Libby Basett, Andrew Byrne and Fiona Stewart meet up at the opera. Bill Brooks nearby too!

Dear Colleagues,  

What a surprise to have Libby Bassett come up to me in the foyer of the Sydney Recital Centre in Angel Place at the opening night of Pinchgut Opera's new baroque opera (see my opera notes for details about 'Orontea', the sexiest opera on the 17 century).  

I told her about Tamara (Cheney) Freund's recent visit to Sydney and our luncheon with Mike Campbell-Smith at Bendooley Estate Vineyards in the Southern Highlands (see photo below).   Libby looked gorgeous ... and told me she had read my blog and had also retired, leading a more relaxed existence.  Her daughter Jane Sheldon is a successful opera singer and is about to embark on an engagement in Holland.  

In the intermission I noted Leo Schofield talking to Fiona Stewart but thought better of interrupting them.  I hope they were enjoying the performance as much as we were.  

On the way home we bumped into Bill Brooks who was walking along Macquarie Street having dined at the Australia Club (as you do).  He was looking forward to seeing Mefistophiles in Melbourne, making our local baroque Pinchgut outing seem very parochial.  

So it is indeed a small world ... or else our university colleagues have some sort of magnetic GPS finding system!  

Best wishes and hope that most have a warmer winter to look forward to than frosty Bowral, NSW.  

Andrew Byrne .. 

Andrew's Opera (andrewsopera.blogspot.com)

Message from Mark Henschke

 Dear Andrew, 

Thank you again for all your work keeping the Class of 1978 in contact with each other. Enjoy retirement and stay well!

I'm in  my 11th year as a Senior Lecturer with UNSW Rural Clinical School, Coffs Harbour and have no plans to retire

Each February I meet a new cohort of 3rd Year students, most with rural backgrounds. All very bright and a pleasure to teach both at the bedside and in tutorials. 

It is so satisfying to see them grow in knowledge and confidence over the year. 

Fiona Stewart's comment to you that 'medical education is not a patch on what we had all those years ago' is ridiculous.

We didn't get near a patient in the first three years of our six year undergraduate curriculum. I learned all my medical skills after graduation!

I conduct Clinical Training Visits with the GP Registrars and the Australian graduates are very impressive. 

I would love to catch up with any '78ers' passing through Coffs. A beautiful part of the world! I can easily be reached at the Rural Clinical School, UNSW.

Best wishes 

Mark Henschke

 

Message from Robert Hall in South Australia

Andrew

Thanks very much for this, and for all the work you've done over the years keeping us all in touch. Here's some news from me, in the Adelaide Hills.

I'm now in my second retirement. I had been doing some teaching in the medical course at Flinders Uni, and planned to retire at the end of first semester in 2020. I was teaching public health to second and third years---an interesting challenge: how do you give students some idea of public health in 8 sessions of 2 hours each over 2 years? And what knowledge should they have when they walk out at graduation? And then covid arrived. I have to say, sadly, all my predictions about the pandemic to the students have come true.

Then I had a phone call in March 2020 from SA Health: would I come and work for them again? So I did, and for my pains wound up as Director of Covid Operations, running contact tracing in the state, with about 120 staff. In those days we tried to eliminate transmission. We had one big fright with local transmission in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, which we successfully managed to stop after what seemed like aeons of 24 hour days. And it wasn't fun wrecking people's lives by ordering them in to quarantine, sometimes for weeks, as the disease spread from one family member to the next. I did that until February 2021, when I moved over to Covid Immunisation. I ran the adverse events surveillance system, and was a general troubleshooter. Most of my time was spent giving GPs advice about the vaccines, and organizing vaccination for people who didn't quite fit criteria. I have worked in immunization for 35 years, and this was the first time I had ever seen convincing evidence of people dying after vaccination. SA Health wanted to renew my contract, but I thought I had done my bit after 2 years, so at the beginning of 2022 I retired for real.

We now live on 20 acres of paradise in the Adelaide Hills. I am in the local bushfire brigade (the Cudlee Creek fire was another interesting story), the local landcare group, and I still keep up with a few friends from 1978.

All the very best to everyone.

Robert Hall

Message from Ian Freed ...

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for your personal email and for the collation of other old friends' and colleagues' updates.

You sent me photos of your recent lunch in Bowral with Tamara who doesn't seem to have aged at all (love the hair) and Mike Campbell-Smith who, similarly, looks no different to when I last saw him 40 odd (occasionally very odd) years ago. Was always a lovely bloke.

Yes, I am retired too. Six years now. I'm sure there must be similar pressures and stresses in Australia but working in the NHS in the UK was no easy matter. The patients were great but every five minutes there was a new Health Minister hoping to make a name for him/herself by upending the system and introducing costly and, ultimately, unnecessary changes. And all of them seemed to have a vendetta against a semi-independent General Practice.

Still, I sat at the same desk for 34 years. I did not climb Everest or trek the Kokoda trail or sail in the Sydney to Hobart as some of our Uni and my School mates have done. I have led a rather quiet, safe existence firstly in Essex and, for the last 20 years, in St Albans Hertfordshire.

As you know, I had a NSTEMI in 2017 and 1 stent. Since then, no problems....oh, apart form Type 2, B12 deficiency, Hypothyroidism, BCC et al. For someone who would refrain from ever taking a paracetamol to now taking 9 different medications daily!!! 

I prescribed all this stuff for all those years but never thought I would end up taking them myself. I calculated once that I had probably signed my name 400,000 times on scripts (repeat and acute) and other documents. At the end my signature was a flat line without any of its former glorious curves and loops. At one stage, I realised I had started signing my name with 3 e's! That's what the NHS does to you!

I went to an opera once. It was on my bucket list. La Boheme at the Royal Albert Hall. Bloody hell, Mimi took a long time to die! The waiters in the banquet scene were on roller skates ... I assumed that was standard for Puccini. Did he write any parts for people on jet-skis?

As you know, I'm an adherent of Duke Ellington's assertion that "it don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing".

My wife of 46 years (whose father was a famous British jazz drummer and composer) and I are ardent jazz fans as well as devotees of the recently departed and beloved Stephen Sondheim.

I started learning piano a few years ago in a very unstructured (and so far unsuccessful) way but my F sharp minor seventh flat five is a delight! Ahh....jazz chords are truly wonderful.

And, of course, I am a fan of The Arsenal. Football here, soccer to you. Winter weekends at the Emirates Stadium. There is no colder place than a football stand on a January afternoon in England. Well, perhaps, there are. I imagine it gets a bit nippy in the Antarctic.

Lynn and I have 3 kids. Dylan who is a drummer and composer (and on Spotify!!), Lily who is a marketeer and her twin sister, Rose, in-house counsel for a media company. And one grandchild who is so clever, cute and funny and, happily, seems quite fond of "Pops".

We sold the French farmhouse I mentioned in a an email to you many years ago. Just before lockdown so good timing. I do miss France but our brilliantly conceived and constructed Brexit would have made life more difficult

So, there you have it. Approaching 69 wondering (like the rest of us) where the time went and what lies in store.

Now that my Mum has died (2018), I am not getting back to Sydney as often as I used to but perhaps, one day, I will be able to raise a glass of Henschke with you and toast the old days.

I send my very best wishes to you and to anyone you care to share this with,

Ian Freed