by GILES BOINTON – I GRADUATED from medical school in Birmingham in the UK in July 1974.
In those days, the requirement was to complete two six-month “house jobs” in what was a pre-registration year before being let loose on the world at large.
- When I look at Australia now, I could almost cry. Where’s the sense of fair play?
- That special spirit must still be there somewhere.
- How will Australia rediscover itself or is it all too late?
I did my surgical six months first in Coventry, and my medical attachment in medicine in Wolverhampton.
Everyone else in my year was lining up jobs with a view to climbing the greasy medical pole to become psychiatrists or general practitioners or orthopaedic surgeons or cardiologists etc.
SOAKED
Not for me; I wanted to travel for a year or two and work out which branch of medicine I should follow.
Where to go? To my mind, Australia wasn’t my first choice. I think I’d soaked up too much of the Barry Mackenzie scripts from the satirical magazine, Private Eye.
New Zealand seemed a better bet, and the hospitals I wrote to all offered me positions. I chose Wellington and it didn’t disappoint. I made good friends and learned a lot.
I’d heard lots of good things about Australia during eighteen happy months in NZ, so I thought it would be churlish not to check Australia out.
I had a classmate in Melbourne so off I went. Right from the drive into Melbourne from Tullamarine I had a good feeling.
Hard to describe, but the bright lights of the big city were notable after Wellington.
After three days I thought I’d look for work and turned up at a locum agency in Melbourne.
It was run by a chap called Rod, who it turned out, had done an “inside stretch” for some misdemeanour but I didn’t know that at the time.
Half an hour later he’d fixed me up with a GP locum way out to the western extremity of Victoria, in a one-horse town called Edenhope.
The pay seemed enormous and helped me overcome my trepidation in a world of General Practice, of which I had no experience.
He also arranged two tickets to an end of season AFL function and a lovely girl to accompany me. I thought to myself, “I’m beginning to like Australia!”
On handover, the doctor asked if I could take X-rays? I told him no, but half-an-hour later I could manage passable images. I did the locum for six weeks without too many mishaps.
I loved the “can do” attitude from the start. The typical straightforward no-nonsense Australian stereotype was apparent but there was humour, good natured banter (usually about cricket) and a true sense of fair play.
DIRECT
Rules were only relevant if they made good sense. Conversations were more direct than I was used to but that was an easy adaptation for me to make.
I did other locums, in particular in the lovely town of Myrtleford in Northern Victoria. I was always looked after and invited out.
At one memorable barbecue, I was talking to a nice man who had moved his family out from England some five years earlier.
He was a mechanic and ran a successful car garage in town. He knew that I was, temporarily, the town doctor.
He looked at me directly and said “I’m just as good as you”. I knew exactly what he meant.
He was not being rude or aggressive but was just telling it like he saw it. Australia had given him the freedom to be the best he could be.
Hardly any red tape, hard work was rewarded, taxation was reasonable and there was a pervading sense of fairness.
Many farmer driven utes carried the sticker “This is cattle country, eat more beef you bastards!”
It was the same wherever I went. I remember a sign outside a restaurant in the little town of Tumut. It said “If you want your steak well done, then go somewhere else”.
I went back to the UK and travelled and worked in other countries but Australia had got me and in 1982 I returned and eventually had my own practice in Noosa, Queensland.
My four children were all born there. Eventually in 1995, we retuned to the UK for family reasons.
DRAGGED
Recent media images from Australia, especially from Victoria have been truly upsetting, with staggering levels of police brutality; people dragged from their cars for not wearing a mask, handcuffed and pushed face down in the dirt; people beaten and children terrorised in the street for similar offences; but all for the good of their health, right?
These are widespread and common events carried out by police acting more like the Stasi.
Politicians have trampled over people’s liberties with the enthusiastic help of law enforcement. Why is Daniel Andrews still in his post?
The State governments (the Federal government seems to have been defenestrated), are now ignoring the Nuremberg code, signed after the war to enshrine the right of a person not to be subjected to medical experiments without their full informed consent.
Vaccines still in a trial should not be mandated as a means of people keeping their jobs.
Indigenous people are being carted off to a facility called Howard Springs, in the Northern Territory for the crime of living next door to someone who tests positive for COVID.
Chief Minister Michael Gunner gave a particularly aggressive TV broadcast in a neo-Nazi style.
He was bullying Aboriginal people into having vaccines, when their sad history has made them cautious about what they may see as yet another experiment on them by the people who took their land.
In former times, liberals would have laid down in front of police cars to protest these actions.
In all areas of life, even before the pandemic, Aussies had a strong sense of fairness and would really stand up for themselves.
COWED
They’re now cowed by a bullying authority and I, for one, am very sad to see it happen to a nation that I revered for so long.
Licenced duck hunters have been prevented from shooting ducks by way of illegal protests; which then became an excuse for government to confiscate their guns.
Government schools have declared children to be mentally unfit when they’ve expressed political views that are contrary to the Left-wing narrative.
Animal rights organisations are seeking to give animals the same rights as humans.
Although not peculiar to Australia, the call of “cultural appropriation”, eg, wearing a Sombrero to the beach, is the type of nonsense I always thought the plain-speaking Australians would ignore.
Many Aussies bemoan the death of the “larrikin:, a distinctly Australian entity, and in addition, comedy in Australia (and many western countries) is dying as comics fear being cancelled by the Left-wing mob.
SUCCUMBED
Sadly, politically correct comedy is seldom funny. Wokeness is widespread in the developed world but what has surprised me most is that the strong Australian character, with its independent nature, has succumbed to this humourless and dehumanising cult.
When I look at Australia now, I could almost cry. Where’s the sense of fair play? The rule taking and red tape seems to have completely strangled everything. The “battlers” seem to have become the “bottlers”.
That special spirit must still be there somewhere. How will Australia rediscover itself or is it all too late?PC
Dr Giles Bointon is now a retired GP after over forty years’ service in family medicine. He spent much of that time practicing in Australia.
Dear Giles. I was the medical staffing administrator at Coventry when you were doing your surgical house job. You were one of the brightest stars in a notably friendly group of house officers and it was a pleasure to work and mess party with you. What a fascinating account of your life post-Coventry, though the latter part of the article saddened me. I’ve never been to Australasia but would like to visit before old age becomes a disincentive! But not sure what I would find now. Warm regards, Ian.
AUSTRALIA – YOU’RE BEING PLAYED
06/12/2021 CHI Australia, Big Pharma, Bill Gates, C19, China, Corruption, Vax
As many Australians believe the only way to regain lost freedoms is to comply with those dictating the inoculation campaign, it’s worth looking at those bureaucrats responsible, especially as some of these people refuse to discuss the options offered by experienced vaccine developers, immunologists, and molecular biologists, but instead, put their faith in only those campaigning for these experimental shots.
But first, a bit of history; back in November 1940, the recently appointed director general for information for the Australian government, Sir Keith Murdoch, an influential Australian media owner himself, resigned his post after comparisons were made with Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels – the press withdrew co-operation, and politicians protested. By then his son, Rupert Murdoch, was 9 years old. Rupert Murdoch extended his father’s media success and amassed one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, with additional massive investment in pharmaceuticals, particularly, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
Please continue :-
https://carter-heavy-industries.com/2021/12/06/australia-corruption-covid-bgi-vaccines/
Giles, I think you’re doing what you’ve accused Aussies of doing – you’ve believed the media hype. Sure Comrade Daniel Andrews is a total nutjob who should be confined in a safe place somewhere where he can’t do any harm, but he only bullies Victorians. His female counterpart in Queensland, the fragrant Anastasia Palachook – which she pronounces as ‘Palashay’, presumably because she’s ashamed of her Polish heritage – is every bit as bad. She allowed a six year old boy with leukaemia to die alone in a Queensland hospital because his parents lived just over the border in NSW. She justified this by saying she completely understood how his parents were feeling, because she had an uncle suffering from cancer!
Leaving these two loons aside, only Mark McGowan is behaving like a despot, but that’s because he knows that if WA were to find itself involved in an outbreak of covid, he wouldn’t have a clue how to handle it.
Those of us in NSW are still possessed of the fighting spirit that made Australia great. The control freaks may have the upper hand at the moment, but that won’t last forever.
The next time some flattering European romantic thinks about moving to Australia – remember this.
This is a former penal colony (less than four generations removed). It is a harsh environment.
The people who live here are aggressive and those they elect are brutal.
We all hate it. But it’s the way it is. For now.
Giles, the political class (with full cooperation of the unquestioning Australian media) has managed to scare the beJesus out of the Australian population.
Their trigger has been that we are all going to die – along with our children.
Of course the, otherwise uniformed, masses take note when children are involved.
Don’t look too harshly on Australians. When this mess is revealed as a fraud, the politicians who instigated this deception will be out of employment.
As will be the senior cops who brutally enforced political ideology on their mates.
State Labor Governments, State Parliament legislated emergency powers enforced by State Health and State Police.
By far the worst experiences were in Victoria, particularly in Melbourne, followed by Queensland.
As a former fellow Pom’ – in fact a 10 pound Pom – who came to Australian ’66 to join the army and of course stayed, I agree with Giles 100%. This is no longer the country I came to and came to love. I won’t go on as Giles has already and admirably said what had to be said. I will make this point however, the decline started long before Covid. It is a synthesis of several complex factors including demographic changes and, significantly, the determined take-over of the education industry by the left.
The Aussie spirit bounced back from WW1 followed by Spanish Influenza pandemic with no vaccine protection available, the Great Depression and then WW2.
And in 2022 onwards we will move forward and in the majority be relieved that vaccination was available and free of charge, that our Federal Government arranged financial support for employers and employees to prop the economy up and did everything possible to deal with a pandemic not experienced since over 100 years ago.
And Australians got through it so far in much better shape than most countries.
And despite the political games played by Labor State Governments and Premiers knowing that the Federal Government and Prime Minister has little power or control over State Government in public health including hospitals, etc. The misleadingly named National Leaders Cabinet, it is not a government cabinet as such but it is a forum for discussion and attempting to gain cooperation and coordination between States and Territories, has been a disappointment and that is the fault of Labor Premiers mostly.
Insightful article Giles. An outsider often has a better perspective than the masses caught in a Police state.
We’ve done this to ourselves I’m afraid. We have elected, and then re-elected radicalised, hard left leaning politicians to rule us.
There is now little distinction between our once conservative politicians and their socialist “best mates” on the Left.
Is it too late? Maybe.
Thank you Giles and spot on. Australian’s have had it too good for too long and if history has taught us anything. Once a civilised society becomes Godless, amoral, hedonistic and selfish, it gets the ruling politicians it deserves and heads the same way the Roman’s went. There is still time for Australia to wake up, but time is ticking…
With all the woketard rubbish of “cultural appropriation” I suggest we fight back. Halloween, “All Hallows’ Eve” has its roots in early Christian beliefs and practices. Probably purloined from the Pagan festival of Samhain, it is nonetheless of provably Northern European origin. I would suggest anyone who ‘celebrates’ Halloween and is not Christian or Northern European or Northern European Pagan is culturally appropriating the festival and should stop forthwith. Of course they won’t because that street on goes one way.