How and why we came to Ottawa

This has ben a busy week with visits by us to the ALS Clinic, and several very pleasant visits by others to us here in our 11th floor pad. The last of the week's visitors were especially welcome: Mariella Peca, Monica Prince, and Pauline, who used to be Pauline Carr but has been married for about 25 years now and to my shame I've forgotten her married name. If she reads this, she can let me know. In the 1970s all three worked in our office; Mariella still does, and they've been good friends with each other and with us ever since. It felt just like old times to see all three of them sitting in our living room, a really delightful reunion. We should have celebrated with some South Australian liquid sunshine, but Wendy doesn't drink nowadays, Mariella was driving, and cups (or rather mugs) of tea seemed more appropriate to the occasion. I think it was Pauline who asked if I am still Australian, so I told the sad story of how I had to sacrifice my birthright and become Canadian in 1976 so that David, then aged 17, could begin his career as an officer cadet at the Royal Military College. He had to be a Canadian citizen, and before he turned 18 and was of legal age to become one on his own, I also had to be Canadian. I sacrificed my boomerang, must get a visa to enter the land of my birth, but I've kept my Australian accent as a permanent reminder that deep inside I'm still an Aussie. How did we end up in Canada, Pauline asked. It's a long story. We left Australia at the end of 1963 for a post at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, an old university founded before the American Revolution, then a little over a year later, left the USA for the University of Edinburgh. We had five very happy and, for me, very productive years in Edinburgh. Then I began to get serious invitations to move onward and upward, to an English medical school, or to one of several in the USA. The most attractive of these was a cross-appointment between the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. I took that one very seriously, went to Boston, jumped through the necessary hoops, and provisionally accepted the position. Almost as an afterthought I flew on from Boston to Ottawa, arrived here late on a hot June afternoon. I had a room at the lovely old colonial Bytown Inn, since demolished. I had eaten in Boston, or on the plane, or perhaps both, so I went for a walk, over to the Rideau Canal and along the pathway beside it, up to one or two streets beyond where we live now. Kids were playing street hockey while their parents sat on the doorsteps watching them and chatting. I had one of those life-changing flashes of insight: this would be a better place to raise our kids than Boston! To put it in context, the late 1960s were a violent and turbulent time in the USA; we had lived in the USA before, had then and have now many very good American friends. But there are aspects of the American way of life we never embraced. One of the deciding factors in 1965 in choosing Edinburgh over Baltimore (where I'd been offered a position at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health) was the right to bear arms. It came up one evening at dinner with three other couples, gentle folk from other faculties of the University of Vermont. We were the only ones who didn't keep a loaded handgun in the house - in Burlington, a small, peaceful university city! Wendy and I had been appalled, had decided there and then that we didn't want our kids to grow up with values like those of our American friends. Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister of Canada then; we'd seen and heard him being interviewed on BBC TV. We liked him, and what he said about Canada. In Edinburgh I'd met enough Canadians to feel comfortable about sharing values in common with them more than with many Americans. So despite the eminence of Harvard and the prestige that might have come from working there, despite the lowly status of the medical school in Ottawa in those days, and even despite the long and bitterly cold winters, we chose to come to Ottawa. We've never regretted it. The medical school has come up in the world since 1970 (I like to think I have contributed a little bit to its ascendency); the city has become a cosmopolitan metropolis, with more gains than losses from the transformation; and thanks to global climate change, even the winters have gotten shorter and milder in recent years. And lately of course, we've been very thankful that Canada is among the civilized nations that has a pretty secure social safety net.

I may be the only person ever to have declined invitations to join the staff of two of the most prestigious schools of public health in the world, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. But I don't boast about it. I declined both of these attractive invitations (and a few others also) because I didn't feel inclined to gamble yet again with my dependent family's future, as I had when I left the security of general practice and all four of us lived on my savings for a year while I studied public health sciences, and when we left the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney to join Kerr White's group at the University of Vermont, an episode I have yet to describe in this blog. Those gambles had both succeeded. It was best to quit while I was ahead. Neither the Johns Hopkins nor the Harvard position was tenure track or "hard-funded" -- my salary and the family's sole source of support could have been shot out from under me at any time, even without warning. That could have precipitated a nightmare scenario that doesn't bear thinking about. Anyway, it all worked out well, and we lived happily ever after, more or less.