Damned if I Do (10 page)

And so Esther was left with no choice but to die a slow and difficult death. I gradually increased Esther's morphine dose, but even in doing this there was risk in this post-ROTI environment. Again,
Steve Baddeley came to my assistance, by driving his Porsche out to Esther's house in the rural outskirts of Darwin and providing his support for this grim slow euthanasia procedure. At one point Esther briefly regained consciousness, and called out to her close friend Cathy who was nearby. Her final words, ‘Am I dead yet, Cathy?'

Murray McLaughlin made another
Four Corners
­program, this time about Esther, called ‘
The Dying Game', and there was a subsequent medical inquiry into what actually had happened.
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Steve Baddeley backed me all the way.

Some time after Esther's death, her partner,
Martin Williams, confronted
Deane on one of the governor-general's visits to Darwin. Martin pushed through the crowd ­outside the city's art gallery and yelled, ‘You bastard, you're the one who didn't have the guts to let my Esther have a decent death.'

ELEVEN

Moving on

May I wish Mr Kevin Andrews a long and excruciatingly painful life.

Letter to the editor,
Sydney Morning Herald

E
ven though I had become the face of the voluntary euthanasia struggle, I still wasn't consciously intending to make this my life's work. That crept up on me.

After the disappointment of failing to organise a
united national euthanasia movement, I changed tactics. In ­forming the
Voluntary Euthanasia Research Foundation (VERF), now called Exit International, my idea was to provide people with information about their end-of-life options. Sick people still wanted to die, but I was also being approached by well people—particularly the elderly—who wanted to know more about voluntary euthanasia, and in particular, what possibilities now existed with the loss of the ROTI Act. These people drove the agenda and influenced what happened next; their needs abolished any thoughts I had about stepping away from the issue.

VERF wasn't well organised, structurally or ­financially, but donations started coming in; one five-figure cash amount even arrived in a shoebox. I continued to work as a doctor but I also began to conduct
information workshops. The very first workshop I ran was in Melbourne in 1997. The manager of the Downtowner Motel in Lygon Street, Carlton,
Tim Nicholson, had been in Darwin when the
voluntary-­euthanasia debate raged. He was a strong supporter of the movement, and he provided me with free accommodation and a meeting room to conduct the workshop. I was nervous, although there were no more than a dozen or so elderly people present, sitting around a table. In two ways that first workshop set the ­pattern of things to come: first, those attending were elderly, average age around seventy-five years, with slightly more women than men and, second, the group wanted to know all they could about how to get the best end-of-life drug, the barbiturate Nembutal. I ran that session in the way that has become standard. I gave a talk outlining practical options, alongside the legal constraints and considerations. I then threw the session open to questions and discussion, saying, ‘You tell me what you want to know and I'll do my best to answer.' It was a very small beginning for something that would become bigger than I ever imagined. These days, with Exit workshops running around the world, it's not uncommon to get over two hundred people at such events.

The workshops start with a free public meeting in which I explain to the group why it makes sense for them all to learn how, and acquire the means, to be able to peacefully and reliably end their life at the time of their choosing. It is a simple argument. With no euthanasia legislation in place, no one can lawfully help you die and the penalties for assisting someone are savage. Suicide, though, is not a crime, so if you carry out the act yourself no legal risks are taken. Plan ahead, I argue. Don't leave it until you find yourself so sick and incapable that you have to ask those you love to assist you to get you the lethal drugs you need. This argument strikes a chord, and most of those attending stay on for the following closed workshop, which is the practical Q&A ­session on how to ­suicide. To stay on, participants need to join Exit, and that is how much of the funding for the organisation is obtained.

Before VERF, an incorporated association, became Exit International, a public non-profit company with ­externally audited and publicly viewable accounts, things were very informal. Back then, I was helped by
Des Carne, who'd found the Camperdown squat while I was at medical school and helped me build the
Deliverance Machine. He came to Darwin, put a demountable on my rural block and started helping set things up. He was self-taught and interested in computers, and created a database so we could coordinate the growing number of letters and email coming in, and also keep an eye on the finances. It was an amateurish outfit though, and our record keeping was fragile.

Since that time, I have been able to eke out a humble financial existence thanks to the generosity and ­contributions of supporters. While my opponents often accuse me of growing rich out of death, the truth is very different. For the last decade, I have drawn around $50 000 a year as my salary from Exit International, a fraction of what I was making annually when working as a Darwin doctor in the late 1990s. These days, the organisation's main income is from annual memberships and book and merchandise sales, and grosses around $500 000 a year. The average membership age is seventy-five years, and unless there is a good reason, only those over fifty years can join. There are many, though, with good reasons. One memorable example was the Melbourne writer
Angelique Flowers, who died in tragic circumstances in September 2008, aged thirty-one. She suffered her whole short life with Crohn's disease, but it wasn't until she received the even worse diagnosis of terminal bowel cancer that she made contact with Exit. We met and talked at length about her options. Shortly after this she acquired the
Nembutal she desperately wanted, but was then hospitalised before she was able to use the drug. Her filmed YouTube appeal to the prime minister at the time,
Kevin Rudd, to change the euthanasia laws in Australia has become an important motivator for younger people looking at the euthanasia issue.
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In the late 1990s it became clear there was a significant lack of coordination and communication between me, so often on the move, and our Darwin office, creating a number of dangerous situations. A crisis point was reached one day, when I received an agitated and desperate phone call in Sydney from a woman whose ill husband had just killed himself. She kept threatening to go the police, saying that Exit had told her husband to do this, and provided advice, yet I knew nothing about it. As it happened, he'd been in touch with the Darwin office but the information hadn't been passed on to me. Our
database just wasn't capable of providing instant access within the organisation to details of every important contact. This crisis passed, and the police were never involved, but it showed me that there was a desperate need for Exit to make use of much better technology.

Today, our records are not only encrypted, but database information is instantly available to all of the organisation's small staff. The system is maintained for us by a professional company on a pro-bono basis. Their incredible work has saved us, so many times, from walking into ­trouble.
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It has been
quite humbling that such expertise has been provided in this way.

* * *

In 1998, I relaunched my
political career, standing as a candidate against
Kevin Andrews in the Melbourne seat of Menzies. This time I worked closely with the
Voluntary Euthanasia Society o
f
Victoria, which had so disappointed me when we were trying to defend the Northern Territory legislation. In this campaign, though, they gave me their full support. The $120 000 in donations stood as a record for funds raised for an independent candidate and showed the level of ­community support for
voluntary euthanasia.

On polling day, I received over 10 per cent of the ­primary vote. Many people who had previously voted for Kevin Andrews shifted their vote to me, and for the first time, Andrews failed to obtain an absolute majority. Preferences had to be counted. While the Liberal Party ultimately held the seat (it had previously been considered a safe blue-ribbon seat) no one expected this result. During the campaign, I met Kevin Andrews for the first time at a debate held in a Doncaster hall. We were sitting quite close to each other and exchanged a few civil words, but photographs taken at the time say it all. We were never going to be mates. The 1998 election result must have shocked him. But to my supporters and me, it felt like some small payback for the misery his Andrews Act
had caused.

By the new decade, Exit International was up and running, and I was experiencing life on the road. I was travelling extensively both in Australia and overseas, giving
workshops, seeing patients, giving talks at conferences and ­engaging in debates. However, it was not until I met
Fiona Stewart in 2001 that my life turned another corner, and with it, Exit's entire modus operandi. Back then, Fiona, a sociologist, was regularly writing opinion columns for
The Australian
,
The Age
and
Herald Sun
newspapers, and was an ­emerging face of Generation X feminism. She had also recently founded a dot com start-up, the consumer complaints website NotGoodEnough.org.

We met at Brisbane's inaugural Festival of Ideas, at the Powerhouse, on the banks of the Brisbane River. At the time, I was still partnered with
Tristan, and Fiona had been in a ten-year
relationship with a Melbourne man, Michael. We were introduced at a planning meeting that was held shortly before we took to the stage for a debate titled ‘
There's no such thing as a new idea'. We were on opposing sides of the podium, with
Phillip Adams as chair, and the event was broadcast live-to-air on
Late Night Live
on Radio National. By the end of the debate, Fiona and
Lynne Spender (one of my team members) had changed sides, as neither agreed with the line their team was running. That night, Fiona and I started talking, progressing to the bar for a beer, and onwards throughout the rest of the festival. Now, more than a decade on, we haven't stopped.

Our relationship had a difficult beginning. I hesitated, refusing to tell
Tristan what was happening. We had been in trouble for some time, mostly because she really wanted to have children and felt that time was running out. I had never had fatherhood ambitions though, and did all I could to avoid talking about the issue. She was hurt and disappointed and felt betrayed; this was the issue that finally drove us apart.

Fiona is much more like me. She is feisty, outspoken and quite radical in her politics, although something of an extrovert, which contrasts with my shyness. On the night we met, Fiona was upfront about her lack of desire to have ­children. Dogs, yes, she said, kids, no. Indeed,
60 Minutes
had just screened a story in which she featured as an ­example of a thirty-something professional woman who saw no need to reproduce in order to have a full and rewarding life. In August 2001, Fiona was living in inner Melbourne and, for the next eighteen months, that city was to draw me back time and time again. But it wasn't easy. She came to Darwin for the first time late in 2001, but I wasn't there to meet her. I was in London, trying (with a
60 Minutes
crew) to get to meet
Diane Pretty, a motor-neurone-disease sufferer who at that stage was the public face of the campaign for voluntary euthanasia in Britain. When I finally did get back to Darwin, Fiona came out to my rural shed, and this didn't help at all. After all, she was from Melbourne's South Yarra, and my place in Coolalinga was, well, pretty rough. Despite our fierce attraction, I wondered then and there if Fiona's and my relationship could ever work.

I took her bush, to see a different part of the Territory and to meet different people, in the hope that things between us would improve. Given her politics, I thought she'd be interested in Wave Hill and its history in the struggle for Aboriginal land rights, so we packed our camping gear and set off.

It's about 300 kilometres from Darwin, south to Katherine,
and then another 500 kilometres southwest to Wave Hill. The road is sealed all the way, the legacy of the Territory beef indus­try, but it is a narrow, one-lane bitumen strip. From Katherine we pushed on to the isolated Top Springs pub, halfway between Katherine and Wave Hill. Stuck out in the middle of a mulga flat, it was a notorious bush pub, the one
where I'd had my fight with
David Quinn all those years ago.

On that first trip we camped out, a short distance from the
Dagaragu community. The place had changed enormously from when I was last there; the shed Jenny and I had lived in was long gone. There was a plaque to show where the famous shelter—the one that appears in all the photographs of the
Wave Hill strike in the 1970s, including the ones with
Frank Hardy, with the
Gurindji sign over the heads of the people—used to be, and there was a small museum erected with some of the early photographs and other memorabilia of those days.

Only a handful of the Gurindji people I'd known were still there but
Mick (Hoppy Mick) Rangiari was, and we talked with him. He'd been one of the youngest of the original strikers, and the last one left. The conditions seemed as grim as they'd always been, and there were people sitting around in the dirt with their dogs, in much the same way as they had back in 1973. I wondered what Fiona would make of it all.

I needn't have worried. She coped with everything, including the humidity and the heat—and the January monsoon
thunderstorms. Our mosquito net saved us from a fate worse than death. The trip was a great success and Fiona fell for the Territory and, thankfully, for me.

She agreed to give Darwin a full-time go in early 2003. More than a decade on, she is my best friend and my lover, my sounding board, and my staunchest and most loyal confidant. I would be lost without her.
Our impromptu wedding at the Stained Glass Chapel in Las Vegas, on 17 November 2009, was the best day of my life.