5

THE POLITICS OF PEACE

At the end of my working holiday, I went back to Nelson Street, where Stuart came to visit on his first weekend home from Sydney University. He had a couple of exams to go and was obviously studying hard. He mentioned that the reason he chose medicine was that the Women’s Weekly listed it as the most distinguished of all careers. It was a tongue-in-cheek comment but had a serious edge. In the next breath, he told me that as a child he’d dreamed of following in the steps of the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. Whatever he thought, did, decided was perfectly all right with me.

I had the impression that he didn’t take himself or life too seriously. A friend from his university years recently told me that he was a quirky, in-your-face student with the glimmer of a social attitude, different from many of those studying medicine at that time.

His sense of humour was certainly different and at times risky. Apparently he once pretended to suffer a grand mal seizure in front of a crowd of people. This surprised me; it painted a different picture from the quiet, caring, reserved man I knew. I didn’t think too hard about it. I waited patiently till he completed his final exams, secretly hoping that he wouldn’t lose interest in me or meet someone else.

Mum was increasingly immersed in her activities as an alderman on the Newcastle City Council. She never had a driver’s licence, but regularly caught the bus to official engagements. Fortunately, our home was on the 104 bus route, with a stop right out the front, which was helpful when Mum ran late. The drivers often slowed down and waited, or one of us would be stationed at the front gate to yell ‘It’s turned the corner!’ If she hopped on the bus with a zipper half-closed or a label sticking out, the regular passengers on the 104 would zip her up and tuck her in. She sprayed her hair with fly spray on more than one occasion. She wrote wonderful speeches on the back of an envelope or serviette, but mostly she just winged it.

In 1969, I answered an advertisement in the local paper for someone to share the rent of a flat in Perkins Street in inner-city Newcastle with a young nurse from the Royal Newcastle Hospital. It wasn’t a hard decision to leave home. I was nineteen years old, and I needed a little space of my own, having shared a bedroom all my life. Besides, I’d done of lot of growing up in New Zealand.

Things were heating up on a local level. The Citizens Group that controlled the council secretly had approved the destruction of some beautiful Moreton Bay fig trees in Burwood Park to make way for a road into the city. The issue came up at one of Mum’s first council meetings, and we all went along with banners protesting against the destruction of the trees. The Lord Mayor at the time, Alderman Doug McDougall, shouted at us in the public gallery, ‘What do you think this is – a circus?’ Stuart stood up and said in his cultivated university manner, ‘Yes, and you’re the Chief Clown.’ He was showing a cheekier side of his character.

Mostly, though, it was the peace movement rather than local government affairs that dominated our hearts and cemented our relationship. The horror of the Vietnam War filled the newspapers every day and consumed us emotionally. We committed ourselves to the struggle till the end of the war. Stuart was by now spending a lot of his time organising meetings and communicating with other like-minded people around the country. He could do no wrong in my eyes, and I was proud to stand by his side. I believed he could have had anyone in the world. I harboured a lingering dread that someone more worthy, beautiful and intelligent would come along and whisk him away. I anticipated bowing out graciously and nursing another broken heart. Yet for now, here he was – choosing to be with me. Conscious of my inability to express myself as clearly and confidently as he did, I tried hard to be worthy of him. I always felt I had to mind my p’s and q’s.

We dated and partied and involved ourselves in the Vietnam Moratorium movement. Articulate and intelligent spokespeople were elected to convene the movement in the cities around Australia, and Stuart was elected convener in Newcastle. We spent our weekends organising marches and meetings and rallies and concerts. It was such a dreadful, unnecessary war; we felt we were doing something important and moral, and it was wonderful to be part of a growing movement worldwide.

By now, Stuart had graduated and was working as an intern at the Royal Newcastle Hospital. He put his hard-earned salary into stamps, envelopes and rent for premises where we could paint banners and print pamphlets. His generosity blew me away. No doubt our ASIO files were also expanding. As a public servant, I was especially worried about the consequences of having my photo taken during peace marches by ASIO, who seemed very busy collecting files on everyone in the peace movement. Anyone who voiced opposition to the war was branded a communist, which was funny, as Stuart had many disagreements with the local communists over politics and ideology.

Not long after we began dating, someone stole my purse with a fortnight’s salary in it. Stuart tried to insist on giving me money to replace my lost wages, but I refused to let him. His offer reinforced my positive opinion of him.

Around this time Stuart helped Dad in a way that made the whole family grateful. Dad had been very ill with thyrotoxicosis, and we were afraid he was going to die. Stuart noticed that Dad was taking a high dose of a very powerful drug prescribed by his doctor, Dr Barnes. Stuart sat down with Dad one day and explained in detail that the drug and the quantity, taken over a long period of time, could damage his heart and ultimately kill him.

Dr Barnes had been our family doctor for many years, and delivered all four of us as babies. He treated our childhood illnesses with great care and often made house calls until he was too old to practise medicine. Dad had stayed loyal to him long after we children moved on to younger, more modern general practitioners. Year after year, Dad cycled to his tiny surgery in Islington only to be told that his condition was inoperable. It most likely was inoperable in the 1930s when Dr Barnes studied medicine, but it was now 1970.

After discussing his treatment with Dad, Stuart spoke to Dr Fowler, a leading physician at the Royal Newcastle Hospital, and within a week Dad’s thyroid had been removed. It was a major operation requiring the surgeon to open up Dad’s chest cavity, but it gave us back the father we had known before he became ill. We have Doc Wynt, as he was known around the Royal, to thank for giving our father many more happy and healthy years of life.

Much to our dismay, Dad loyally returned to Dr Barnes as soon as he was better. I guess he decided there was nothing to lose. For all we know, Dad may have been Dr Barnes’s only patient at the end.

Some of Stuart’s other professional activities were more danger-ous, and arose out of his commitment to ending the war in Vietnam. We never talked much about the possible consequences of his actions, but we both knew he risked being arrested and perhaps losing his career.

In Newcastle and all across Australia, young men were being conscripted to fill vacancies in the army where volunteer recruitment failed. They were selected through a disgraceful kind of lottery in which their birth dates were drawn from a barrel, and all those whose dates were drawn were conscripted. I remember the huge relief in our family when Ray, my gentle younger brother, was in the ballot and his birth date wasn’t drawn. Over the course of the war, almost 20,000 conscripts were sent to Vietnam, where they risked death or serious injury. More than five hundred Australian servicemen were killed in Vietnam. There’s a beautiful memorial in Newcastle constructed around the number 19, honouring the nineteen young men from Newcastle and the Hunter Valley who lost their lives.

Many women were active in the movement against the war. There was an organisation of concerned mothers and grandmothers called Save Our Sons, which was quite big in Newcastle and across the country. Some of these women were arrested and jailed for their protests. Supporters of the war tried to promote dissension between the peace movement and the soldiers. My friend Kevin Claydon, who served in Vietnam, tells me that as a regular soldier he was flown back to barracks in Australia and protected from protesters, while the conscripts were returned late at night on commercial planes to face the waiting anger. But for all these machinations, the movement was at odds with the government of the day, not with the young conscripts. Many were only nineteen-year-olds, who didn’t even have the right to vote at that time. We felt very protective of our boys and were overjoyed when they returned safely to Australia.

If these boys failed their medical examinations, they would not be conscripted. This was where Stuart came in. While he never compromised the Hippocratic oath that declares ‘First, do no harm’, he assisted young men to fail their medicals, mainly by manufacturing the symptoms of a bleeding ulcer. On the evening before their medical appointments, Stuart helped them to let and consume enough of their own blood to ensure they failed. He gave them support and reassurance throughout the procedure. It took courage to do what he did, and I looked up to him more than ever after this. He willingly risked his career for young men he didn’t know, but for a cause we both believed in.

I can’t recall a period when Stuart and I were so close. We didn’t live together, but I occasionally stayed overnight with him at the doctors’ quarters across from the hospital, and he occasionally stayed at Perkins Street. Neither place was conducive to a blossoming love affair, but we were happy simply being together.

I’d enrolled in night school at Hamilton Evening College and was studying for my Higher School Certificate until Stuart told me it wasn’t necessary. In hindsight, I probably would have gained self-confidence if I’d continued my studies, but at the time I mainly felt a huge sense of relief. Stuart liked me the way I was! It was too wonderful to be true.