John Hayman

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I was born in 1934, on the 17th of January, to be quite specific. I was the first of two sons; now, in 2020, we are both still around and brother has turned 83 this year. We both have had health problems but, all in all, we are not in too bad a shape. Our parents were not wealthy; our father had great talent but not as a business person. He was enterprising but a less than successful small builder, going bankrupt, having to sell the home and move in with my mother’s parents who lived in an adjoining street. Most of my early memories are of the grandparent’s house, “Nirvana”– a grand old one-time farmhouse, even then encircled by development but still with an immense front garden and a formidable surrounding cypress hedge. That hedge and the broad surrounding verandas were havens for me; I also had the use of one small room, part of the house but with its own door opening to the outside, equipped with a sink and electricity, known originally as ‘the dairy’. Now it was my laboratory; it also served as my photographic darkroom.

I know I was vaguely interested in chemistry at that time. My mother was mildly addicted to a ‘tonic’; name now forgotten but a mixture that contained phenobarbital– I was once instructed to purchase same and was to make sure it was the variety with the barbiturate. Anyhow, from my mother I acquired an impressive collection of these empty bottles which were of average size with flat sides. These I filled with water that I had turned to many different colours, mostly with ingredients from a harmlessly safe juvenile chemistry set. I also had an interest in electricity and wired various lights and buzzers with low voltage power. I used copper wire from old transformers and once had a device that rang a bell when letters were deposited in the front letterbox.

My maternal grandfather was a great influence on me. He was a retired schoolteacher who through diligence had become head teacher, firstly at the Avoca primary school in rural Victoria, then head teacher at the Lloyd Street State School in East Malvern. He was also Superintendent of the All Saints Church of England Sunday school in East Malvern and a diligent church warden. He maintained many of the country traditions– I remember each year he would fatten a goose in a pen in the yard and then at Easter slaughter it himself and give it to my poor grandmother, later to my mother, to pluck and cook for our Easter Sunday lunch. Every morning he would be first up in the house and in winter would have the wood fire lit in our living room. He maintained the huge garden, grew prize vegetables in the garden behind the house and annually cut the 4-metre-high and hundred-metre-long hedge. He would spend hours with me, playing board games or showing me how to plant seeds or seedlings. He had deep religious beliefs; I remember him telling me once that everything thing on Earth was there for God’s purpose– spiders for example were there to get rid of insects. All this I accepted without question, for I too believed it all.

Our mother was a University graduate and obtained an MA from the University of Melbourne at a time when there were very few such women graduates. She never really used her qualification, working only as a tutor before marrying and having us. She was ambitious for both her sons and scrupulously saved all her ‘child endowment’ money so we might go to a ‘good’ school. So, after an initial primary schooling at Lloyd Street state school I arrived at Grimwade House. I disliked Melbourne Grammar. I was socially inept; I was hopeless at all sport, I was not Jewish, and I was not from a wealthy family. I belonged to none of the established social groups. My greatest pleasure was riding my bicycle from East Malvern, firstly to Grimwade House and later to Senior School. My ambition, on these occasions, was to beat the tram, not a difficult feat in the days when trams were slow, drafty and noisy.

I do, however, thank Grammar enormously. The few friends I made then are mostly still with me now and it was Grammar that allowed me entry into medicine. In those days anyone with the prerequisite subjects could enter first year medicine, then known as ‘Pre-Med’. In that first year there were some 600 of us; the following year the number was culled, and we were down to some 200 odd. First year subjects were very similar to the subjects we had learnt in our final matriculation year at school; it was ‘Archie’ Gardiner’s notes and to a lesser extent the teaching of ‘Wally’ Ricketts that enabled me to pass that first year of medicine.

Like Grammar, I did not enjoy my first years in medicine as I was fairly isolated. My few friends from Grammar were in different courses, those from Grammar in medicine were in College and formed their own College Group. An exception was Gordon Mushin, who lived near me in Malvern. We would drive into Uni in my Austin 7, always running late, parking across the road from the old medical school and in at lecture 30 mins after leaving Gordon’s house. Life improved greatly once I moved to clinical school at Prince Henry’s Hospital where we had a close friendship, a table tennis and billiard table and a magnificent view of Melbourne from the 10th floor of the now demolished building on St Kilda Road.

University life was phased with National Service training, with an initial 14-week period of full-time army service at the Puckapunyal Reserve, near Seymour, Victoria, followed by weeknight, weekend and annual fortnightly training with the Melbourne University Regiment. This was not an entirely negative event– it brought new experiences, provided an income to support university expenditures, and with myself, after the period of full-time training, a degree of physical fitness not attained before (or since).

I graduated in medicine at the end of 1957, and spent my first year as an intern (then called ‘resident’) with a room and night duties at Prince Henry’s. I remember the mistakes I made then even now– we ran casualty/ emergency and had very little active supervision. As part of that year I spent a month back at Puckapunyal, back in the same training battalion where I had been a recruit. Life as a captain, even as an honorary captain was very different from that of a recruit. I stayed on with the citizen military forces (CMF), now as a member of the 4th Field Ambulance. I completed army exams to confirm my rank, went on to complete exams for major. The army gave me much more confidence– I found I could demonstrate first aid and give basic lectures. My second year after graduation was at the Repatriation General Hospital, Heidelberg, where we again were actively encouraged to have a military connection.

I married that year, during my final month at Prince Henry's, and I have three wonderful daughters from that marriage. The next year (1960) we set off to England. With my wife and brother we shipped a fairly new Volkswagen beetle to Mumbai (then Bombay). We travelled long days across India, becoming lost in old Delhi, visiting the Taj Mahal in Agra, then Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France and on to London. I have many memories of that trip but alas our photos and brother’s film are missing.

I spent three years in England; after several unsuccessful attempts to become a physician I switched to pathology. As I look back, I had great interest in disease and diagnosis but little interest or rapport with the patients– the examiners did well to fail me– I was much better suited to pathology. After initial training in Sheffield I completed training at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne as an endentured extra numerary registrar. Pathologists were then in short supply and before I was fully qualified, I was appointed as a ‘Regional Pathologist’ to the East Gippsland Hospital region. My initial appointment was for two years– I stayed for twenty.

After returning from England I rejoined my CMF unit, encouraged by the Alfred. The Director of Pathology, Alan Jackson, had been a pathologist in the 2nd AIF, serving in Palestine and New Guinea. I was now a major and was appointed 2IC in the unit. The CO was Graeme Sloman, then director of cardiology at the Royal Melbourne. Graeme was punctilious, both as a cardiologist and as a CO. I remember the mistakes I made then, just as I remember my mistakes as a casualty officer. Graeme did not hesitate to tell me of my mistakes; I learnt much from him but the main message was to pay attention to detail.

As well as the unit and divisional functions we had the School of Army Health at Healesville, a splendid resort built around a once grand old guest house, Summerleigh Lodge. It came complete with a ball room, gardens (tree planted by HM Queen Elizabeth), a golf course and swimming pool. Ornamental gates, with the corps crest, tree-lined drive, broad steps up to the entrance foyer. There was a week long corps exercise there every year and courses. I attended one course on tropical diseases, with my Alfred boss, now a full colonel, resplendent in his army uniform. The formal dinner (a necessary part of any course) was a grand affair: mess dress, unit silver on display and of course the formal toasts. I was coached by older officers in correct etiquette, if nothing else I learnt which knife and fork to use for each course, and how to engage visiting foreign officers. The dinner finished with port and cigars– fortunately our quarters were not too far up the hill.

I was a regional hospital based Pathologist at what was then the Gippsland Base Hospital from 1966 until 1986.My parish extended to various places– Mallacoota in the east, Warragul, Droin, Korrumburra and Wonthaggi to the south-west. I had brief, exciting excursions as pathologist to the Australian Army in Vietnam and as Senior Lecturer in Pathology at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby. I became the ‘world expert ‘on the pathology of the ‘Bairnsdale ulcer’ (Mycobacterium ulcerans infection), a world-wide infection first described from, for some still unexplained reason then prevalent in my district. I also became interested in fatal diving accidents, of which there were several among the abalone divers operating out of Mallacoota.

I had a pleasant existence– unusual, interesting pathology, a farming enterprise, and various learning and adventure experiences. My future plan was to eventually retire from full time work but continue farming and do various pathology locums around the country. All this changed with the arrival of a first-year intern on rotation to the country from St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne.

For a while, with varying success, Sale had recruited house officers on its own, generally new graduates. Sale was not the first pick for a newly qualified MBBS and often we fell back on foreign-trained doctors with varying ability. This arrangement ceased and was replaced with an arrangement with St Vincent’s in Melbourne where their first-year medicos could choose a rotation to one of several country hospitals. Our second-rate, ‘she’ll be right’ approach changed overnight. I was summoned to the hospital (from the farm) by dispute between the newly arrived intern and the pathology scientist on duty, overwhelmed by a request for more than one test on a recently admitted patient. The intern’s first remark to me was “Are you medically qualified? It was not love at first sight.

I returned to Melbourne, became mildly academic and interested in teaching. So here I am now, still teaching (albeit part-time), the first-year intern is now a Professor of Medicine at the University of Melbourne and we have an impressive 24 year-old son who is completing a PhD at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. To my second wife I owe a second life and I thank her for the simple fact that I am still alive.

Update, April 2022 I am now 88, thankfully still alive with reasonable brain function. Physically I have deteriorated, and my exercise tolerance has declined. Like our old dog, Harry, I do spend more time sleeping. However, I can still get around; visit long suffering daughters and keep up some farming pursuits in Avoca. I would like to complete some papers and a book that I am writing with a colleague in Berlin on Charles Darwin and his illness; our proposal is that he suffered from a maternally inherited mitochondrial disorder. I have published endless papers on this seemingly irrelevant topic.

My teaching with UniMelb has ceased but I have an honorary appointment which allows me access to library facilities– a privilege that I use and appreciate. The Medical Board have refused to renew my registration and VicRoads have put restrictions on my driving licence. But, as I have said, I can still get around.

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by John Hayman at registration.