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New role for trailblazing Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Annette Holian is the first female President of the AOA in the organisation’s 85-year history her mother unable to walk unaided and damaged her father’s arm.
While the work is rewarding, it can also be extremely confronting.
“I was very aware of the challenges they faced, and particularly the motor challenges,” she says.
“I remember trying to help save an eightyear-old boy who had been shot, but who died on the operating table despite our best efforts. I was doing the CPR for his arrest, and we had to call it, on a pink warm child in asystole.
After following the typical orthopaedic surgery pathway into private and public practice, Dr Holian embarked on a road less travelled when she began to work providing pro bono surgery for Papua New Guinea children in 1996. She carried out surgery in Melbourne alongside her colleagues at the then Monash Medical Centre and helped teach local surgeons in PNG.
It takes courage to travel to the scene of a natural disaster and operate without running water or reliable electricity. But for Annette Holian, the same level of courage has been required to break the many glass ceilings she has encountered as an orthopaedic surgeon. Dr Holian has in 2021 become the first female President of the Australian Orthopaedic Association (AOA) in the organisation’s 85-year history. The appointment comes 35 years after Dr Holian was one of the first two women to enter the Australian orthopaedic training program in 1986. In her new position, she plans to create a profession that demands less courage and welcomes greater diversity among the surgeons of the future. Growing up in Reservoir in Melbourne’s north, Dr Holian was originally inspired to pursue a career in medicine as a child after reading the novel Hills End. In the book, an isolated group of children confront extreme challenges. A boy whose friend is injured decides to be a doctor so he can help others. Dr Holian identified with the character and set her sights on becoming a doctor and helping in adverse conditions became part of her story. Dr Holian’s parents had met as patients in a polio clinic and this history also drove her interest in medicine. The disease had left
In this role, she derived great satisfaction from improving the lives of people who had suffered from diseases like polio, club foot, infections of bones and joints and neglected. These patients would have been unlikely to have received adequate care without the work of Dr Holian and other Australian surgeons. Among her most memorable cases was that of a 29-year-old woman whose tight Achilles tendons had confined her to a wheelchair from infancy. After a simple 20-minute operation under local anaesthetic, she could walk up a set of stairs. “Everything we taught and did had a huge impact on the people we were caring for and I found it incredibly rewarding.” Dr Holian was part of the first Australian medical team on the ground after the Boxing Day tsunami in Banda Aceh. She remembers seeing people everywhere searching for family members and witnessing trucks moving bodies into open tips.
“As a first responder at natural disasters, you can rationalise that it wasn’t of human making, but it’s very confronting to see people hurting other people in this way. And it is particularly emotionally laden when your patient is a child.” Dr Holian was also deeply affected by a helicopter accident that killed members of the medical team providing assistance following an earthquake in Indonesia. After the crash, she had to recover the bodies of her colleagues. “There were 50 Australians working there and we lost five of them. That accident was a seminal part of my story,” she says. Her work has provided her with first-hand experience of the sense of isolation soldiers feel when they return from a war zone. “When I got home, I remember being asked if I had ‘had a good time’. It made me realise that only people who have been there know what you went through. “I can’t burden others by talking about those overseas experiences, but I love spending time with those who were there with me. We can just be together and know that part of our story is shared. We are not alone.” Her chosen mode of relaxation from an emotionally taxing job is gardening, and she is looking forward to getting her plants that are currently potted into the ground.
Her team operated in extremely challenging conditions, without reliable power or access to running water.
Dr Holian’s military service was recognised in 2006 when she was appointed a Governor at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance.
In 2000, she joined the Royal Australian Air Force for service in East Timor and subsequently shifted towards trauma surgery, later serving in the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, and the Middle East.
A circle closed in a surprising way when the author of Hills End, Ivan Southall AM, DFC was featured in a recent exhibition at the Shrine. The writer had been a RAAF pilot in World War II, later becoming an author.
She has undertaken five deployments to war zones, including three in Afghanistan.
Dr Holian stood open-mouthed before the exhibition, astounded that years
