Heather and I used to go to the Cairns area for holidays and in November 1984 we stayed at Palm Cove.
While there we often walked the esplanade passed a block of units being built and when almost completed I went in one day when I saw someone doing a final clean. He was the developer, Gordon Churcher, who showed me through and gave me a sales pamphlet of the three storey block of twelve units called Paringa Building.
We returned to Alice Springs and Heather said “it’s time I went down to Adelaide to check on the boys”. I drove her to the airport and when returning thinking about beautiful tropical Palm Cove, red sand was blowing across the road in front of me, the announcer on the car radio said “it’s forty-two degrees outside and now here’s the news.” I thought “what am I doing here when I could be in Palm Cove”. I drove back to the office and phoned Les Loy in the real estate office and said “how much would I get for my office premises and would there be a buyer about? After looking into it he rang back and said “I could get you $190,000 for your office and I have a buyer”. “make it $195,000 and he’s got a deal” I replied. I then phoned the real estate agent handling the sale of Paringa Units and asked him to send me a contract on Unit No. 4.
When Heather returned from Adelaide I told her that I had sold the office, put the house on the market and was awaiting a contract to buy unit 4 in Paringa Building, Palm Cove.
I was tired of Central Australia and It’s time I started to do what I want, not what others want. She was quiet and after a few days I heard her tell someone who said “and what do you think about this”
Heather replied “I am still in shock but I think I like the idea” so she got into the job of moving.
What started my thinking about leaving the Northern Territory was an incident at seven AM on the morning of November 12, 1983. The clock radio awakened me with the news that prime minister Bob Hawk has given the Ayers Rock National Park “back to the aboriginals”. The funny thing was that they had given it to the wrong aboriginals. The name was then changed to Uluru.
I thought that if a government was that stupid then they are likely to one day decide that the solution to all of their aboriginal problems throughout Australia would be to give the whole of the Northern Territory to the aboriginals and tell them all to go and live there.
So I thought it might be a good idea to get all of my assets out of the northern Territory before this could happen.
I had just completed the construction phase of the Catholic High School and the Tennant Creek Civic centre and from past experience I knew that the time to get out of a business was when you are ahead.
Working from the house I finalized the few small jobs I had and by the end of February had sold the house and in early March with the RX7 stacked to the roof, drove to Palm Cove. The only sad thing about leaving Alice Springs at that time was that Peter was still living at home and we had to virtually throw him out of the house because it had been sold.
I stayed overnight in Mount Isa and intended to stay the next night in Townsville but on arrival there was a power strike on and no hotel or motel would answer their door so I kept driving and tried to get a room at Cardwell but the same existed there. I plodded on in tropical rain and total darkness and arrived at Palm Cove in poring tropical rain at midnight on March 7th 1985.
This was the time the premier of Queensland, Joe Bejelkie Petersen, had taken on the unions in the electrical generating industry and they were on partial strike, supplying power to different areas for an hour about every two or three hours. There was no power on in the unit which had been closed up for weeks and it was stifling hot and muggy.
Then the power came on so I turned on the air conditioner, lights and TV only to see an announcement that it was forbidden to use any air conditioners and if you did you would have your power cut off.
Heather arrived a few days later with Katie and Haggis, our two little dogs, and we settled into unit living on the beach at Palm Cove.
We went for a drive to Port Douglas one day and found that Gary Hunt, King-Jones and partners, from Alice Springs, had opened a branch of their Alice Springs office on the first floor of the ANZ bank so I called in to see them. They offered me work on a freelance basis which I accepted sometimes working on the balcony of the unit in Palm Cove and sometimes in their office. One job I did for them was the house for Jim and Jo Wallace, founders of the Quicksilver reef tours.
Gary Hunt was then bought by Woodhead Australia, architects from Adelaide and Gary and David King-Jones became directors of Woodheads.
In September 1985 Heather’s mother broke her hip and contracted a golden staff infection while in the hospital so Heather wanted to go to Adelaide.
The Mirage projects looked ready to start and I offered my services to Woodheads and promised that I would return from Adelaide when the jobs got underway.
We decided that we would need the car in Adelaide so fitted out ourselves with high tech camping gear that took little space and with our two little dogs had a nice camping holiday on the way to Adelaide.
While in Adelaide Heather got a job as personal secretary to Ms Tiddy, the director of ‘Equal Opportunities’, but I found getting a job quite difficult partly because of my age and partly because no architect wanted an architect who had more experience than the boss, working for them. What I found interesting was how much the profession had changed in the nineteen years since leaving Adelaide. The emphasis was on ‘how good are you at selling’ and ‘which football club did you play for when you were young’.
My answers to both questions were; I believe that an architect should get work because he does good work not because he is a good salesman and I have not played football since leaving high school, were apparently not acceptable.
I did eventually get a good job at Brown Falconer, Architects where they were just getting into using computers and they soon discovered that I was well ahead of them in the use of computers in an architectural practice. They decided to start a computer cell in their practice members of which would be trained to do computer aided drawing (CAD) as well as computer administration and they employed a young man who had done a course in CAD. To teach us. With a bank of PC’s using AutoCad release 2, three of us were given lessons in AutoCad, It was good to be paid while learning.
Unfortunately after about four months Adelaide’s economy fell into a hole as it seems to do every couple of years and the practice decided that they needed to use the resources they already had, which was manual draughtsmen, and closed down their computer cell. I felt sorry for the practice because after spending all that money training us they got no return on their investment. But I had gained the skill in the use of AutoCad.
I then got a temporary job working for an architect whose office was in Hindmarsh square on the opposite side to where I worked for ETSA in the 1950s, just while his senior draughtsman was on holidays. This architect and his wife, also an architect both lectured at the Adelaide University.
In late January 1987 I got a job with two architects in partnership and was due to start work on the following Monday.
On the Thursday before, I got a phone call from Gavin Lee, manager of Woodhead architects in Port Douglas, offering me the job of being site architect for the Mirage Condominiums being built by Christopher Skase.
The two architects I was going to work for said “we don’t blame you for preferring to go to Port Douglas to work” and released me from my commitment to them.
I packed my RX7 and started my 4,200 kilometre drive to Port Douglas at first light on Friday morning, arrived on Sunday afternoon and started work Monday morning.
Gavin Lee put me into a unit which belonged to a draughtsman who was on holidays and when he came back I stayed in Michelle Piat’s house on the hill for a month while they went on holidays and then into a cockroach ridden holiday house on Solander Boulevard.
Heather flew up on April 17 to be here for my birthday on the 18th and we immediately started looking for a house to buy in Port Douglas.
We bought a two bedroom octagonal house at 129 Davidson Street for $105,000 with only a one week settlement time and borrowed Woodhead’s Toyota four wheel drive, drove to Cairns and bought a queen bed and bedding, a dining room suite all in ‘flat pack’ and a washing machine so we could move in. Later we bought a cane lounge and brought it back from Cairns on a roof rack on the RX7.
This house was right across the road from the condominium building site so I was almost living on site. Skase insisted that the people working on his jobs always carry a two way radio so he could contact us at any time, (there were no mobile phones then) and for security reasons he never let anyone know where he would be at any time but he would call a meeting at a minutes notice.
Heather got work at Harvey First National Real Estate with Chris Harvey who is married to Janet, younger daughter of John and Marilyn Morris. Chris Harvey later Joined with Tony McGrath and started an LJ Hooker office.
A block of four prototype condominiums (now called villas) was the first building we started for Christopher Skase. We had the walls built to first floor level, reinforced and filled with concrete and the formwork for the first floor slab was erected by the Thursday before Easter 1987.
Skase made an inspection and said “these rooms are not large enough.
I want the Living Room increased by one metre in width and two metres in length, The Master Bedroom increased in width by one and a half metres, the second bedroom increased by one metre”.
I said “rooms always look too small when a building is at this stage with all the Acrow props filling the spaces, are you sure you need this extra space?” He replied “we have been building long enough to know what we want”.
I thought “but apparently not long enough to know how to read room sizes from the plans, what an un-necessary waste of money”. If he was any good he would have known from the plans that the room sizes did not suit him. The original designs had been done by Media five architects of Brisbane and the working drawings by Woodhead Australia.
Then he said ”I want the necessary demolition done and the revised drawings delivered to the builder by the resumption of work on Tuesday, after Easter”. As we walked away I heard the foreman shout to his men “come on, let’s get this scaffolding down”.
I went back to Woodhead’s office and said to the drawing staff “I hope none of you had plans for Easter because we are all working for the whole holidays, we have to redesign the condominiums and have the new drawings done by 8.00 AM Tuesday morning”. I heard dead silence so I knew what they were thinking.
Of-course there was no chance of doing a whole set of drawings in that time so we did the drawings essential for the builder to start on the footings on Tuesday, the rest would be done to keep ahead of the builder. The changes Skase wanted increased the spans of all of the roof structural members so to avoid having to re-design and redraw all the details I substituted 200mm deep cold rolled steel rafters for 200 deep timber rafters.
On Good Friday morning the site foreman phoned “these walls are full of reinforced concrete so it is not possible to get them demolished by Tuesday unless we use dynamite and I have a powder monkey’s licence”
“Don’t ask “ I said, or I have to say NO!”. He got the message and said “OK”. If he had asked to use explosives I would have to say NO! because we could not get the necessary permits until after Easter which would be too late. Also the site was in the middle of the jungle so there was no danger to neighbours.
Heather and I had just sat down for lunch on Good Friday when I heard a series of blasts, “there seems to be a lot of cars backfiring today” I commented.
The demolition was completed by 8.00 Tuesday morning when I took the revised drawings to the site office.
I soon found that concrete workers in Far North Queensland were real cowboys as concreters and they would not take any notice of an architect or engineer.
After you had explained how you wanted the concrete to be poured and vibrated to get a good result they would say “you stick to your drawings, mate, and we will stick to our concrete work, we are the concreters”. You could never get good off-form concrete in North Queensland like you could in Alice Springs. They did not understand the significance of the ‘water to cement ratio’ and they added too much water to make the concrete easily workable consequently there would usually be shrinkage cracks. They did not understand the importance of curing concrete.
Concretors could not get falls in floors so the water would drain to a floor waste, they would just make a floor level and dig out an area of concrete around the floor waste so you were left with a slope of about 30 degrees form about 300 mm around the drain.
The tiler of course could not tile to that shape so they used to fill it in with grout and build up a fall that resulted in a 40 mm step up into the bathroom at the doorway, a totally unacceptable and dangerous result for the end user.
On one job I instructed the builder to instruct the concreter to screed the floors in an even slope from the Bathroom walls to the floor waste as I had specified but as I walked away I heard the builder say “the architect says you are a rat-shit concreter Bruce”. Bruce replied “tell the architect to come back when we are pouring more concrete and we will bury him under it”.
So the only solution was to design a set-down of 40 mm into the wet area slabs and let the tiler grout the floor to get the correct slope which of course is extra cost to the owner.
Skase couldn’t wait for the block of four prototype units to be finished and so instructed us to proceed with the other forty four units of stage one so I was soon supervising the construction of forty eight units. The project managers employed two clerks of works to assist me with inspections and reports.
I had my own personal computer which I took into work to use for spread sheets and AutoCad drawings. The office had only a mini computer, a Wycat, which was connected to the main frame in the head office at Adelaide which was about equivalent in capabilities to the Tandy model 2 that I had in 1979 in Alice Springs except it had a lot more memory, but it could not do CAD. The Wycat bombed out every time we had a power fluctuation or power failure, which were frequent in those days Every time this happened, the keyboards and printers had to be reconfigured which took about two hours. After about four or five crashes it would die and have to be packed off to Brisbane to be fixed which was about every week in the wet season. The guy in charge of computers in the Adelaide head office just said “it must be something you do wrong in that office because we never have that problem in Adelaide”. They would not approve of the purchase of an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) so I kept a diary of every crash and every total breakdown and gave an extract of my diary to the manager of Wycat Adelaide. He was very embarrassed and asked me to send the CPU to Brisbane where they added some components and it never crashed again. Then I got into trouble from the directors because the computer controller in Woodheads complained about being bypassed.
Woodhead Architects were going through a phase, as many other large offices were at that time. They employed young inexperienced architects as office managers thinking that they would add some dynamics to the practice but all they did was make a lot of mistakes as we all did at that age. It was frustrating for me when I knew exactly what should be done in terms of procedure (not design) but the young architect would not listen and consequently get the practice into difficulties from which they then wanted me to extract them.
As far as architectural design was concerned I would give practical advice to try to help them achieve their concept.
I taught some of their young architects, including Gary Hunt, to use AutoCad and they soon surpassed me with their skills in CAD drawing.
In 1991, due to a slowing of the economy and even more so because of the pilot strike, Port Douglas was in a deep recession and Woodhead closed their Port Douglas Office. For a time I worked in their Cairns office and also helped in their Sydney office on the Herald Weekly Times new building.
Gary Hunt decided to resign from Woodhead and to open his own practice in Port Douglas. I worked for him on a freelance basis and he had some hard times in his early years. He had to sell his Porsche and his boat but when the economy picked up he soon replaced them.
After one year in the house at 129 Davidson Street Heather and I decided we were tired of living on a main road on which traffic was rapidly increasing and so looked for a quiet place to live.
We liked Oak Beach but the price of land or a beach shack was expensive until the pilots’ strike when it almost halved. Heather did not like Oak Beach as a place to live at first but when I drove her to the alternative places and at each one asked “would you like to live here?” she said no to all but Oak Beach. We bought an old shack at No. 7 Oak Beach for $170,000, about the same cost of a house in Port, and renovated it. We lived there from 1989 until 1994, although we sometimes stayed in our unit at Palm Cove.
We sold the house at Davidson Street for $175,000 so we swapped a house for a lifestyle.
We renovated the concrete block fishing shack to make it more liveable but it did not all go smoothly.
In a letter to Marlene Wigzell dated 23rd. April 1991, Heather wrote :-
Then again on 24 November 1991 :-
We have had some lovely rain here at last, the first since last April. We have got water in the tanks again. It is a bit difficult at times not being on a town water supply.
Andy wasn’t pleased with the rain yesterday though. He is replacing the large tarpaulin which roofs our carport, and he was told that if he painted it, it would last twice as long. He bought sufficient paint for the area, got up early to go to buy a roller 30 Kms return. The paint only covered half what he expected and he had to go another 30 Kms again and buy another can. When he opened it, it was green – not white as the label said. Back to the shop again. He had just finished painting when the clouds burst and down came torrents of rain and we had white pools of water running over the ground and it will have to be done again. Usually I think it is his own fault when things go wrong but yesterday he seemed fairly unlucky.
Heather and I organized a party to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary to be held at the kiosk at Waterfall Gulley, near Adelaide, where we had our wedding reception on 5th of March, 1955.
At the party Marlene Wigzell presented Heather with a folder which contained every letter Heather had written to her from 17th January 1955 up to this date.
Heather made her own wedding dress and had her ‘going away outfit’ tailored to my design. In that first letter to Marlene Wigzel she wrote:
Dear Marlene,
Thanks for sending over that piece of nylon but I have already bought some material. Actually I had no intention of buying it at the time but I was in Myers one lunch time and saw this nylon and it was only sixteen shillings and eleven pence per yard. It’s very pretty and mum just loves it ( the only thing is that mum and Andy have very different tastes) but I hope everyone will like it.
Communication by letter was the normal thing in those days.
When work for Woodhead was getting scarce in Port Douglas I got some part-time work teaching DOS (computer Disk Operating System) and Lotus 123, spread sheet at TAFE, Mossman.
Woodhead’s Cairns office had three multi storied buildings on the drawing boards and they had nominated me to be the site architect to manage the construction phase of each building so Heather and I thought it was an opportunity to get a good house closer to Cairns.
There is an enclave at Clifton Beach of large white houses with red tiled roofs which the locals call ‘New Guinea Houses’ because they were built for a number of Australians who had to leave New Guinea when they got independence from Australia. There was a short attractive walk through a rainforest to the beach.
We bought one of these houses and lived there for a year.
The three multi storied buildings in Cairns did not eventuate and we decided that we would rather live in or near Port Douglas where there was a good small town community life without being parochial.
We had bought a block of land in a subdivision called Reef Park on Ribbon Avenue in 1988 for an investment but the price had gone down, not up, so we built a house in 1994 for an investment on this block with the intention of living there until we could recoup our money and maybe make a small profit.
We lived in a holiday house I designed belonging to E-laine and Lionel Berkowitz on Solander Boulevard while I had the house in Ribbon Avenue built.
I had been the site architect on a complex of 29 units called ‘Reef Terraces Two’ and a few days before completion the builder (from Melbourne) was declared bankrupt and I found that they had not paid any of the local sub-contractors. The developer, John Morris, was most displeased about this and so when he decided to build ’Tree Tops Resort’, which consisted of 300 rooms I was able to convince him to use a construction method called ‘construction Management’. Construction management is a method of building best described as “sub-contracting” but employing professional persons to manage the process.
John Morris paid me a $15.000 bonus for getting the project finished on time and on budget.
While we had the ‘system’ running he also built a block of 14 town houses in Reef Park.
To give the local sub-contractors a chance to recover from the bankruptcy of this Melbourne building contractor I convinced John Morris to try to employ only locals and to give them special contractual conditions that suited their financial capabilities. For example when the local plumber said that he would like to do the job but he could not finance the purchase of materials nor the large payroll John Morris agreed to special contractual conditions. Instead of paying the sub-contractor the usual way, which was monthly and thirty days after the months work was complete, he agreed to pay on a weekly basis. He also agreed to pay for materials for the job delivered to site and securely stored. This idea, as well as helping the plumber, ensured that there were no delays to the construction program while awaiting the delivery of materials.
While the Tree Tops project was underway, Heather started to get severe pains in her abdomen mainly during the night and her general practitioner sent her to consult a range of specialists in Cairns. After many X-rays, CT scans, colonoscopies and gastroscopies they found nothing and her GP suggested that it may be emotional, she may be imagining the pain.
Heather was a strong woman of strong build, tall with a straight back and she held her head high which made her look taller than she was and although she was from a farming family she had a natural dignity and articulated the English language with clarity and perfection. She had conceived four times and given birth to and brought up four strong sons. She was also a very pragmatic person. This is not the type of woman who imagines pain. In this Heather’s main fault was that she had too much faith in doctors and no matter how much I tried to persuade her she refused for two months to get a second opinion.
She went to another GP this time in Mossman who gave her treatment for gaudier, a common cause for stomach pains and diarrhoea in the tropics for which none of the other doctors had tested.
This proved negative so he treated her for a particular stomach worm that he had found in some women with similar symptoms but that was not the cause.
After studying the results of all her other tests he sent her to Cairns for the old fashioned Barium Meal X-Ray which showed an obstruction in the small bowel where it joins the large bowel (the Ileum) and apparently was not detectable by the other tests.
More CT scans showed two small lesions on her liver and it was decided to take a biopsy of them to see if they were malignant. The diagnostic report said that the lesions were benign and probably not metastasised from the tumour in the bowel.
Before Heather began getting these pains and diarrhoea, whenever she had a drink of wine she had a hot flush but because she was around the age of menopause no doctor thought this to be relevant. The hot flushes became more severe during the two years period of these tests so that just one sip of wine would have her face glowing so much that everyone present made comment on her red face.
The GP referred her to an oncologist who referred her to a surgeon, both different to the first lot, and they decided to give her an 5-HIAA, 24 hour urine test which she had on January 2nd. 1994.
On Tuesday January 21st. 1994 we had just began the descent on the Cook Highway, North of Palm Cove, on the way to Port Douglas where you first see the Coral sea through the trees at Ellis Beach when she said “if there is anything I want to do I will have to do it now, two years is not long”.
Neither of us had spoken since we left Dr. Lynch’s consulting rooms in Cairns 30 minutes ago, I was in some kind of shock, my emotions were tightly bound, the information we had received I was afraid to accept.
He said ten years, not two, he speaks quietly but I am sure he said ten years.
“It doesn’t matter”, she said, “I have done all I wanted and more in my life, I am happy with my life.”
The test showed that she had high levels of serotonin in her urine which indicates that she has a condition called carcinoid syndrome.
An official definition of carcinoid went as follows :-
CARCINOID SYNDROME.
A syndrome of episodic cutaneous flushing, diarrhea, valvular heart disease,and less commonly asthma, produced by metastic carsinoid (argentaffin) tumors which secrete excessive amounts of serotonin and other vasoactive substances, including bradykinin and prostaglandins.
Functioning malignant carcinoid usually arises in the ileum. Endroctrine products released into the portal circulation are rapidly destroyed by blood and liver enzymes, serotonin
(5-hydroxytrypttamine, 5-HT) by hepatic monoamine oxidase. Thus, the carcinoid syndrome can occur from an ileal primary only after hepatic metastases with serotonin release via hepatic veins directly into the systemic circulation.
Diagnoses of the condition is established by a 24 hour urine test for 5-hydroxyindole acetate acid
(5-HIAA), which is the end product of the breakdown of tryptophan to serotonin. Patients with carcinoid syndrome may have very high levels, 100 – 500 mg. in 24 hours.
Carcinoid tumors are sometimes benign but are usually malignant growths. Surgical excision of the tumor and any associated mesenteric nodes is the treatment of choice. Chemotherapy can be used with metastatic disease and other drugs are prescribed as indicated to manage the hypotension, diarrhea, flushing and other symptoms. Efforts are made to improve nutrition and at the same time avoid serotonin-containing foods such as walnuts and bananas which are known to precipitate an attack.
Basically this condition produces a chemical in the body which causes tumours to grow usually at first in the small bowel and then other places in Heather’s case in the liver. Each tumour produces more serotonin which in turn produces more tumours. The specialists advised us that the tumours need not be removed unless they were interfering with some body function. The tumour in the small bowel has to be removed to allow the bowel to function.
Carcinoid syndrome usually takes about 10 years to kill its victim and there is no cure and no chance of remission.
Heather decided that nothing was going to stop her from living life to the full for whatever time she had left, not even this slow merciless killer and for about a year she told no one and although I tried to persuade her to tell the family she forbid me to tell anyone. How she coped with her situation had to be her decision. I of course got into trouble from our four sons for not telling them.
We went to a specialist oncologist in Adelaide who was reputed to know all about carcinoid syndrome, Dr. Jack Russell, for a second opinion but he had nothing new to tell so it seemed that the diagnosis and treatment she was having in Cairns was as good as you could get at that time.
The tumor was removed with 100 mm of small bowel which is a fairly major operation and recovery took some time after which she was quite well for a couple of years. On a visit to the surgeon I asked if she should have the small tumors removed from her liver but he just stared at me and ignored my question. Neither the oncologist or the surgeon would talk to me and yet Heather needed my help to remember all that she was told during a consultation, I suppose they think that I should not be there because their consultations with their patient is confidential.
We were living in the house in Ribbon Avenue when in 1996 I said to Heather “we have this property on the beach, should we build a new house and live there?”, she said she would like to so I designed and built the current house at 7 Oak Beach and moved in over the weekend of December 14, 1996.
Erica Fleming phoned and said “I am in Cairns, on a bus trip and have a free day, could we meet some where?”. Heather and I arranged to pick her up from her hotel and go for a walk in and have lunch at the botanic gardens. Naturally I asked “how’s Harry going?”. Erica replied “Oh!, didn’t you know, Harry died about ten years ago. He was coming home from work early because we were having a big party for our son’s twenty first-birthday. A truck loaded with gravel went through a red light”.
I must have looked a bit distressed because she touched my arm and said “he wouldn’t have suffered at all, he was killed instantly.”
About two years after the operation Heather got a bowel obstruction which was caused by food catching on ‘attachments’ which I suppose is like scar tissue which grew where the bowel had been cut and sewn together. The method of clearing the ‘blockage’ (I called it) was to be admitted to hospital with a sign above her bed which said ‘NIL BY MOUTH’ on an intravenous drip, a tube placed into the stomach via the nose, which was not pleasant, and a nurse sucked out the contents of her stomach about every two hours. The process took about four days after which she was given something to eat and if it passed through she was allowed to go home. Her diet from now on had to be as near as possible to a ‘no fibre diet’. This was not easy, every time in hospital she ordered a low fibre meal they brought a high fibre meal and when she told them they said “just eat what you can of it”. I often had to go down to the hospital kiosk and get her a chicken sandwich with white bread.
From then about once a month she would wake usually in the early hours of the morning in severe pain and I would have to drive her to the Cairns Private Hospital, fairly slowly because every bend in the road caused extra pain. We would have to go to the emergency ward where the doctor was always some one she had never seen before who would have to make his own diagnosis and then try to insert an intravenous drip.
By then the pain was so great that all her peripheries had shut down.
Her lips, hands and feet would be blue and of-course because the arteries had collapsed in her arms they could never get the needle in for the intravenous drip into which they would give her morphine.
So I would tell the doctor on duty briefly the problem and ask if he could give her an immediate injection of pain killer and then do his diagnosis and insert the drip after the pain was under control. Some did but others treated me as though I wasn’t there and put her through another hour or more of agony while they stuffed around with their procedures.
I asked her oncologist if he could put a note in her file so the emergency ward could give her an injected pain killer on arrival but he just stared at me turned and walked away. I would have loved to have grabbed him by the throat shouted in the bastards face to do something about the gross incompetence of the hospital procedures but I knew they would just call security, throw me out and still ignore me.
I was president of the Rotary club of Port Douglas for 1996-1997. On the Queen’s birthday weekend the club charters a Quicksilver boat and takes tourists to Cooktown to witness the re-enactment of Captain Cook’s landing on the bank of the Endeavour River where he repaired his boat in 1770.
As President I had to go on the trip and on the return journey the sea was so rough that a two hour trip took four and a quarter hours.
The boat was rising and thumping over waves of over two metres high the whole way and there were so many people sick and passing out that it looked like a war time hospital ship. Luckily we had an ambulance officer on board.
When I got in my car to drive home from the marina I felt stiff and had difficulty working the pedals of the car.
That night I had terrible pains in my lower back and Heather had to call an ambulance because I couldn’t stand up let alone walk.
They took me to the Mossman Hospital where they got the pain under control and organized an appointment for me to see Dr. Muscio, an orthopaedic surgeon, in two weeks time.
After being home unable to walk and on strong pain killers for twenty four hours I said to Heather “I can’t do this for two more weeks, what if you drive me to the Cairns private emergency ward, they would have to admit me to the Cairns Private Hospital where I would see Dr. Muscio the next day”.
After X-rays, bone scans and a CT scan he found I had a disk extrusion and said that the boat trip would have caused it and many fishermen got this injury. He recommended a quartezone injection to the damaged disk which was done.
I was in a four bed ward with two other patients.
The patient next to me was a man of about seventy years of age who looked like he was a successful grazier. He had a fall and his doctor was worried that he had some brain damage so they were doing tests.
He wouldn’t talk to anyone. Every afternoon a gaggle of family came in, chatted amongst themselves, ignoring him, and took him outside for a walk. He was like a sack of potatoes, limp, lifeless and unresponsive. Two nurses, who also didn’t bother to acknowledge his presence as a person, had to struggle to lift him from his bed into the wheelchair. On most days his grand daughter came to see him during her lunch hour and she was about 22, lively, chatty, cheerful and obviously intelligent.
She called him ‘Big Daddy” and he responded, joked and chatted with her. While she was visiting one day his doctor came in with a large envelope in his hand and said “we have the results of your brain scan”, “did you find anything” she asked and Big Daddy and she laughed.
I couldn’t get him into a conversation.
We got a new nurse who was one of those lovely new age London girls who speak with beautiful clear and precise English, as though they had been taught by Professor Higgins. She was not a big girl, he must have been near twice her weight but she got him from his bed into his wheelchair by herself.
She spoke to him, asked him to sit up and swing his legs over the side of the bed, she bent her knees and got down beside him, put her arms around him and saying now you hug me too and straighten your legs as I do. Without much effort but using an intelligent technique she stood him, spun him around ninety degrees and lowered him into the wheelchair.
This was not only an intelligent patient handling method, it was also therapy, both physical and psychological but it showed the difference good nursing can make.
After four days of this type of caring he was responding to everyone normally and standing up by himself. He told me that he was from a cattle station in central Queensland where he would return.
About six weeks after leaving hospital I was able to walk without a walking frame. Luckily this happened between Heather’s bowel blockages. I was just able to drive again when I had to take her to the Cairns Private Hospital.
Copying the Queen I called 1997 our ‘annus horribilus’.
Every time she had a bowel blockage she lost weight and as they occurred more frequently she had no time between attacks to regain her lost weight until she was like a skeleton.
In August 1998 Heather had been home from hospital after a bowel blockage for only twenty four hours.
I had spent the whole day at meetings on the links job with the client, engineers, the builder and interior designer and arrived home at 6.00 apparently looking very tired because Heather waited until I had my dinner before she said “the obstruction has returned and I have to go back to hospital.
I have phoned Dr. Lynch and he has arranged for me to be admitted directly into hospital but would you give me a shower first?”.
She had to sit in the shower because she didn’t have enough strength to stand while I washed her.
She was like a bag of bones.
Luckily because of the shower water she couldn’t feel my tears falling on her.
We arrived at about two minutes after 8.00 o’clock to be told “you have to be here before 8.00 to be admitted, you will have to go to the emergency department”.
I lost my cool which I wish I hadn’t because it only upset Heather, and was storming when we arrived at the emergency room.
When they said after “what’s your name?” “have you been to this hospital before?”. I said “yes twenty four fucking hours ago for christ’s sake don’t you have a bloody file on her?, she practically lives here.”. Fortunately the sister was like they should all be, ‘caring’ and ran and got Heather’s file, shoved it in the doctors hands and then said to me “now you come and sit here while I make you a cup of tea otherwise you will have to be admitted with a heart attack.”
Being the husband of a dying woman is a very hard place to be. You need to be able to make everything right for her but you are helpless. It is difficult to be patient with the medical profession and hospitals especially at times when you know they could be much more professional in their procedures.
The only thing left for you is anger.
While all this was happening Matthew, in Adelaide was having problems with his daughter Nichole who was 14 years old and not attending school so he sent her to Mt. St Bernards Catholic Girls Boarding School in Herberton, two hours drive each way for us.
Heather attended social nights that the school held and once a month at least we had to pick her up and take her back to the bus stop at Smithfield when she came to our place for a weekend. She kept track of Nichol’s school curriculum and term periods because we had to organize our own activities around them. We attended her graduation at the end of the 1999 school year.
I thought having Nichole gave Heather a maternal interest and responsibility that she enjoyed and Heather was a good influence on Nichole who had been brought up by the most horrible mother anyone could imagine and without her father, our son.
In 1998 after she had been discharged from one of her stints in hospital Heather went to see Dr. Lynch and asked if there was anything he could do to improve her fitness long enough to go to Matthew’s wedding in September. He tapped his pencil on his desk and stared out the window for a while and said “I could prescribe steroids and see how you go” which he did.
Although they did nothing to improve her condition the steroids made her look really good. At Matthew’s and Tanya’s wedding everyone was saying how good she looked. Heather would say “I feel like a fraud because I am supposed to be dying but I feel so good.”
During this time Heather said to me “wouldn’t it be funny if I got better”
This was one of the times I wish I could have responded better and said “it wouldn’t be funny it would be wonderful” but because I was always on the edge of breaking down and I thought I had to maintain a strong front for Heather I just said “mmm”
Heather didn’t tell me about all of the minor problems she was having and I usually found out when taking her to the doctor but I have just found a note in her diary in shaky hand writing:-
6 : 12 : 1999
My eyes are clearer but my hands still tremble sometimes
I tend to feel exhausted a lot of the time and not as good as I did a month ago.
I haven’t seen Dr. Lansky yet on my bladder problem. The drugs mentioned on Dr. Mieleo’s sheet can have side effects + we are planning to go to Adelaide for Xmas
I thought I would wait until I get back. The incontinence is a problem but at present I can handle it by wearing protection.
We planned to go to Adelaide for Christmas to see our boys and grandchildren because we knew, without saying, that this would be her last Christmas. When we were packing she slumped onto the bed and cried “I can’t do it!”. I said “you rest and I will finish your packing”, “but what if I can’t come back!? I might be too sick to come back!”. “It doesn’t matter, if you can’t come back we will stay there”, I replied.
When we got to our unit in Adelaide the temperature was 42 degrees and the refrigerator broke down. Mathew fixed it but it broke down again so he brought a small bar refrigerator and Peter also brought one from his place as a temporary measure because it was holidays and there was no where to buy a new one.
Then the air conditioner broke down but Mathew fixed that and also put a ceiling fan in our bedroom but it was very uncomfortable for Heather for a couple of days. It must also have been bloody uncomfortable for Matt in the roof while installing a fan in 42 degrees heat and probably 60 degrees in the roof..
Heather was at times hyperactive but irrational, she would ask me to do something and before I had a chance to start doing it she would want something else done and then complain because I hadn’t done the first thing. Once when I started to do the dishes she shouted “don’t do the dishes!, when I am not capable of doing the dishes I don’t want to be alive!.
But I had often done the dishes lately.
We had Christmas mid day dinner with Peter, Kathleen and their children Hamish and the twins, Sarah and Kellie and we had Christmas eve with Matthew and Tania and Dina.
New years eve, we spent at home watching the celebrations on television.
John and Marlene Wigzell picked us up on the fourth of January 2000, took us for a drive through the Adelaide Hills through the small hills-towns which is an area Heather loved.
They came down the next day and we had lunch at the Mitcham shopping Centre and that night she was not well. They were going to take us for a drive to Victor Harbor on January sixth but Heather was not well enough to go, she was in some pain but didn’t want to go to a doctor.
On January seventh when I woke at about seven she was sitting up, in pain waiting for me to wake and said I will have to go to a doctor and get him to admit me to hospital, can you try to get me an early appointment.
I took her to Dr. Bain at the Mitcham medical centre who was quick to access the situation after a brief briefing from Heather and arranged for admission to St. Andrews Hospital on South Terrace Adelaide.
When we arrived Heather told the male nurse in attendance that she needed an immediate injection of octreotide (Sandostatin) because she hadn’t been able to take her medication for two days but he was puzzled and said he would tell the doctor. At each stage of going through the admittance procedure we asked about the octreotide but no one wanted to listen.
When she was eventually admitted with the drip installed and they came to put the tube up her nose she said that she didn’t want it.
I thought that meant that she had decided to die this time.
When the Surgeon, Mr. Gue, came to see her I phoned Heather’s surgeon, Dr. Knot, in Cairns, told him the story and asked him to speak to Mr. Gue and explain the need for an injection of octreotide and to brief him on Heather’s history.
The male nurse was very good and treated her with understanding and affection while he gave her excellent attention. Heather liked him and they exchanged jokes.
The surgeon decided by Sunday the ninth of January that an operation was urgent. “ It would be too cruel not to operate” he said.
I phoned Matthew and Peter and Anthony who was visiting from Melbourne. They all came to the hospital and Heather said goodbye to them.
I phoned Andrew who was still in Port Douglas and asked him to get to Adelaide as soon as he could.
While talking to Mr.Gue she said “if I stop breathing or my heart stops while operating do not try to resuscitate me, it would be good to die under anaesthetic.
I went with her in the lift holding her hand and when I had to let her go into the operating theatre we didn’t want to let go. When I did let go I almost lost control and when I saw a group of patients watching television, as a distraction, I joined them..
When it was over Mr. Gue said that it turned into a major operation because this obstruction was caused by a tumor in her bowel so a large section of bowel had to be removed. But there were hundreds of tumors from two millimetres to twenty five millimetres in size, scattered throughout her body as well as the two large ones on her liver that we already knew about.
I went to wait for her to wake up in the ‘high dependency unit’ with my face close to hers smiling because I really expected to not see her alive again.
When she opened her eyes that huge bright smile that first captured me lighted up her face she said
“I didn’t die.”
She was quite bright, sitting up and talking to visitors but on January the twelfth when I arrived she said “would you take my bag off the foot of the bed” which I did but when I put it on the floor she said “don’t put it in the water!” I said “there is no water there” She said “Oh, isn’t there.” Other visitors were there a bit later on, I was standing at the foot of her bed when she said “don’t stand there, you are getting wet, there is water running off the bed all over your trousers”. When I explained that there was no water she said “it must be the morphine, they are giving it to me every hour.
When the nurse came to inject it into her drip I asked “why did you take away the ‘morphine on demand gadget’?”
she said “because she wasn’t using it”.
I now know that I must have been under too much stress to think properly because now it seems too obvious to me that if she wasn’t using it, she didn’t want morphine, isn’t that what it is for?. but at the time I thought, as the hospital must have, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Isn’t there something wrong with their logic?. Later in 2008 after my bowel operation a nurse said to me “you are not using the morphine dispenser much, if you don’t use it more they will take it away and give it to you manually”.!! I thought “I don’t want them deciding when I need morphine and consequently get hallucinating” so made sure I used it more often.
On Friday January 14 I went home to our unit at about two o’clock for a rest and to feed Jessie (our little dog). She was sleeping and knowing that Matthew was going in to the hospital at about 5.30 I thought I could leave her for a while.
At six o’clock Matthew phoned to say “are you coming in because she is totally irrational”.
I went in and found that she had been put into a normal ward, taken off the drip and had been given a meal to eat which she didn’t want. I tried to talk to her but she was frantic and irrational and could not communicate.
Then I saw that she had no water.
I went out into the corridor where I found a nurse and said “where is your pantry?”
I must have been very aggressive because she showed me without objection or comment. I got a jug of iced water and Heather drank down three glasses and then was totally her-self.
The sister in charge, who was hugely pregnant, (about eight months) said “I’ve just come on duty and I didn’t know there was anything wrong, I thought she was probably like that all of the time.
She phoned Mr. Gue who was home having his dinner but he came in and put Heather back into the ‘high dependency ward’ in the sound proof glass room (the death room) where they proceeded to give her high doses of morphine.
I heard Mr. Gue ask the sister why she hadn’t looked into Heather’s problem and she told him the same but he said “didn’t you look at the previous sister’s notes?”. The pregnant sister replied that she had but there was nothing in them saying that she had to have water. ???
I remember in the Cairns hospital, after taking her off the drip, they always gave her a jug of water with marks down the side and said that she had to drink down to the next mark every fifteen minutes.
Her kidneys had stopped working and they brought in kidney specialists but they couldn’t improve her condition. He said to me that there was nothing more they could do and she would last another day, or two at most. I said to Mr. Gue that she had decided to take her own life when she reached this stage and if she was home that is what she would probably do. Naturally he had to say that they can’t do that here. She looked young again because she was full of fluid.
She was so drugged that her eyes were starry and I imagined that she would be having terrible hallucinations and thought about asking them to stop giving her morphine unless she asked for it. But then thought “I wonder if they are going to secretly overdose her, which would be the best thing.”
On the night of January fifteenth I asked them to put a stretcher in her room so I could sleep there. Anthony said he would come in between 1.O’ and two O’clock to relieve me. I took a light sleeping pill and was woken by Anthony at about 1.45 AM saying “I think she needs more morphine”.
Without thinking I ran out to the nurses station and said “she needs more morphine”.
The three of them were discussing something in a women’s magazine and one said “OK in a minute”
I ran back to her and she was taking huge breaths, like nothing I had seen before.
I ran back to the nurses and said “I think she is dying”
Then they leapt into action.
I ran back and looking into her eyes, watched her take three or four more breaths until the last one, then the air just escaped from her lungs.
I closed her eyes and hugged Anthony. It was two AM. On Sunday January 16, in the year 2000..
The nurses pulled down blinds over the glass walls and asked us to wait outside.
When they let us in they had tidied the bed and made up her face so she looked at peace at last.
The death certificate showed ‘Renal Failure’ as the cause of death but if it had not been that, it would have been something else.
Eight years had passed since she was diagnosed with carcinoid syndrome but the various doctors had taken two years to diagnose it, so she had survived the expected ten years with this condition.
I was living on the edge of sanity and was afraid of what I might do if I lost control and I didn’t know how I was going to get through the memorial service so I went for a walk along Lochness Avenue where I ran into Mark who I knew from when we lived in that street. He works at the Flinders University and suggested that I talk to a psychologist he knew, Jane Fowler, who also did work at the university. He got me an appointment with her for the next morning.
After listening to me for about thirty minutes she gave me quite a bit of practical advice that was to prove very helpful.
Blackwell Funerals service were excellent and ran such a professional service so that I had nothing to worry about including transporting Heather to Port Douglas where she is buried.
I thought “if only hospitals were run half as good as this”.
There has been a lot of remarkable developments in the invention of new medical equipment, techniques and surgical procedures as well as great progress in the development of drugs.
But there seems to me to have been no progress in the hospital and doctors’ procedures in relation to their patients since about 1900.
Although they may be technically brilliant it appears that the process of logic has never entered into their training.
And that “the patient’s welfare and convenience, as a person, comes well down near the bottom of their priorities”.
There are a few and getting to be more specialists who have an efficient practice and process their patients with friendly efficiency but most make you wait for two to three hours for a five minute consultation with no apology. People say that they must have had an emergency but that is seldom the case.
Once after visiting Heather’s oncologist in Cairns he asked us to wait because there was to be a conference of oncologists who were visiting Cairns and they would like to interview Heather. After waiting for two hours when everyone seemed to have gone home I found someone who phoned someone who said that that the conference had been cancelled. No one thought to tell us and there was no apology.
Getting admission to a hospital in cases like Heather’s should be a hell of a lot more efficient. If there are rules and regulations that prevent efficiency then they should be revised and there is no doubt about that.
When I returned to Oak Beach I continued to work on private jobs and designed a few houses, three in the new Mirage Beach Front Residential Enclave, one at No. 13 Oak Beach for Lydia and David Edwards and another at 25 Oak Beach for Wendy and Paul Lambert Firth.
Andrew had in 1996 left from working at McDonald solicitors in Cairns and bought a one hectare block of land on Reynolds Road, Oak Beach and was growing herbs for a living while Mel was doing hair dressing now in Port Douglas.
Andrew and Mel had me over for dinner quite often and they are always there for me.
Bill and Cecily Ridderhof lived in an original fibro shack at number 3 Oak Beach, Bill was a primary school teacher and Cecily, at this stage, a teachers aid and they have three daughters, Lucy, Kate and Suzy. They all looked after my wellbeing during the worst period of my grieving and had me to dinner at least once a week.
This family are the most beautiful people and I love them all dearly. When their daughters were becoming teenagers and wanted to live closer to their friends they moved to Port Douglas. Cecily went back to university at the JCU, obtained a degree in education and now she and Bill teach primary school in Port Douglas. I think that school is very lucky to have two such wonderful teachers.
Living without someone you had loved and bonded with, raised children and built your life with over a period of forty-five years was a difficult adjustment to make.
It is not easy to maintain a will to live.
For more than a year whenever I heard or saw something interesting I caught myself thinking “Heather will be pleased to hear that”.
My sisters Lorna and Joan were in Adelaide in early January and were about to return to Mildura when Heather went into Hospital. Lorna stayed to give me support for which I am eternally grateful.
Some years ago the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ insurance brokers had made me an offer that was; ‘if I took out my professional indemnity insurance with them and stayed with them for more than three years they would cover me after I retired for the rest of my life’. I contacted them in 2003 and informed them that I was going to retire and would they honour that agreement.
When I received the agreement in writing it included the words ‘After the retirement date I would agree to do no architectural work at all, not even voluntary work.’ This was a surprise but a good thing because when people found out that I had retired I was asked to do a lot of small additions or renovations jobs and was pleased to have a ready excuse to refuse.
I no longer wanted to be tied to work.
The RAIA made me a special member so that I can remain a member without paying fees.
To fund my retirement I needed to rent out the unit, No.2 at 3 Ballogie Road, Adelaide and Natasha, Matthew’s second daughter, needed somewhere to live so I rented it to her and a girl friend whose boyfriend also lived there. Natasha when I last saw her was ambitious and had plans of joining the Navy where she would study Law. A good plan I thought, Natasha would have to pay only one third of the $200 rent I was asking.
However Natasha’s friends were not good tenants, were unreliable in paying their share of the rent and didn’t stay long and they left Natasha with a $500 electricity bill to pay.
When I asked Natasha how could they possibly run up a $500 electricity bill she replied “I don’t know, I think they were doing something in the roof.”
This sounded serious so I went to Adelaide at the first opportunity.
I found in the roof space remanents of a hydroponic farm and in the garage, some partly used containers of special fertilizer for marijuana.
I was telling my son Peter about it and saying that I was thinking of reporting them to the drug squad. Peter said “be care-full because I heard of a land lord who reported his tenants for growing marijuana in his garden. The drug squad confiscated his property because it had been used for the production of drugs” so I didn’t report them.
The unit was in a mess, the insect screens on the sliding doors had disappeared, insect screens from two windows had disappeared, walls were chipped and dirty, there were holes in one wall up near the ceiling. Weeds in the Eastern garden were one and a half metres high and their dog had dug up and chewed up the irrigation pipes.
There were thirteen plastic garbage bin liners full of rubbish in the garage.
I worked hard for three weeks doing repairs and painting.
There were only two light bulbs in the house that worked.
While I was replacing the light bulb in the Dining Room the step-stool I was standing on wobbled, I lost my balance and fell fortunately cleanly through the doorway into the kitchen. I injured my left hand and had to next day go to a doctor who sent me for x-rays which took a whole day. I guess I was lucky I didn’t hit my head on the door frame or I probably would have died there on the Kitchen floor, there was no one to check on me.
One leg of the step stool had been bent probably from misuse by the tenants and that’s what caused the accident.
For three garbage collection nights I could be seen walking the streets with a garbage bag over each shoulder, looking like santa clause depositing garbage bags in other people’s bins if they would fit.
While washing out a paint roller I heard someone at the gas meter. It was a man from the gas company. I said “what are you doing?”.
He replied “cutting off your gas, why don’t you pay your bill?”
I said “I don’t have a bill, shouldn’t you give a final notice?, Iv’e only been here three days”
“Nothing to do with me mate, I’m only paid to cut off your gas.”
I phoned the gas company and asked who owed the money and how much. They replied that they could not give me that information due to the privacy act. “So how can I pay the bill if I don’t know how much it is and I’m not going to pay unless I know who owes the debt. “Well you won’t get any gas then” was their reply.
I phoned the gas Ombudsman (they have a special Ombudsman for gas and electricity) who told me to give him two hours and ring the gas company again.
This time they gave me the information; the debts were owed by two people, a Natasha McPhee and a Natasha Krilly. Natasha’s mother’s previous name was Krilly, so I paid the account.
Then the same thing happened with electricity from two separate electricity supply companies. These accounts totalled almost $2,000.
Natasha would not contact me, she changed her mobile phone number and Matthew said he didn’t know her new number and wouldn’t tell me her new address until I received a renewal notice for her car registration and I needed to re-address it.
Apparently Natasha’s mother’s influence was coming to the fore, such a pity.
I wrote to Natasha telling her that it was her choice, she could live the life of a responsible loving person and be happy or a life of a cheat and hate-full person and be un-happy like her mother.
She appears to have chosen the latter course but I do hope she comes to her senses, she was a nice little girl. Otherwise so as far as I am concerned, she is not my granddaughter. To do these things to me after what I have been through, well I just do not want to know people like that but I am still hopeful that she will turn her life around.
The latest news about Natasha, all good, is that she has turned her life around. She has a good job and a very nice boy friend
For some years I have been having a ‘full-moon’ party’ (just a sausage sizzle and champagne in candle light) on the beach in front of my house when the weather was good enough. My friends, E-lane and Lionel Berkowitz, always came when they were in Port Douglas and one night they brought John and Gwen McIlwraith who also come up to Port for five or six months each year.
I had to learn to spell this strange name, John McIlwraith when I was working at Hassell and McConnell in Adelaide in 1954 because they always specified John McIlwraith taps, baths and basins to be installed in their buildings. So I asked John if he was related to John McIlwraith taps etc. and he was.
He was the last chairman of the board of directors of John McIlwraith industries, they had sold to Email.
John’s great grandfather had started a brass foundry in Melbourne in 1854,
A couple of years later when John and Gwen came to my full moon party they brought their divorced daughter Jillian and we got on well and started dating. Jill lived in Western Australia in a Perth suburb called Daglish and I visited her there a couple of times.
She came to live with me at Oak Beach in 2005.
I was thinking about getting back into art as a retirement hobby and to encourage me Anthony had given me a sketch book, pencils and paints but I did nothing until Jill came along. Jill has been an amateur painter for some time and she encouraged me to join an organisation called ‘The Art House’ and I have been doing life drawing, portrait painting and water colour painting classes.
I found that I enjoyed doing portraits in oils and for practice have done portraits of Jill’s and my family and ancestors.
I am now the president of ArtHouse Port Douglas Incorporated.
Through Virginia Maywald (Anthony’s wife) we met Karlene and Dean Maywald (called Jock by his friends) and their daughter Tilly who was about four years old at the time.
This family has become very close friends to Jill and I and they visit us almost every year. Dean is one of those men who likes to be doing something constructive, even on holidays. During their visits he has build a much needed new fence along my Southern boundary as well as doing other necessary maintenance jobs about the house.
At the time we met them Karlene was ‘The Honourable Karlene Maywald MP’, a minister in the South Australian Government and Dean was the Mayor of Waikerie, a wine grape growing district in the Barossa Valley on the Murray River. We have a lot of fun at Oak Beach when they visit especially when Anthony, Virginia, Grace and Hugo time their visit to coincide with theirs.
Last year, in June 2006, the Alice Springs council invited me to the opening of additions to the council chambers that I designed in 1978 and I accepted the invitation.
So I arrived in Alice Springs exactly forty years after my first arrival to live there in 1966.
Brian Martin, who was also on the first council, was invited and we both gave a speech.
GHD were the architects for the extensions and in my opinion the design was not compatible with the existing design nor with the character or climate of Alice Springs. They also had renovated the old buildings and put flat plaster board .ceilings throughout.
Apparently the mayor, Fran Kilgarrif, saved the original building from being totally demolished to make way for more commercial buildings.
I arrived on Friday afternoon and was told by Pat McDonald (an officer in the council who was there when I was on the council) that tonight is the change over dinner for the Alice Springs Rotary, my old Club, and her husband was a Rotarian and would I like to go with him. This club has over fifty members now although there are three other clubs in the town. There were over one hundred people at the dinner some of which were children of Rotarians who were members when I was.
I sat with my old friends Shirley and George Brown and Dave and June Bottrall as well as Pat McDonald and her husband. It was sad to see that June was not well, she appeared to have Alzheimer’s disease, but Dave was very kind and patient with her. George is a water colour artist and does beautiful central Australian landscapes. Shirley has become an author of note and has published a number of historic books about Central Australia.
I took a number of photos of the catholic and Anglican church and others of my buildings and was disappointed to see the marvellous slab-glass and concrete window of the baptistery in the catholic church was falling apart. The epoxy used in the concrete was disintegrating. I believe it is in the process of being restored.
Since my previous experience in hospital in 1997, there has appeared a new type of hospital where you can be admitted for just the day if you require only a simple procedure.
I have been to a couple of these, one for a colonoscopy and a couple of times in another to have the lens in my eyes replaced with plastic ones. These facilities are very professional and efficient and all the staff are friendly, competent and treat you like they care about you.
While there we often walked the esplanade passed a block of units being built and when almost completed I went in one day when I saw someone doing a final clean. He was the developer, Gordon Churcher, who showed me through and gave me a sales pamphlet of the three storey block of twelve units called Paringa Building.
We returned to Alice Springs and Heather said “it’s time I went down to Adelaide to check on the boys”. I drove her to the airport and when returning thinking about beautiful tropical Palm Cove, red sand was blowing across the road in front of me, the announcer on the car radio said “it’s forty-two degrees outside and now here’s the news.” I thought “what am I doing here when I could be in Palm Cove”. I drove back to the office and phoned Les Loy in the real estate office and said “how much would I get for my office premises and would there be a buyer about? After looking into it he rang back and said “I could get you $190,000 for your office and I have a buyer”. “make it $195,000 and he’s got a deal” I replied. I then phoned the real estate agent handling the sale of Paringa Units and asked him to send me a contract on Unit No. 4.
When Heather returned from Adelaide I told her that I had sold the office, put the house on the market and was awaiting a contract to buy unit 4 in Paringa Building, Palm Cove.
I was tired of Central Australia and It’s time I started to do what I want, not what others want. She was quiet and after a few days I heard her tell someone who said “and what do you think about this”
Heather replied “I am still in shock but I think I like the idea” so she got into the job of moving.
What started my thinking about leaving the Northern Territory was an incident at seven AM on the morning of November 12, 1983. The clock radio awakened me with the news that prime minister Bob Hawk has given the Ayers Rock National Park “back to the aboriginals”. The funny thing was that they had given it to the wrong aboriginals. The name was then changed to Uluru.
I thought that if a government was that stupid then they are likely to one day decide that the solution to all of their aboriginal problems throughout Australia would be to give the whole of the Northern Territory to the aboriginals and tell them all to go and live there.
So I thought it might be a good idea to get all of my assets out of the northern Territory before this could happen.
I had just completed the construction phase of the Catholic High School and the Tennant Creek Civic centre and from past experience I knew that the time to get out of a business was when you are ahead.
Working from the house I finalized the few small jobs I had and by the end of February had sold the house and in early March with the RX7 stacked to the roof, drove to Palm Cove. The only sad thing about leaving Alice Springs at that time was that Peter was still living at home and we had to virtually throw him out of the house because it had been sold.
I stayed overnight in Mount Isa and intended to stay the next night in Townsville but on arrival there was a power strike on and no hotel or motel would answer their door so I kept driving and tried to get a room at Cardwell but the same existed there. I plodded on in tropical rain and total darkness and arrived at Palm Cove in poring tropical rain at midnight on March 7th 1985.
This was the time the premier of Queensland, Joe Bejelkie Petersen, had taken on the unions in the electrical generating industry and they were on partial strike, supplying power to different areas for an hour about every two or three hours. There was no power on in the unit which had been closed up for weeks and it was stifling hot and muggy.
Then the power came on so I turned on the air conditioner, lights and TV only to see an announcement that it was forbidden to use any air conditioners and if you did you would have your power cut off.
Heather arrived a few days later with Katie and Haggis, our two little dogs, and we settled into unit living on the beach at Palm Cove.
Heather at the Kuranda market 1983, before it became over commercialized.
We went for a drive to Port Douglas one day and found that Gary Hunt, King-Jones and partners, from Alice Springs, had opened a branch of their Alice Springs office on the first floor of the ANZ bank so I called in to see them. They offered me work on a freelance basis which I accepted sometimes working on the balcony of the unit in Palm Cove and sometimes in their office. One job I did for them was the house for Jim and Jo Wallace, founders of the Quicksilver reef tours.
Gary Hunt was then bought by Woodhead Australia, architects from Adelaide and Gary and David King-Jones became directors of Woodheads.
In September 1985 Heather’s mother broke her hip and contracted a golden staff infection while in the hospital so Heather wanted to go to Adelaide.
The Mirage projects looked ready to start and I offered my services to Woodheads and promised that I would return from Adelaide when the jobs got underway.
We decided that we would need the car in Adelaide so fitted out ourselves with high tech camping gear that took little space and with our two little dogs had a nice camping holiday on the way to Adelaide.
While in Adelaide Heather got a job as personal secretary to Ms Tiddy, the director of ‘Equal Opportunities’, but I found getting a job quite difficult partly because of my age and partly because no architect wanted an architect who had more experience than the boss, working for them. What I found interesting was how much the profession had changed in the nineteen years since leaving Adelaide. The emphasis was on ‘how good are you at selling’ and ‘which football club did you play for when you were young’.
My answers to both questions were; I believe that an architect should get work because he does good work not because he is a good salesman and I have not played football since leaving high school, were apparently not acceptable.
I did eventually get a good job at Brown Falconer, Architects where they were just getting into using computers and they soon discovered that I was well ahead of them in the use of computers in an architectural practice. They decided to start a computer cell in their practice members of which would be trained to do computer aided drawing (CAD) as well as computer administration and they employed a young man who had done a course in CAD. To teach us. With a bank of PC’s using AutoCad release 2, three of us were given lessons in AutoCad, It was good to be paid while learning.
Unfortunately after about four months Adelaide’s economy fell into a hole as it seems to do every couple of years and the practice decided that they needed to use the resources they already had, which was manual draughtsmen, and closed down their computer cell. I felt sorry for the practice because after spending all that money training us they got no return on their investment. But I had gained the skill in the use of AutoCad.
I then got a temporary job working for an architect whose office was in Hindmarsh square on the opposite side to where I worked for ETSA in the 1950s, just while his senior draughtsman was on holidays. This architect and his wife, also an architect both lectured at the Adelaide University.
In late January 1987 I got a job with two architects in partnership and was due to start work on the following Monday.
On the Thursday before, I got a phone call from Gavin Lee, manager of Woodhead architects in Port Douglas, offering me the job of being site architect for the Mirage Condominiums being built by Christopher Skase.
The two architects I was going to work for said “we don’t blame you for preferring to go to Port Douglas to work” and released me from my commitment to them.
I packed my RX7 and started my 4,200 kilometre drive to Port Douglas at first light on Friday morning, arrived on Sunday afternoon and started work Monday morning.
Gavin Lee put me into a unit which belonged to a draughtsman who was on holidays and when he came back I stayed in Michelle Piat’s house on the hill for a month while they went on holidays and then into a cockroach ridden holiday house on Solander Boulevard.
Heather flew up on April 17 to be here for my birthday on the 18th and we immediately started looking for a house to buy in Port Douglas.
We bought a two bedroom octagonal house at 129 Davidson Street for $105,000 with only a one week settlement time and borrowed Woodhead’s Toyota four wheel drive, drove to Cairns and bought a queen bed and bedding, a dining room suite all in ‘flat pack’ and a washing machine so we could move in. Later we bought a cane lounge and brought it back from Cairns on a roof rack on the RX7.
This house was right across the road from the condominium building site so I was almost living on site. Skase insisted that the people working on his jobs always carry a two way radio so he could contact us at any time, (there were no mobile phones then) and for security reasons he never let anyone know where he would be at any time but he would call a meeting at a minutes notice.
Heather got work at Harvey First National Real Estate with Chris Harvey who is married to Janet, younger daughter of John and Marilyn Morris. Chris Harvey later Joined with Tony McGrath and started an LJ Hooker office.
A block of four prototype condominiums (now called villas) was the first building we started for Christopher Skase. We had the walls built to first floor level, reinforced and filled with concrete and the formwork for the first floor slab was erected by the Thursday before Easter 1987.
Skase made an inspection and said “these rooms are not large enough.
I want the Living Room increased by one metre in width and two metres in length, The Master Bedroom increased in width by one and a half metres, the second bedroom increased by one metre”.
I said “rooms always look too small when a building is at this stage with all the Acrow props filling the spaces, are you sure you need this extra space?” He replied “we have been building long enough to know what we want”.
I thought “but apparently not long enough to know how to read room sizes from the plans, what an un-necessary waste of money”. If he was any good he would have known from the plans that the room sizes did not suit him. The original designs had been done by Media five architects of Brisbane and the working drawings by Woodhead Australia.
Then he said ”I want the necessary demolition done and the revised drawings delivered to the builder by the resumption of work on Tuesday, after Easter”. As we walked away I heard the foreman shout to his men “come on, let’s get this scaffolding down”.
I went back to Woodhead’s office and said to the drawing staff “I hope none of you had plans for Easter because we are all working for the whole holidays, we have to redesign the condominiums and have the new drawings done by 8.00 AM Tuesday morning”. I heard dead silence so I knew what they were thinking.
Of-course there was no chance of doing a whole set of drawings in that time so we did the drawings essential for the builder to start on the footings on Tuesday, the rest would be done to keep ahead of the builder. The changes Skase wanted increased the spans of all of the roof structural members so to avoid having to re-design and redraw all the details I substituted 200mm deep cold rolled steel rafters for 200 deep timber rafters.
On Good Friday morning the site foreman phoned “these walls are full of reinforced concrete so it is not possible to get them demolished by Tuesday unless we use dynamite and I have a powder monkey’s licence”
“Don’t ask “ I said, or I have to say NO!”. He got the message and said “OK”. If he had asked to use explosives I would have to say NO! because we could not get the necessary permits until after Easter which would be too late. Also the site was in the middle of the jungle so there was no danger to neighbours.
Heather and I had just sat down for lunch on Good Friday when I heard a series of blasts, “there seems to be a lot of cars backfiring today” I commented.
The demolition was completed by 8.00 Tuesday morning when I took the revised drawings to the site office.
I soon found that concrete workers in Far North Queensland were real cowboys as concreters and they would not take any notice of an architect or engineer.
After you had explained how you wanted the concrete to be poured and vibrated to get a good result they would say “you stick to your drawings, mate, and we will stick to our concrete work, we are the concreters”. You could never get good off-form concrete in North Queensland like you could in Alice Springs. They did not understand the significance of the ‘water to cement ratio’ and they added too much water to make the concrete easily workable consequently there would usually be shrinkage cracks. They did not understand the importance of curing concrete.
Concretors could not get falls in floors so the water would drain to a floor waste, they would just make a floor level and dig out an area of concrete around the floor waste so you were left with a slope of about 30 degrees form about 300 mm around the drain.
The tiler of course could not tile to that shape so they used to fill it in with grout and build up a fall that resulted in a 40 mm step up into the bathroom at the doorway, a totally unacceptable and dangerous result for the end user.
On one job I instructed the builder to instruct the concreter to screed the floors in an even slope from the Bathroom walls to the floor waste as I had specified but as I walked away I heard the builder say “the architect says you are a rat-shit concreter Bruce”. Bruce replied “tell the architect to come back when we are pouring more concrete and we will bury him under it”.
So the only solution was to design a set-down of 40 mm into the wet area slabs and let the tiler grout the floor to get the correct slope which of course is extra cost to the owner.
Skase couldn’t wait for the block of four prototype units to be finished and so instructed us to proceed with the other forty four units of stage one so I was soon supervising the construction of forty eight units. The project managers employed two clerks of works to assist me with inspections and reports.
I had my own personal computer which I took into work to use for spread sheets and AutoCad drawings. The office had only a mini computer, a Wycat, which was connected to the main frame in the head office at Adelaide which was about equivalent in capabilities to the Tandy model 2 that I had in 1979 in Alice Springs except it had a lot more memory, but it could not do CAD. The Wycat bombed out every time we had a power fluctuation or power failure, which were frequent in those days Every time this happened, the keyboards and printers had to be reconfigured which took about two hours. After about four or five crashes it would die and have to be packed off to Brisbane to be fixed which was about every week in the wet season. The guy in charge of computers in the Adelaide head office just said “it must be something you do wrong in that office because we never have that problem in Adelaide”. They would not approve of the purchase of an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) so I kept a diary of every crash and every total breakdown and gave an extract of my diary to the manager of Wycat Adelaide. He was very embarrassed and asked me to send the CPU to Brisbane where they added some components and it never crashed again. Then I got into trouble from the directors because the computer controller in Woodheads complained about being bypassed.
Woodhead Architects were going through a phase, as many other large offices were at that time. They employed young inexperienced architects as office managers thinking that they would add some dynamics to the practice but all they did was make a lot of mistakes as we all did at that age. It was frustrating for me when I knew exactly what should be done in terms of procedure (not design) but the young architect would not listen and consequently get the practice into difficulties from which they then wanted me to extract them.
As far as architectural design was concerned I would give practical advice to try to help them achieve their concept.
I taught some of their young architects, including Gary Hunt, to use AutoCad and they soon surpassed me with their skills in CAD drawing.
In 1991, due to a slowing of the economy and even more so because of the pilot strike, Port Douglas was in a deep recession and Woodhead closed their Port Douglas Office. For a time I worked in their Cairns office and also helped in their Sydney office on the Herald Weekly Times new building.
Gary Hunt decided to resign from Woodhead and to open his own practice in Port Douglas. I worked for him on a freelance basis and he had some hard times in his early years. He had to sell his Porsche and his boat but when the economy picked up he soon replaced them.
After one year in the house at 129 Davidson Street Heather and I decided we were tired of living on a main road on which traffic was rapidly increasing and so looked for a quiet place to live.
We liked Oak Beach but the price of land or a beach shack was expensive until the pilots’ strike when it almost halved. Heather did not like Oak Beach as a place to live at first but when I drove her to the alternative places and at each one asked “would you like to live here?” she said no to all but Oak Beach. We bought an old shack at No. 7 Oak Beach for $170,000, about the same cost of a house in Port, and renovated it. We lived there from 1989 until 1994, although we sometimes stayed in our unit at Palm Cove.
We sold the house at Davidson Street for $175,000 so we swapped a house for a lifestyle.
We renovated the concrete block fishing shack to make it more liveable but it did not all go smoothly.
In a letter to Marlene Wigzell dated 23rd. April 1991, Heather wrote :-
Andy has been coming into work quite often finishing off things that he was involved in, without pay, because he wouldn’t be earning anything if he was home anyway. He is a bit dismal – in the last twelve months he has lost his dog, his car and his job so someone somewhere doesn’t like him.
Last week Andy sand papered our frig and freezer which were threatening to disintegrate from rust, and sprayed them with a good result eventually, but it wasn’t the ‘piece of cake’ job that it looked. All sorts of things went wrong, he had to take them outside to do it and as soon as he started spraying the wind came up. Then a sheet of news-paper blew onto the freshly painted door, and after redoing it, a swarm of small native wild bees came along and tried to stick themselves to the wet paint. [they are paint junkies]
Then again on 24 November 1991 :-
We have had some lovely rain here at last, the first since last April. We have got water in the tanks again. It is a bit difficult at times not being on a town water supply.
Andy wasn’t pleased with the rain yesterday though. He is replacing the large tarpaulin which roofs our carport, and he was told that if he painted it, it would last twice as long. He bought sufficient paint for the area, got up early to go to buy a roller 30 Kms return. The paint only covered half what he expected and he had to go another 30 Kms again and buy another can. When he opened it, it was green – not white as the label said. Back to the shop again. He had just finished painting when the clouds burst and down came torrents of rain and we had white pools of water running over the ground and it will have to be done again. Usually I think it is his own fault when things go wrong but yesterday he seemed fairly unlucky.
Heather and I organized a party to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary to be held at the kiosk at Waterfall Gulley, near Adelaide, where we had our wedding reception on 5th of March, 1955.
At the party Marlene Wigzell presented Heather with a folder which contained every letter Heather had written to her from 17th January 1955 up to this date.
Heather made her own wedding dress and had her ‘going away outfit’ tailored to my design. In that first letter to Marlene Wigzel she wrote:
Dear Marlene,
Thanks for sending over that piece of nylon but I have already bought some material. Actually I had no intention of buying it at the time but I was in Myers one lunch time and saw this nylon and it was only sixteen shillings and eleven pence per yard. It’s very pretty and mum just loves it ( the only thing is that mum and Andy have very different tastes) but I hope everyone will like it.
Communication by letter was the normal thing in those days.
When work for Woodhead was getting scarce in Port Douglas I got some part-time work teaching DOS (computer Disk Operating System) and Lotus 123, spread sheet at TAFE, Mossman.
Woodhead’s Cairns office had three multi storied buildings on the drawing boards and they had nominated me to be the site architect to manage the construction phase of each building so Heather and I thought it was an opportunity to get a good house closer to Cairns.
There is an enclave at Clifton Beach of large white houses with red tiled roofs which the locals call ‘New Guinea Houses’ because they were built for a number of Australians who had to leave New Guinea when they got independence from Australia. There was a short attractive walk through a rainforest to the beach.
We bought one of these houses and lived there for a year.
The three multi storied buildings in Cairns did not eventuate and we decided that we would rather live in or near Port Douglas where there was a good small town community life without being parochial.
We had bought a block of land in a subdivision called Reef Park on Ribbon Avenue in 1988 for an investment but the price had gone down, not up, so we built a house in 1994 for an investment on this block with the intention of living there until we could recoup our money and maybe make a small profit.
We lived in a holiday house I designed belonging to E-laine and Lionel Berkowitz on Solander Boulevard while I had the house in Ribbon Avenue built.
I had been the site architect on a complex of 29 units called ‘Reef Terraces Two’ and a few days before completion the builder (from Melbourne) was declared bankrupt and I found that they had not paid any of the local sub-contractors. The developer, John Morris, was most displeased about this and so when he decided to build ’Tree Tops Resort’, which consisted of 300 rooms I was able to convince him to use a construction method called ‘construction Management’. Construction management is a method of building best described as “sub-contracting” but employing professional persons to manage the process.
John Morris paid me a $15.000 bonus for getting the project finished on time and on budget.
While we had the ‘system’ running he also built a block of 14 town houses in Reef Park.
To give the local sub-contractors a chance to recover from the bankruptcy of this Melbourne building contractor I convinced John Morris to try to employ only locals and to give them special contractual conditions that suited their financial capabilities. For example when the local plumber said that he would like to do the job but he could not finance the purchase of materials nor the large payroll John Morris agreed to special contractual conditions. Instead of paying the sub-contractor the usual way, which was monthly and thirty days after the months work was complete, he agreed to pay on a weekly basis. He also agreed to pay for materials for the job delivered to site and securely stored. This idea, as well as helping the plumber, ensured that there were no delays to the construction program while awaiting the delivery of materials.
While the Tree Tops project was underway, Heather started to get severe pains in her abdomen mainly during the night and her general practitioner sent her to consult a range of specialists in Cairns. After many X-rays, CT scans, colonoscopies and gastroscopies they found nothing and her GP suggested that it may be emotional, she may be imagining the pain.
Heather was a strong woman of strong build, tall with a straight back and she held her head high which made her look taller than she was and although she was from a farming family she had a natural dignity and articulated the English language with clarity and perfection. She had conceived four times and given birth to and brought up four strong sons. She was also a very pragmatic person. This is not the type of woman who imagines pain. In this Heather’s main fault was that she had too much faith in doctors and no matter how much I tried to persuade her she refused for two months to get a second opinion.
She went to another GP this time in Mossman who gave her treatment for gaudier, a common cause for stomach pains and diarrhoea in the tropics for which none of the other doctors had tested.
This proved negative so he treated her for a particular stomach worm that he had found in some women with similar symptoms but that was not the cause.
After studying the results of all her other tests he sent her to Cairns for the old fashioned Barium Meal X-Ray which showed an obstruction in the small bowel where it joins the large bowel (the Ileum) and apparently was not detectable by the other tests.
More CT scans showed two small lesions on her liver and it was decided to take a biopsy of them to see if they were malignant. The diagnostic report said that the lesions were benign and probably not metastasised from the tumour in the bowel.
Before Heather began getting these pains and diarrhoea, whenever she had a drink of wine she had a hot flush but because she was around the age of menopause no doctor thought this to be relevant. The hot flushes became more severe during the two years period of these tests so that just one sip of wine would have her face glowing so much that everyone present made comment on her red face.
The GP referred her to an oncologist who referred her to a surgeon, both different to the first lot, and they decided to give her an 5-HIAA, 24 hour urine test which she had on January 2nd. 1994.
On Tuesday January 21st. 1994 we had just began the descent on the Cook Highway, North of Palm Cove, on the way to Port Douglas where you first see the Coral sea through the trees at Ellis Beach when she said “if there is anything I want to do I will have to do it now, two years is not long”.
Neither of us had spoken since we left Dr. Lynch’s consulting rooms in Cairns 30 minutes ago, I was in some kind of shock, my emotions were tightly bound, the information we had received I was afraid to accept.
He said ten years, not two, he speaks quietly but I am sure he said ten years.
“It doesn’t matter”, she said, “I have done all I wanted and more in my life, I am happy with my life.”
The test showed that she had high levels of serotonin in her urine which indicates that she has a condition called carcinoid syndrome.
An official definition of carcinoid went as follows :-
CARCINOID SYNDROME.
A syndrome of episodic cutaneous flushing, diarrhea, valvular heart disease,and less commonly asthma, produced by metastic carsinoid (argentaffin) tumors which secrete excessive amounts of serotonin and other vasoactive substances, including bradykinin and prostaglandins.
Functioning malignant carcinoid usually arises in the ileum. Endroctrine products released into the portal circulation are rapidly destroyed by blood and liver enzymes, serotonin
(5-hydroxytrypttamine, 5-HT) by hepatic monoamine oxidase. Thus, the carcinoid syndrome can occur from an ileal primary only after hepatic metastases with serotonin release via hepatic veins directly into the systemic circulation.
Diagnoses of the condition is established by a 24 hour urine test for 5-hydroxyindole acetate acid
(5-HIAA), which is the end product of the breakdown of tryptophan to serotonin. Patients with carcinoid syndrome may have very high levels, 100 – 500 mg. in 24 hours.
Carcinoid tumors are sometimes benign but are usually malignant growths. Surgical excision of the tumor and any associated mesenteric nodes is the treatment of choice. Chemotherapy can be used with metastatic disease and other drugs are prescribed as indicated to manage the hypotension, diarrhea, flushing and other symptoms. Efforts are made to improve nutrition and at the same time avoid serotonin-containing foods such as walnuts and bananas which are known to precipitate an attack.
Basically this condition produces a chemical in the body which causes tumours to grow usually at first in the small bowel and then other places in Heather’s case in the liver. Each tumour produces more serotonin which in turn produces more tumours. The specialists advised us that the tumours need not be removed unless they were interfering with some body function. The tumour in the small bowel has to be removed to allow the bowel to function.
Carcinoid syndrome usually takes about 10 years to kill its victim and there is no cure and no chance of remission.
Heather decided that nothing was going to stop her from living life to the full for whatever time she had left, not even this slow merciless killer and for about a year she told no one and although I tried to persuade her to tell the family she forbid me to tell anyone. How she coped with her situation had to be her decision. I of course got into trouble from our four sons for not telling them.
We went to a specialist oncologist in Adelaide who was reputed to know all about carcinoid syndrome, Dr. Jack Russell, for a second opinion but he had nothing new to tell so it seemed that the diagnosis and treatment she was having in Cairns was as good as you could get at that time.
The tumor was removed with 100 mm of small bowel which is a fairly major operation and recovery took some time after which she was quite well for a couple of years. On a visit to the surgeon I asked if she should have the small tumors removed from her liver but he just stared at me and ignored my question. Neither the oncologist or the surgeon would talk to me and yet Heather needed my help to remember all that she was told during a consultation, I suppose they think that I should not be there because their consultations with their patient is confidential.
We were living in the house in Ribbon Avenue when in 1996 I said to Heather “we have this property on the beach, should we build a new house and live there?”, she said she would like to so I designed and built the current house at 7 Oak Beach and moved in over the weekend of December 14, 1996.
Erica Fleming phoned and said “I am in Cairns, on a bus trip and have a free day, could we meet some where?”. Heather and I arranged to pick her up from her hotel and go for a walk in and have lunch at the botanic gardens. Naturally I asked “how’s Harry going?”. Erica replied “Oh!, didn’t you know, Harry died about ten years ago. He was coming home from work early because we were having a big party for our son’s twenty first-birthday. A truck loaded with gravel went through a red light”.
I must have looked a bit distressed because she touched my arm and said “he wouldn’t have suffered at all, he was killed instantly.”
About two years after the operation Heather got a bowel obstruction which was caused by food catching on ‘attachments’ which I suppose is like scar tissue which grew where the bowel had been cut and sewn together. The method of clearing the ‘blockage’ (I called it) was to be admitted to hospital with a sign above her bed which said ‘NIL BY MOUTH’ on an intravenous drip, a tube placed into the stomach via the nose, which was not pleasant, and a nurse sucked out the contents of her stomach about every two hours. The process took about four days after which she was given something to eat and if it passed through she was allowed to go home. Her diet from now on had to be as near as possible to a ‘no fibre diet’. This was not easy, every time in hospital she ordered a low fibre meal they brought a high fibre meal and when she told them they said “just eat what you can of it”. I often had to go down to the hospital kiosk and get her a chicken sandwich with white bread.
From then about once a month she would wake usually in the early hours of the morning in severe pain and I would have to drive her to the Cairns Private Hospital, fairly slowly because every bend in the road caused extra pain. We would have to go to the emergency ward where the doctor was always some one she had never seen before who would have to make his own diagnosis and then try to insert an intravenous drip.
By then the pain was so great that all her peripheries had shut down.
Her lips, hands and feet would be blue and of-course because the arteries had collapsed in her arms they could never get the needle in for the intravenous drip into which they would give her morphine.
So I would tell the doctor on duty briefly the problem and ask if he could give her an immediate injection of pain killer and then do his diagnosis and insert the drip after the pain was under control. Some did but others treated me as though I wasn’t there and put her through another hour or more of agony while they stuffed around with their procedures.
I asked her oncologist if he could put a note in her file so the emergency ward could give her an injected pain killer on arrival but he just stared at me turned and walked away. I would have loved to have grabbed him by the throat shouted in the bastards face to do something about the gross incompetence of the hospital procedures but I knew they would just call security, throw me out and still ignore me.
I was president of the Rotary club of Port Douglas for 1996-1997. On the Queen’s birthday weekend the club charters a Quicksilver boat and takes tourists to Cooktown to witness the re-enactment of Captain Cook’s landing on the bank of the Endeavour River where he repaired his boat in 1770.
As President I had to go on the trip and on the return journey the sea was so rough that a two hour trip took four and a quarter hours.
The boat was rising and thumping over waves of over two metres high the whole way and there were so many people sick and passing out that it looked like a war time hospital ship. Luckily we had an ambulance officer on board.
When I got in my car to drive home from the marina I felt stiff and had difficulty working the pedals of the car.
That night I had terrible pains in my lower back and Heather had to call an ambulance because I couldn’t stand up let alone walk.
They took me to the Mossman Hospital where they got the pain under control and organized an appointment for me to see Dr. Muscio, an orthopaedic surgeon, in two weeks time.
After being home unable to walk and on strong pain killers for twenty four hours I said to Heather “I can’t do this for two more weeks, what if you drive me to the Cairns private emergency ward, they would have to admit me to the Cairns Private Hospital where I would see Dr. Muscio the next day”.
After X-rays, bone scans and a CT scan he found I had a disk extrusion and said that the boat trip would have caused it and many fishermen got this injury. He recommended a quartezone injection to the damaged disk which was done.
I was in a four bed ward with two other patients.
The patient next to me was a man of about seventy years of age who looked like he was a successful grazier. He had a fall and his doctor was worried that he had some brain damage so they were doing tests.
He wouldn’t talk to anyone. Every afternoon a gaggle of family came in, chatted amongst themselves, ignoring him, and took him outside for a walk. He was like a sack of potatoes, limp, lifeless and unresponsive. Two nurses, who also didn’t bother to acknowledge his presence as a person, had to struggle to lift him from his bed into the wheelchair. On most days his grand daughter came to see him during her lunch hour and she was about 22, lively, chatty, cheerful and obviously intelligent.
She called him ‘Big Daddy” and he responded, joked and chatted with her. While she was visiting one day his doctor came in with a large envelope in his hand and said “we have the results of your brain scan”, “did you find anything” she asked and Big Daddy and she laughed.
I couldn’t get him into a conversation.
We got a new nurse who was one of those lovely new age London girls who speak with beautiful clear and precise English, as though they had been taught by Professor Higgins. She was not a big girl, he must have been near twice her weight but she got him from his bed into his wheelchair by herself.
She spoke to him, asked him to sit up and swing his legs over the side of the bed, she bent her knees and got down beside him, put her arms around him and saying now you hug me too and straighten your legs as I do. Without much effort but using an intelligent technique she stood him, spun him around ninety degrees and lowered him into the wheelchair.
This was not only an intelligent patient handling method, it was also therapy, both physical and psychological but it showed the difference good nursing can make.
After four days of this type of caring he was responding to everyone normally and standing up by himself. He told me that he was from a cattle station in central Queensland where he would return.
About six weeks after leaving hospital I was able to walk without a walking frame. Luckily this happened between Heather’s bowel blockages. I was just able to drive again when I had to take her to the Cairns Private Hospital.
Copying the Queen I called 1997 our ‘annus horribilus’.
Every time she had a bowel blockage she lost weight and as they occurred more frequently she had no time between attacks to regain her lost weight until she was like a skeleton.
In August 1998 Heather had been home from hospital after a bowel blockage for only twenty four hours.
I had spent the whole day at meetings on the links job with the client, engineers, the builder and interior designer and arrived home at 6.00 apparently looking very tired because Heather waited until I had my dinner before she said “the obstruction has returned and I have to go back to hospital.
I have phoned Dr. Lynch and he has arranged for me to be admitted directly into hospital but would you give me a shower first?”.
She had to sit in the shower because she didn’t have enough strength to stand while I washed her.
She was like a bag of bones.
Luckily because of the shower water she couldn’t feel my tears falling on her.
We arrived at about two minutes after 8.00 o’clock to be told “you have to be here before 8.00 to be admitted, you will have to go to the emergency department”.
I lost my cool which I wish I hadn’t because it only upset Heather, and was storming when we arrived at the emergency room.
When they said after “what’s your name?” “have you been to this hospital before?”. I said “yes twenty four fucking hours ago for christ’s sake don’t you have a bloody file on her?, she practically lives here.”. Fortunately the sister was like they should all be, ‘caring’ and ran and got Heather’s file, shoved it in the doctors hands and then said to me “now you come and sit here while I make you a cup of tea otherwise you will have to be admitted with a heart attack.”
Being the husband of a dying woman is a very hard place to be. You need to be able to make everything right for her but you are helpless. It is difficult to be patient with the medical profession and hospitals especially at times when you know they could be much more professional in their procedures.
The only thing left for you is anger.
While all this was happening Matthew, in Adelaide was having problems with his daughter Nichole who was 14 years old and not attending school so he sent her to Mt. St Bernards Catholic Girls Boarding School in Herberton, two hours drive each way for us.
Heather attended social nights that the school held and once a month at least we had to pick her up and take her back to the bus stop at Smithfield when she came to our place for a weekend. She kept track of Nichol’s school curriculum and term periods because we had to organize our own activities around them. We attended her graduation at the end of the 1999 school year.
I thought having Nichole gave Heather a maternal interest and responsibility that she enjoyed and Heather was a good influence on Nichole who had been brought up by the most horrible mother anyone could imagine and without her father, our son.
In 1998 after she had been discharged from one of her stints in hospital Heather went to see Dr. Lynch and asked if there was anything he could do to improve her fitness long enough to go to Matthew’s wedding in September. He tapped his pencil on his desk and stared out the window for a while and said “I could prescribe steroids and see how you go” which he did.
Although they did nothing to improve her condition the steroids made her look really good. At Matthew’s and Tanya’s wedding everyone was saying how good she looked. Heather would say “I feel like a fraud because I am supposed to be dying but I feel so good.”
During this time Heather said to me “wouldn’t it be funny if I got better”
This was one of the times I wish I could have responded better and said “it wouldn’t be funny it would be wonderful” but because I was always on the edge of breaking down and I thought I had to maintain a strong front for Heather I just said “mmm”
Heather didn’t tell me about all of the minor problems she was having and I usually found out when taking her to the doctor but I have just found a note in her diary in shaky hand writing:-
6 : 12 : 1999
My eyes are clearer but my hands still tremble sometimes
I tend to feel exhausted a lot of the time and not as good as I did a month ago.
I haven’t seen Dr. Lansky yet on my bladder problem. The drugs mentioned on Dr. Mieleo’s sheet can have side effects + we are planning to go to Adelaide for Xmas
I thought I would wait until I get back. The incontinence is a problem but at present I can handle it by wearing protection.
We planned to go to Adelaide for Christmas to see our boys and grandchildren because we knew, without saying, that this would be her last Christmas. When we were packing she slumped onto the bed and cried “I can’t do it!”. I said “you rest and I will finish your packing”, “but what if I can’t come back!? I might be too sick to come back!”. “It doesn’t matter, if you can’t come back we will stay there”, I replied.
When we got to our unit in Adelaide the temperature was 42 degrees and the refrigerator broke down. Mathew fixed it but it broke down again so he brought a small bar refrigerator and Peter also brought one from his place as a temporary measure because it was holidays and there was no where to buy a new one.
Then the air conditioner broke down but Mathew fixed that and also put a ceiling fan in our bedroom but it was very uncomfortable for Heather for a couple of days. It must also have been bloody uncomfortable for Matt in the roof while installing a fan in 42 degrees heat and probably 60 degrees in the roof..
Heather was at times hyperactive but irrational, she would ask me to do something and before I had a chance to start doing it she would want something else done and then complain because I hadn’t done the first thing. Once when I started to do the dishes she shouted “don’t do the dishes!, when I am not capable of doing the dishes I don’t want to be alive!.
But I had often done the dishes lately.
We had Christmas mid day dinner with Peter, Kathleen and their children Hamish and the twins, Sarah and Kellie and we had Christmas eve with Matthew and Tania and Dina.
New years eve, we spent at home watching the celebrations on television.
John and Marlene Wigzell picked us up on the fourth of January 2000, took us for a drive through the Adelaide Hills through the small hills-towns which is an area Heather loved.
They came down the next day and we had lunch at the Mitcham shopping Centre and that night she was not well. They were going to take us for a drive to Victor Harbor on January sixth but Heather was not well enough to go, she was in some pain but didn’t want to go to a doctor.
On January seventh when I woke at about seven she was sitting up, in pain waiting for me to wake and said I will have to go to a doctor and get him to admit me to hospital, can you try to get me an early appointment.
I took her to Dr. Bain at the Mitcham medical centre who was quick to access the situation after a brief briefing from Heather and arranged for admission to St. Andrews Hospital on South Terrace Adelaide.
When we arrived Heather told the male nurse in attendance that she needed an immediate injection of octreotide (Sandostatin) because she hadn’t been able to take her medication for two days but he was puzzled and said he would tell the doctor. At each stage of going through the admittance procedure we asked about the octreotide but no one wanted to listen.
When she was eventually admitted with the drip installed and they came to put the tube up her nose she said that she didn’t want it.
I thought that meant that she had decided to die this time.
When the Surgeon, Mr. Gue, came to see her I phoned Heather’s surgeon, Dr. Knot, in Cairns, told him the story and asked him to speak to Mr. Gue and explain the need for an injection of octreotide and to brief him on Heather’s history.
The male nurse was very good and treated her with understanding and affection while he gave her excellent attention. Heather liked him and they exchanged jokes.
The surgeon decided by Sunday the ninth of January that an operation was urgent. “ It would be too cruel not to operate” he said.
I phoned Matthew and Peter and Anthony who was visiting from Melbourne. They all came to the hospital and Heather said goodbye to them.
I phoned Andrew who was still in Port Douglas and asked him to get to Adelaide as soon as he could.
While talking to Mr.Gue she said “if I stop breathing or my heart stops while operating do not try to resuscitate me, it would be good to die under anaesthetic.
I went with her in the lift holding her hand and when I had to let her go into the operating theatre we didn’t want to let go. When I did let go I almost lost control and when I saw a group of patients watching television, as a distraction, I joined them..
When it was over Mr. Gue said that it turned into a major operation because this obstruction was caused by a tumor in her bowel so a large section of bowel had to be removed. But there were hundreds of tumors from two millimetres to twenty five millimetres in size, scattered throughout her body as well as the two large ones on her liver that we already knew about.
I went to wait for her to wake up in the ‘high dependency unit’ with my face close to hers smiling because I really expected to not see her alive again.
When she opened her eyes that huge bright smile that first captured me lighted up her face she said
“I didn’t die.”
She was quite bright, sitting up and talking to visitors but on January the twelfth when I arrived she said “would you take my bag off the foot of the bed” which I did but when I put it on the floor she said “don’t put it in the water!” I said “there is no water there” She said “Oh, isn’t there.” Other visitors were there a bit later on, I was standing at the foot of her bed when she said “don’t stand there, you are getting wet, there is water running off the bed all over your trousers”. When I explained that there was no water she said “it must be the morphine, they are giving it to me every hour.
When the nurse came to inject it into her drip I asked “why did you take away the ‘morphine on demand gadget’?”
she said “because she wasn’t using it”.
I now know that I must have been under too much stress to think properly because now it seems too obvious to me that if she wasn’t using it, she didn’t want morphine, isn’t that what it is for?. but at the time I thought, as the hospital must have, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Isn’t there something wrong with their logic?. Later in 2008 after my bowel operation a nurse said to me “you are not using the morphine dispenser much, if you don’t use it more they will take it away and give it to you manually”.!! I thought “I don’t want them deciding when I need morphine and consequently get hallucinating” so made sure I used it more often.
On Friday January 14 I went home to our unit at about two o’clock for a rest and to feed Jessie (our little dog). She was sleeping and knowing that Matthew was going in to the hospital at about 5.30 I thought I could leave her for a while.
At six o’clock Matthew phoned to say “are you coming in because she is totally irrational”.
I went in and found that she had been put into a normal ward, taken off the drip and had been given a meal to eat which she didn’t want. I tried to talk to her but she was frantic and irrational and could not communicate.
Then I saw that she had no water.
I went out into the corridor where I found a nurse and said “where is your pantry?”
I must have been very aggressive because she showed me without objection or comment. I got a jug of iced water and Heather drank down three glasses and then was totally her-self.
The sister in charge, who was hugely pregnant, (about eight months) said “I’ve just come on duty and I didn’t know there was anything wrong, I thought she was probably like that all of the time.
She phoned Mr. Gue who was home having his dinner but he came in and put Heather back into the ‘high dependency ward’ in the sound proof glass room (the death room) where they proceeded to give her high doses of morphine.
I heard Mr. Gue ask the sister why she hadn’t looked into Heather’s problem and she told him the same but he said “didn’t you look at the previous sister’s notes?”. The pregnant sister replied that she had but there was nothing in them saying that she had to have water. ???
I remember in the Cairns hospital, after taking her off the drip, they always gave her a jug of water with marks down the side and said that she had to drink down to the next mark every fifteen minutes.
Her kidneys had stopped working and they brought in kidney specialists but they couldn’t improve her condition. He said to me that there was nothing more they could do and she would last another day, or two at most. I said to Mr. Gue that she had decided to take her own life when she reached this stage and if she was home that is what she would probably do. Naturally he had to say that they can’t do that here. She looked young again because she was full of fluid.
She was so drugged that her eyes were starry and I imagined that she would be having terrible hallucinations and thought about asking them to stop giving her morphine unless she asked for it. But then thought “I wonder if they are going to secretly overdose her, which would be the best thing.”
On the night of January fifteenth I asked them to put a stretcher in her room so I could sleep there. Anthony said he would come in between 1.O’ and two O’clock to relieve me. I took a light sleeping pill and was woken by Anthony at about 1.45 AM saying “I think she needs more morphine”.
Without thinking I ran out to the nurses station and said “she needs more morphine”.
The three of them were discussing something in a women’s magazine and one said “OK in a minute”
I ran back to her and she was taking huge breaths, like nothing I had seen before.
I ran back to the nurses and said “I think she is dying”
Then they leapt into action.
I ran back and looking into her eyes, watched her take three or four more breaths until the last one, then the air just escaped from her lungs.
I closed her eyes and hugged Anthony. It was two AM. On Sunday January 16, in the year 2000..
The nurses pulled down blinds over the glass walls and asked us to wait outside.
When they let us in they had tidied the bed and made up her face so she looked at peace at last.
The death certificate showed ‘Renal Failure’ as the cause of death but if it had not been that, it would have been something else.
Eight years had passed since she was diagnosed with carcinoid syndrome but the various doctors had taken two years to diagnose it, so she had survived the expected ten years with this condition.
I was living on the edge of sanity and was afraid of what I might do if I lost control and I didn’t know how I was going to get through the memorial service so I went for a walk along Lochness Avenue where I ran into Mark who I knew from when we lived in that street. He works at the Flinders University and suggested that I talk to a psychologist he knew, Jane Fowler, who also did work at the university. He got me an appointment with her for the next morning.
After listening to me for about thirty minutes she gave me quite a bit of practical advice that was to prove very helpful.
Blackwell Funerals service were excellent and ran such a professional service so that I had nothing to worry about including transporting Heather to Port Douglas where she is buried.
I thought “if only hospitals were run half as good as this”.
There has been a lot of remarkable developments in the invention of new medical equipment, techniques and surgical procedures as well as great progress in the development of drugs.
But there seems to me to have been no progress in the hospital and doctors’ procedures in relation to their patients since about 1900.
Although they may be technically brilliant it appears that the process of logic has never entered into their training.
And that “the patient’s welfare and convenience, as a person, comes well down near the bottom of their priorities”.
There are a few and getting to be more specialists who have an efficient practice and process their patients with friendly efficiency but most make you wait for two to three hours for a five minute consultation with no apology. People say that they must have had an emergency but that is seldom the case.
Once after visiting Heather’s oncologist in Cairns he asked us to wait because there was to be a conference of oncologists who were visiting Cairns and they would like to interview Heather. After waiting for two hours when everyone seemed to have gone home I found someone who phoned someone who said that that the conference had been cancelled. No one thought to tell us and there was no apology.
Getting admission to a hospital in cases like Heather’s should be a hell of a lot more efficient. If there are rules and regulations that prevent efficiency then they should be revised and there is no doubt about that.
Portrait of Heather
.When I returned to Oak Beach I continued to work on private jobs and designed a few houses, three in the new Mirage Beach Front Residential Enclave, one at No. 13 Oak Beach for Lydia and David Edwards and another at 25 Oak Beach for Wendy and Paul Lambert Firth.
Andrew had in 1996 left from working at McDonald solicitors in Cairns and bought a one hectare block of land on Reynolds Road, Oak Beach and was growing herbs for a living while Mel was doing hair dressing now in Port Douglas.
Andrew and Mel had me over for dinner quite often and they are always there for me.
Bill and Cecily Ridderhof lived in an original fibro shack at number 3 Oak Beach, Bill was a primary school teacher and Cecily, at this stage, a teachers aid and they have three daughters, Lucy, Kate and Suzy. They all looked after my wellbeing during the worst period of my grieving and had me to dinner at least once a week.
This family are the most beautiful people and I love them all dearly. When their daughters were becoming teenagers and wanted to live closer to their friends they moved to Port Douglas. Cecily went back to university at the JCU, obtained a degree in education and now she and Bill teach primary school in Port Douglas. I think that school is very lucky to have two such wonderful teachers.
Living without someone you had loved and bonded with, raised children and built your life with over a period of forty-five years was a difficult adjustment to make.
It is not easy to maintain a will to live.
For more than a year whenever I heard or saw something interesting I caught myself thinking “Heather will be pleased to hear that”.
My sisters Lorna and Joan were in Adelaide in early January and were about to return to Mildura when Heather went into Hospital. Lorna stayed to give me support for which I am eternally grateful.
*************************************************
Some years ago the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ insurance brokers had made me an offer that was; ‘if I took out my professional indemnity insurance with them and stayed with them for more than three years they would cover me after I retired for the rest of my life’. I contacted them in 2003 and informed them that I was going to retire and would they honour that agreement.
When I received the agreement in writing it included the words ‘After the retirement date I would agree to do no architectural work at all, not even voluntary work.’ This was a surprise but a good thing because when people found out that I had retired I was asked to do a lot of small additions or renovations jobs and was pleased to have a ready excuse to refuse.
I no longer wanted to be tied to work.
The RAIA made me a special member so that I can remain a member without paying fees.
To fund my retirement I needed to rent out the unit, No.2 at 3 Ballogie Road, Adelaide and Natasha, Matthew’s second daughter, needed somewhere to live so I rented it to her and a girl friend whose boyfriend also lived there. Natasha when I last saw her was ambitious and had plans of joining the Navy where she would study Law. A good plan I thought, Natasha would have to pay only one third of the $200 rent I was asking.
However Natasha’s friends were not good tenants, were unreliable in paying their share of the rent and didn’t stay long and they left Natasha with a $500 electricity bill to pay.
When I asked Natasha how could they possibly run up a $500 electricity bill she replied “I don’t know, I think they were doing something in the roof.”
This sounded serious so I went to Adelaide at the first opportunity.
I found in the roof space remanents of a hydroponic farm and in the garage, some partly used containers of special fertilizer for marijuana.
I was telling my son Peter about it and saying that I was thinking of reporting them to the drug squad. Peter said “be care-full because I heard of a land lord who reported his tenants for growing marijuana in his garden. The drug squad confiscated his property because it had been used for the production of drugs” so I didn’t report them.
The unit was in a mess, the insect screens on the sliding doors had disappeared, insect screens from two windows had disappeared, walls were chipped and dirty, there were holes in one wall up near the ceiling. Weeds in the Eastern garden were one and a half metres high and their dog had dug up and chewed up the irrigation pipes.
There were thirteen plastic garbage bin liners full of rubbish in the garage.
I worked hard for three weeks doing repairs and painting.
There were only two light bulbs in the house that worked.
While I was replacing the light bulb in the Dining Room the step-stool I was standing on wobbled, I lost my balance and fell fortunately cleanly through the doorway into the kitchen. I injured my left hand and had to next day go to a doctor who sent me for x-rays which took a whole day. I guess I was lucky I didn’t hit my head on the door frame or I probably would have died there on the Kitchen floor, there was no one to check on me.
One leg of the step stool had been bent probably from misuse by the tenants and that’s what caused the accident.
For three garbage collection nights I could be seen walking the streets with a garbage bag over each shoulder, looking like santa clause depositing garbage bags in other people’s bins if they would fit.
While washing out a paint roller I heard someone at the gas meter. It was a man from the gas company. I said “what are you doing?”.
He replied “cutting off your gas, why don’t you pay your bill?”
I said “I don’t have a bill, shouldn’t you give a final notice?, Iv’e only been here three days”
“Nothing to do with me mate, I’m only paid to cut off your gas.”
I phoned the gas company and asked who owed the money and how much. They replied that they could not give me that information due to the privacy act. “So how can I pay the bill if I don’t know how much it is and I’m not going to pay unless I know who owes the debt. “Well you won’t get any gas then” was their reply.
I phoned the gas Ombudsman (they have a special Ombudsman for gas and electricity) who told me to give him two hours and ring the gas company again.
This time they gave me the information; the debts were owed by two people, a Natasha McPhee and a Natasha Krilly. Natasha’s mother’s previous name was Krilly, so I paid the account.
Then the same thing happened with electricity from two separate electricity supply companies. These accounts totalled almost $2,000.
Natasha would not contact me, she changed her mobile phone number and Matthew said he didn’t know her new number and wouldn’t tell me her new address until I received a renewal notice for her car registration and I needed to re-address it.
Apparently Natasha’s mother’s influence was coming to the fore, such a pity.
I wrote to Natasha telling her that it was her choice, she could live the life of a responsible loving person and be happy or a life of a cheat and hate-full person and be un-happy like her mother.
She appears to have chosen the latter course but I do hope she comes to her senses, she was a nice little girl. Otherwise so as far as I am concerned, she is not my granddaughter. To do these things to me after what I have been through, well I just do not want to know people like that but I am still hopeful that she will turn her life around.
The latest news about Natasha, all good, is that she has turned her life around. She has a good job and a very nice boy friend
For some years I have been having a ‘full-moon’ party’ (just a sausage sizzle and champagne in candle light) on the beach in front of my house when the weather was good enough. My friends, E-lane and Lionel Berkowitz, always came when they were in Port Douglas and one night they brought John and Gwen McIlwraith who also come up to Port for five or six months each year.
I had to learn to spell this strange name, John McIlwraith when I was working at Hassell and McConnell in Adelaide in 1954 because they always specified John McIlwraith taps, baths and basins to be installed in their buildings. So I asked John if he was related to John McIlwraith taps etc. and he was.
He was the last chairman of the board of directors of John McIlwraith industries, they had sold to Email.
John’s great grandfather had started a brass foundry in Melbourne in 1854,
A couple of years later when John and Gwen came to my full moon party they brought their divorced daughter Jillian and we got on well and started dating. Jill lived in Western Australia in a Perth suburb called Daglish and I visited her there a couple of times.
She came to live with me at Oak Beach in 2005.
I was thinking about getting back into art as a retirement hobby and to encourage me Anthony had given me a sketch book, pencils and paints but I did nothing until Jill came along. Jill has been an amateur painter for some time and she encouraged me to join an organisation called ‘The Art House’ and I have been doing life drawing, portrait painting and water colour painting classes.
I found that I enjoyed doing portraits in oils and for practice have done portraits of Jill’s and my family and ancestors.
I am now the president of ArtHouse Port Douglas Incorporated.
Through Virginia Maywald (Anthony’s wife) we met Karlene and Dean Maywald (called Jock by his friends) and their daughter Tilly who was about four years old at the time.
This family has become very close friends to Jill and I and they visit us almost every year. Dean is one of those men who likes to be doing something constructive, even on holidays. During their visits he has build a much needed new fence along my Southern boundary as well as doing other necessary maintenance jobs about the house.
At the time we met them Karlene was ‘The Honourable Karlene Maywald MP’, a minister in the South Australian Government and Dean was the Mayor of Waikerie, a wine grape growing district in the Barossa Valley on the Murray River. We have a lot of fun at Oak Beach when they visit especially when Anthony, Virginia, Grace and Hugo time their visit to coincide with theirs.
Last year, in June 2006, the Alice Springs council invited me to the opening of additions to the council chambers that I designed in 1978 and I accepted the invitation.
So I arrived in Alice Springs exactly forty years after my first arrival to live there in 1966.
Brian Martin, who was also on the first council, was invited and we both gave a speech.
GHD were the architects for the extensions and in my opinion the design was not compatible with the existing design nor with the character or climate of Alice Springs. They also had renovated the old buildings and put flat plaster board .ceilings throughout.
Apparently the mayor, Fran Kilgarrif, saved the original building from being totally demolished to make way for more commercial buildings.
I arrived on Friday afternoon and was told by Pat McDonald (an officer in the council who was there when I was on the council) that tonight is the change over dinner for the Alice Springs Rotary, my old Club, and her husband was a Rotarian and would I like to go with him. This club has over fifty members now although there are three other clubs in the town. There were over one hundred people at the dinner some of which were children of Rotarians who were members when I was.
I sat with my old friends Shirley and George Brown and Dave and June Bottrall as well as Pat McDonald and her husband. It was sad to see that June was not well, she appeared to have Alzheimer’s disease, but Dave was very kind and patient with her. George is a water colour artist and does beautiful central Australian landscapes. Shirley has become an author of note and has published a number of historic books about Central Australia.
I took a number of photos of the catholic and Anglican church and others of my buildings and was disappointed to see the marvellous slab-glass and concrete window of the baptistery in the catholic church was falling apart. The epoxy used in the concrete was disintegrating. I believe it is in the process of being restored.
Since my previous experience in hospital in 1997, there has appeared a new type of hospital where you can be admitted for just the day if you require only a simple procedure.
I have been to a couple of these, one for a colonoscopy and a couple of times in another to have the lens in my eyes replaced with plastic ones. These facilities are very professional and efficient and all the staff are friendly, competent and treat you like they care about you.
*****
Grace Heather Hugo Myself, 1998, about 18 months before heather died
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