RIGHTEOUS SON I've been involved in a lot of issues where there's been conflict; lots of protests in the days of [the] Vietnam [war], when I was a student. Then I got involved with [Australian] aboriginal land rights in a very high-profile case; a group of stockmen from the Gurindji people went on strike for the first time. Large cattle bases were owned by foreign interests and these people had been basically working for nothing. Finally, they just decided that they wanted their land back. They sent people to the southern universities to try and get support and were desperate for someone who could read and write to work there, so I went up [to Australia's Northern Territory].
MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD I was there for two years and it was hard going; living in a tin lean-to shed; the weather was impossible; diseases I'd never seen; lots of people had leprosy. It was a grim third-world environment which I'd not seen before. The mail plane would come in, I would read letters to the tribe leaders and they would dictate them back to federal parliament in Canberra. I discovered a few things: one is that you get into a position of incredible power when you can read and write. It was too much power perhaps for a young kid; I read some of my letters from that time and I think, 'Oh my god, this is a 20-year-old who thinks he's bloody running the show'. But then my partner walked off with a drifting American recovering from Vietnam, so that brought me back down. I fell apart and that was the end of it.
PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE There was only one pub there and it was about 200 kilometres away - but when you'd go, you couldn't get out of the place without having a fight with the stockmen. Nowhere since has it become that physical.
People get nasty at a more civilised level with [euthanasia]. I put up with the nickname [Dr Death]; there's about seven of us in Wikipedia and some of them, like [Nazi physician] Josef Mengele and [British doctor/serial killer] Harold Shipman, are not the best of company. But, if you get upset about name calling, you don't go far.
There's a lot of support, though. I won the Humanist of the Year award [from the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, in 1998]; I guess this issue is considered by many to be a fundamental rights issue. To say you've got this gift of life but you can't give it away in a way that you determine strikes me as being a little quaint. It's a rare day when someone doesn't come up and say something nice. It's very sustaining.
THE ESCAPE KEY I've always been keen on inventions and have a background in science and technology. After our legislation passed for a short time in 1999 [it was later repealed] it was crunch time because I'd worked very hard to get it through and then found myself faced with the job of going around on Sunday and helping someone die. That's quite a hard ask. So I built a machine. It was partly a laptop that presented three very direct questions on the screen. The last one was, 'If you press this button you will die. Would you like to go ahead?' It was grim but [the man] was able to hold his wife and die in her arms, with me on the other side of the room.
