When I Learned to Care Differently

In 2008, my working life moved between worlds. As a doctor, I looked after people in very different occupations: stevedores, butchers, sailors, posties, miners and circus performers. I was developing an occupational health business, assisting an orthopaedic surgeon in theatre and running a not-for-profit group that had just completed a five-year community therapeutic sensory garden project on the roof of Fremantle Hospital.

A pivotal moment came during a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement teacher-training course. We were asked to turn our heads towards each number on an imaginary clock.

As I moved, I looked around the room. People twice my age were turning with far greater ease than I was. I was in pain.

Something in me clocked that something needed to change.

I realised I needed to step away from the stress of my familiar working life as a doctor. A few days after the workshop, I decided to move to Denmark, Western Australia. I stayed for 18 months.

Fortunately, the surgeon I assisted also operated in Albany, so I was able to continue working with him and other surgeons while doing business development remotely. But I also wanted to learn how to grow my own food. I had studied horticulture at TAFE, which helped me find work at the local nursery, tending and selling plants—and, on one memorable occasion, making a wedding bouquet at the last minute.

I knew people at The Wolery, our state’s oldest intentional ecological community, and became a willing worker on organic farms through WWOOF. In exchange for accommodation, I learned to prune herbs such as basil to extend their growing season, plant seedlings, harvest seeds—and do a great deal of weeding. Time at The Wolery brought its own unexpected pleasures, including memorable harmonica lessons and glimpses of passive-solar homes taking shape on the drawing board.

Later, I moved between house-sits: an artist’s studio and unfamiliar homes overlooking the inlet or dams, sometimes with cows staring back at me. Among all this, I discovered my love of qigong, martial arts and acupuncture.

A day might begin with a view across the still inlet. I would brave the cold and drive through misty green hills and towering Karri forest to Albany Hospital. In theatre, I held a shoulder joint open for the surgeon and later helped close the incision, while being surprised as Johnny Cash played in the background.

Back home, I picked plump peaches and salad ingredients from the garden for lunch, answered a few work emails, then spent several hours keeping plants alive at the Denmark nursery.

On other days, I learnt piercing martial-arts strikes at Lights Beach or arranged meetings with prospective companies in Perth, all while tending an abundant garden and pressing my fingers into its chocolate soil.

Around me were majestic walks through the karri forests, native flowers both delicate and wild, the invigorating waters of Madfish Bay and the sweeping ocean views from Monkey Rock.

My assumptions about health began to shift. Wellbeing was no longer only something I delivered to patients. I encountered it in movement, nature, curiosity and connection—and in the freedom to live differently.

This photograph catches me somewhere between my old life and what was emerging: still, exposed and reflected.

The photographer, Michael Hemmings, had worked in fashion and wanted to explore photography in a different way. He imagined taking a photograph among the paperbark trees. I had been learning Butoh and imagined myself painted entirely white.

Instead, as the sun began to fall, Michael had the brilliant idea of submerging me in the inlet.

The water was freezing.

Behind this moment of apparent stillness was a flurry of preparation: fading light, technical decisions, cold water and the pressure to capture a tiny window before it disappeared.

Looking at the image now, I’m drawn to my reflection in the water. It seems to reach in both directions—back towards the life I was leaving, and am still leaving, and forward into the ways I continue to care differently and more deeply.

And then, for an instant, everything became quiet.

Who cares for the carer?

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