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