Free Damned if I Do by Philip Nitschke Page A

appointed. When the student tutorial lists went up, however, I found I was rostered as a student in my own tutorial. I took this information to the Dean of the Medical Faculty and finally they deigned to grant me an exemption from first-year physics.
    My biggest stroke of luck during medical school was getting virtually free accommodation. Sydney is, and was, an expensive place to live and I was going to be on a very tight budget. Before I left the Territory, I metGil Scrine, who was making his award-winning film Home on the Range ,about thePine Gap base. I got to know him quite well and he told me that if I were ever in Sydney, I could use the houseboat he had moored at Balmain, as he was going to be off filming somewhere. I took him up on this and stayed in that rather nice setting for a while. Rowing out at night, study­ing by kerosene light, living illegally on Sydney Harbour. He also gave me the use of his VW Beetle so I could commute to the university. It was a pleasant, but impractical way to live, and when in the middle of my first year the offer of a place in a Camperdown squat came up, I jumped at the chance.
    I had met up with another Alice Springs connection,Des Carne, who was squatting in the unoccupied South Sydney Women’s Hospital. It was perfect: in Camperdown, walking distance to the university, and free. I stayed there for a year, and had a huge space, one of the old operating theatres, all to myself. When it was finally sold at the end of my first year, the new owners decided to demolish it, and a number of us simply moved across the street, to what had been the nurses’ quarters. With the power and water connected, and with the cooperation of the owner, a church affiliate of some kind, we were well set up. Vandals had caused damage, and had stripped some of the lead and other things of value, so we were welcomed as rent-free caretakers. I stayed there for the next three years andMarlies moved in.
    Still, I can’t say I was altogether happy doing medicine at Sydney. My friendships with my fellow students weren’t close ones. At thirty-five years of age I didn’t have much in common with them, most of whom, I thought, had had pretty sheltered lives. I also found the rote learning of medical facts boring, but I still sweated over the exams, even though they were mostly multiple-choice, tick-the-boxes style.
    That said, the actual content of the course was ­everything I’d hoped for, especially in the first few years. Like many doctors, I’m fascinated by the complexities of the human body and especially its interaction with the environment. I was, and am, particularly interested in the history and philosophy of medicine, topics that continue to be highly relevant to my work today.
    Living in Sydney I missed the Territory, though. At one point, the city overwhelmed me and I took off to go bush, about as far as you can go. The Gibson Desert is a remote area of about 15 million hectares on the Western Australia–Northern Territory border. I’d always wanted to go there and it provided the perfect antidote to Sydney. I went out toJupiter Well, a dot on the map of the Gibson, and didn’t see anyone or talk to anyone for over a month. I didn’t go out of my way to avoid people; it was just that no one came along. I’d get up every day at sunrise and clamber up the sand dune nearest the camp, and could see the whole 360 degrees of the horizon. It was an amazing and humbling experience.
    For a period of about four days, I could see smoke on the horizon and it moved a little to the east each day. That meant there were people still out there, although the last of the traditionalPintupi people had supposedly walked out of the desert into Aboriginal communities in the mid 1960s. It pleased me to think that there were still some people out there, out of contact and unaffected by Western civilisation.
    Jupiter Well was really a soak, and I dug it out so that I could get