Damned if I Do (19 page)

Again we were saved by the public reaction to the Library's attempt to ban my talk, and almost immediately, the
Vancouver Unitarian Church stepped forward to fill the void. The Vancouver workshop then went ahead, as planned, in front of a packed audience. The Unitarians would later continue this support by providing Exit with workshop venues in Toronto and Montreal. Other workshops on that tour were held in San Francisco, Bellingham and Anaheim in
­southern California. No security was ever needed, despite my ­concerns, even in gun-bearing America. While our small
Bellingham gathering was picketed by a disproportionately large crowd of
right-to-lifers, the much bigger San Francisco meeting attracted only a handful of wheelchair protestors, this time from the
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

When well-known activist
Marilyn Golden managed to get her wheelchair wedged in the front door of the San Francisco Buddhist Centre, where the workshop was being held,
Fiona was able to quietly dislodge her, in what she says became a battle of brute force. Luckily for us, no ­photographs were taken.

Over the years, I have experienced right-to-life ­protests on a number of occasions. Nelson, on New Zealand's South Island, is home to a Christian sect called
Light of Christ Covenants Community. They reliably turn out with their placards and their children each time we visit. We also had a Christian youth group demonstrate with megaphones outside a Sydney conference Exit was holding at the YWCA. However, it was not until we held a workshop in Ireland that we felt the full impact of organised opposition.

To date, we have held two series of workshops in Dublin, both attracting large numbers of pro-life demonstrators. A notable feature at one meeting was the number of professionally produced placards bearing the message: ‘LOCK UP YOUR GRANNIES.
DR DEATH IS HERE.' This was a variant of the media headline that used to appear when the Rolling Stones were in town—‘Lock Up Your Daughters'.

As to be expected in a Catholic country such as Ireland, moral outrage in this part of the world is well organised and systemic. Through groups such as the
Youth Defence and the
Christian Solidarity Party, not to mention the Catholic and Anglican churches, opposition to voluntary euthanasia is every­where in the Emerald Isle. This has led to the usual cancellation of venues for our events. In fact Dublin still holds the record, with four venues in a row cancelling over the course of two days. Included in this list was the famous
Buswells Hotel, which had initially approached us when they heard of our problems. They told me there wouldn't be any issue with us. They'd hosted pro-abortion gatherings with
Mary Robinson, political meetings with
Sinn Fein, even at the height of the Irish unrest, and never cancelled. Twelve hours later they cancelled, with just a brief phone message; no explanation, no appeal. The problem was solved eventually with the assistance of local groups such as
Atheist Ireland.

In Dublin we also saw the infiltration and disruption of our meetings by protestors (something that has rarely happened before).
Andrea Williams, CEO of an organisation called
Christian Concern, trotted out an argument that was new to me. She said, ‘In the context of such a dismal economic climate [in Ireland], Dr Nitschke's message is a great danger to vulnerable people who may feel pressured into taking their own lives'.
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A line difficult to take seriously.

But there has been an upside.
Voluntary euthanasia in Ireland is now an issue that is increasingly discussed and a topic of public debate. While the authorities continue to wield a heavy hand—in 2011 the friend of a terminally ill Exit member was threatened with charges should she accompany her friend to Zurich for an assisted suicide—there is an emergent right-to-die movement in that country. Our meetings, and the media that our visits have attracted, have changed the climate. That Exit now has an Irish chapter, or branch, led by activist
Tom Curran, is testimony to this. In 2012 I took part in a debate on the euthanasia issue at the
Dublin debating society ‘The Phil' at Trinity College, with Tom and Sir
Terry Pratchett, and in late 2012 Tom launched his own court action in Ireland, aimed at restoring the right of his long-term partner,
Marie, who is severely disabled by multiple sclerosis, to choose when she might die.
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This important case found its way to the Irish Supreme Court, but in March 2013 her case was dismissed.

Exit's workshop program sees me visit the UK and North America on a regular basis, and I've also often found myself travelling abroad for debates, conferences, talks at medical schools and even literary festivals. I am always keen to extend the Exit meeting-and-workshop program to new countries, but that does require some local support to get things set up. As we offer people better practical end-of-life options, and associated technologies like drug testing, the need to spread the program increases. In 2013 Exit held its first ever workshops in Germany and the Netherlands, and there are now active negotiations to stage such events in South Africa, Israel and Singapore.

In 2009 I was excited to be part of a new cable network channel broadcasting into China. Led by Hong Kong entrepreneur
Robert Chua, the thirteen-part series
Dignified Departures
aimed at getting the Chinese middle classes to talk about how to plan ahead for death. I travelled to Hong Kong to participate in the venture and had the chance to learn of some of the subtle cultural differences that exist. This was the first time Chinese mass media had tackled the issue on the mainland, an important milestone.

It never ceases to amaze me that the elderly workshop attendees and conference audiences in places as diverse as India, New Caledonia and even Switzerland all ask much the same question—where do I get my Nembutal, how do I store it for the next twenty years and what will my death be like should I ever drink it? The same applies to ­journalists, regardless of whether they are from prominent Polish newspapers, such as the
Gazeta Wyborcza
, or the ones asking me questions at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, or tiny regional publications like
Barrier Daily Truth
in Broken Hill. Why do you do it? How many of your patients have you helped/killed? Have you ever been arrested? While emphasis may change from country to country, the strong ­interest in how we are to die is universal.

SEVENTEEN

Time out

… George Fraser soldered a broken exhaust pipe for the headstrong schoolmaster, and begged him not to go on with the mad project of crossing the desert to Ayer's Rock in the midsummer heat.

Frank Clune,
The Red Heart: Sagas of Centralia
, 1940

A
t times my life has been seriously out of balance. Being absorbed in various causes—Aboriginal land rights, resistance to US bases, voluntary euthanasia—that take up energy and time can seriously effect personal
relationships.
Thankfully, that is not the case now.
With a partner as involved
in the voluntary euthanasia issue as I am, work and personal matters are often intertwined, but it is still possible on occasions to step back and enjoy life together—simple things like camping, the silence of the Outback, a shared enthusiasm for craft beers, overseas travel, good food, friends and so on. As I said in an interview a few years back, ‘We don't just sit around talking about death and dying all the time.'

I'm fond of films and music. The quirky
Harold and Maude
, the first time I'd ever heard of the right age for an elective death, long before I met Lisette Nigot, and the ugly
Wake in Fright
, which so captures the atmosphere of Broken Hill and dispels the romantic outback myth, are among my favourites. In recent years I've discovered
internet radio, which has made my treasured library of old 78s all but ­obsolete. Going bush, I liked the idea of copying
Karen Blixen, with the wind-up gramophone on the fold-up camp table and a slow waltz around the camp site. Now when
Fiona and I are out, as long as we are close enough to an Aboriginal community with good internet connectivity, we just tune the iPad to one of the amazing 1930s or 1940s music internet radio stations and bring the sounds of the interwar years into our happy-hour drinks.

Over the years, the way we take time out from work has varied a lot. There's been the occasional trip to Singapore (closer, and cheaper, than Sydney for a short break), the odd five-star hotel in Europe (as a treat), and more than one beer-and-brewery tour in either New Zealand or the US. One motif of home-based holidays is touring on either our motorbike or in the MG through the desert or hills.

My father had
motorbikes when I was very young, and my brother
Dennis rode one for years and I've always been interested in them. In 1976 or thereabouts, I was ­walking along Todd Street in Alice Springs when I saw a ­dishevelled rider covered in oil and dirt pull his motorbike up to the kerb and almost fall into a heap in the gutter. I had a ­motorbike at the time, a 1955 British Matchless 500cc single cylinder ‘thumper', so I knew a bit about classic bikes. I recognised this as one of the relatively new
Russian Cossack 650cc, which I commented on.

‘Yeah,' he said, ‘and if you want it, you can have it.'

He'd come up from Adelaide. In those days, the Stuart Highway was unsealed and known for its corrugations. They were bad and unavoidable, from grader ridge to grader ridge. This poor guy was covered in dust and was still shaking from what had clearly been a very rough ride.

‘How much?' I said.

‘Four hundred bucks.'

I guessed the bike was about two or three years old. Four hundred dollars wasn't a sensational bargain because the bikes sold new for $650; people used to joke that they cost a dollar a cc. But getting a bike like that in Alice in any other circumstances would have been difficult, and here was one on a plate. I bought it there and then. Later, I bought another one and I kept the original on the road by cannibalising parts from the second.

The Cossack is a Russian copy of a pre–World War II German BMW designed to be fitted with a sidecar—the sort of thing you commonly see in war movies, with a machine-gun mounted on the front, the officer in the sidecar in his leather coat with another stormtrooper doing the hard riding. The Cossack had only a six-volt electrical system, which caused trouble, and brakes so poor that it seemed they'd been added as a late optional extra. The biggest problem though was kick starting, especially with the sidecar fitted; in the Russian Steppes, with a sidecar on the right, a kick starter on the left may have been manageable. But here, forced to mount the chair on the opposite side, kick starting this beast was almost impossible.

The Russians seem to have a knack of making things that might work well, but look as though they're forty years out of date and that was the case with the Cossack. It wasn't pre-war, but looked it. And I racked up a lot of kilometres on it, commuting from Darwin to Sydney for my medical course, across the Plenty Highway, and coming down through Queensland and South Australia, and along the Birdsville on a number of occasions. It performed much better on the open road than in town, and it worked best with the sidecar, especially when I had a genuine Russian one imported and fitted for me by a dodgy neo-Nazi bike shop that used to be on Parramatta Road, just out past Leichhardt.

I decided to attend the fortieth anniversary of the 1966 walk-off from
Wave Hill Station in August 2006. ABC TV's Aboriginal current affairs program,
Message Stick
, had contacted me to say they were making a documentary called ‘
Ripples from Wave Hill'.
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They knew of my involvement and wanted some film of me going back for the reunion. I liked that idea and thought I'd take my old Toyota, which had first taken me out there in 1973 and had become well known during my time there. I had kept it registered over all the years, and had run it intermittently, but it needed a lot of work. When I pulled the engine down I found the head was badly cracked; it couldn't be welded and I couldn't get a replacement in time. So we decided to travel by
motorbike to the reunion.

The ABC filmed me on the motorbike as a sort of mock-up of my original journey to Wave Hill, although, of course, it hadn't been anything like that.
Fiona and I went down with our camping gear strapped on at the back of the sidecar. The weekend was structured with various activities, including a procession and a re-enactment of the walk-off. There were a lot of emotional moments.
Kev Carmody was there and he
sang ‘
From Little Things Big Things Grow', and I was able to talk with
Hoppy Mick Rangiari. It was the last time I saw Hoppy Mick, who died not long after. He was the last of the active members of the strike. I recognised a few people around who were just kids when I was first there decades earlier.

Gabi Hollows,
Fred's widow, and
Peter Garrett attended, each surrounded by a large entourage.
David Quinn, who I barely recognised, was also there. It was the first time I'd seen him since our fight at Top Springs Pub some thirty-five years earlier. We talked briefly, without hostility. I also met
Tom Uren, a minister in the Whitlam government. I'd admired him for a long time and he had been a friend and boxing opponent of my old boss in Parks and Wildlife,
Bob Darken. He said some nice things about my work

There were very strict rules about camping at the site, so I did as I always had and rode a few kilometres down the track to camp off in the bush. It felt good to go back. I couldn't get to the forty-fifth anniversary in 2011, and had to watch it on television. I'm determined to be there for the fiftieth.

* * *

In 2006
Fiona and I took a long overdue holiday together. We planned a
motorbike trip from Sydney to the Territory. But there is a preamble to this story.

During my medical studies in the 1980s I would travel back to Alice Springs at every opportunity. It was on one of these visits that I was browsing some old books of my father's, including one called
The Red Heart
by
Frank Clune. It was a collection of short non-fiction stories and one story was about
Ellis Bankin, a schoolteacher from Glenroy, in Melbourne, who rode his 350cc Triumph motorbike to all kinds of places across Australia in his school holidays in the 1930s. During the summer holidays in 1936, he attempted to become the first to ever ride by motorbike to Uluru, but he didn't make it. Instead, Bankin lost his way, ran out of fuel and died of dehydration under a mulga tree near Mount Conner, about a ­hundred kilometres east of the Rock. The motorbike was found intact when a search party finally located his body, and he was buried where he lay. The owner of the old
Lynda Vale station, only 16 kilometres from where Ellis died,
put up a headstone and erected a post-and-rail fence around the grave.

I was intrigued by this story. This was in 1985, and I realised that the fiftieth anniversary of Ellis's death was approaching. I wanted to find out more and started by ringing all people with the name Bankin who lived in Victoria. Quite quickly I located
Frank, Ellis Bankin's brother, who was then living in the Dandenongs, to Melbourne's east. He said I was the second person who had recently inquired about Ellis. The other person had been
Dick Duckworth, a ­motorcycle enthusiast and amateur historian, who lived in Yarraville. I met up with Dick and the idea of marking the fiftieth anniversary of Ellis Bankin's tragic journey was formed. We both thought the grave might become a significant destination for adventurous motorcyclists to visit.

The grave is on the
Curtin Springs station and, as it happened, I knew
Peter Severin, the station owner, from my time as a ranger, and made contact. I'd arranged for some pre-publicity in an article published in
Motorcycle News
magazine and on a hot January evening in 1986, on the anniversary of Bankin's death, Dick and I and a dozen or so people—some local pastoralists, some motor-cycle enthusiasts from Alice Springs—held a small ceremony at pretty much the exact time Bankin was thought to have died.
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The headstone and the post-and-rail fence were still there, although the worse for wear after fifty years. I had a brass plaque made up in Sydney to commemorate the anniversary, and we bolted this onto one of the posts to mark the event.
Dave Richardson, a journalist from the
Centralian Advocate
, also came and recorded the event in a double-page spread in his paper. I was pleased that this indomitable character, who wasn't as widely known as he deserved to be, finally had some recognition. Dick Duckworth self-published a book on Bankin in 1977, called
Ellis Matthewman Bankin: Outback Motorcyclist Who Perished: A Biography
, and it includes a photograph of my
motorbike sitting there on a sand dune.

The year 2006 would be the seventieth anniversary of Bankin's death and I thought,
Why not make it our holiday to go to the gravesite by motorbike?
Fiona liked the idea. I had the bike trucked from Darwin to Sydney and we left from Kings Cross, going up over the Blue Mountains to Bathurst, west to Broken Hill and Yunta. The plan was to go through the north Flinders Ranges, up to Oodnadatta and on to Finke, then to turn off towards Mount Conner and the gravesite. We would then finish the holiday heading up to Alice and on to Darwin, camping all the way. We were carrying food, water and plenty of extra fuel.

All went well until, while we were camping north of Oodnadatta on the Finke road, Fiona discovered she'd lost her bag and some precious photographs. There was no option. The next day we rode back to Oodnadatta and spoke to the police. There had been a crowd of locals looking at the bike when we were refuelling and we thought the bag must have been stolen. Just as the interrogation of the locals was about to start, a truck driver radioed through to the Pink Roadhouse saying that he'd seen the bag lying by the side of the road and that it could now be collected up the track at Hamilton Station. We were to pay for this delay. As we left Oodnadatta, reports were coming in of heavy rain in the area, and we were advised to get back to the bitumen before the storm stuck. We did make the main Oodnadatta–Marla road, which was better, but still not sealed. That night the storm hit; first the swirling dust and sand, then sheet after sheet of rain until everything was flooded. We would spend the next two days struggling to get the bike unbogged from one spot, only to see the wheels sink down a few metres further along the road. I had to deflate the tyres to get some traction, and then pump them up again with a hand pump, only to make about 50 metres before again sinking into the mud. This was done over and over, until we were both exhausted and it was clear that we couldn't go on; we would just have to wait the weather out. There was no traffic and we knew the road had been closed. Our sleeping gear and everything else was drenched, everything except a precious box of matches. We'd also run out of coffee and beer, but surrounded by water and with plenty of flour, it was clear we'd survive.

The following morning, a light plane flew over and Fiona started marking out a giant ‘HELP' sign on the road, and running round trying to use her reflective helmet visor to attract the pilot's attention. I thought this was a little over the top. We weren't in any real danger. Uncomfortable yes, but we could have safely sat there for a fortnight. Hard, I thought, explaining a giant ‘HELP' sign on the road. In any event, the plane flew on, and we sat for another day and another night. On day three, a four-wheel drive appeared in the distance and slowly crawled its way through the mud to our campsite.

The driver of the Toyota was
Doug Lillecrapp of
Todmorden Station and pilot of the light plane that had previously flown over. He had driven out from the station to see what damage the rain had caused, and offered to help us get back to the bitumen at Marla. Our gear was moved from the bike to his truck, and Fiona rode in the front seat. The sun had emerged and the road was starting to dry out, and with an unloaded bike and an empty sidecar, we finally made it to Marla. From there, we had to abandon any hopes of getting to the Bankin grave; we had simply run out of time. Instead, we travelled south to Coober Pedy. Fiona booked into a motel, and I flew out to Perth for two days to launch the election campaign for
Steve Walker, an independent standing in the coming West Australian state election.