Glenn Bree Rosendahl MB BS (Sydney University 1970)
0414 223 665
Born in Murwillumbah, North NSW in 1944, I am a general practitioner, graduate of Sydney University (1970), still in practice, having spent most of the last 5 years in Aboriginal Medical Services. To remote Indigenous settlements out of Alice Springs; at Mareeba, Mosman Gorge, Capalaba, Rockhampton, Mount Morgan, Tweed Heads, Condobolin, Walgett, Brewarrina, Bourke, Kempsey and Gladstone. I have read and am reading significant history of the colonisation of Australia. (That is what the British called it at the time, we can use their terminology.) Recently: ‘1835, the Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia’ – James Boyce.
Ancestry informs me that genetically I have no Aboriginal blood. Instead, half Scandinavian, half Channel Island (There is Hugenot blood there!) I did grow and attend school in New Zealand – from one year of age to sixteen years of age. I was taught New Zealand’s initially violent colonial history. I finished high school in Armidale, NSW, Studied Medicine at Sydney University from 1964 to 1969, one year’s residency in Canberra, six month’s residency in Alice Springs. I spend 15 months, as a second and third year medical graduate, in a mission hospital on Malaita, in the (then) British Solomon Islands Protectorate. There I observed an indigenous community – not invaded by foreign settlers, their lands not confiscated for foreign agriculture nor animal husbandry – that lived communally in health, peace and contentment. Despite very little ‘modern technology’. It is ‘colonization’ that destroys an indigenous community. (With colonisation independent human communities were subjugated, their social structures degraded, their natural resources usurped and vandalized for the crass commercial benefit of the invaders. A new population imported, a foreign form of government imposed.)
Then seven years in primary practice (1974 – 1980) in British Columbia, Canada. Canadian medicine taught me a superior ‘general practice’. All hospital admissions and discharges were made by the ‘family physicians’, who treated their patients in the hospital, who referred their patients to specialists in the hospital – as they did in the community – who maintained daily collaboration with the consultants in the hospital They were fully respected – and practiced – as professional equals. In Australia, as a medical student in the 60’s, I observed Australian specialists beginning to expel general practitioners from city hospital practice. By my return from Canada, in 1980, that eviction was complete. In the 1960’s – and until now – Australian general practice was considered – is considered – an inferior discipline. In Canada, the family physician was responsible for pregnancy care, all normal deliveries, and post-natal care of the patient. A specialist obstetrician was on hand – at four minutes notice – if a significant problem developed at any stage of the delivery and puerperium. In my seven years of obstetric practice there, I would likely have managed at least one hundred deliveries.
On return to Canberra practice in 1980, I shortly found myself caught up in the epidemic of ‘Repetition Strain Injury’ in the public service, an affliction of stenographers confronted with the new-fangled ‘electronic typewriters’ that created an electronic document on the initial ‘computer screens’. The new stenographic expectation was of typing faster than the standard expectation of 60 words per minute on a manual typewriter. The problem was that the keys of the new keyboards were not ‘spring loaded’, the return lift of a finger was now completely the task of the finger extensor muscle/tendon complex, in a rapid alternating synchronization with the finger flexor muscle/tendon complex that depressed a key in an almost microscopic advance – with a ‘hard landing’ of ‘typing on a tabletop’. Stenographers typed for an eight-hour day. Performing up to 5 keystrokes a second. The technology had previously been introduced to Japan, then to Europe and North America, with the same result – ‘RSI’. Stenographers became permanently crippled with forearm and hand pain – that was elicited in any further significant attempt to type. This may simply have been a ‘Pavlovian reflex’. Typing elicited pain. I was the only GP in Canberra who ‘stuck to my guns’ and continued to entitle these patients to their COMCARE compensation entitlements – for 15 years.
It provided me with an idea of a methodology and technology of ‘skeletal muscle function assessment’ – much less vulnerable to the imprecision that can arise from a subject’s desire to feign disability – than commonly used clinical methodologies.
I had arrived back in Australia just before the abduction of Azariah Chamberlain, a six-week old infant killed by a dingo near Alice Springs. Myself then a Seventh Day Adventist, and an acquaintance of Michael Chamberlain, I studied the medico-legal events that then transpired, and wrote a book, ’The Dark Side of the Law’, exposing the legal and forensic anomalies that resulted Lindy Chamberlain’s unjust incarceration for her alleged murder of her daughter, Azaria. It was published just before the discovery of the matinee jacket, that quite independently – as ‘fresh evidence’ – irrevocably proved her innocence. The legal proceedings, from the beginning, had completely lacked scientific rigor. She and her husband, Michael, suffered ‘Aboriginal justice’ in Alice Springs. Ironically, more than three decades later I served 8 weeks as Medical Officer of the Alice Springs Corrections Centre.
I worked for Australian Immigration for a year just under a decade ago, caring for immigrants in Detention Centres in Yongah Hill West Australia and at the Scherger Air Force Base Near Weipa. Then for more than 4 years, intermittently, as a locum in Aboriginal Health, from Mosman Gorge and Mareeba down to Kempsey, from Capalaba to Alice Springs, including Bourke, Condobolin and Walgett. Two years ago, at the AMS in Mt Isa, I suffered significant myocardial ischemia, was flown to Townsville, had a stent inserted, and returned to the Gold Coast, where I have stayed and practiced ever since.