Return to previous page	Listen to interview
Trevor Anderson Transcript of interview by Ina Bertrand 11 January 2001 - tape 1 (1 hour 5 mins)
Trevor Anderson interviewed at Essendon on 11th January 2001 Ok can we start with the very beginning? Where and when were you born and a bit about your family? Ok, I was born in Melbourne in 1941, 20th July. My … I was the oldest child, so I was the first born in my family. My father was in the army at that stage. He had been, I think he joined the army down at Queenscliff, which was the Royal Australian Artillery and then during the war he served in the Ordinance Corps up in New Guinea I grew up in … partly in Camberwell, Balwyn and then in South Caulfield where my parents bought a house. So you didn't live on bases then, on military bases? No, no. Well that was 1941 during the war so my father was away in New Guinea. Em … I think my father was away for quite a fair bit of my early childhood because my father's mother was … her name was Ethel, but it turned out that I called her Keek because I overhead my mother talking with her quite a lot and they were obviously referring to my father as Keith, but I distorted this, and so that grew up as a family type of name. So, I suppose I must have been maybe 3 or 4 when my father came home and I knew him. Did you have difficulty adjusting to having your father back? Eh … not that I recall. Em, the only difficulties I ever had I recall regarding to that was when I went to school. At that stage after the war I suppose my recollections were other boys at school … there was much talk about the war and I can recall spending a lot of time in school perfecting the drawing of a Spitfire plane and I was bullied that time because people disputed that my … some boys disputed that my father had been to the war. And it is only in retrospect that I realise that that sort of played some sort of significant part in my life, that disputation of what my family background was. Did your father talk much about the war? Em … no, not really for many decades really. He had his moments. I think at Christmas time he became quite maudlin when he heard the carol Silent Night and he spoke of an experience in New Guinea where they had been under fire from Japanese mortars and the Catholic Priests had been giving mass to people who were in the water and they had sung, the people, the natives had sung Silent Night. So that was really, I suppose, one of the lasting memories that he sort of used to talk about and he talked about that about Christmas time, about how he had been sort of moved by that experience. But most other times he didn't have much to say about it. Did he leave the army after the war? No he stayed on as a career - he had been in the permanent military before the war and he continued on, so, after the war in 1950 the family went to England. He was posted to England to continue doing some course that at the … I think, the Imperial College of Science or an establishment like that relating to explosives, because he was an expert in explosives, being in the Ordinance Corps. So do you think he expected you to become a soldier? Em … no, I don't think he expected it so much as that probably later on he thought it was not a bad idea. Em … we spent some time, 2 years in England and 6 months in Germany. In Germany we spent … we lived within the British Occupation Forces, so we had quite a lot of contact with military sort of people and so on. And in England we lived in a village and often had people from different parts of the Commonwealth - India, Canada, Nigeria, people like that staying with us at weekends, so I had seen quite a variety of military people who were my father's colleagues and friends. But he didn't really have, I don't think, a strong expectation. So you came back to Australia from … ? We came back to Australia, to South Australia, where he was officer commanding an ordinance ammunition depot in South Australia near Gladstone, the mid north of South Australia. So I went to local schools there, primary school and then to high school and it was at high school at Gladstone that I started and I formed the idea that I would like to study medicine and em .. I don't think I sort of wavered from that moment on, even though I didn't have a very clear notion of what medicine was about. I liked science and I thought that it would be good do medicine as a matter of applied science. I had read the story at that stage of Albert Schweizer and I was quite impressed with that, although I didn't have a lot of musical talent like he did. Oh, I think that is like a lot of young boys have been impressed by him. That's right. So, you trained though in Melbourne didn't you? So then we returned to Melbourne in 1957 and I went to Melbourne High School and em … really just went on through that to matriculation in 1960 and then to get in medicine in 1961 at Melbourne University. Right, which hospitals were you working in? The Royal Melbourne … I was, and then The Austin Hospital I did my … what was called First Year Residency, they call it internship now but, it was First Year Residency at The Austin Hospital and then from there I went into the army. As far as my army service was concerned, I actually joined the army while I was an undergraduate in fourth year. What was called a short service commission. The army offered a short service commission to medical students and dental students in order to try to recruit those professions into the military, the idea being that they paid fees and a salary during the undergraduate course and then once qualified, we would serve 4 years in the … well in my case, in the medical corps on a short service commission in return for that payment. It was rather like, I suppose, the things they had for recruiting teachers into the Education Department in those days. I know those ones too. Ok, so then your first postings were to military hospitals were they, when did you begin? Yes. Well the first … the start was after that was that em there was an indoctrination or training course into military aspects of medicine conducted at the Healesville, the army School of Health, which located at Healesville in those days and that was for 3 months and from there my first posting was to Townsville to the camp hospital up there. What was the Healesville training about? Was there … what was considered military aspects of medicine? Yeah, and also I suppose the military cu.., that was indoctrination into the military culture. Culture, yes. Which was essentially a, you know, how to wear the uniform properly, who to salute and when, how to march, the sort of commands you are given, those sorts of things. The sort of things that are done in basic training for recruits into the military, but then in addition to that there was lectures about the organisational structure of the army and the various terminology and em some practical aspects where you did a bit of working out and using radios for communication and something to do with, also acquaintance with minor tactics like, in a sense, like playing soldiers really. Any weapons training? Yes, we did some time firing the basic weapons which em small arms .. in those days the SLR, the self loading rifle that was the standard infantry weapon. What rank did you go in as? As an undergraduate, I was a Lieutenant and once I graduated I was a Captain. Right, so then you went to Townsville? Townsville, that is right, yeah. And what sort of work was it up there? Well, it was, I suppose, you could describe it as general practice type of medicine, with a military eh … within the military, so, I would conduct a clinic at the Task Force with one of the Infantry Battalions there, the 6 RAR, and it would be just like a general practice, so I would go there and the soldiers would come in as patients and they would be processed through in the usual sort of way. The difference being from a civilian general practice of course was that there were no children, women and they were all, by and large, healthy young men. There were a few people in there - late 30's and early 40's - these were the career NCO's and officers, but, by and large, they were sort of young people in their 20's and early 30's. And the sort of medicine really was, I suppose, the infectious diseases like the 'flu and all those sorts of things. A lot of sporting type injuries, sprains of ankles, a few broken bones and the odd dislocation occurring on the football field. Cuts, sometimes requiring suturing, that sort of thing. Did you find it satisfying? I found it quite interesting, but because the medical corps were very supportive and encouraging to maintaining and furthering my medical skills so, apart from doing … conducting those clinics and looking after the health of the battalion, I also was arranged to do some sessions at the local general hospital working with the consultant surgeon and physician so that I was able to sort of continue expanding my training and getting experience with more experienced and qualified doctors in a variety of other areas. So it wasn't just the static, eh, doing the … what you might call the hackwork of general practice. Where did you go then? Ah well from then I went to Vietnam. Right, when was that? So that was May 1969. And by then you were married? Well, I married in actually 8th January 1968, which was just after I had completed my first year of residency and just before I really got eh … became involved directly in all the military work. So, my wife Janice and I then were fairly newlyweds going to Townsville in April, May, 1968. Right, how did you find out that you were going to Vietnam? Well, in those days it was on the cards that I would eventually go to Vietnam. The usual posting time was something like 2 years in a particular posting. So, my posting was to Townsville and during the course of 1968, while I was actually providing the medical services to the 6th Battalion, the CO approached and asked would I be prepared to go with them to Vietnam as their regimental medical officer. The other alternative would have been is that they would have been allocated a medical officer from elsewhere who would then have been posted to the battalion just before they were leaving in early 1969. So, at that stage, I took the view that if the CO was asking me to go, it was a better situation than being posted to some unit unasked. So I decided that I .. recognised the view that I would be going sooner or later and also at that stage I had the view that I should make the best of my military experience because I wasn't considering I would remain in the army as a long term career, but that it was something that I should try to extract from it … the sort of military medical experience that was unique. Did you have a lot of knowledge about the war and about what you could expect in Vietnam? Em … in retrospect I would say no really. Does that mean that you thought you did at the time? Em … but I knew even less than I thought I did. Right. So what of preparation did the army give you for going? Well, during the course of 1969, being associated with the 6th Battalion, they went on various training exercises and, in particular, I spent quite long periods with their Mortar Platoon out in the high range country at the back of Townsville where they have the artillery range. This was because the military had a rule that artillery practice could not go on unless medical assistance, skilled medical assistance, was within 20 minutes. Now, they did have a helicopter, they could have had helicopters, but in those days they did not have the helicopters available for that, so therefore the doctor had to go out with the Mortar Platoon to be immediately available. It was about a 3 hour 4 wheel drive to get out there. So I spent quite a bit of time with the battalion's Mortar Platoon out in the field and we were camping there a lot. And then on their preparatory exercises, so I also operated with the battalion which essentially means with an infantry battalion you carry your bedding on your back and all your food and you walk long distances and then dig holes to sleep in in the night and pack up and move on and so on. So it's a … I suppose you would call it arduous camping and bushwalking. And was it useful to you when you got to Nui Dat? Em … not so much because once we got to Nui Dat and, as far as I was concerned, transport was fairly readily available so we had to … wherever I had to go virtually I was carried in either by a land vehicle or a helicopter. But it was useful in that it sort of toughened me up physically, and you couldn't say the conditions of living in Nui Dat were particularly salubrious. I slept on a camp stretcher under a mosquito net on duck boards with a 12 x 12 tent over the top and sand bags up to about waist height. That was in the Nui Dat area. And that was relatively comfortable for outdoor camping if you like and we would get in a building that was the mess. Out on operations though I lived in the … within the Far Support base where the battalion headquarters was located and there was eh … what usually consisted of some sort of a hole dug in the ground, sand bagged and roofed over to give protection against any sort of mortar or rocket fire. The command eh … battalion command operated from in there with radio communication and then within a sort of perimeter the eh … all the people who were part of the battalion headquarters team were located and that included myself. I had a … again had a sort of a primitive regimental aid post which was again a sand bagged hole in the ground that would accommodate perhaps only one or two, maybe three people if need be and within that perimeter we had some artillery and the battalion mortars which can provide covering fire to, I think about 10 or 12 kilometres radius from that point. So, the tactics then would be that, during the time I was there was that a Far Support base would be set up, the battalion headquarters would go in, establish that base, mortar, artillery would be sent in and then from that particular position, rifle companies would patrol within, usually the artillery or mortar fire radius which was, as I said, in about 10 or 12 kilometres. And what about your part in this? Did you stay put or did you go out with them? I went out … I was in … I didn't go out with the rifle companies, except on rare occasions. On one occasion, for example, I was at a Far Support base where a company was given the task of going out to a particular area to try to locate a Vietcong hospital which was believed to be dug under ground in the vicinity, so the CO suggested that I go with the company since I would be … if they did locate a hospital, they would need at least some medical expertise to deal with what they might discover. But on that particular occasion we didn't discover or come across that hospital. So mostly you were at the base then? Mostly, I was at the Far Support base there. What sort of facility did you have there? Facilities … well I slept in a trench. It was a trench … the trench was a "T" shaped trench so that you could stand in the cross arm of the "T' up to about chest high and that had a layer of sand bags around the periphery. The idea was that at stand to in the first light or before first light in the dusk in the evening everybody would stand to in these firing trenches with their weapons because that, from experience, was the most likely time of any sort of attack. And, so that is all that was. But leading back from that the sort of main stem of the "T" if you like was another trench about - a little wider than the width of my shoulders, and about 6 ft long and in that I had an inflatable mattress and a blanket and a mosquito net slung over the top and then that was roofed over with some beams and sandbags. So you could only have one patient at a time then? Well no, this was my … this was just my sleeping area, this was where I slept at night. Back from that I had a … first … they were different in different places, but I did have a … what was an R rated regimental aid post, RAP, which was a rectangular hole, I suppose about 8 ft., maybe 6ft or 8ft deep and that was roofed over with some timber beams and again covered with a layer of 2 or 3 layers of sandbags filled with sand. At the first Far Support Base I was at actually I slept in that RAP. We had a … probably room for maybe 4 or 5 people could fit in that if necessary, if there were casualties, but I think the first or second night in that we had a massive downpour of rain and I was sleeping on a platform that was carved out of the earth in this, that was at about waist height and I had a call from the battalion headquarters on the field telephone, they wanted me over there in the night and I stepped out of this into waist deep water. So … it didn't prove very successful and we didn't have to use it. After that I had a tent above ground if I needed to treat any patients. So what sort of patients were you getting then? Well, again, in that particular situation most of the patients I'd have were fairly mild sort of … mild sort of em matters … there would be a few people with gastro intestinal upsets, diarrhea and vomiting, usually transient insect bites. Also the effects of dehydration and heat … eh prickly heat … that people had developed these skin rashes. They didn't sweat adequately and they developed eh very itchy and uncomfortable skin rashes related to the humidity and the heat. Fairly minor … If there were … these people in that circumstance in the Far Support Base, you see were mostly the people who were the Mortar Platoon people and the artillery people who were active in the night or often in the day firing off their guns and during the day they would be involved in just maintaining the area and there would be some patrolling. But the majority of the people in the Far Support Base battalion headquarters had .. eh … you might describe them as organisational jobs, so there would be the Intelligence Officer and he would be sort of keeping check of where people were and collating intelligent information as to where enemy movements were and that sort of thing. So the battalion headquarters there is the operational area and the administrative sort of area of the battalion on active duty. What sort of medical support did you have? Where was the nearest hospital for instance? Well, the nearest, we had a small convalescent medical clinic, I suppose you would call it, at Nui Dat. There was a doctor there - a Major - and of course there were the other … usually one battalion went out - there were three battalions in the task force., so, usually it meant that there was some eh one or two - there was the doctor there at the clinic, then there were one or two doctors from the actual other battalions and there was a dentist - or a couple of dentists, and they had that there. The main hospital though was at … 1 Australian Field Hospital … was at Fung Tow, which was essentially a small, fully equipped surgical and medical type of hospital. What was your communication with them? We could be, I suppose more often than not, we were within 20 minutes or so helicopter ride there. So it wasn't, in terms of time, separation, there wasn't a great deal of separation. How did you come to be on the helicopter into the minefield? Well, that was one of those days where I was expecting to go out to a local village with our Intelligence Officer who had arranged a meeting with somebody to glean some intelligence about the movements of the local North Vietnamese and Vietcong regiments and I was going out to conduct what was … came under the term medical and dental medcap - Dentcap they call them. Medical and dental aid programs where I have done doctor and/or dentists went out to local villages and we worked with the local medical sort of assistant person who brings some sort of medical and dental attention to the local population. So that, I had my sort of pack with some medical equipment and drugs and things like that in preparation to going out on that. I got a call from the 2RC in the command post to say that one of our platoons from A Company had run into some difficulty and were calling for medical assistance and the reconnaissance helicopter that the CO used for reconnoitring was available and would I go out in that and see what I could do. So that is how I came to be in this little helicopter. How far away from your base was it? From … ? Was it a minefield? How far did you have to go? Um … it is hard to recall now. It would have only been between 5 and 10 minutes helicopter ride away. So it wouldn't have been very far. What did you find when you got there? Well, we flew over area that was … I can best describe … relate to Australian conditions as like our Mallee Scrub, you know, somewhat sparse, straggly trees with sort of clearings in between. But when the helicopter pilot came to put the helicopter down because we could see the remainder of the platoon signalling to us on the ground. The trees were just too close together for him to comfortably bring the helicopter down. He said to me, "look I can't land here because we will damage the rotors and we will crash" so I said then, "if you can get in reasonably close I can get out the door and onto the skid of the helicopter and then drop down", which he said, "ok don't be too jerky in jumping off the … when you jump out." So, I did that and eh, very conscious really of the risks and in fact before I did it I suppose I weighed up in my mind, should I sort of simply say, well there is nothing I can do here because we can't land and go back, or should I try a bit harder and I suppose, for whatever reasons I tried, I decided I should try a bit harder and the helicopter pilot readily agreed that he could do that, so that is what I ended up doing. How did you know where to drop to? Well the Corporal em … one of the section leader Corporals, he was a man Meads - John Meads - who was sort of signalling to us and he had his bayonet and had used that as a (??30.00) see so landmines there, about the size of a tin of baked beans or something like that and sticking out from them they had these spikes which, so that the mine is buried about 6" or 8" under the surface, and then the ground is covered so that the spike, the detonator spike is just below the surface, so that if you tread on top of one of these spikes, the pressure is sufficient to detonate a charge in the mine itself when then lifts out of the ground and then there is a secondary explosion, the main explosion, which shatters the mine and sprays fragments all around the place. Now some of them with a … one way of detecting them is to use a metal detector, but if you haven't got a metal detector, the other way is for somebody using a probe such as a bayonet pushed obliquely into the ground and then you … by detecting anything you can dig sideways in and uncover the mine and then make it safe. So that is what this fellow John Meads said they were doing. He had been crawling around so … I essentially dropped into his footsteps and then very gingerly followed him around to where his platoon commander lay. One look at him made me realise that he was probably dead because he was very still and in fact examination quickly revealed the fact that he had been killed by an initial mine explosion. But there were other men lying around wounded too? Em … well I think there were 8 we eventually evacuated there who were wounded in that first explosion. I suppose about … maybe 6 might have been quite seriously injured and the rest were relatively minor injuries. How many had you managed to look at before you were injured yourself? Well, we had in fact cleared … by the … we managed to sort of clear all those initial casualties out, evacuate them all out and when I was injured it was just prior to me leaving the field. I had sort of done all that I could do there and we had moved off to a safe area while an area was cleared of trees to allow a helicopter to land. Well that was in the process of being done. Field Engineers were in with mine detectors looking for mines and laying out white tape to demarcate areas that were regarded as safe and clear of mines versus those which was uncertain and em … we were moving towards this area to get a helicopter and it was then that this other mine went off. I say this other mine went off because I don't know who trod on it. But it wasn't you? I don't know that even. I have a vivid picture, recollection of the way the area was marked off with tape and I was very conscious before I even went in and even while I was in there of being careful where I trod and I was told in the hospital back at Nui Dat that it was Meads who had stepped off and triggered off this other mine. But then some year or so later, the eh … somebody came up to me and said, "You are the first person I have ever seen who survived treading on a mine" and he insisted that I had trodden on it, so I don't really know. Well I suppose really afterwards it doesn't matter much does it? It doesn't matter really very much. How were you treated at the site and who looked after you and what did they do? Well, I sort of fell to the ground and … in a lot of pain and I couldn't see anything and I immediately … and I can sort of remember … sort of moving about a bit and then sort of freezing and thinking I had better not … I had better just keep very still in case there's more mines to go off. And the most pain I had was in my right leg and I couldn't see, I had a field dressing in a pocket in my shirt which I took off and started to try to apply that to my right leg. And a fellow came up to me and he said, "Oh, can I help you mate?" and then I said, "You can stop to try and put this bandage on my leg." I had a horror of bleeding to death actually, but em … he helped me there. This is not a medical person at all, just a … ? No, actually this turns out to be a man that I subsequently had some meeting with, Geoff Andrews. He was a Sapper with the Field Engineers and had a mine detector and he had been sort of working a little bit of distance and he heard the mine explosion and he saw me, he saw this other fellow Meads and saw him sitting up and thought he was ok and stepped past him, 'cos I was covered with blood from my head face down and so he then said that and then somebody else came along and said we had better get you out of here Doc and I think that was the company Sergeant Major who lifted me then on to the … what they call a jungle penetrator … it looked like a weight with a fold down seat that the hovering helicopter could lower down through trees and because of its weight and its shape it would penetrate the trees and I was strapped onto that and winched out and taken off to an American hospital as it turned out. Were you conscious the whole time? Yes. Yes, I was very conscious I suppose. That must have been an eerie experience to not be able to see anything, but to be able to hear everything? Em … yes, I don't know about eerie. It was fairly frightening. People were offering to give me morphine and I was refusing that because I had a sort of sense that there was more chance of the morphine reducing my … em … life expectancy than doing anything. I had a view that I wouldn't actually die from the pain, but I could die from the effects of inappropriate or overdose of morphine, so I refused that. At that stage I had thought that the reason why I couldn't see was that I just had all this blood over my face, but em … then when I came into this American hospital, the triage area, and there were surgeons there and they em … they took over and debated how they were going to treat me while I listened in. At that stage they were considering drilling through my skull - (??36.3) we called them, because in those days they didn't have CT scans so if there was some intra-cranial bleeding, it was imperative to arrest the bleeding or you could get adverse affects from compression of the brain due to grazed intra-cranial pressure. So that was a big apprehension of mine at that stage. Fortunately they didn't have to do that because the X-rays revealed that no pieces of metal had actually penetrated through my skull. So where was the blood coming from? All from your leg? Blood was coming from superficial injuries on my face. The skin and everything like that, so the face is em … you know very well endowed with blood supply so eh … you know, cuts on the face lose a lot of blood really. But as it turned out of course my eyes were injured too and so I woke in the hospital. I had both legs in plaster at that stage and a drip and things like that and also my eyes were bandaged and I was told fairly soon after that they had to remove the left eye to begin with, but they were hopeful the right eye could be saved. I think it was about 3 days later when they removed the bandages and I couldn't see anything and it was at that point that I knew in my own mind that I was blind, totally blind. The doctors and everybody sort of maintained this sort of optimistic attitude and I was on antibiotics and intravenous antiobiotics and so on and they kept the … left the eye in but eh … I was back in Australia in 2 weeks. I spent a week in the hospital in Vietnam and then took about a week of going, first I think to Butterworth, and then Richmond in New South Wales and then down here to Laverton and (??38.3) to Heidelberg Hospital. How long were your legs in plaster? My right leg was the main one where I had the main fracture and that was about 13 weeks, which was remarkably short really. Do you think it was an advantage to have had medical training and to know what was going on or … em did that actually make it worse? Em. I don't know that I have ever really thought about that. I think that overall it is an advantage because I knew the system. END OF SIDE A, TAPE 1 SIDE B, TAPE 1 … and so, while, you know, the disadvantage might be is that I also was aware of all the complications of the things that could go wrong. No false hopes? I didn't have false hopes, that's right. Ok, so rehabilitation. How long did this take and how did you go about doing it, because obviously it was your own will as much as anything? That began almost straight away actually. Prior to my leaving Vietnam or in a week or two before I had been injured, I had actually been in conversation with a consultant psychiatrist who was from New South Wales, from The Institute of Psychiatry. He was the consultant for the Australian Army up there at the time and had talked to him about some psychiatric cases that I had had in the battalion and I was also considering the idea of what I would do when I left the army and specialising in psychiatry. So he knew that I was interested in this. So just before I was … came back to Australia, evacuated back to Australia, he came up to me - Maurice Sainsbury it was. He came up to me and said, "Look, don't give up this idea of doing psychiatry because it is possible. I know a psychiatrist in New South Wales who practises as a psychiatrist who is blind and I will get in touch with you later on." So I left Vietnam with that sort of idea in my mind. So when I came down here and people said … started talking about what are you going to do, I kept voicing that. But the … I suppose the first thing that people sort of said to me, "How can I help?" so I asked could I have a watch? So the Red Cross presented me with a brail watch which, you know, seems a little sort of thing, but just being able to keep track of time when you are in hospital is … it is just a step in independence, not having to ask people, but being able to look at the time is sort of a step. Good motivation for learning brail too I should think. Yes. Well no, brail watches aren't … they are a bit of a misnomer … they are really just a sort of a palpable watch. You can see this one I have got. I can open the face, the hands are the same as an ordinary analogue watch and the numbers are little raised dots so that you can quickly feel with your fingers where the hands … which is the … differentiate between the large and the small hand and which numbers they are pointing to. So it is not … Brail on the other hand is a relatively simply pattern code using raised dots. It is essentially basically a cell of 6 dots, 2 columns of 3, and … depending on that configuration, they form the letters of the alphabet and numbers and a whole lot of contractions that enable you to read and write English. And it is also used in mathematics and in other languages. But I … so. So while I was in hospital I asked about that and somebody arranged for a brail teacher to come out and teach me the rudimentary elements of brail while I was in hospital. An occupational therapist came around and said, "How can I help?" and I said, "Well, you can teach me to touch type." She didn't know how to touch type so she went and found a big manual typewriter and a book on teaching typing so she taught me … I memorised the keys of the typewriter and the layout and by the time I left hospital after about 16 weeks, I could touch type, slowly, but I could write a letter with a standard typewriter. How did you know if you made a mistake? Well, I didn't, I just had to sort of concentrate very strongly on where my fingers were and what I was writing. And of course I did make a number of mistakes in those days, but … But you were able to go onto university to do a post-grad degree? Yes. You didn't use brail there? I used tape recorders mainly. I made some enquiries and decided that for my purposes brail … learning brail to become fluent at it, both reading and writing was going to take too long, whereas I could get … and even so, any text material I needed would still have to be translated from standard printed English or whatever into the brail format, whereas I could get somebody to read onto a tape and that would be immediate and also I discovered that I could actually speed the tapes up and so that I could listen to tape material about 150% - sometimes 200%, but comfortably most information I could listen to at about 1&#frac12 times the rate at which it had been read. Did you have to train your memory as well? No, I just had to train myself to be more systematic I think. That certainly … I learned to become more sort of ruthless in discarding things that I didn't think were necessary, so I had to become much better organised. I couldn't just … as I have always tended to do, look at something interesting and say, "Oh, I will put that aside" and you know put this paper aside and then you accumulate all these papers which, I suppose, lots of us do, but never get round to reading. What I sort of made a point of … ok I can't deal with it now, or I can't deal with it in a week or so, I am not going to keep it. Right. So I had to be very well organised like that. How did you manage exams? Em … the exams I had an individual supervisor and in a private room … the supervisor read me the questions and I then typed my answers and he read them back to me (or she) read them back to me and with … just as purely a reader … and I then made any … proffered any corrections I wanted and that was how I did the written exam. Did you have trouble getting a job afterwards? Well, not … I assume by now you have left the army, I should have asked you about that shouldn't I? Not really because it was mid 1969 when I was injured - July 1969 - it was actually the day that they reported the moon landing and in Heidelberg Hospital, by the end of that year, I was … the staff psychiatrist at the hospital had organised for me to go down to the ward rounds and participate in the teaching and training sessions that were run for the doctors there in psychiatry with the Professor of Psychiatry for Melbourne University, Brian Davies, and so I was able to impress him enough that I was interested and capable and when I approached he simply said, "Well look, what we require is that you demonstrate your competence and knowledge. How you do it doesn't matter to us, provided you can demonstrate your competence and knowledge." So then for the following 12 months I was … I was still in there … for the following 18 months I was still in the army. They kept me on there and so that is when I did most of my training and then in, I think, 1972, I, as part of my training, I approached the Mental Health Department at Royal Park and I was employed there as a trainee … as a medical office in psychiatry and I then passed the exams for the Melbourne University of Psychiatric Medicine in 1973 and was appointed as a psychiatrist at Royal Park then. I suppose in many respects I was fortunate in that there is not a lot of … there wasn't so much competition to get into psychiatry in those days. I think in Australia really, apart from competition to get into particular jobs in particular places, it has always been relatively easy to get a job as a doctor. There was only one sort of set back I had there after I had passed the exams in 1973 … is that I did apply for a job as psychiatrist at the Parkville Psychiatric Unit which was the joint unit between the Mental Health Department and the Melbourne University Department of Psychiatry and I was appointed and then told that the university had refused … rejected me on the grounds that they wanted someone who could supervise the medical students and I wouldn't be able to read their histories that they have to write up as part of their training. I accepted that and worked at Royal Park. I suppose in retrospect I probably could have … I don't know about then, but certainly today I could have appealed that to the Equal Opportunities Commission and said I was being discriminated against. But you didn't go back into psychiatric work with the army? No. Did you ever have any interest in going back to deal with Vietnam vets for instance? Not directly at that stage, no. Has it happened in the course of your general sort of … Well, I did … 1971 … during all of 1970 I worked out at Heidelberg Repat. where I was really sort of … I was doing the work of a psychiatric medical officer and there were a few Vietnam veterans coming through the psychiatric ward then, although most of the patients with psychiatric conditions were in fact people from the earlier conflicts. Right. So, at that … in those years, in the early 1970's I was more focused on training and developing my experience and skills as a psychiatrist than in considering applying them to any particular group like Vietnam veterans. There must have been a lot of other adjustments too, if you could just briefly comment about em … your marriage, your … the things that you used to do as a … that were no longer open to you. Well that's … I mean I think the effects on my marriage and family have probably continued for a long time and have continued, I suppose I was, my oldest daughter was born in March of 1969 and I was injured in July and not long after that my wife's mother died as a result of breast cancer. So then I was injured in Vietnam so not only had she a husband who had gone off to the war and then her mother died, but then her husband was severely injured, so that was a big thing. And I suppose in many respects we sort of put things off. I was conscious of the notions - the theoretical notions - as well as practical notions of loss and bereavement and how it affects people, but it is one thing having an academic knowledge of these things and also a husband or a wife can't be a therapist for the partner. You can give advice, but you know you can't be, in a sense you can be your own doctor to a certain point, you can be your own therapist, but there are grave, gross limitations on how far you can do that and I suppose we sort of soldiered on, the two of us, I suppose we had ourselves and our daughter and we sort of, in a sense, became immersed in ourselves. Did you keep in touch with the people in the army? I did write letters to them for a while, but after a while that sort of drifted off because I suppose really because we had been acquaintances and friends by virtue of common activities rather than we had necessarily chosen each other as a result of other, more personal interests. Did you join any of the organisations? Well, sort of. I will say sort of because my father was a member of the RSL and he immediately took the opportunity to join me up with the RSL down at St Georges Road in Elsternwick but I was sort of, you would say, a lapsed member for many years. About 20 years really. I didn't really continue paying up the membership and I didn't stick with it. Do you march on ANZAC Day? I have in recent years, I didn't last year. I really started, I suppose, when my kids were teenagers and they started expressing an interest and said you should go in so I did it, in a sense, I went in, I think the first time I went with my son and we marched together and then I think 2 of my daughters at least have been in with me and Janice has too. Ok, tell us the story about getting back from university. Well, I'd had a person teach me how to use a long cane which is essentially you sweep the ground in front so you find … detect obstacles before you trip over them. So my wife used to pick me up from the university after I had been to lectures in the afternoon and I determined that sooner or later I would have to do it by myself. So I told her not to bother this particular night and I would catch the tram home. Now, from my earlier recollections I knew the geography of the area around Grattan Street and Mount Alexander Road but walking along by myself with this long cane sweeping the ground, the distances seemed inordinate - they seemed much longer. And I did get home on the tram. I asked the tram conductor where I could get off and he put me off and so on, but I was absolutely lathered with perspiration. I felt terrified. It was more terrifying, I think that journey home in that particular way than when I had actually gone into the minefield. So did it get easier? It gets easier every time you do it? It got easier and I think, I mean that is my experience, I think most people's experience is if something is difficult, the more often you do it, the easier it becomes, the less stressful it becomes. Ok, support? Well I think that there was a lot of emphasis on what I have achieved, but I have always been conscious of how much my achievements are in a sense the result of teamwork. From support from institutions, support from many individuals and most particularly from my wife and family. While there are lots of things that I can do as a blind person, with some simple tricks or adaptive technology, there are lots of things that I can't do and there are also lots of things that I am very slow to do and so it makes it much easier and less frustrating if other people can do those things for me. The medical profession has, I've found, always been extremely supportive. When I went to Professor Brian Davies, his attitude was to say, "Well you just have to demonstrate your competence." When I went to Melbourne University enquiring about doing the Diploma of Psychological Medicine, Professor Wright, Pansy Wright, whose comment simply was 'How can I help?" and that has been the case, I think, by and large in the profession. And the Department of Veteran Affairs out at Heidelberg, the staff there were very willing to be helpful. They didn't really know how they were going to be helpful because, for example, earlier on they kept on insisting that they could come out and put raised toilet seats and handrails in the bathroom, which I didn't need them, but they had that capacity to do that and so that is what they were offering. I think since the … the Heidelberg has changed and so, and the Department of Veteran Affairs has become more bureaucratic it is less easy to get the assistance that I need. For instance they provided me with a typewriter earlier on, but when I acquired my own computer with speed synthesiser and then I sort of realised that perhaps they might subsidise it and I wrote to them and asked did they have any provision for updating equipment that they had earlier given me. I have been given the run around a bit, although I have ultimately got what I needed from them. So their bureaucracy is a bit hard to navigate through I have to say. The army, well once I was no longer a member of the army I think they … officially they don't sort of really care much. There are individuals and the Battalion Association who have taken an interest and who have contacted me and they are there supportive in the background, although in practical terms they haven't really done much. But I think, to be fair, they don't know what to do. I mean, in a sense, as a blind doctor I am really almost a "one off". People don't know what to do. They would like to be helpful, but half the time they don't know what to do.
Return to previous page	Listen to interview

Top of page

Victorians at War - Oral History Project