and hear enormous chunks of ice carving into the ocean, creating waves that rocked our little craft.

After arriving in Juneau, we took a helicopter flight over some big glaciers. Shod with spiked boots, we landed and took a short stroll on the ice. From Juneau we flew to Anchorage, and then by train to Fairbanks and Denali National Park (19,000 square kilometres). We had brief glimpses of the highest mountain in USA, Mount McKinley (6,190m) as well as brown bears, a wolf or two, caribou and a lynx.

Having flown down from Anchorage to Calvary in Canada, we hired a car and drove up through the Rockies to Lake Louise. We continued north through Banff along the most scenic Icefields Parkway, which winds along the Rockies. The sight of the turquoise coloured Peyto Lake surrounded by snow covered mountains was magical. This has to be one of the most scenic car trips in the world. Around every corner was another jaw dropping view.

Svalbard 2011 via Scotland

We arranged this trip through Aurora, an Australian adventure company which specialised in expeditions to remote areas. We decided that before joining them in Spitzbergen, we would have a road trip in Scotland. After hiring a car in Edinburgh, we drove west to the Isle of Skye, and from there by ferry to the islands of Harris and Lewis. Coming back to mainland Scotland, we drove across the top and out to the Orkney Island, where we saw Scarabrae a group of prehistoric houses that were occupied about 5000 years ago.

A quick flight to Oslo in Norway, and from there to Longyearbyen, capital of Svalbard, which is the northernmost permanently populatedpoint on earth. There we joined the ‘Polar Pioneer’, a retired Russian scientific ship, which carried only about fifty passengers and twenty Russian crew.

The ship was nothing fancy, but a big feature was being allowed up onto the Bridge with the captain. It was a prime spot to keep an eye out for beautifully sculpted icebergs, as well as whales, polar bears and the enormous numbers of noisy birds that lived on the vertical cliff faces.

I was in the kayaking group. While the others were out exploring in the zodiacs, (rubber boats with outboard motors) we were paddling, (sometimes with difficulty), amongst the pancake ice. One day we came across a pod of white beluga whales and calves feeding on fish close to shore. One came straight for me – fortunately diving under the kayak at the last minute and surfacing on the other side! I thought I was going into the icy water for sure.

Mairi’s father Ian had been to Svalbard on a University expedition in 1923, and it was interesting to see from his photo collection how far the very same glaciers had retreated since then. Mairi had put together a slide show of Ian’s images for the interest of those aboard the Aurora.

We headed North, until we nosed up gently onto solid Arctic ice, at only nine degrees from the North Pole. A polar bear came from quite some distance to inspect our stationary ship. Standing on the front of the ship we could clearly see the bear, only about twenty metres away.

After circumnavigating Svalbard, we felt at the end of our voyage that we had experienced a marvellous arctic adventure.

Clockwise from top left: Scottish sheep; Polar Pioneer on pack ice, 600 miles from the North Pole; spider plant, Lomme Bay; Reindeer with our ship at anchor in Ankerfjella; polar bear on pack ice, 8.1 degrees north; blue iceberg in Hornshun. Centre: paddling in the Arctic; ice cliff, Svalbard.

African Safari 2012 Kenya & Tanzania

Our African trip began in Capetown. We drove south in a hire car one day to Cape Point, which is quite close to the Cape of Good Hope. Another day we took a trip out to sea to visit Robbin Island, and visited the small cell occupied by Nelson Mandela for eighteen years, and the quarry where he had to break rocks every day.

After flying to Nairobi, we joined a Kenyan Safari trip that took us over some very rough dirt roads to the Maasai Mara, a huge National Park. We walked around a Masai Village made of mud huts with low ceilings and only two rooms, with a third room for a goat or two, and where the school room was open to the air on one side.

The whole village was surrounded by a fence of thorny bushes to keep the lions out at night. Every few years they built a new village and moved out of the old one. Every day each family shepherded their small herd of cows and goats to pasture and water, wearing their traditional bright red clothing. We were entertained by a village group who performed a dance routine, which involved repeated standing jumps of a great height. Our guide told us that these semi-nomadic people were very clever at school, and came top in mathematics in the high school he had attended.

Across the border we travelled to Tanzania, where we had a very good African guide who spoke French, English and Swahili, and could spot rare wildlife and birds very quickly as we travelled along in our four-wheel drive.

The Serengeti National Park is a huge area, containing the Rift valley which extends North all the way to the Red Sea. Growing here in the very fertile volcanic soil were huge acreages of native grasses and wild oats, which supported enormous numbers of wildebeest, zebras, buffaloes, giraffes, herds of elephants and antelopes. These in turn were eaten by lions, cheetahs, leopards, hyenas and native dogs, all of which we got up close to.

Scenes from the Masai Mara & the Masai village in Kenya: elephants, zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, cheetah, impala, hippo, superb starling & meeting the Masai village families.

The Ngorongoro crater, which is an extinct volcano with steep walls, is about twenty km wide and home to an enormous number of wild animals living on its well-watered grassy floor. There we saw a wildebeest being killed by a lioness, who hung onto the throat choking it for about ten minutes.

Other nearby wildebeest seemed very disinterested, and just kept munching away at a safe distance as if to say, “Poor cousin Fred, but he was just a bit slow off the mark today”. It is difficult to describe the feelings we experienced being amongst all these wild animals and beautiful birds.

The Olduvai gorge was particularly interesting because of the pillars of rock rising up from the floor of the deep gorge, made up of layer upon layer of volcanic rock, which have been sequentially dated to as far back as two million years ago. In one of these older lower layers was found the 1.8 million year old fossilized skull of Australopithecus bosei, and from the upper layers have been fossils of homo sapiens, which probably evolved from homo erectus further down. In a small museum on the edge of the gorge was a replica of the first known two legged hominid footprints, dated 3.75 million years ago, discovered close by the gorge.

Finally back to Jo’burgh, and then home. Driving out to the airport was through miles of neighbourhoods where, not only was each house surrounded by a high wall topped by barbed wire, but each side street off the main road was blocked off by a high barbed wire fence and a gate. A reminder of the daily violence occurring in this city.

Flamingos in Lake Magadi, Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania; Masai Mara lion, “Ready for my closeup, Mr. de Mille.”

Elephants, zebras, leopard, pelicans & rhinocerous; the lilacbreasted roller bird; mother& babies in the Masai village.

The Amur River is the Russia/China border; autumnal scenes from around Lake Baikal; the stunning silver birch tree is known as a symbol of Russia. Breathtaking birch forests unfolded as our train sped past.

Autumn in Russia 2013

The Trans-Siberian Railway

Covering a distance of 9,623 kilometres, and travelling through nine time zones, the Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest railway in the world. The distance from Vladivostok in the east on the sea of Japan, across to St Petersburgh on the gulf of Finland, corresponds on the world map to the distance from Alice Springs to Johannesburg. Nonstop it would take seven days and nights, but in September 2013 Mairi and I took a scenic fourteen day trip that allowed for visits along the way to to Irkutz and Lake Baikal, Yekaterinburg and the Urals, and Moscow.

With a group of Australians and Kiwis we occupied a whole carriage, under the watchful eye of a formidable Russian woman who sat by the samovar at the rear of the corridor.

Our journey took us through miles and miles of Siberian forest, called taiga, displaying the beautiful autumn colours of endless beech, larch and spruce trees, which are also home to the Siberian tiger.

For a long time we travelled alongside the north bank of Russia’s longest river, the Amur, which separates Russia from China and freezes over in the winter. Now and then we came into some cleared farm land with small villages of timber cottages, each with their brightly painted windows frames and shutters. Every backyard had rows and rows of well tilled vegetables.

The timetable in the brightly curtained dining car was set to Moscow time, which meant that in the early part of the trip the evening meal time was served at midnight! At our first stop at Irkutsk we got a feel for how things had changed since the Soviet era ended in 1991. We visited a beautifully restored Russian Orthodox church, which under the Soviets was used to store grain. At nearby Lake Baikal, the world’s greatest freshwater lake, we crossed paths with the local pig abattoir workers’ annual picnic day, and so had to celebrate with them by drinking a couple of vodka shots. To do otherwise would have been rude.

At Yekaterinburg it was snowing and minus four degrees. As we were about to climb down onto the platform , by the light of a traditional steel street lamp I noticed flakes of snow gently falling onto the dark coloured coats and fur hats of those being farewelled standing below us. It was a scene straight out of the movie Dr Zhivago.

Russia: golden domes, birch, vodka & fountains. Onion domes are everywhere in Russian Orthodox cities & towns; in the grounds of the Catherine Palace outside of St Petersburg; Mairi at St Basils, Red Square.

Our bus driver who picked us up off the train said “Welcome to Yekaterinburg, where it is always cold except when its freezing.”

We visited the top of the Ural Mountains, which separates European Russia from Asian Siberia. Nearby we saw rows and rows of brick walls, to which were attached brass plates with the names of those buried beneath, many of whom had not been very old and were victims of Stalin’s purges and the establishment of Gulags in the 1930s and 40s.

Nearby was a large Byzantine-style Church of the Blood, which marks the site of the murders of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, his wife and five children in 1918. They have all been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

On reaching Moscow it was quite an experience walking through Red Square in front of the multi-domed St Basil’s Cathedral, having seen it for years on TV during the annual May Day parade of tanks and missiles in Red Square under the watch of Stalin, Khrushchev Brezhnev and company. Yet here we were wandering within the red brick boundary walls of the Kremlin overlooking the Moscow River and surrounded by all those golden onion domes.

The local corner stores had one person behind the counter and another shadowing you to make sure you weren’t shoplifting. A big feature of these small stores was a big wall display of vodka. The average age of death of Russian men at that time was 65 years of age partly because nearly everyone seemed to smoke – and they drank a lot. The poor Russians have had a hard time: first of all with the Tsars, then losing millions in the two world wars, then having to put up with Stalin and finally being robbed blind by the oligarchs since 1991. Corruption is widespread and part of everyday life, like hiring a tradesman.

We finished our journey with an overnight train trip to St Petersburg, and there visited the famous Hermitage Art Gallery with its works by the great artists, such as Rembrandt, Monet, Da Vinci and Picasso. We had a day trip to the Peterhof on the gulf of Finland, and were amazed at the amount of gold on the staircases, door frames and architraves, and in the gardens were hundreds of fountains. The Soviets had maintained this summer palace of Peter the Great and ran tours for the workers to show them why Russia had to have a revolution.

Antarctica: icebergs, icicles, seals and many, many penguins. From right: Macaroni & adelie; centre, king penguins minding egg, & as far as the eye can see behind Mairi & me.

Antarctic Christmas 2014 including

Argentina, Chile, South Georgia & The Falklands

In December 2014 we flew direct to Santiago in Chile, and from there on to the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires. After a couple of days in this very European-style city we flew up to the Iguazu falls, on the Brazilian and Argentine border.

Through the picture window of the hotel we could see a big rainbow in the middle of a huge cloud of mist above the falls a mile away. The next day we walked through the rain forest towards the falls, where you could hear a very loud booming noise, until suddenly there they were. A huge horseshoe of falls, one of the biggest in the world. Riding in a small boat right up to under the edge of a powerful curtain of water was an exciting, very noisy and thoroughly wetting experience! It was hot, so we soon dried out.

We began our expedition to Antarctica at the southern-most point of the South American mainland, at Puerto Williams in Chile. There we once again boarded the small Russian-crewed ship, the Polar Pioneer, on which we had travelled on our 2015 trip to Svalbard, joining fifty other passengers and sailing out past Cape Horn into the wild Drake Passage. Fortunately the crossing to Antarctica wasn’t too rough, and the waves didn’t reach fifty feet high as they are known to often do. However they still were big enough to break over the bow as we watched from the bridge, surrounded by big albatross as they glided around the ship through the roaring forties.

On reaching the placid waters of the Antarctic peninsula we came across some beautifully sculptured icebergs, on which we could see resting penguins or seals. We were able to get very close to these on our daily expeditions ashore on board the zodiacs.

Clockwise from above: watvching whales from the zodiac boats; capturing the incredible moment a gentoos penguin chick hatched; adelie, gentoos & a ‘creche’ of fluffy brown baby king penguins, (communally looked after while parents hunt at sea); extraordinary blue iceberg; fur seal & baby, elephant seal roaring.

One outstanding experience was spending a couple of hours in calm water watching a group of humpback whales only fifty metres away work together, bubble-netting for krill.

We watched in awe from the bridge as our Russian captain Yuri steered us very slowly through the very narrow and icy Lemaire channel, in between vertical ice clad cliffs a thousand metres high. We didn’t see another ship at any time on this expedition and felt a special sense of being totally isolated in nature’s wonderland.

There is a quote which I like that goes: “No one comes back from Antarctica unchanged, because of the overwhelming experience of confronting nature on such a vast scale.”

From Antarctica we followed the route taken by the shipwrecked Ernest Shackleton and his crew as they went in open boats out into the Atlantic ocean to Elephant Island, and then onto South Georgia. We encountered a very big swell at Elephant Island, which made it tricky to time your leap onto the rising zodiac from the side steps of the Polar Pioneer, and unfortunately because the katabatic wind was so strong blowing off the cliff there we couldn’t go ashore.

Christmas day was spent on the Scotia Sea, and then onto South Georgia, where we had the amazing experience of being exposed to such an abundance of wildlife that it’s impossible to describe it.

Imagine standing on a small rise, and then seeing a King Penguin colony numbering 200,000, extending for a mile or so. There were also hundreds of fur seals making a lot of noise as they frolicked in the shallows, while huge elephant seals either slept nearby on the beach or went for each other chest to chest. I thought at the time that this is how the whole world probably used to be thousands of years ago, before man came along.

Then onto Stanley, the capital of the Falklands, from where we flew to Santiago, and then home. What a great experience this all was. As Sir David Attenborough put it: “Great images of nature have one thing in common: they are unforgettable. They can also be a profound source of beauty, wonder and joy.”

Siberia & Wrangle Island 2015

In August 2015 we went on a great expedition from Alaska up through the Bering strait into the Arctic Ocean, visiting the coast of N.E. Siberia on our way to Wrangle and Herald Islands.

The flight from Anchorage to the small and very isolated frontier Alaskan town of Nome took us over the winding Yukon river, where the big gold rush took place in 1892. Off the beach in Nome were numerous small craft vacuuming the sandy sea floor, looking for nuggets washed down the river..

The locals in Nome were very excited about a big cruise ship from New York that was due to arrive the day after we left. It was the first ever able to navigate the North-West Passage over the top of Canada, now possible only because of global warming melting the sea ice there.

In the main street of Nome is a memorial plaque marking the finish post of the annual 700 mile Iditarod dogsled race from Anchorage. It commemorates the fantastic feat of how the 1925 diptheria epidemic in Nome was cut short by the arrival of antitoxin, carried by dog sled teams over this route in only six days in the middle of winter, so saving lots of children’s lives.

A chartered flight took us west and across the international dateline to Anadyr, the most eastern city in Siberia, (formerly Russia), where about fifty of us boarded the expedition ship named “Professor Kromoff”. This was an old scientific vessel, which had probably been a spy ship during the cold war days. It had a reinforced steel hull, compulsory for vessels going up through the Bering strait as likely to hit an ice berg.

At 66 degrees north we entered the arctic circle, where in the winter the sun disappears for a whole month. We then called into some small settlements populated by the indigenous Chukis people. At Laurentia, where the temperature ranges from -20 degrees C in the winter to + 5 C in the summer, we were treated to some dancing and singing.

We climbed up onto Cape Deshnev, the western headland of the Bering strait, and looked over towards Alaska where the old land bridge would have been, now only fifty metres below the surface. Here we saw the remains of a village with dwellings made of dry stone walls and whale bone ribs across the top, acting as rafters to support the roof – now long gone.

It was interesting to see whale steaks being hung out to dry before being smoked and salted by a nomadic reindeer herder in preparation for his autumn journey into warmer climes in southern Siberia.

Cloackwise from top lefty: Siberian landscape; a Chuki dancer; puffins; Mairi amidst the arctic flora; arctic fox babies playing; cormorants’ our ship from a distance, (bracketed by the ubiquitous whale ribs used as sculptural monuments); reindeer skulls litter the landscape.

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The reindeer herders had been treated badly by the Communists who accused the head herders of being Kulaks, and making money out of the labour of their underlings. They tried to collectivise these nomadic people, and when they didn’t co-operate thousands from this area were placed in gulags, where many of them died of starvation and slave labour.

Nearby I had a swim in a warm water pool fed by a spring that had passed over hot rocks hundreds of metres below. It was lovely and warm in, but freezing cold out.

Overnight we cruised 180 km north to Wrangle Island, waking up to see ice floating all around us with large numbers of walrus camped on one big ice floe. Twenty years ago we would not have been able to sail these waters, as sea ice joined Wrangle island to Siberia, even in summer. Wrangle is sometimes referred to as the polar bear maternity ward, because of the large number of maternity dens dug in the snow around the island.

On one occasion, having just alighted from a Zodiac onto a shingle beach, we saw a polar bear a couple of hundred metres away walking towards us. The bear didn’t notice us until only about 70 metres away, then took fright and made a sudden dash for the water and swam out to sea. On nearby Herald island we spotted fifteen bears in the one morning: some on land, some on ice and some swimming from one ice floe to another.

The profusion of wildlife and plant life on Wrangle and Herald islands, taking advantage of the very short summer, was amazing. While up close to the cliffs on Herald the noise made by the birds was deafening. We saw Shearwaters that had flown all the way from south of New Zealand to take advantage of the fish available in the Northern Hemisphere summer, (so we were told by our on board naturalist).

The areas are remote and as far north as any tourist can go. We were told that we were the only tourists allowed onto Herald Island that year, and this was only after extensive negotiations between Moscow and our tour operator.

This was perhaps because of a Russian defence base on one side of Wrangle Island that we had to stay well away from. We each had to pay $500 in US notes at the start of our sea trip.

Ice floes, walrus, arctic blooms & bear paw prints; enjoying the hot springs; Lenin in a Chuki village, a reminder of the communist presence in the villagers’ history and their current lives; polar bear & cubs; and rewarded yet again by whale sightings.

Colours Of Japan 2018

Over ten days in September we were treated to the spectacular vibrant autumn colours of northern Japan. Travelling from Tokyo up through Honshu Island, and then over to Sapporo on Hokkaido Island, we were given some idea of Japanese culture and tradition, and every day immersed in beautiful scenery.

One particularly memorable afternoon was spent in a beautiful forest of gold and orange in the Oirase gorge. For a couple of hours we walked along a gradual downhill path that ran alongside a shallow stream, which flowed over small rapids and waterfalls. The ground was covered with autumn leaves, and the rocks were covered with vivid green moss, all to the sound of running water. It was such a beautiful experience, too marvellous to describe.

Another afternoon we were conveyed up a big lake by a large canoe, poled along in a spectacular narrow gorge, flanked by very tall cliffs with impressive waterfalls on either side. On our way back our traditionally dressed boatman sang some old folk songs, adding to the lovely atmosphere experienced in the late afternoon light.

A bullet train took us over to Sapporo, where we were shown over the famous Sapporo brewery. From there they took us to see some sheep on a small agriculture research station on the edge of the city, (because we were an Australian group they thought we would be interested).

Driving in, I recognized some sheep in a paddock as Corriedales, the same breed that Dad ran at Kaloola and the Bruces ran at Orange. In the research station was a placard history describing an attempt to establish a cottage wool industry on Honshu Island prior to WW2. Interestingly, Dad sold quite a few live Corriedales to Japan in the 1930s, through Mr Kusano, a regular visitor to Kaloola. So who is to say that some of these we saw are not descendants of our sheep!

We found the Japanese people very polite and kind, which cured my previous feeling that they enjoyed being cruel after all they had done to Australian POWs in WW2.

ASOHNS Treasurer 1991–1998

The title “Australian Society of Otolaryngology” is such a mouthful of a name, that by the three hundred or so ENT Surgeons around Australia, (which it represents), it is usually simply called ASOHNS.

The Society is run out of an office in Sydney, and as the Treasurer was always someone from Sydney, I finished up being in that position for seven years. During that time I got to know well four successive Federal Presidents from different States, and all of the State Presidents that made up the Committee.

The main function of the Society is to select trainees, and organize their training under the umbrella of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. After four years they sit for the College-run exam and graduate with a Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (FRACS).

Another important function of ASOHNS is to maintain the knowledge and skills of its members by running an annual Scientific meeting, with guest speakers from all around the world, who are leading experts in their field. In addition, there are regular cadaver dissection courses held in the anatomy departments of the various universities, to keep everyone up to speed in, say microsurgery of the ear, or fibreoptic sinus surgery, (so avoiding complications that could arise from wandering off course in real life). All these activities earn points towards continuing professional development, which have to be presented when renewing registration each year.

I had to sign all the cheques involved in paying for all this, which meant that they were posted

to me from head office, and after signing I would send them back by snail mail. (There was no internet banking in those days!) Money from annual subscriptions or profit from conferences was held in term deposits. The interest rate on these in 1990 was a staggering 17.5%, compared to 1% today.

World Congress, Sydney 1997

Australia had successfully bid for and won the right to run the 1997 World Congress in Otolaryngology which, like the Olympics, was run in a different country every four years. It was to be held at the new Darling Harbour Conference Centre.

I was the Treasurer – which was a bit frightening as if there were insufficient attendees, we could make a big loss and send ASOHNS broke, so I had to keep a really close eye on all of our expenses. For about two years before the event, members of the Organizing Committee, one from each state, would meet every few months, (something that today would be mostly done on Zoom).

In addition, each member took it in turns to go to the Annual ENT conferences in countries all around the world to publicize the Sydney Conference. I was asked to go to New Orleans for the USA annual conference in 1996, although not many Americans were expected to come to Sydney as they had all the expertise possible at home and also had the reputation of being poor travellers.

I flew business class for the first time ever, and in addition was able to talk my way into Luxury Class upstairs in the nose of the Boeing 747, where I could stretch out.

I was met by a hire car driver at New Orleans airport, and on the trip into the city he asked

me how were things in Australia. I replied, it was Spring time and things looked good.

“How can that be?” he said, “Here we are in the Fall.” I explained we were down under, on the other side of the world, and our seasons were opposite. “Well Lordy be!” he said. “How can that be? Lordy be!”

The New Orleans Conference Centre was huge and overlooked the Mississippi River.

I remember walking around a corner and being amazed to see a huge ship passing upstream, high above the end of the street beyond a fifty foot high levee bank. New Orleans, I thought, was a bit on the seedy side. I was told to be sure to stick to the main streets at night, as there were an average of seven murders each day in the City.

I overheard a conversation between two men while I was waiting at the pedestrian lights. One said to the other, “And how’s your friend going?” to which came the reply, “Oh didn’t you hear, he was murdered two weeks ago.”

In the Conference centre, I manned a booth in the foyer advertising the Sydney World Conference, directly opposite the main lecture theatre exit doors.

Standing on a small stage in front of big posters of the Great Barrier Reef, Ayers Rock (now Uluru) and the Opera House on Sydney Harbour, I would tell those gathered they shouldn’t miss this opportunity to visit Australia, and that it wasn’t very far, really. Only 14 hours from L.A., and they could easily take in New Zealand at the same time. At one time there was a crowd of about thirty people listening to all this patter, and when I stopped talking for a moment, a woman said, “Don’t stop, just keep talking, we just love to hear the sound of your accent!”

Members of the committee & honoraries on stage at the opening of the 1997 World Conference, (me 2nd from left); the hardworking outgoing Conference committee.

We need not have worried about making a big loss at our conference due to lack of attendees. We finished up with about 5000 registrants –which was a record in Sydney at the time – and incidentally more came from the USA than had been expected.

The Conference was opened at the Opera House in March 1997 by our much admired Governor General, Sir William Deane, to whom our Committee were all separately introduced over drinks before we joined him on stage for his opening speech.

As I was the Treasurer, he asked me what was happening to any profit we made. I was able to tell him that half went to the World Governing Body to be spent on Third World programmes for the Deaf. The other half was kept, and was able to cover most of the price of an office we bought at Milson’s Point, saving ASOHNS from having to pay rent thereafter.

President 2002–2004

I received a tap on the shoulder to become President of the ENT Society of Australia for two years in 2002, when it was the turn of New South Wales to nominate someone.

The Presidency involved keeping in contact with all the state Presidents regarding educational and training activities, and overseeing the annual scientific meetings. The head office, bought with proceeds from the World Conference five years earlier, was at Milson’s Point and I needed to be there at least once a week.

The first unexpected crisis at the beginning of my Presidency in 2002 was a huge rise in the numbers of doctors being sued. There were so many that the main NSW Medical Insurance company went broke. My insurance premium

trebled from $25,000 a year to $75,000. The Obstetricians and Neurosurgeons, (being those who wer emost often taken to court), had to pay $150,000 per annum, and as a result, many retired prematurely. This represented a big loss of experience available to the community. There were frequent advertisements on radio and TV telling people to contact this or that law firm in order to sue a doctor on a ‘no win, no pay’ basis. I was in court twice in two years. I got off both times but it was enough to keep me awake at night.

Something drastic had to be done. After a record breaking rally of 4000 doctors at Randwick racecourse, it was decided that all those specialists whose work was mainly nonlifesaving or not urgent should submit their resignation from public hospitals. This is where most of the suing came from, even though public patients received their surgery free of charge.

The resignations were submitted with instructions to be enacted when instructed. So, the resignation gun was cocked but not yet fired – and this finally made the government do something. The NSW Premier and the Federal Health Minister enacted legislation to reform the law. Instead of having a judge decide that a doctor had not performed to an acceptable standard, it would now depend whether respected medical peers considered the standard to be unsatisfactory. This got rid of the claimant’s “hired gun” doctors of doubtful expertise.

The next major issue that arose during my presidency was recognising the need for surgical patient information brochures to be provided to the public. Warning patients about the risks of an operation was something that needed to be improved. To that end, I had the

task of developing brochures for the twelve most common ENT surgical procedures.

I wrote over half of them, and asked various colleagues to write the others. Eventually a four page illustrated brochure for each operation was produced, with a list of complications and their incidence. I am proud to say that these are still being widely used, and many thousands have been given out to patients over the past twenty years.

As the ASOHNS President, I had to attend the regular meetings at the Royal College Australasian College of Surgeons headquarters in Melbourne, catching the 6.30am flight from Sydney and the 5pm flight back.

They were always fully booked – evidence that the Sydney to Melbourne route was the third busiest in the world! Since Covid-19, Zoom meetings have become commonplace, so that a lot of these trips are probably now avoidable.

In 2008, for my efforts as Treasurer for seven years, (including Treasurer for the World Conference), my two years as President and two more as past-President, I was awarded an Honorary Life Membership of ASOHNS, a rare event at the time.

Because I came from a peripheral suburban hospital, rather than from a more elite tertiary referral teaching hospital, I was initially reluctant to take on the Presidency.

I was glad afterwards that I did so. It was a fulfilling experience, and proved that following the Riverview motto I learnt as a boy was the right course of action.

“Quantum Potes Tantum Aude” As Much As You Are Able, So Much Should You Dare.

One of the surgical information brochures for the public, many of which I wrote; receiving my Life Membership from President Rob Black in 2008.

Having given up surgery in 2007, and only consulting a few days a week, I sold my rooms in the Medical Centre in Gibbs Street Miranda, built by a group of doctors including myself in the mid-1970’s.

I then joined Andrew Bridger and Ted Smith in the newly formed “Shire Family ENT Practice” next door, (incidentally I knew both of their parents even before they were married!). GPs referred patients to me that did not require surgery, and I had a number of very long-standing regular patients.

This practice has now expanded to include three more ENT surgeons to make it one of the biggest in Sydney.

About this same time in 2007, I began one day a week working in Medico-Legal, doing assessments of those injured in car accidents or workers compensation cases for industrial deafness. Now that I am very experienced, I am often on a panel ,composed of another ENT and a lawyer, to decide on appeals to assessments. Every five years or so an appeal is made against our panel’s judgement, in which case it goes to a judge in the NSW Supreme court.

I continued to consult at the Miranda rooms, eventually for just one day a week, until deciding to finally finish up in March 2025, aged 85.

Doctor Calls It Quits on 52 Year Career

A career spanning 52 years is coming to an end this month, with Robert Payten set to hang up his medical tools for the final time.

The ear, nose and throat doctor who is a founding specialist of Shire Family ENT at Miranda, is retiring at the end of March.

He started in Miranda Fair in 1973 and then in 1977 joined 14 Specialists in building a medical centre in Gibbs Street.

“I often see three generations in a family;’ Dr Payten, 85, said. “It’s not uncommon for patients to say I operated on their ear after I removed their daughter’s tonsils, and now their granddaughter sees me.”

Dr Payten worked in general practice for one year before he decided to cement his specialty.

“ENT puts you in touch with toddlers, their mothers, and the elderly. Talking to these people of all ages makes for a very interesting day;’ he said.

Going against the morning peak-hour traffic from Sydney’s east to Sutherland Shire was a relaxing trip for the former Yowie Bay resident.

“I stayed working in the Sutherland Shire because, by and large, the patients are very friendly and family-oriented,” Dr Payten said.

“People put enormous trust in you to operate on them or their children.”

Dr Payten doesn’t operate on patients anymore, but he marvels at technological advances over the decades.

“Technology, especially CT and MRI scans, has been fantastic/’ he said. “Say someone has gone deaf in one ear or has a loud ringing in one ear. They could have a tumour on their nerve in the ear. It wasn’t easy to diagnose that, even though you might suspect it. But anyone who has a headache, you can now be sure they don’t have something nasty.”

Gone are the days of inserting an “an old copper tube with blinky bulbs at the end” into a child’s oesophagus after they swallowed a coin.

“Fibre optics have made a big difference;’ Dr Payten said. “We’ve now got brilliant light at the bottom of an oesophagoscope, and we can do

keyhole sinus surgery with a fibreoptic telescope and specially designed instruments. The ENT specialty was the first to start using the operating microscope, and those ear procedures were very rewarding because they allowed you to get a person’s hearing up.

“Seeing a child’s personality improve and being much happier after improving their hearing by simply inserting a grommet into the eardrum was also very rewarding.”

It’s thanks to his staff who have stretched the longevity of his practice.

“I did most of my ear surgery at Kareena Private Hospital, where I had the same theatre sister and anaesthetist for 25 years,” Dr Payten said. “That was a big factor in the success of microsurgical procedures.”

“I’ve had very loyal, capable staff in my office. They’ve stayed for a long time. They run the show. I just do what I’m told, and they point me in the right direction.”

But all good things must come to an end.

“I don’t want to be accused of being in a Joe Biden situation;’ Dr Payten said. “I’ve got all my marbles for now, but it’s as good a time as any to retire”

“I’ll miss the personal contact. A lot of people in their 80s and 90s come in with their walkers.

I’ve seen them for years with their chronic ear conditions, for which there’s been no real cure so I’ve got to know them quite well. They’ve given me cards and boxes of chocolates on hearing of my retirement.

“But it’s a two-way street. I owe them a lot, too.”

Eva Kolimar

So now in 2025, more than sixty years after graduation, I am almost retired.

I still have the love and companionship of Mairi and my children, and now my grandchildren, and I thank God for my fortunate life.

Where Did We  Come From?

Our Genealogy in Australia

Our generation owes much of its good fortune to the hard work and success of our forebears, not forgetting the adversity they experienced along the way.

The following traces the stories of their lives, beginning with the optimism and bravery they showed in departing from Scotland and Ireland, and travelling in small sailing ships to an unknown – but hopefully better – future in a far distant country.

We also owe much to my late sister, Marianne, for her careful & loving research into our family genealogy.

Marianne researched several booklets on our family history. In 2015 she produced one on the “Trip of A Lifetime” made by Emilie, her mother and sister Josie in 1924/1925, based on diary entries made at that time by our mother. The following is a note from Marianne in this booklet, explaining how she came upon the photo opposite of the Dwyer family:

When I first visited Ireland in 1979 I stayed at different farmhouses, on a tour. We passed through Cashel, and I realised sadly that I had no idea where my Dwyer forebears had lived, or where our surviving cousins there were to be found. That evening, as we drove to the ceilidh, I told the farmhouse host this ... “My wife is a Dwyer from Cashel,” he said. Next morning at breakfast, out came this photo from the family album: it was my mother and her family. A gift I suppose, on the trip my grandparents James and Kate made back to see family in 1907.

Tom & Jean Payten, (nee Renwick), my father’s parents. The Dwyer family in 1907: Josie aged 8, my grandmother Kate (Katherine, nee Hannan), 8; Nell at the back, 10; Ena at the front, 4, James my grandfather, 53, and my mother Emilie, 6.

Jean Renwick (1857 – 1915)

The Ancestry of my Father’s Mother

The Scots were the first to come to Australia in 1839. On my father’s side, my great-grandfather, Walter Renwick (1826 –1865) was only thirteen years old when he and his parents James & Janet – and nine of his siblings – set sail for Australia aboard the “Hero”.

Janet was also heavily pregnant with her eleventh child. How brave she must have been, leaving her home, knowing she would have the baby on board the ship.

Hailing from just north of Lockerbie in Dumfrieshire, South-West Scotland, James was tenant farmer who was tied to working for a landowner. Much of the hard-earned profit from the farm went to the owner.

So while hugely daunting for a young family, an assisted passage to Australia, and the hope of becoming landowners (which James later fulfilled), also made emigration a very attractive prospect for the family.

The Renwicks disembarked at Tahlee in Port Stephens, and travelled north for 70 kms along a bush track to the Stroud district.

They found employment with the Australian Agricultural Company, and the Renwick State Forest and Renwick Sugarloaf Mountain are today found in the area where they lived.

In 1850, 24-year-old Walter sailed to San Francisco with three of his brothers, hoping to strike it rich in the Califiornian gold rush. They didn’t have much luck there, but on returning home the brothers are recorded as being successful gold miners, after continuing the search on Peel River, in the NundleTamworth area, and also at Burrendong creek near Wellington.

In 1855, aged 29, Walter married 19-yearold Elizabeth Armstrong (1835-1878), who also originally came from Dumfrieshire. She had been three years old when her parents, William and Margaret Armstrong, migrated to Australia in 1839.

Walter and Elizabeth ran a store and a pub at Wingham, the town where shipping on the Manning River ended. It was here that my grandmother Jean was born in 1857, as the second of six children (five girls and one boy).

Walter and his brothers were also accomplished drovers. In the early 1860’s they drove a big mob of cattle along the inland route, (shorter but steeper than the coastal route): through Walcha, Uralla, Warwick, Toowoomba and Dalby, to the newly opened up area of Rockhampton.

The journey covered a distance of 1200 kms and took over six months. Walter is duly remembered for this incredible feat in the Australian Stockmen’s Hall of Fame in Longreach. Elizabeth and the six children came up by boat to join him.

holidays, trips & travels: 1978–2018

Unfortunately in 1865, Walter fell ill of an overpowering “gastric fever” and died at the age of 38. It was probably typhoid fever, which was not uncommon in the port town of Rockhampton in those early days. Tragically, within a day, Elizabeth also lost her younger brother Richard Armstrong, aged 24, from “pulmonary phthisis, consumption of the lungs,” (that is, tuberculosis).

Elizabeth was a widow at the age of thirty, with six children, aged between two and nine years old. My grandmother Jean was the second-oldest, at seven years.

After returning to Sydney, around March 1868, Elizabeth was pregnant again. (We have no details of the relationship.)

In June 1868, Jean, now eleven, and her three younger sisters were placed in the Protestant Orphan School near Parramatta, where they were given schooling until lunch time and taught domestic duties in the afternoon.

of the Protestant Orphan School taken in 1870, probably including Jean.

Photo

The eldest, Margaret, was thirteen and old enough to go out to work. The youngest child, William, stayed with his mother.

Baby Catherine was born in December 1868, but died from “mirasmus” aged only seven weeks. This is a condition most likely resulting from pyloric stenosis, which causes projectile vomiting, leading to malnutrition and eventually starvation. These days it can be cured by a simple operation, which I witnessed on a few occasions working at The Childrens’ Hospital, with very good results.

In 1870, Elizabeth re-married, to widower Thomas Blades of Douglas Park. The younger three girls were able to leave the Orphan School and reunite with their mother.

By that time, my grandmother Jean had turned thirteen, so after being discharged from the

The Orphan School building & The Great Northern Hotel in Maree, as they are today.

Orphan School, was apprenticed to a well-todo Scottish Presbyterian family in Balmain as a live-in domestic employee. She stayed there for about five years.

Jean’s only brother William, (the baby of that family), ended up running the big stone Great Northern Hotel, found on the bottom end of the Birdsville Track, at Maree in South Australia. That’s where cattle from Queensland would be yarded to meet the railhead from Port Augusta and Adelaide. Maree was also the hub for the camel trains heading North. William died in 1899 aged only thirty-six but his son, (also William), ran the Great Northern in the 1930s.

Elizabeth had three more children with Thomas Blades, making it ten children in over twenty-three years of childbirth. Sadly, at just forty-three, she died in 1878.

Some of the older Blades boys, (Elizabeth’s stepsons and Jean’s step-brothers), worked on the nearby Macarthur’s Camden Park Estate, where the Payten family were living and the Payten boys also worked. And that probably explains how my grandmother Jean came to meet Tom Payten, my grandfather.

The affectionate letter in our family archives, written by Jean to Tom during their courtship, shows that she had received a good education at the Orphanage.

The love letters did the trick, and Jean Renwick and Tom Payten were married in the Waverley Catholic Church in June 1881.

After a long illness, Jean died in 1915 of renal failure, aged fifty-eight years. She is buried with Tom in the Randwick Cemetery, amongst a group of Payten graves.

A typewritten copy of Jean’s affectionate letter to Tom Payten; Jean as a young woman; their graves in the Randwick cemetary.

Tom Payten (1855 – 1920)

The Ancestry of my Father’s Father

The first of our Irish ancestors to arrive in Australia in 1842 was my father’s grandfather, Martin Payten. He was of uncertain age, (because church records did not exist in Ireland), either in his late 20s or mid-30s.

Martin hailed from Tullamore in County Offaly, (previously Kings County), and became a tenant farmer for John Macarthur at Menangle, south west of Sydney.

Grave of Martin & Mary Payten in Campbelltown.

Martin married a young Irish girl, Mary Connor (1830–1903). Having survived the Irish famine of the late 1840s, Mary left her family in Shanagolden, (west Limerick, not far south of the Shannon River), for ever in 1850.

Her journey to Australia was on the “Emigrant”, which became infected with Typhus during the voyage. This is an infectious disease, which we now know to be transmitted by lice, (but wasn’t known then).

While on board, and later during quarantine on Stradbroke Island for several months, Mary cared for six orphaned children from two families. The book “Ship of Death,” by Jane Smith, is about the ill-fated ship and its voyage, and is dedicated to the author’s two children and that plucky Irish girl Mary Connor. (See pages 63 & 64 for more).

After their marriage in 1852, Martin and Mary had twelve children, and the secondeldest was Tom, my father’s father. Both could read but they couldn’t write, having been forbidden schooling by the English occupation.

Mary had the reputation of being a great wit. I heard this first-hand from two old ladies who I met as patients in Menangle, and knew Mary when they were children. (See page 64).

Unusually for a woman at that time, Mary had her obituary published in the Freemans Journal, and it noted the very large number of people who attended her funeral. Martin died in 1882, and his obituary in the publication “Early Menangle”, says “he possessed a wide circle of friends, being of that kindly nature which made him popular with all classes”.

Mary and Martin are both buried in the St Johns Catholic Cemetery, George Street Campbelltown, along with their son Timothy who died in childhood, (close to the grave of James Ruse).

Most young men were familar with horses at the time, and Tom rode and worked with horses from a young age. His path to becoming a leading racehorse trainer began when he left school in 1869 at the age of fourteen. With so many younger siblings to feed, he had to go out and find work.

He began at the Kirkham horse stud, on the Camden Park Estate, owned in the 1870s by politician and wealthy upper Hunter landowner James White. He had also purchased the Newmarket house in Randwick Randwick, and had a big stable there.

Tom had been noticed as being talented with horses, and eventually went to work as an

assistant to White’s horse trainer Michael Fennelly at Randwick. After marrying Jean Renwick in 1881, the couple initially lived on Jane Street, Struggletown Randwick, but then moved to a larger house on the corner of Avoca and Helena streets, (the house is still there).

The wealthy James White was able to purchase some good horses, and finished the 1882/1883 season as Australia’s leading owner of winners.

In the last few years of his life Fennelly was increasingly unwell, and relied on young Tom to follow his instructions about training. When Fennelly died in 1887, Tom had clearly impressed White enough that the owner told him that since he had effectively been training his horses for the past few years, he may as well continue by becoming his full-time trainer. Tom was just thirty-two years of age. He was tall and had a distinctive beard, described in the 1988 book “Australian Horse Racing” (by Jack Pollard) as having “movie idol’s good looks and a soldier’s straight back”.

In the autumn of 1888, in his first year as head trainer for James White, Tom took a team of horses down to Melbourne and won nine of the richest races at Flemington.

Tom became very successful.He had a very good eye when it came to buying yearlings, and excelled in the training of two-year-olds.

The Payten family at Randwick races, around 1930: Auntie Lorna, Uncle Tom, Auntie Dot (Bayly’s wife), Uncle Leo Maloney, Auntie Doris, Uncle Leo Payten, his wife Auntie Eva, Uncle Bayly.

He was said to be able to identify all of the horses doing track work in the early dawn light at Randwick racecourse, and was thus in a position to know the fitness of his opposition. This allowed him not only to select into which race his horses should be entered, but when to have a reasonably safe bet.

He must have been smart, because when James White died in 1890, Tom was able to purchase Newmarket – at the age of thirty-five. and by the time he and Jean moved into that famous, grand old home, they had four children.

My father Jack was born here in 1901, the youngest of Tom and Jean’s eight children. He had three sisters: Lorna, Doris and Jean, and four brothers Leo, Tom, Bayly and Joe.

Tom initiated the Newmarket yearling sales in 1897, and eventually leased part of Newmarket for these sales to auctioneer John Inglis in 1905. The whole of the Newmarket complex

was sold to William Inglis & Son in 1918. Tom retired and bought a house, “Cambooya,” in Arthur St. Randwick, but died suddenly of a heart complaint in 1920, aged 69.

Before his death, Tom had purchased properties in the Canowindra district for sons Leo and Tom, in the Gooloogong/Eugowra district for Joe and Jack, and built training stables for Bayly in Randwick.

Both Tom and Bayly are in the Australian Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, Tom being the first to win over 200 feature races, and Bayly being the leading trainer in Sydney for every year except one from 1940 to 1948, before his untimely death.

I have no doubt that Tom’s legacy can be seen in the current generations of the Payten family. His talent and hard work directly resulted in providing opportunities to this day, for all of his descendants.

Tom Payten, younger

brother Martin & Stan Lamond

Yearling sales in front of the house in 1918, Tom’s final year at Newmarket

Following is part of the story of Billy the Goat from Marianne’s booklet, ‘The Payten Family of Newmarket’, (as told by Helen): “Of all the pets at Newmarket, the one most often heard about in later years was Billy, the goat, trained from a very early age by Jack to pull a little billy-cart. Jack said it was like ‘breaking in a two-year-old’. When Billy was older, Jack drove him with a second goat, not only inside the Newmarket grounds, but outside too, around the streets of Randwick. The goats were very prone to suddenly swerve into someone’s garden or front hedge if they saw something good to nibble.” (More to the story in the booklet).

Jack Payten, my father, as a boy at Newmarket

James Dwyer (1855 – 1921) & Katherine Hannan (1868 – 1955)

The Ancestry of my Mother’s

Parents

James Dwyer & Katherine Hannan both emigrated from Ireland in the early 1890s.

Ruins of the house in Ireland that my grandfather James grew up in.

The original Mercantile Rowing Club Hotel in The Rocks was knocked down to make way for the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge; the “new” Mercantile was built on George Street, the Bridge seen behind under way.

James, in his mid-30s, had come from the Cashel area in County Tipperary, and Katherine, in her mid-20s and known as Kate, had followed a number of her brothers and sisters across from Kildorrie in County Cork. (Ten of the eleven Hannan siblings eventually came to Australia). They both arrived with nothing, and got work in Sydney to begin with as a labourer and a domestic.

In 1998 when Mairi and I visited my second cousin Sean O’Dwyer, a pharmacist in Cashel, we were shown where my grandfather James had grown up nearby. It was in a very basic tworoomed, rectangular stone dwelling, about thirty metres long. The roof was gone, having being pulled off by the English to punish the family: a cousin, Tim, was a Freedom fighter and had evaded capture.

Six years after arriving in Australia, James Dwyer had saved up enough to marry Kate and buy the license for the Mercantile Rowing Club Hotel at Campbell’s Cove in The Rocks. One of the few ways that Catholics could get ahead in those days was to run a hotel. (Job advertisements sometimes included: “Catholics need not apply,” – the Irish, and by extension Catholics, were looked down on and mistrusted, and were often without much formal education).

James Dwyer became the first licensee of the Hotel, across from the Mercantile Rowing Club. He and Kate worked hard and did well, with scullers from the club across the road being good customers. They had four daughters in quick succession, all born and raised upstairs at the Hotel: Nell, Josie, Emilie (my mother, born 1901) and Ena.

Mum told us that from the Hotel there was a clear view of the harbour on which they could see ships anchored, some with both sails and funnels. Rowing clubs were a big part of Sydney life at the time, but the Mercantile Rowing Club’s lease on their site down by the water’s edge expired in 1911, so the club moved to Mosman, (becoming the Mosman Rowing Club of today).

Because the land was needed to build the south pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the original Mercantile Rowing Club Hotel was knocked down in 1914. The Mercantile Hotel was built not far away on George Street to replace the old hotel, and opened in 1915. It has traded continuously since then, gaining a reputation as “Australia’s oldest Irish Pub”.

In December of that year, James and Kate’s youngest daughter, Ena, died suddenly, aged nearly twelve. It was recorded as scarlet fever, but my mother always thought it was from an infection from a cut on her finger, (probably streptococcal septicaemia). My mother was very close to her little sister, and always said that the family never got over her death, particularly James.

Music was everything to the Dwyer girls, who grew up being taught by the Mercy nuns in Newtown in primary school, then secondary school at OLMC Parramatta, where they

boarded. After proving herself a talented musician at school, my mother went on to study at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney. She graduated from there in the early 1920s, making her our family’s first university graduate. On occasion she would fill in for the regular piano player at the picture theatre, playing the musical accompaniment to the silent movies.

After the loss of Ena, the family were increasingly unhappy living at the Hotel, and eventually moved to Randwick, first in 1918 to a place on Darley Road. In 1920, James and Kate bought “Waroona”, at 65 St Paul’s Street. James is recorded as attending the funeral of Tom Payten that year at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Randwick.

In July 1921, just a few days after cutting the big sloping front lawn at Waroona with a scythe in apparent good health, James died suddenly, aged 66. He is buried in the Waverley Cemetery along with his wife, Katherine. (My sister Jean, who died of cot death as an infant in 1934, is also buried there).

Nell, Emilie & Josie Dwyer at their boarding school, Our Lady of Mercy College Parramatta, 1914.

The Ormonde leaving Sydney Harbour, with my parents and the Australian Olympic team on board.

My mother, Emilie: a stylish young woman of the 1920s.

On deck: Doris Payten, Os Merret, (manager of the Olympic team),

Josie Dwyer, Jean Payten, Emilie & Jack.

The Troubles in Ireland had settled down by the end of 1923, and at last the widowed Kate and many of her Irish-born friends thought it safe enough to go home to see family and old friends.

Passage was booked on the R.M.S. Ormonde and Waroona sold. (It happened that the house was sold to Leo and Lorna Maloney, a sister to my father Jack, so the Payten family came to know the house very well, as Lorna lived there for thirty years).

On 30 April 1924, Katherine (Nanna), Mum (Emilie) and Aunty Josie set off for the “trip of a lifetime”. The Australian Olympic team were also passengers onn the Ormonde, on their way to Paris, including famous swimming gold medal winner Andrew “Boy” Charlton. The ship was farewelled at Circular Quay by a madly cheering crowd throwing thousands of coloured streamers.

A large group of the Dwyer’s friends and aquaintances were on board, including my father Jack and his older sisters Doris and Jean, who were heading to Ceylon, (now Sri Lanka), for a holiday. Emilie would likely have got to know Jack and the Payten family through the church, after arriving in Randwick as a teenager. Jack had moved out west to run the farm bought him by his father Tom, but was taking this trip with his sisters as he recovered from a bout of pneumonia.

Emilie’s diary records time on the Ormonde passing in a whirl of balls (masked and fancy dress), parties, cards, concerts and singalongs, with sports and games on deck, as well as many onshore excursions. There are frequent mentions of Jack, and the entry on May 21 records that when it came time to say goodbye to Jack in Colombo, Emilie “felt quite sad”.

Possibly there was a blossoming on-board romance between them, both aged 23 at the time, which led to their eventual marriage seven years later. (One story, passed on by the daughter of Mum’’s dear school friend Nora Cassidy, who’d also been on the ship, was that Jack proposed before that goodbye in Colombo – but Emilie turned him down!)

After the holiday in Ceylon, Jack returned to work on ‘Kaloola’, his farm in the Lachlan valley, twenty-five miles away from the Forbes. My mother continued her adventures for many months further.

The Ormonde arrived on the docks in London on June 17. Renting a flat in Kensington, Emilie and Josie spent two months here with their mother, and other Australian-Irish friends from home, before continuing to Ireland, then travelling further to the Continent, USA, and finally back to Sydney via Tahiti. They finally returned to Australia on 18 March 1925, after more than ten months away.

Route of the “Ormonde”in 1924: departed Sydney 30 April; in port of Colombo 21 May; docked in London June 17.

Passenger list from the trip: dots have been added to note members of my family and the famous swimmer, Andrew “Boy” Charlton.

James Renwick

b. Scotland 1783–1854

Arrived Aust 1839

GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER

Janet Kennedy

b. Scotland 1794–1878

Arrived Aust 1839

GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

William Armstrong

b. Scotland 1807–?

Arrived Aust 1839

GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER

Margaret Beatty

b. Scotland 1813–?

GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

Walter Renwick

b. Scotland 1828–1865

Arrived Aust 1839

GREAT-GRANDFATHER

Jean Renwick 1857–1915

GRANDMOTHER

Elizabeth Armstrong

b. Scotland 1835–1878

Arrived Aust 1839

GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

Martin Payten

b. Ireland 1806?–1882

Arrived Aust 1841

GREAT-GRANDFATHER

Thomas Payten 1855–1920

GRANDFATHER

Mary Connor b. Ireland 1831–1903

Arrived Aust 1850

GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

James Dwyer b. Ireland 1858–1920 Arrived Aust early 1890s

GRANDFATHER

Katherine Hannan b. Ireland 1869–1955 Arrived Aust early 1890s

GRANDMOTHER

So, to end this story of where did we come from: my parents Emilie Dwyer, of Irish descent, married my father Jack Payten of Irish and Scottish descent.

That makes me 75% Irish and 25% Scottish.

John (Jack) Payten 1901–1974

Helen Payten (Malloy) 1932

Jan Payten 1935

Kathie Payten (Mason) 1937

Robert (Bob) Payten 1939

David Payten 1942

Marianne Payten 1944–2023

Emilie Dwyer 1901–1985

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Mairi for deciphering my “scribble” & typing out every single word, and for all the photographs – of our travels and the family albums over the years; to Caroline for the layout & editing; and to Alan & Jan Oxenham for their encouragement. Thanks also to my late sister Marianne for her research & resulting family history booklets.

back cover?????