Across the Pacific to Panama Canal and USA

This post is excerpted from memoirs written in the early 1990s, illustrated with some photos.

Three youthful sailors on the Port Alfred

On January 3, 1964, we left Sydney on a refrigerator ship, the Port Alfred, called in Brisbane to top off the cargo. We carried 12 passengers and about 30,000 tons of frozen meat across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, Vera Cruz, Mexico, and on up the eastern seaboard of the United States. I had free passage as ship’s surgeon, Wendy was charged half the regular fare and our three kids were carried at about a quarter of the adult fare. It was luxury travel in a spacious stateroom on a ship in which our quarters were air conditioned. I had a separate cabin, the ship’s surgeon’s quarters, but seldom slept there, preferring to cuddle with Wendy. There was a huge amount of deck space for the kids to play, and a swimming pool. This way to travel is far superior to travel on a cruise ship with thousands of passengers. Without doubt, this 5-6 week voyage was one of the highlights of our lives. We’ve always felt sorry the children were too young to appreciate or even to remember much about it.   

 Rebecca chatting to the First Mate of the Port Alfred

The voyage across the Pacific was one of the high points of my life because I love the sea so much. Wendy, Rebecca and David thoroughly enjoyed it too. Jonathan slept most of the time, days as well as nights. We had a pleasant ship’s company, the captain, deck officers, engineer officers, and refrigerator engineers were splendid people with whom we could socialize comfortably. As I got to know the officers, I recognized personality characteristics that made them select themselves for life at sea, away from family with whom constant contact would be emotionally intolerable, whereas occasional home leave was a time for rejoicing and revelry. The radio officer was type-cast, a reclusive, solitary individual, like most who work for the Marconi Corporation. One of my statistical tasks at the Social Medicine Research Unit had been analyses of sickness and death rates in occupational groups insured by the Prudential Life Assurance Company.  Maritime radio operators employed by the Marconi Corporation (which had a monopoly covering most European merchant fleets) were well outside the continuum for “normal” mental and emotional states. Psychiatric disturbances including obsessive disorders and depression were very common, associated with preference for solitude. Marconi Corporation radio operators had by far the highest suicide rates of any occupational group.   I have only vague memories of the other passengers. There was an American oil man with his wife and small child, and an Australian girl who was clearly his mistress as well as the nanny to the little boy; there were only two or three others (twelve passengers in all). None made any impact on my memory comparable to that of Captain Barlow, Bob MacDonald, the big, red-bearded second engineer, and several other officers who were all very pleasant company. My duties as ship’s surgeon were undemanding: I hardly ever had to do anything other than the daily inspection with the captain, first officer and chief steward. I had to suture a laceration, render a little psychotherapy when two gay stewards had a lover’s quarrel, provide ointment for skin rashes, etc. Fortunately there were no surgical or medical emergencies.

 Wendy in Port Alfred's swimming pool with Rebecca and David, midway across the Pacific

A few days out from Brisbane we ran head-on into a powerful storm, almost a hurricane, and for 3 days battered our way into the teeth of fierce winds and huge seas. This was a much stronger storm than the one I had experienced in the Southern Ocean in 1954, enough to clear the dining saloon of all but three or four of us when it was at its height. The dining saloon faced aft on the Port Alfred. The best vantage point to view the stormy sea was the bridge, to which I had access as a member of the crew, the ship's doctor. I spent many hours on the bridge discretely out of the way aft of the wheel and the instruments that told us how this storm was slowing our way through the ocean. It was fascinating to see huge waves breaking over the bows and surging back, with the wind helping them gather force before they crashed into the superstructure, making the ship, sometimes those watching too, tremble. The open decks were dangerous, and if I ventured out the spray hit my face with the force of shots from a gun. I felt then the full power of the sea. The dining saloon for officers and passengers thinned out during those days, the table cloths were dampened to stop plates sliding about, the fiddles were raised and our heavy chairs firmly fixed to the deck. 

 When the storm passed and the sea was calm again, we could see the ocean all around us ablaze with ghostly light on moonless nights from myriads of tiny phosphorescent plants and animals. If you flush a ship's toilet in the dark at such a time, it’s a dramatic sight - ship's toilets use sea water so the luminescent little creatures can be seen there too as well as in the wake and all around the ship. There were many tropical nights when the phosphorescence in the wake was bright enough almost to read by, many nights when the stars seemed close enough to touch. One night when Wendy and I were strolling on the deck after bedding down the children, the first officer called out to us from the bridge, drawing our attention to a satellite crossing the sky; in those days, satellites were still uncommon enough to be noteworthy. We saw little other shipping apart from a few Japanese fishing trawlers and only a few islands, low atolls where palm trees seemed suspended in the sea, and one high volcanic peak on the horizon in the Society Islands group.

Gatun Lock, the highest point on Panama Canal

The Panama Canal was fascinating with its locks that lifted and then lowered the great ship. 

Then we were in the Caribbean. We were berthed in Kingston for a week unloading some of our cargo of frozen meat – frozen goat carcases; goat meat is popular in Jamaica. We went most days to the swimming pool at the Myrtle Bank Hotel (made famous just before this in a James Bond novel and movie). We saw the city of Kingston and the Botanical Gardens and had a brief excursion to the Blue Mountains. We often left Jonathan who slept almost all the time, in air-conditioned comfort in our cabin.

I went sailing across the harbour to the old buccaneer haven of Port Royal, now a few feet under water because of an earthquake 300 years ago, with Jim McKenzie, the refrigerator engineer, who had a tiny yacht on board. Sailing to Port Royal was great, with a light breeze that carried us along, the sail gently filling with wind. At Port Royal a party of fat tourists off a cruise ship included the brother of the medical school dean at the University of Vermont (I forget how we learnt   this but it led to some worth-while conversation). Getting back safely from Port Royal was a different matter. The trade wind had freshened into a gale and it was all we could do to prevent capsizing when we were caught in the wake of a large tanker, and we were well aware that the harbour contained man-eating sharks.

Jonathan with Bob MacDonald and Captain Barlow

Wendy and I had a wedding anniversary in Kingston and spent the evening at the Bamboo Club, a raucous night spot where we watched highly sexed scantily clad Jamaican girls writhing and gyrating on a small dance-floor. We didn’t know it when a party of ship’s officers invited us to join them but the Bamboo Club was a well known brothel. It was an excellent place to celebrate a wedding anniversary, one of several memorable wedding anniversaries we have had in exotic places. I remember that evening with much pleasure.

Wendy with Second Engineer Bob MacDonald

Our first US landfall was at Charleston, South Carolina, a picturesque old city where the Civil War started when the confederate army bombarded Fort Sumter located in the harbour. As the Port Alfred moved up the river, I was struck by shanty-town settlements of poor blacks that we passed before we saw the affluent mansions of the well-to-do whites. I had never before seen such blatant contrasts of wealth and poverty nor the contrasting lives of blacks and whites; it was a foretaste of much that would follow about the American way of life. Another foretaste was a gun-shop window with rows of ugly, heavy automatic pistols and revolvers on display. We were in the land where people had the right to bear arms, a right as important to many as freedom of religion.  Like the lovingly preserved slave auction market with the auction block and signs displaying prices, this was an eloquent reminder that we had come to a violent nation with a brutal and violent past. In other ways Charleston was a good place to be introduced to the USA. It is a graceful old city with many very beautiful ante-bellum mansions, boasting lovely wrought iron balconies, pillared porches and porticoes, white clapboard or red brick sides. There was a feeling that these people cared about the past and about their history. The fact that some of the past was brutal and the history was violent didn’t seem to trouble them.

We went on around Cape Hattaras to Norfolk, Virginia, then Philadelphia, another historically interesting city that it was good to see at the beginning of life in America. I left the ship in Philadelphia and flew to Burlington, Vermont, via New York. It was a heavily overcast day as the plane from Philadelphia touched down at Newark, and the connecting flight to Burlington had been cancelled. I was taken by bus from Newark through the Holland Tunnel, across Manhattan Island, past the Empire State Building, out the Midtown tunnel, and across Brooklyn to Kennedy Airport where I waited a few hours for the flight to Burlington. Those airport arrivals and departures at two of New York’s airports were harbingers of many similar experiences stretching over all the years since that day in February 1964. Our life in the New World had begun.

Renewed Uncertainty and an Enticing Invitation

My encounter with the aggressive bureaucrats from the Commonwealth Department of Health had a very unsettling effect.  Based on a handshake agreement I had been appointed as a ‘lecturer’ in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney, but my salary was paid by the Commonwealth of Australia Department of Health and my contract identified me as a Commonwealth civil servant, not as a staff member of the University of Sydney. When I had mentioned ‘academic freedom’ in that unpleasant encounter, one of the bureaucrats had uttered an obscenity laden rebuttal of the notion. As far as he was concerned, there was no such thing – I certainly had no academic freedom as he saw it. For several weeks I felt badly shaken and very insecure, although I carried on as best I could, trying to put the incident behind me. I immersed myself in my interesting projects on weekdays and in family life at weekends.  

Then, out of the blue it seemed at the time though the chain of causation soon became clear, I had a letter from Kerr White, MD, Chairman of the newly established department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont. The letter was an invitation to me to join the team he was building. I had never met Kerr White but had heard a lot about him. He had been my predecessor as visiting fellow at the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit, and while I was working there a year after he had been there, he had published a paper on the ‘Ecology of medical care’ that had been much discussed. Kerr’s paper was the other side of the coin, so to say, of my ‘Iceberg’ article. He and several colleagues had calculated where and how a hypothetical 1000 people in America got their medical care. Kerr was originally Canadian, a McGill medical graduate trained in internal medicine and – much like me – had been attracted to epidemiology.  In early 1963, Kerr had returned to the UK from the USA on a brief head-hunting expedition, seeking  to recruit an experienced family physician trained in epidemiology, able to apply epidemiological methods in health care research. My friends at the SMRU had given him my name. At that time, experienced family doctors with training in epidemiology were very rare, I was one of a very small select group, and the demand in universities far exceeded the supply. Kerr White offered to pay my fare and my family’s fare from Adelaide to Burlington, Vermont, and offered me a key position on his research team, where I would lead several research projects for which he had secured funds.

This invitation led to much soul-searching discussion between Wendy and me, and thence to a decision and subsequent events that changed the course of our lives once again. We realized immediately how life-changing this decision would be, and the enormity of what we faced gave us considerable pause. We had just made a down payment on our first home, begun to put down roots for the first time in our married life. If I accepted Kerr White’s invitation, we would have to uproot and resettle as immigrants in the USA – this was not an exchange fellowship but a long-term perhaps permanent move away from Australia to a new life in a new country.  We would be in a similar situation to some of the immigrant patients whose lives and health problems had interested me so much when I had been in general practice. Wendy and I thought about and talked about Kerr White’s invitation for several weeks before deciding what to do.  This most certainly would truly be a life-altering decision. We could see that it would ultimately involve a decision about giving up our nationality and citizenship and becoming American. We loved our homelands enough to face this prospect with many misgivings.  Having delayed as long as I decently could, I wrote back to Kerr White, accepting his invitation.  I described this in my memoirs, composed about 20 years ago, and what follows is edited from these memoirs:

Wendy and I knew that the decision to emigrate from Australia would be life-changing, even though at the time I was uncertain whether we would be leaving for an interlude of a few years or for life. We hoped it would be just for a few years. For many weeks we weighed the pros and cons. We were in the situation, not for the first or the last time, in Robert Frost’s poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;  

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,  

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.  

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and

I — I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.  

Our choice surely made all the difference in our lives. The roads before us led in two entirely different directions. One road was slow and unexciting, secure if I conformed to the conventions. The other was hazardous, vague, unknowable - but adventurous. Wendy loved adventure if anything more even than I did. We had mixed and confusing images of the United States, of American academia, and of Kerr White, who had invited me to join his team. Complex and lengthy procedures involving much paperwork were required to get the necessary documents to enter the USA as immigrants and a work permit for me. I wrote the examination that would confer eligibility to write state certifying examinations to get a licence that would enable me to practice medicine in the state of my choice. I passed this easily despite encountering incomprehensible questions on new realms of biochemistry and pharmacology that had materialized since I last thought about these subjects. Meanwhile, I had disturbing thoughts about my reckless improvidence and the culturally disruptive act we were committing. Yet as I dipped into books and magazine articles that provided glimpses of many and varied aspects of American customs and culture, I began to feel a little bit of its magnetic appeal. Not much, just a touch.

I had some insight into the psycho-social aspects of migration, having begun to study the process as a family doctor and as a graduate student (my dissertation for the DPH dealt with some health implications of cultural differences between migrants and Australian-born citizens). I understood a little of what was involved in uprooting ourselves from Australia where four out of five of us had been born and where I had been raised. My own roots were shallow in some ways, quite deep in others, especially when it came to family ties. I felt no pull from Australian traditions and customs.  Indeed I wondered if there were any, though once removed from the land  of my birth and upbringing I began to perceive with nostalgic force some Australian traditions and customs, most of which I miss much more now than when we set off for America.

As we prepared to leave Australia perhaps for ever, we cut some ties. Helen, my dachshund bitch, was among the first of these. She was aging and ailing with some canine gynecological disorder that made her a low-slung nymphomaniac, perpetually in season. One morning we awoke to barking and other doggy noises, and saw on the terraces of our hillside garden in Cremorne a parade of dogs of every description, each waiting his turn to mount and impregnate her. The honour, we decided, went to an elderly and rheumaticky bitser from along the road, who snuck into the house itself when our backs were turned. The pups were born looking deformed and went into a bucket of water. Helen soon after that accompanied me on her last walk. With heavy heart I took her to see a friend at the University of Sydney who gave her a lethal injection. Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being hadn’t been written then, but he captured in his poignant account of the last moments of “Karenin” something of what I felt as I walked Helen into the School of Public Health to meet her humane dispatcher.  Soon after that we held what would nowadays be called a garage sale, disposing at sacrifice prices of some family treasures, my golf clubs, sundry household impedimenta (we had a Royal Doulton chamberpot that we sold for pennies, perhaps worth a fortune as an antique; other antiques we didn’t recognize no doubt went too). I gave many books to our neighbour and baby-sitter Richard Sweet and was happy to see most of them, old friends, safe on his shelves when I stayed with him and his wife Patsy years later at their home on the edge of Sydney Harbour in Kirribilli. Other items went into store to be sent for later or disposed of when our future became clearer. It was the first of several times we thinned out possessions, each time inadvertently parting from treasures we later missed, things we had thought were of no account that could have been meaningful, useful or both.

Our drive across Australia from Sydney back to Adelaide for the Christmas of 1963 gave me an opportunity to immerse myself for what I knew might be the last time in familiar sights and sounds, the clear blue sky,  warbling magpies, bleating sheep, the dust and heat of the inland.

We went through sleepy little country towns and stayed briefly on a farm near Bordertown, South Australia with our friends Jan and Allan Fry.

 We had a slightly melancholy sixth birthday party for Rebecca in the east parklands on the edge of the city where there was a jungle gym shaped like an elephant, and a small tribe of little children wearing paper hats sat around a picnic table eating cakes and drinking lemonade. 

Then we said farewell to my mother and other family, flew back to Sydney and after a night at a hotel beside the Harbour at Neutral Bay, we went aboard the Port Alfred, a well-appointed passenger carrying refrigerator ship on which I had free passage as the ship’s surgeon, with Wendy and the children traveling at peppercorn rates as passengers. That voyage was interesting enough to be the subject of another post on this blog.

The Riverkeeper

Inukshuks in Ottawa River, 2008

Speakers at the Friday Lunch Discussion Club at the Ottawa Y are always interesting.  The most recent was the most interesting and worth while talk I’ve heard since I was invited to join this club. Meredith Brown is a very impressive, articulate young woman, qualified in engineering and biological sciences. She is the executive director of the NGO called the Ottawa Riverkeeper. Her aim is to ensure that the Ottawa River water is drinkable, swimmable and fishable – in other words, to do whatever is necessary to maintain the integrity of the Ottawa River catchment area ecosystem. She described what she does in one of the best talks I’ve heard for several years. The Ottawa River is a very large fresh water ecosystem with a catchment area about the size of Western Europe; the river water is used for drinking, sanitation, hydro-electric power generation, cleansing, nourishing vegetation, recreation (swimming, fishing, white water rafting,ski-ing, snow-shoeing, etc) by 90 municipalities, the largest of course being the conurbation of Ottawa-Gatineau with a population of over one and a quarter million.  Some, but by no means all municipalities give a little money to the Ottawa Riverkeeper NGO. Additional but very modest support comes from federal and provincial governments, a few corporations and private donors. Collectively it’s just enough to pay modest salaries to the Riverkeeper and a very small staff. This handful of dedicated staff measures and monitors the quality, quantity, uses and misuses of the river water, engages in advocacy, education and interaction with concerned agencies, interest groups and individuals at federal, provincial and local level. There is a huge amount of work to be done. As an example, Meredith Brown told the sad story of fresh water eels, which mature upstream in the headwaters of rivers, return to the oceans to breed – reversing the migrations of salmon, for instance. These eels are extinct in the Ottawa River system because their migratory route is blocked by numerous dams and hydroelectric power plants. All that would be required for their survival is a series of fish ladders to enable them to get past these obstructions. Fish ladders are ridiculously cheap, just a few thousand dollars each.  I was more than usually interested. I was hoping to hear some clues about her perspectives on the interactions of ecosystem health and human health. Predictably, I didn’t hear a lot on this important but tantalizing issue.  Intuitively we would all like to believe there is a close correlation between ecosystem health and human health but sometimes it can be very difficult to demonstrate.  Swamps, flood plain lagoons and tidal wetlands can be healthy ecosystems, but if they are havens for insect vectors like mosquitoes that carry malaria, dengue or viral encephalitis, they can be serious or even grave dangers to health. On the other hand, a wetland can be so heavily polluted with petrochemicals, heavy metals or other toxic substances that wildlife, migratory birds, endangered species, are exterminated for ever, while people in adjoining cities remain healthy. After listening to Meredith Brown, the Ottawa Riverkeeper, I cheerfully donated to her NGO, and would be happy to bounce a few ideas around with her about ways to explore further the fascinating, sometimes perplexing relationship of human and ecosystem health. Incidentally, that term 'Riverkeeper' is perfect. At first glance there may be a warm and fuzzy impression, but on reflection, I find the notion of keeping the river, keeping its integrity intact, a powerful symbol of care for essential life-sustaining ecosystems.

Working at the School of Public Health

Following up the work on “The Iceberg” I had several other ideas in quick succession. The avuncular director of the School of Public Health came into my office one day, with an interesting question. The island of Tasmania with a population of about 350,000 at that time, had two cities, Hobart at the south end, Launceston at the north end; it was separated from the mainland of Australia by the usually rough sea of Bass Strait, and in those days air services were unreliable, often disrupted by poor weather. The question was this: How many neurosurgeons should there be in Tasmania? Was a single neurosurgical unit in Hobart enough, or should there be another in Launceston at the other end of the island? The two cities were several hours drive apart, and some people with severe head injuries would die in transit if they had to be taken by road from one end of the island to the other. I immediately wanted to answer a more general question: how many doctors of all kinds, in general practice and in every specialty, should there be? It was technically easier first to answer other questions: how many doctors were there? Where were they? Were they distributed equitably in the population? Were some specialties “over-serviced” and were the numbers in other specialties inadequate?  How could practicing doctors be identified and counted? There were several sources of information, all of them flawed. One immediate problem was that lists of licensed medical practitioners were separately maintained in each state, and significant numbers were licensed in more than one state. In some states, including my home state South Australia, it was possible to be licensed for life rather than renewing the license annually. I was licensed for life myself.   There was no easy way to deal with this problem other than to go laboriously through the printed lists of licensed medical practitioners in each state, strike out those with addresses outside that state, and count the totals, then adjust if possible for reduced activity by semi-retired and part-time practitioners, setting arbitrary ages or years since graduation, for retirement.. There were other sources of information: specialty societies had lists of their members. The pharmaceutical industry maintained up-to-date lists of doctors and basic facts about their practices, including useful information about the extent to which doctors were practising full-time, specialized, or focused on specific aspects of practice. They even had some figures for retired and part-time medical practitioners. This information enabled salesmen for the drug companies to concentrate their sales pitch on specific doctors and aspects of practice, and relevant drugs for this aspect when they talked to individual doctors. I recalled being asked by salesmen about my practice, and that the salesmen wrote down what I said. Very few doctors refused to see drug company salesmen, so this source of information was reasonably reliable. Even so, when my paper on “Medical manpower in Australia” was published, I commented on the shortcomings of my sources of information.  I looked also at ancillary professions such as optometry, podiatry, community nursing, physiotherapy and pharmacy, and glanced at the interactions and territorial disputes among them. These aspects of the sociology of professions were very interesting and had I stayed put in Australia I think it is likely that I would have explored this domain in greater depth.

Rebecca and David in inland Australia, 1963

While I was in the group practice in Adelaide I had published a descriptive article on the health problems I had observed among immigrant patients in my practice. This brought me to the attention of two social demographers at the Australian National University, Bill Borrie and Jerzy Zubrytsky. They asked me about my possible interest in becoming a research fellow in their group, but the salary they were offering was derisory, so nothing came of this. I’ve wondered sometimes how differently my career and our family’s lives might have evolved if it had been possible to respond positively to that inquiry.  I used to think wistfully about it in later years whenever Wendy and I returned to Canberra, sometimes to stay for a few weeks in the urbane ANU Residence in the increasingly attractive city of Canberra. It would have been a superb place to work and live…

"Where the dog sits on the tucker-box, five miles from Gundagai"

By the middle of 1963 I felt comfortable in my own skin, and that I was doing worthwhile work, carving out a niche that nobody else in Australia seemed concerned about.  In 1962-63 I wrote several original articles on these aspects of what we called ‘manpower’ in those days, now de-gendered and renamed  ‘human resources.’ These articles were published in small-circulation journals such as the Australian Journal of Social Issues and serial publications of Commonwealth and state health departments, mostly after we had left Australia again at the beginning of 1964. Home life was relaxed and very happy.

Family picnic, National Park, Adelaide Hills, 1963
L-R: Rob, David, Rebecca, Wendy, Vera Last; in front: Jenny, Kate, Peter - all of us except I who took the photo

An eminent semi-retired surgeon who was Director of the NSW Postgraduate Medical Foundation, asked me to evaluate continuing education programs for rural GPs. Data from the recently inaugurated Pharmaceutical Benefits Program had revealed upsurges in prescriptions for costly polypharmaceuticals after drug company salesmen’s visits to a district. Could I re-examine the data to find out whether educational programs aimed at discouraging use of such drugs were having any impact on prescribing habits of GPs? I did this, and wanted to expand the question. Medical insurance claims data could also be examined to explore other aspects of continuing medical education, for instance to discover whether qualified surgeons had better outcomes than GP-surgeons for frequently performed surgical procedures, appendectomy, hysterectomy, gall bladder surgery and inguinal hernia repair. In NSW in the late 1950s and early 1960s, surgeons with higher surgical qualifications performed about one third of appendectomies and inguinal hernia repairs, and two thirds of gall bladder surgery and hysterectomies. Surgical outcomes could be compared and measured by length of hospital stay, and incidence of complications such as postoperative infections and thrombosis.  All the data were available in medical insurance claims records.  I submitted a proposal to the Commonwealth National Health and Medical Research Council to conduct an analysis of records. I emphasized that such an analysis could be done discretely and without revealing any doctors’ identities; moreover it would cost very little. I submitted the proposal in the form of a letter to the secretary of the NH&MRC in Canberra.  Within a week or two, without any advance notice, two senior bureaucrats from the Commonwealth Department of Health came to my office. They stood at the corners of my desk while I sat behind it, and shouted at me, that I wasn’t ever again even to think thoughts such as those I had expressed in my letter to the Secretary of the NH&MRC. They made me give them the file copy of my letter and left, warning me that questions such as those I sought to answer were not scientific but “political” and were none of my business. I was virtually commanded never again even to think about investigating such a politically sensitive question. I found it very discouraging and frustrating to have my inquiring mind so aggressively deterred. I felt defeated, disconsolate, depressed. I described the experience in a letter to my friends in the Social Medicine Research Unit in London, telling them that Australians were not ready for this kind of health services research.

 Little Miss Twinkletoes and her partner, in our garden at 98 Grasmere Road, Cremorne, Sydney, about September 1963

Settling in Sydney in 1962

Looking NW from our sun room at 98 Grasmere Road; Cremorne, Sydney; a sliver of water in Middle Harbour is visible above the chimneys just right of centre.

When our ship reached Adelaide in May 1962, Wendy and I paused  long enough at brother Peter's home to celebrate our niece Kate’s birthday, before collecting Helen, our dachshund, loading our trusty station wagon, and heading back to Sydney, where I had been offered a position as lecturer at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, University of Sydney. My dream of combining family practice and epidemiology, which I had discussed with the professor of medicine in Adelaide before leaving the group practice at the end of 1959, had collapsed. Adelaide wasn’t ready for academic family medicine in 1962.  I wasn’t too upset by this change in direction. The year with Jerry Morris and his colleagues at the Social Medicine Research Unit had been a rich intellectual feast that equipped me with many new skills and the insight and capability to ask worthwhile questions about health services and medical care. My first priority was to prepare for publication my paper on “Completing the clinical picture in general practice” and I did this without much fuss, one back-and-forth exchange of an advanced, near-final draft between me in Sydney and Jerry Morris in London, and the paper was ready to submit to a journal. I sent it to Sir Theodore (“Robbie”) Fox, editor of the Lancet. He accepted it without any changes in the text, but gave it a new title, “The Iceberg”, keeping my original title as a subtitle. Ever since its publication in July 1963 I’ve been famous as the author of “The Iceberg.” Even now, 50 years later, this paper, and the concept of the “iceberg” of disease, what is visible and what lies below the surface, remain well-known and frequently cited. I had literally hundreds of requests for copies, and the paper has been reprinted in several anthologies of ground-breaking original articles. I am forever in Jerry Morris’s debt for giving me the inspiration for this paper, and allowing me to take all the credit. I suppose it’s fair: he had the germ of the idea, and I took it, nourished it and made it grow and flourish.

 

El Alamein fountain, King's Cross, Sydney; L-R: Jonathan (in pram) Kerry, Wendy, David, Rebecca, August 1963 

On arriving in Sydney, we rented a house in Bondi, intending to buy a home in the Eastern Suburbs conveniently close to the University of Sydney. We quickly realized that house prices in this district were far outside our reach, so we shifted focus and began to look at houses across the Harbour but close to the Harbour Bridge so as to avoid a long commute up the north shore. We found a modest small house at 98 Grasmere Road, Cremorne and settled there happily within a couple of months. We expected our stay in Sydney to be a long one, perhaps for the rest of our lives, so we took some care to select a suitable district with good schools. We set about exploring Sydney, re-discovering its many charms and attractions that we had glimpsed during our previous stay, and finding new charms on the north side of the harbour which we had barely known when we lived there in 1960. My working life was absorbing most of my time from Monday to Friday, but weekends were almost always free of commitments so we used these to discover the many delights that Sydney had to offer. We folded Kerry Edwards back into our lives, not just to help Wendy with the kids, but as a good friend to all of us. She came with us to Adelaide over Christmas at the end of 1962.

R and D with Grannie Vera Last, Cremorne, Sydney, 1963

Our children loved Sydney, settled in quickly. They enjoyed playing in our steeply terraced garden, with banana palms and a swing at the bottom and a series of terraces to lawn on a level space below the back veranda and sun-room. They enjoyed our days at the rocky harbourside pools in which they could paddle and swim safely.

 Cooling off on a hot day in Sydney

Rock pool at Mosman, Sydney Harbour, 1963

Beside a swimming pool, Mosman, Sydney Harbour, 1963






Wendy and I decided it was time to provide a little brother or sister for Rebecca and David. Wendy’s pregnancy proceeded smoothly without incident and Jonathan was born after a very short easy labour on June 9, 1963. Here again is Wendy's diary entry for Saturday-Sunday June 8-9 1963: "Had a quiet day. Did some hand-washing & tidied up. Wrote to Dodie and Jan Gilfillan [Fry]. John got lunch ready & took kids for a run on beach while I made choc cake, meringues & fruit cake. Had a rush to get ready for Cullen's dinner party. Home 11.30, straight to Mater Hosp. 3 pushes & Jonathan born." I barely had time to wash my hands and ease Jonathan into the world, because the midwife was busy trying to phone our doctor, who arrived eventually about an hour later. We managed fine without that GP, who missed the very loud heart murmur that I heard when I examined Jonathan 3-4 weeks later on a Sunday night because we were worried about his persistent cough and breathlessness.The heart murmur was so loud I could actually hear it if I put my ear close to Jonathan's chest. From then on, Jonathan was in the care of a pediatric cardiologist. Every specialist who saw him at that time thought he had a large ventricular septal defect, a "hole in the heart" that allowed blood to flow between left and right sides. We didn't know the exact nature of the problem until he was between 5 and 6 years old and had cardiac catheter studies while I was on staff at the University of Edinburgh.The problem was much more complex than anybody thought, and could be dealt with at that time by only two cardiac surgeons in the world. I will describe it later in another post.

On the road between Adelaide and Sydney, near Canberra, 1962 

Christmas 1962. L-R: Kerry, Wendy, Vera Last

Rebecca and David, already politically active, approaching Parliament House, Canberra, 1963

Our family, December 1963

Discussing the unthinkable

Radio and TV discussions of a so-called 'preventive' war against Iran shrivel my marrow. Iran, formerly Persia, is a nation of about 80 million people, the seat of one of the oldest civilizations of humankind. In the mid-20th century its democratically elected left-leaning government was overthrown in a violent coup supported by the CIA and several European powers with interests in Iranian oil. The Shah was chosen by these western powers to rule Iran. I recall a student at the University of Edinburgh in the late 1960s, who had no fingernails on his right hand. When he was a small boy, Savak, the Shah's vicious secret police, had pulled out his fingernails in front of his father, in an attempt to persuade his father to confess to sedition against the Shah. In 1969 the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini became the leader of a theocracy supported by revolutionary guards who seem to be as brutal and unpleasant as the Shah's thugs. The Shah had aspired to lead a regional hegemony possessing nuclear weapons, and so it appears, do the current leaders of Iran. Leaders of western nations, the USA, the UK and and the EU have imposed sanctions with the aim of deterring Iran from expanding its nuclear program. The Israelis have assassinated several Iranian nuclear scientists. There is increasingly bellicose talk of waging war against Iran to stave off advances in its nuclear program. Such a war would be ecstatically welcomed by lunatic fringe believers in the fantasy of 'end times' and doubtless by arms manufacturers and other misguided or just plain evil people. Americans who still cherish memories of their humiliation by the Revolutionary Guards who held US Embassy staff hostage, welcome it too. Like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing - except perhaps the calamitous fiasco of their campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I wonder if these fantasists who are talking about and probably planning war against Iran have thought through all the likely consequences. Have they considered, for instance, possible Chinese reactions, and the fact that world oil supplies would certainly be disrupted, probably for a long time, with devastating economic effects? Have they considered how Russia and the central Asian republics might react? Among my friends and professional colleagues there are several Iranians for whom I have a high regard and affection. My friend Mohsen Janghorbani, a professor of epidemiology in Isfahan, translated the Dictionary of Epidemiology into Farsi.  I admit that I haven't given deep thought to scenarios involving war against Iran, but I've thought enough to fail to visualize any scenario with outcomes that are in any way happy for anybody. If I believed in prayer, I would be praying for an outbreak of sanity among leaders of the world's nations.

Wendy's diary of voyage home to Australia, 1962

This post consists of excerpts from Wendy's diary, interspersed with a few photos. We left London by train from Liverpool Street station, for the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. Over to Wendy:
Monday 30 April 1962: Awake 6 am. Breakfast on ship [ferry]. Left by train from Hook of Holland to Rotterdam at 7.40. No trouble through customs. Couldn't get into our room at hotel until 12 MD. Walked around fine city for 2 hours then went to room and slept till 3 pm. Had sandwich in dining room then a tram ride ... excellent dinner. Kids to bed 8.30.

Left: Blitzkrieg Memorial, Rotterdam

  
Tuesday May 1: ... I packed up while John went to shipping agents. Had a chance for another look around Rotterdam - a fine city. Bought nuts, raisins etc. Had a good lunch then straight to ship [MV Morelia].  Doesn't look as ship-shape as Pretoria. Unpacked; sailed at 6 pm. May 2: ... In Scheldt estuary 10 am, finally docked at 11.30 pm. Fell into bed. Set alarm for 6 am for shore going. Children played marvelously well with Lego and dolls. May 3:... Fantastic trip into ANTWERP... A splendid city with lovely statues and buildings and huge cathedral. No time to see Rubens Museum. Bitterly cold and frozen to the bone. Back on board and knitted all day. Read to children, ironed and mended. Bed 9.30 pm.





 Antwerp, City Square


May 4:Out into Channel at 6 am. A foggy day on and off, damp, cold and calm. Children being perfect angels. Played in R's cabin while I did washing then all sat out on deck. I got on well with knitting. Both D and R fell off trapeze and on back of heads. No harm done. Read to them and did puzzle book most of PM. 8 PM: In Bay of Biscay. Quite a pitch but not too bad. Captain's welcome party. May 5: Rough. Ship bucking about a lot. Managed some knitting in the AM but sick at midday. David and John sick too. Rebecca the best sailor. Missed meals and went to bed early. Kids awake at 2 and 4 am.  May 6: A lovely day. Much calmer although ship still has a roll. Spent a peaceful morning washing, mending and reading to children who are still phenomenally good. A gala lunch for which I didn't dress then a walk around whole ship, then a good look at Portuguese coast: very rugged & lovely hotels & houses. Wonderful sunset. May 7: Another calm perfect day. Gibraltar 10 am. Sat on deck with kids who once again had a good day with only one or two boredom tantrums. Knitted all day. Enormous meals again. Another wonderful sunset. May 8: Another glorious day but a bit more windy... Sat in sun with children and read to them. Wrote to Mother and Jenny in afternoon while John baby sat. Captain's party & lots of insincere speeches, drinking & talking after dinner. Bed 11 pm. May 9: MARSEILLES. Hot, humid & hazy. Had a terrible time getting away from wharf & got involved with military loading. Finally caught a bus to city & walked down market streets - oysters, tortoises. Shops expensive, children & people shabby. Lunch at vast price in modest cafe. Back to ship by taxi.                                                      
Here is David protecting Rebecca with his toy pistol, on a sidewalk in Marseille

 

 May 10: GENOVA (Genoa). A clear fine day. Berthed about 9 am. Went ashore soon after 11 am & walked to the old city & window shopped until siesta time then had an excellent trattoria lunch. Then walked to city centre and spent hours looking for a 'gabinetto' - finally relieved R & self! Back to ship feeling mangled by 5 pm. Ashore again at 8 pm, returned `10 pm very tired. May 11: Another fine warm day. Went by organized bus up to Righi to have a good dinner at the Company's expense. A lovely view. Back to town at 3 pm, walking around & shopping. Back to ship by taxi quite exhausted. May 12:Set off with Billie Warren [fellow passenger] shopping in old city. Bought frock, shoes, Mother's jersey. Met John for lunch, then more shopping and back to ship for dinner. Off again after dinner to look for a newspaper. 

Statue of Christopher Columbus, Genoa

May 13: Raining heavily. Children played very well on deck until lunch time while I knitted and John worked. After lunch took funicular up to Righi where we had a wonderful view, then bus downhill, back to ship to feed children, then out to Crespi Ristorante with Billie Warren and Chief Engineer and pub crawl along waterfront (Black Cat and Golden Gate). May 14:Washing, ironing. John rushed into town for shopping.Took children for walk in sun around wharf. After lunch took funicular up hill to Marvonolo, had delightful amble through village on hilltop. Sailed at 9 pm, bed 10 pm. May 15: LIVORNO Cold, dull morning. Berthed at Livorno 8 am. Went by hired car to Pisa and Florence through lovely Tuscany countryside, even lovelier when the sun came out.  
          
                                                                                                      
                     Wendy & Rebecca stride by Leaning Tower


 Saw Leaning Tower and Battisterie, then on to Florence; saw Piazza della Signore. Had lunch, then down to Ponte Vecchio, back up to Duomo (cathedral) and marvellous golden doors; on to Piazza Michelangelo, Straw Market. Back to Livorno on autostrada. Bedded kids down then out to spaghetti dinner. May 16: Still in Livorno. Another lovely day. Left  ship about 10 am, walked through town to hospital, back to zoo - very neatly kept with animals in concrete cages but not much exercise space or logs to jump on or claw at. Back to ship for lunch then ashore again after lunch.                                                                                                         
Wendy & Rebecca, Ponte Vecchio, River Arno
                           

May 17: Sailing along Italian coast. Saw two islands in afternoon, through Straits of Messina at 11 pm. We saw red hot lava from Stromboli and later John saw Mount Etna on Sicily; I slept through that. Children played house in morning with cardboard cartons. Captain's party and get-together. Rather drunken, melancholy evening. May 18: John sat with children, made them a wigwam of rugs while I knitted striped jersey. Two ill mannered passengers spoiling voyage for rest of us. Typed letter home. May 19: Saw snow capped mountains of Crete in distance; passed many islands including Rhodes. A glorious day, calm and sunny. Saw many seagulls, porpoises. Sat in sun aft with children, read to them for an hour early and got quite sunburnt. ... May 20: Another gorgeous day. Sat on Port side, watched coast of Turkey.. Surprisingly little shipping or fishing activity. Wonderful moonrise over entrance to ISKANDERAM at 10 pm. May 21: Up at 7 am, two large barges alongside already loading trucks. Hung around all morning, learning German way to knit while awaiting passport inspection. Finally went ashore after lunch; three hours ashore in most interesting town, highly polished brass pots etc. We bought earthenware amphorae and a brass teapot. John gave me surprise ear-rings.

Iskanderam, Turkey (at the North-East corner of the Mediterranean Sea)








The above are merely excerpts; I've just quoted some highlights. Wendy's diary goes on to describe our passage through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, a brief stop to fill the oil tanks in Aden, across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle, and finally on to Port Adelaide. But this post is already rather long, so I'll leave the story suspended mid-voyage. She's described enough to explain why we loved sea travel on passenger-carrying freighters. We had our best voyage ever, our final one, at the beginning of 1964, across the Pacific from Sydney, through the Panama Canal to Jamaica, Vera Cruz Mexico, then up the eastern seaboard of the USA. I'll talk about that voyage in future posts.

Life in London 1961-62

Our London home 1961-62 was the one on the left with the round window. The partly visible windows to the left were our bedroom. The lower photo is the view of Newington Green from our bedroom window. Our full address was Cromwell Lodge, 30 Newington Green, London, N1; the district was called Islington, now a very up-market trendy part of London but rather dilapidated and down at heel in 1961.

All the time that I spent productively expanding my mind as described in the previous post, Wendy was caring wonderfully with the slenderest of resources, for Rebecca and David. We had to make do with a stipend intended for a single man, and what remained of my savings from the few years in general practice. We were really, really poor. Yet it was one of the happiest years of our lives. Our house in Newington Green was a fascinating old place, over 200 years old, with a new kitchen to replace the one destroyed by a bomb during the blitz. We had a modern kitchen with a new “wetback” stove that heated the kitchen, a decent-sized fridge and a washer and dryer for the laundry. There were parks nearby, Tufnell Park, Clissold Park and Finsbury Park, and of course the little scrap of grass in Newington Green itself. Wendy walked to and from the Ridley Road market a mile or so away to get provisions for us, often bringing back a stroller piled high with spuds, cauliflower, carrots, mincemeat, etc, and one or both kids perched precariously on top. We quickly learnt which of the abundant child-friendly entertainments were available at no or very low cost all over London Town. Feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square cost the bus fare plus tuppence for two little bags of corn, one each for the kids. We were too poor to take many photographs that year, but the few we have confirm how happy and carefree we were in that year of financial anxiety. While I worked, Wendy explored London with Rebecca and David; she has many stories to tell. 

I never confided fully in Wendy at the time, how close we were to total bankruptcy. On a few occasions I had just enough money to buy that week's food. She knew, of course, that we were very hard up, and cooperated wonderfully in scrimping and saving to make ends meet. Looking back from our affluence now, I recall with immense pleasure the innumerable simple ways we entertained ourselves and the children. We discovered free museums all over the nearby parts of inner London, and cheap ways to entertain Rebecca and David. Riding on the top deck of the Number 73 bus from Newington Green to Oxford Circus, or further, along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner; visiting the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and discovering the little bronze fairies, elves, goblins all around its base; feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square; watching the wizened elderly mariners with exquisite model ships that sailed the Round Pond; all these and more were some of our entertainments, and cost no more than the bus fares.

Our social lives were rather circumscribed. We met my father and his miserable wife Margret - a sour woman who never in all the years I knew her had a good word to say for anybody. My father was pleased and interested to meet Wendy, and showed a transient and superficial interest in our children; but never lifted a finger to help us, showed not the slightest concern about our welfare. We had far more affectionate concern from strangers who were our neighbours, the pretty French girl Marie-Christianne and her South-African Indian friend Ismael Patel - who got her pregnant and married her while we were there, and brought them to Canada soon afterwards, where they re-entered our lives years later when we too came to live in Canada. Our other neighbours included a biochemist friend of our landlord, Arnold Rosen; her name was Dora and she lived on the top floor of the house, visited from time to time by her boyfriend. Anne Windsor, a pretty young red-headed school teacher was our other live-in neighbour, also occupying a bed-sitting room on an upper floor; she was a built-in baby-sitter, who later had a tragedy in her life when her fiance drowned while they were holidaying in Spain.

The house at Newington Green had a large old garden with an overgrown frog pond and two little statues at the bottom end of it, just below a high wall that separated us from a school ground. Our children played happily there, and came with us on buses and the Underground at weekends when we explored the parks, museums and many other sights and sounds of London. It was wonderfully happy, carefree year, despite our poverty, or perhaps because of it. 

We were too poor to afford a Christmas Tree, but in our back garden, Wendy found a large branch of a shrub that had broken off the main trunk. She brought it inside, stuck it in a bucket of sand, and decorated it with little bells made by pressing aluminium milk bottle tops on a lemon squeezer. Milk bottle tops were gold if the milk was very rich and creamy, red if the milk was homogenized, and silver for skim milk. Our little bells were a mixture of all three. Then a miracle took place: the bare and leafless branch came to life indoors in the warmth and with its base in the moist sand, it burst into leaf, so our bare branch turned green with little leaves sprouting forth all over it. Rebecca and David, and Wendy and I, were enthralled by this minor miracle. The Wheelers invited us to spend a few days with them at Christmas; they were tigers for punishment! But Bill fell ill, so we stayed with them only for a couple of days instead of the week or so for which they had invited us.

In the early spring of 1962 we allowed ourselves our only extravagance. I rented a car, we drove to Oxford, and on to the Cotswolds where the kids fell in love with the model village at Bourton on the Water. Rebecca is on the bridge in the model village in the upper of these two photos, both kids are on the real bridge in the lower photo. A few years later when we were living in Edinburgh in 1965-69 we managed to revisit the model village in Bourton on the Water several times.

Our “year” in London lasted only about 11 months. Our homeward bound passenger carrying freighter was ahead of schedule. We had to get ourselves to Rotterdam to embark about 3-4 weeks before the originally scheduled sailing date. This was a minor disadvantage of choosing to travel on passenger-carrying freighters rather than regularly scheduled passenger ships. Our journey home will be the subject of another post. 

Waiting for a Number 73 Bus in Newington Green

 Marie-Christianne and Ismael with baby Rebecca, and our Rebecca and David in the back garden at 30 Newington Green, London N1, spring 1962

L-R: Anne Windsor, Dora, carrying David,
Wendy, Rebecca, Dora's boy friend (Eric?) in the garden at 30 Newington Green