I was learning about courage. Treating children who were almost certainly dying of a particularly aggressive disease taught me more about bravery than did my new political career. I first met Helen Sears after she was admitted to the pulmonary unit of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, an adult facility. She was only ten years younger than me, and by the time I got to see her, she was virtually moribund with cystic fibrosis. She was a talented arts student, a lovely, gentle thing, tall with long dark hair, brown eyes, and full lips but very thin, cyanosed (her skin was bluish), and extremely short of breath. It was always so tragic that just when they reached the fullness of youth, these patients had virtually lived out the term of their natural existence.
Because few CF patients lived past childhood, nonpaediatric physicians were not well-versed in the intricacies of the disease. Helen’s parents heard that I could treat cystic fibrosis and called me in for consultation. There was little I could do for Helen, and she died while still in hospital. Her parents Betty and Harold were devastated, but in their grief we formed a close and loving friendship which lasted for many years, I think partly because my name was Helen.
Not all stories of CF patients have such tragic endings, however. The most rewarding CF patient I ever treated was a seven-year-old boy named Bradley Taylor, who was deeply cyanosed and so short of breath that he could not walk. He was referred to me in an offhand way by one of the senior consultants with the implicit but unspoken message that Bradley was dying and there was nothing I could do for him. I took him under my wing, and, largely because of our combined willpower, he began to improve. When I visited Adelaide years later, he was twenty-four and only just alive, surviving with twenty-four-hour oxygen and becoming navy blue within seconds when his nasal oxygen prongs were removed.
Eventually Bradley was placed on the list for a heart-lung transplant. We said goodbye before the operation in a visitors’ room at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and I walked down North Terrace with tears streaming down my face, feeling that I would never see him again. However, a perfect match was found for his heart and lungs in Melbourne, and he was rushed to the airport and flown to the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Victoria. When he woke after the operation, his fingernails were pink instead of blue for the first time. The ordeal of the operation seemed insignificant compared with his new lease on life, or perhaps he had endured such suffering that he hardly noticed a little more.
The operation took place in 1990. Bradley’s body has not rejected the heart or lungs, he plays golf, and recently he even went skydiving, much to his physician’s horror. He is now a part-time public relations officer for the South Australian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He and I are extremely close, and every time I visit Adelaide for a speaking engagement, there he is with eyes of love looking at me from the back of the crowd.
Medicine is never without its times of crisis. When I became a paediatric intern, I was rostered on “take” every three days, which meant that I examined and treated every medical patient admitted to the Children’s Hospital for that twenty-four-hour period. On some particularly busy days we admitted more than twenty-four, some of whom were desperately ill. All had to be thoroughly examined and have a history taken, each of which lasted for the best part of an hour. I was often frantic.
On a particularly hot day we admitted several dehydrated children, and I treated one little girl with a rapid intravenous drip. Because I intended to return later to assess her progress, I omitted to provide a written order to slow the rate after several hours. In the interim I admitted several other children who were very ill with meningitis, and I failed to return.
At three the next morning, while deeply asleep, I picked up the phone to hear the ward sister say the child was “fitting” (having a seizure). Wearing only my short yellow flannelette nightgown, I rushed down to the ward and stood at the end of her bed, panicking. She was suffering from cerebral oedema, or swelling of the brain, caused by too much IV fluid: brain damage was a serious possibility. Quickly John Erlich, my registrar, and I gave her large doses of diuretics to flush the fluid through her kidneys, though I was skeptical whether this would work. I was terrified at the thought of facing her mother, knowing how I would feel if this were my child, and I vowed that if this child suffered brain damage, I would give up medicine forever.
However, the next morning she was standing in her cot playing and laughing, perfectly normal. I took weeks to recover.
The clinical work was much more challenging than it had been when I was an undergraduate ten years earlier. Interim research had disproved many of the lessons drilled into us as medical students. New information was now available, and I was hungry for it. It became obvious to me that once-definitive scientific dictums change as the research community discovers more, and I learned that it behooves scientists to retain a degree of humility.
For the first time, as my knowledge and clinical acumen increased, I began to feel like a competent doctor. I loved learning, and my avid curiosity was rewarded during these years of retraining. I appreciated the feeling in my fingertips as I examined a patient, knowing that my intuition coupled with a thorough knowledge of medicine would reveal even the most obscure diagnosis in most cases. This medical discipline could be compared to the satisfying feeling of solving a difficult esoteric mathematical problem.
It was also a delight working in the same hospital with Bill. He was a brilliant teacher, and his radiology rounds were the most popular sessions of the week. He had a subtle, deadpan approach, and he kept us on our intellectual toes. He began the rounds with little comment while we examined several X-rays on the screen depicting the most rare and interesting case—for instance, a case of congenital hypocalcaemia with associated aortic stenosis. Then he would cross-examine one of us, giving only a few subtle clues spiced with a modicum of appropriate teasing until the penny dropped.
The responsibilities of the family were ever present, but often when I arrived home after the arduous days and nights of “take,” I was a physical basket case. The children were around, but in essence the family continued to function despite me and not because of me. At that time we employed an English housekeeper called Miss Wright, who kept house and family together. She lived in a flat at the back of the garden, and the unlikely combination of our Siamese cat and khaki campbell duck kept her company by sitting side by side on her doormat at night.
After I returned from Paris in August 1972, Bill asked me to refrain from any more political work because he said that it was enough to work eighty hours a week at the hospital as well as keeping some connection to the family, and I agreed. So the latter part of the year was politically uneventful, but I missed that side of my life.
Thank God, despite my controversial politics I was duly appointed registrar the next year. Now I moved into high gear for the membership exam, seeing patients at the hospital all day, studying at night, in the weekends, and early in the mornings. I was required to master the latest in paediatric medicine and the vast range of adult medicine as well: haematology, cardiology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, general medicine, neurology, and other specialties. This intellectual challenge was not a burden for me, because I loved studying and collating information, but it took me away from the family. Often I sent the kids out of the room when they needed me because I required absolute quiet in order to concentrate on such things as the feedback loop of the nephron or the intricacies of the inborn errors of metabolism. I feel bad about this now, and I wish I hadn’t been so single-minded and had given them time when they needed it. After all, what was more important, my career or my children?
The exam was somewhat turbulent. It consisted of two parts, the written and the viva (oral), several months apart. The first took place in June, and I passed. Only one-third of the candidates passed at their first attempt, a deliberate policy since it was considered a great privilege to enter this august college.
Then the viva. I was really nervous because I wanted to pass and put this demanding study behind me so that I could concentrate on the family. There were three long cases to examine and diagnose. I sailed through the first two cases, but the third was my downfall. While I examined a little boy seated on a chair, two doctors stood behind me, swaying intimidatingly backwards and forwards in their pin-striped suits and squeaky black shoes, their hands clasped behind their backs. I detected two heart murmurs, which were confusing and difficult to decipher. Forgetting the axiom that “common things occur commonly,” I made an exotic and somewhat unclear diagnosis.
That afternoon I waited with a sinking heart for the results to be posted at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. My name was absent. I was devastated: this was the first time I had ever failed a medical exam. I needed to put these hours of study behind me, and failing a medical exam was a hell of a blow to my self-esteem. The truth was that I was still a little green, having only been in clinical paediatrics for a year and a half, not long enough to be greatly experienced. I discovered later that I’d been given a case with an ambiguous diagnosis.
The ambiguity of the case made me very critical of the cardiologist who had presented the child for the exam. I was so cross that I went around telling my friends at the hospital. One evening while working in Casualty, an obsequious little consultant whom I shall call Dr. X, a friend of the cardiologist, sought me out and uttered a few veiled threats to the effect that if I continued my criticism, I would not be appointed next year. I was stunned.
This man continued to target me. One Saturday morning I brought Penny in to accompany me on ward rounds. When I introduced her to Dr. X, he asked her to bend over and smacked her on the bottom. “That’s because your mother never has time to smack you,” he said, implying that I had no right to work and should have been at home with the children. I was furious. The blatant sexism was beyond belief, but I was trapped because I now knew that if I complained, my job would be jeopardised.
This attitude caused patients to suffer as well as women doctors. One day while I was rostered on Dr. X’s clinic, we had a patient with a middle ear infection that was unresponsive to antibiotics. The child’s temperature peaked every evening, and, deeply worried about complications, I suggested that we consult an ear, nose, and throat specialist. But Dr. X wouldn’t hear of it, and then proceeded to wax lyrical about his former days in Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London when he had treated middle ear disease, implying that he knew what he was doing. He then went on holiday for a week, and I immediately called the ENT specialist. Within hours the child was on the operating table with the surgeon scooping pus from the lateral sinus in his skull. He recovered.
Dr. X returned from leave, and with some trepidation I said, “I took the liberty of calling an ENT surgeon, and the patient has recovered.” X really ripped into me: how dare I exceed my authority, how dare I go behind his back? The harshness of the attack was so unexpected that I left the ward round and burst into tears in the nurse’s office. Like many women at that time, I did not yet have the presence of mind to withstand a direct attack and to fight back, particularly when the aggressor was senior to me.
In November I sat for the viva again and breezed through. I was now a member of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, and I received my degree in Melbourne. My friend Rena, who had just passed the membership exam herself, and her husband, Rene, took Bill and me out to a posh restaurant, where we drank so much champagne that by the first course I was almost beyond repair, the relief was so profound.
Now at last I had the authority and the qualification to establish a cystic fibrosis clinic at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital, which the powers that be had promised on the condition that I pass the membership. But their response to my plan was: “Oh, we don’t believe in luxury clinics,” and permission was refused—the implication being that the clinic would be a luxury for me, a promotion I didn’t deserve. The patients seemed not to be part of their considerations.
Opposition made me all the more determined. A colleague, Graham Vimpani, and I collected actuarial data on the ACH cystic fibrosis patients, which demonstrated that their 50 percent survival rate was only four years, compared with seventeen years in the combined clinics of North America. Those same consultants who had considered a CF clinic an unnecessary luxury were silent when I presented this information to them one Friday morning at grand rounds. Permission was finally granted.
The ACH cystic fibrosis clinic was established late in 1974. The only one in Australia, it was modelled on Harry Schwachman’s excellent facility in Boston, a combined and collaborative effort with bacteriologists, nutritionists, pharmacologists, physiotherapists, psychologists, social workers, mist tent therapists, and lung function laboratories. We established a close working team, reviewing patient care over coffee and sandwiches once a week. Initially I spent at least two hours with each of the sixty or so patients and their parents to elicit a complete history and to conduct a thorough physical examination. I then brought in all the relevant specialists, and the child was fitted into a specific therapeutic regime. I was very excited to finally be providing these patients with the best, most up-to-date care.
I only had six months to consolidate the patients and their treatment before we left for the United States on a year’s sabbatical leave for both Bill and me. This situation imparted a tremendous sense of urgency, and I became quite frazzled with responsibility. As well as setting up the clinic, I continued working sixty hours a week as a registrar. Though I was tired, this was exciting work because I was the acting medical superintendent at night, a unique privilege, and I felt that I could handle any case that came through the door of the Casualty Department. I was at the peak of my medical knowledge and competence, having just passed the membership. But there was yet another burden to be shouldered.
Shortly after I started the CF clinic with such fervor, I was shocked to discover that the Whitlam government, which we had all considered so visionary, was badly flawed: they intended to export Australian uranium.
I was not well-versed in the dangers of nuclear power or uranium, so I took myself to the Barr Smith Library at the university, where I borrowed Poisoned Power by Arthur Tampin and John Gofman. Gofman, I discovered, was an American physician who had worked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, as had Tampin. My hair stood on end: never had I read of subjects so medically dangerous.
Massive quantities of strontium 90, cesium 137, iodine 131, and 200 other isotopes are manufactured during the generation of nuclear power from fissioned uranium. But the element that really scared me was plutonium. Not only was its half life 24,400 years, but only one-millionth of a gram caused cancer. Fuel for an atomic bomb is 10 pounds. And every large reactor manufactured about 500 pounds (230 kilograms) of this satanic element every year.
Nobody knew what to do with this radioactive waste. What if it leaked into the environment? What guarantee could any country have that the uranium they exported would be used for peaceful purposes? With three children of my own, and treating patients with cystic fibrosis, I was determined to do what I could to prevent children developing leukemia, other malignancies, or genetic disease from exposure to uranium or its fission products. Another political campaign seemed inevitable. As if my hands were not already full enough . . .
I contacted the press who thus far had reported everything I told them about the French tests, but this time they were uninterested. They implied that uranium could become a legitimate export and that it could improve the country’s trade balance. (This attitude prevails in the current 1995 Labor government.) I insisted: “It’s potentially much more dangerous than a little fallout from French tests,” to no avail. Perhaps because the threat of uranium was long term, perhaps because so few people knew of its dreadful potential, my words fell on deaf ears.
However, a chance meeting with an engine driver named Warren Warwick led me in another direction. A true Labor supporter and an officer in the Engine Drivers Union, Warren shared my concern about the government’s irrational decision to mine and export uranium and suggested that I speak to the trade unions on the subject. With his help I wrote to each of South Australia’s seventy-six unions, including the Boilermakers, Plumbers, Pastrycooks, Railway Employees, and Metalworkers, and I was invited to speak at many gatherings.
Most of the audiences consisted of men with little formal secondary education, and they were tough. To communicate, my message needed to be direct and dramatic. The Trades and Labour Councils (the representative union bodies in each state) were particularly difficult. The audience was well lubricated the night I addressed the Adelaide Trades and Labour Council, having downed numerous beers in the bar before the main event. I was given ten minutes to speak with five minutes for questions. “The audience won’t take much notice of you,” I was instructed. “They always talk over guest speakers.”
I’d worn a pair of black velvet slacks and an ivory-coloured satin blouse—so that they might at least look at me. But in vain. I could have been wearing a bag over my head for all the difference it made. They continued their loud conversations unabated as I spoke. At first I panicked, then I had brilliant idea. I began talking about the medical effects of radiation upon testicles. Suddenly you could have heard a pin drop. Australian workers are not adamant about many things, but if there is one subject dear to their hearts, I had found it. When I finished, the men shook their heads and said, “I don’t want my kids growing up in a world like that.” The meeting voted to a man to telegram the prime minister of their deep concerns about uranium mining.
I learned something very important that night. Don’t overwhelm your audience with data they can’t assimilate, because you will lose them. Grab them where they are emotionally vulnerable; once they are with you, the whole occasion is extremely rewarding.
But the pivotal point in the uranium debate came when a railway worker in Queensland was asked to shunt a truck containing yellowcake, or uranium oxide—the name for uranium ore after it has been treated with sulphur during the extraction process—in a railway yard, and he refused on moral grounds. The National Railways Union called a twenty-four-hour strike in support of their colleague, and suddenly uranium hit the headlines because nobody could get to work by train throughout the nation. This happened several days after I flew to Sydney to address the federal executive of the Australian Railways Union, a bunch of hard-bitten men. When they left the room, I felt I had made little impression—but given the events of the next days, obviously I had.
Shortly after the Sydney trip I had a rather hair-raising experience when I was asked to speak to the miners at the Mary Kathleen uranium mine in western Queensland. On arrival in Townsville I was told that passions were running high and that some of the miners had actually threatened to tar and feather me. These men certainly did not want a woman doctor coming into their midst to warn that their occupations and life-styles constituted significant health risks. They lived in nice houses provided by the mining company, the town had a swimming pool and a good school, and they felt they were well cared for.
We drove hundreds of miles from Townsville through the heat of a Queensland day, intermittently overpowered by the stench of dead kangaroos rotting by the roadside. We arrived in the town square just as the assembled crowd were about to catch the six o’clock ABC radio news. The opening theme music ended, and the announcer said, “The Fox Commission has given a green light to uranium mining.” The men cheered. Mining uranium was okay.
My heart sank. This was the greatest possible betrayal. Some months before, the Whitlam government had appointed a three-man team lead by Mr. Justice Fox to enquire into uranium-mining proposals on aboriginal-owned land at Jabiru in the Northern Territory. Of concern was the safety of uranium mining, environmental questions, misuse of end products, and the future of aborigines in the area. Now—and I couldn’t understand how the commissioners could have disregarded the significant health effects implicit in the nuclear fuel cycle—the team had approved the establishment of what became the Ranger uranium mine. Two of the commissioners supported the proposal, with one dissenter, Dr. Charles Birch, a biologist.
Shortly after the announcement I was ushered into a beer garden, where a blackboard and microphone had been set up. A group of men and their wives had gathered around tables to hear me: the atmosphere was tense, and the announcement had not made my job any easier. I took a deep breath and started talking. I explained that the miners were constantly being exposed to radiation while they extracted ore at the mine face, and that inhalation of uranium and radium dust could cause lung cancer, bone cancer, and other malignancies. I told them about genes, chromosomes, mutations, the effect of radiation on testicles and their sperm, and the chances of giving birth to deformed children. As I spoke, a hushed silence descended upon the beer garden.
At the end of the talk men waited in queues to speak to me, and one man shoved a viscous green alcoholic drink into my hand in gratitude. They relayed some harrowing stories. One twenty-five-year-old mineworker told me that both his parents had died of cancer and that he was already excreting radium in his urine. I asked him how he knew this and was told that the mining company tested the urine of the men once a week. I tried to reassure him, but his prognosis was not good.
The following day the management showed me around the open-cut mine, insisting that everything was fine, but I was dissatisfied. None of the men wore masks, and the hot, dry, and dusty conditions that prevailed ensured that everybody was exposed to the inhalation of radioactive dust. It was also obvious that invisible gamma radiation, like X-rays, emanated from the ore face.
We drove away from Mary Kathleen that night through the waves of heat radiating off the desert floor. I lay on the back seat, looking up at the galaxies of stars, and wept for the children born and unborn who would sicken and die from our uranium, for my own powerlessness and frustration at knowing the truth but being overruled by ignorant, powerful men—people who had never borne a child or cared for one as it died.
In the various stratas of society there are scientists who make decisions about uranium and nuclear power but understand nothing of medicine or biology, and businessmen and politicians who on the whole are scientifically illiterate. Medical students are not taught the effects of the nuclear fuel cycle, so doctors also tend to be ignorant about these subjects, although they are extraordinarily receptive to the message when they hear it. Like a Cassandra, I often seem to be the only one imparting a message of dire concern, but because I’m a woman, I’m easy to dismiss as “emotional.” It can be extremely frustrating.
Later I was told that many of the miners left Mary Kathleen after my talk, while others demanded the installation of a clinic. Of course, those who left were immediately replaced by men who were just as ill-informed as the others had been before my lecture.
Convincing unionists of the madness in mining and exporting uranium was only part of my plan. A few days after the Mary Kathleen episode I travelled to Canberra, the capital city, to see Australia’s treasurer and deputy prime minister, my friend Jim Cairns, to persuade him to oppose the decision of the Labor Party to mine uranium. I knew he must have acquiesced in the policy, and I couldn’t understand why. We had gone to Paris together to protest against the French nuclear tests, about which he was so passionate. I could only assume that he had little knowledge about the dangers of uranium itself. Surely when he understood, it would be possible to persuade the rest of the government that Australia’s uranium should remain in the ground.
But something had happened to Jim since our Paris trip. A married man with adopted children, he had fallen deeply in love with an exotically beautiful Filipino named Junie Morosi. According to friends in Canberra, he didn’t want to leave her side. Because of her, I was told, getting a message through to him would be difficult. The affair was overt and had become a scandal in Canberra. Nevertheless, I decided that even if I had to break into his motel room at three in the morning, I was going to talk to him about uranium mining.
Fortunately, one of his close staff members contacted me as I was wandering the halls of Parliament House to say that Jim was in his office and I should come up immediately. When I walked into the office of the Australian treasurer, it was evident that things were awry. Secretaries sat around filing their nails and chatting aimlessly. “They’re in Jim’s office eating lunch,” I was told. Previous to Morosi, everyone had free access to Jim, but after Junie became his secretary, she had constructed her office as a barrier and nobody could get to him. I walked through her door and noticed a large picture of Jim on one wall. Knocking on the inner door, I entered without waiting for a reply, to find Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi sitting together on the couch eating salad.
Jim was a tall, imposing man with a full head of grey hair which flopped over his forehead. He introduced me to Junie, who glared at me. With her long black hair, sensuous figure, and brown skin, she was a very attractive but intimidating woman. Icicles hung in the air because I had had the temerity to barge into her private empire.
I told Jim why I was there and asked whether he knew how dangerous uranium was. “No,” he said, “tell me.”
So while Junie stood in the corner, I sat down on the couch and quietly told Jim the medical dangers of uranium mining and the nuclear fuel cycle. Jim was a man of formidable intellect, but before I finished speaking, I knew he was not giving me his full attention. It seemed to me that he was so besotted with Morosi that he could concentrate on little else. I came away from his office feeling sad.
Having failed to interest the treasurer in the problems of uranium, I decided to talk to the prime minister, Gough Whitlam. He was also very intelligent—surely I could persuade him. A day later I was duly ushered into his office. He listened to me talk about the dangers of uranium with only one ear, because he was preoccupied with catching the proceedings of Parliament on the intercom in case his name was mentioned (this was in the days before closed-circuit TV was installed in Parliament House). I left feeling more annoyed than frustrated. The by-products of uranium fission in nuclear power plants were eventually going to kill millions of people, and Whitlam was uninterested. He had no scientific background; perhaps the magnitude of the problem was not apparent to him.
My next appointment was with Rex Connor, minister for minerals and energy, who agreed to see me at his home on a frosty Canberra morning. This portly, balding gentleman of medium build answered the door in a pair of slippers with his trousers held up by red braces. For several hours I argued the anti-uranium case with him, but he was absolutely unmovable and deaf to scientific logic. Connor’s passion was to “buy back the farm,” to make Australia self-sufficient in minerals and energy production; as far as he was concerned, anything to achieve that end was acceptable. He had bought the line of the nuclear industry that atomic power was cleaner, cheaper, and safer than coal-generated electricity, and he wouldn’t budge.
If the politicians were implacable, there were other avenues. While in Canberra I attended a meeting of the Australian Paediatric Association at the Lakeside Hotel, and during the cocktail hour I circulated with the text for an ad outlining the ways in which uranium was medically dangerous. I persuaded almost every doctor to sign it, which was relatively easy because most had imbibed several drinks before I approached them; if necessary, I used a little flirtation to attain the relevant signature. The ad duly appeared, and medical endorsement of the anti-uranium position gave enormous credibility to the cause. This kind of exercise was repeated when I helped set up Physicians for Social Responsibility in the USA some years later.
I returned to Adelaide to learn that Bob Hawke, then president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), was in town for a meeting at the Waterside Workers’ Hall in Port Adelaide. He was an important figure and a rather famous larrikin (rowdy) character, so in his honour I donned my velvet slacks, satin shirt, and black leather jacket, and off I set. I found Hawke in the rather dilapidated hall at the port, introduced myself, and told him why I was there—to get institutionalised union support for the anti-uranium campaign. I pointed out that I had already spoken to union groups in Mary Kathleen, Adelaide, Darwin, and Sydney and that a statement from him about the dangers of uranium mining would really help the cause.
He looked me up and down, apparently liked what he saw, and said: “Come back in three hours and talk to me.”
I cooled my heels and approached him three hours later, only to find him somewhat inarticulate after the evening’s revelries. This time he said: “I can’t talk about this now, I need all night. In fact, I need thirteen days,” demonstrating that whatever Bob Hawke was interested in didn’t include the problems of uranium and nuclear power. In despair I opened his jacket, placed the relevant anti-uranium literature in his inside pocket, and left.
Several years later, when Hawke became prime minister, his government adopted a pro-uranium stance. I will never forgive him for that, especially after so many Australian unions had led the anti-uranium cause.
A powerful grass-roots group called the Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM) was inaugurated in my North Adelaide dining room, and we organised protest marches and rallies and placed ads in the newspapers. A related group, Campaign Against Nuclear Energy (CANE), was also initiated in Melbourne.
Many people in society became fascinated by the movement. Sir Mark Oliphant, a highly respected nuclear scientist and governor of South Australia, several times asked me to lunch at Government House. He had a shock of curly grey hair, a rosy red face, and innocent, intelligent blue eyes. We had interesting conversations amid the plush settings of Government House; he was fascinated by the campaign, though he himself tended to favour nuclear power. He had worked on the Manhattan Project with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, designing the atomic bombs that had been unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the scientists on the project felt so unhappy about their actions that they decided to assuage their guilt by harnessing “atoms for peace.” Being a highly intelligent man, Sir Mark seemed to understand both sides of the argument, but I felt that his involvement with the Manhattan Project always preyed upon his conscience.
John Coulter, a doctor employed by the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide, was a fantastic resource. An excellent researcher, he provided me with data about radiation and cellular dysfunction, as well as moral support. He later became leader of a small political party, the Australian Democrats, which has since played a pivotal political role in the national Senate.
As the anti-uranium campaign intensified, once again, as with the French tests, I was doing more and more media work. One day I was driving over the railway line in Brompton, a rather depressed inner Adelaide suburb, on my way to the hospital, when I switched on the radio and heard a voice that sounded vaguely familiar. I was somewhat taken aback to discover it was my own, and amazed at how professional and articulate I sounded.