Damned if I Do (2 page)

You hear a lot about this kind of
sexual harassment now, but it was an undiscussed subject back then. Like many people who've had this experience, I didn't know what to do and was frightened. I felt trapped. I'd argued so strongly with my parents to get me out of the Lutheran boarding school and I'd thought the new situation was going to be great, only to find it was worse. As a way of escaping from an intolerable situation, of making a cry for help that couldn't be ignored, I
killed the ­family's pet with my hunting knife.

In any event, I was lucky and unlucky. Lucky, in that my father realised quickly that using a knife to kill a pet dog was unacceptable and dangerous and took me to a psychiatrist to have me psychologically assessed. He knew I would then have a better chance of escaping any kind of juvenile ­criminal penalty, which is exactly what happened. I was unlucky, in that
The
Advertiser
picked up the story. As something indelibly on the public record, this story has been used ever since by those opposed to my work as a campaigner for ­voluntary euthanasia.

It isn't argument, it's mud-slinging, but it can be effective. Related to this are the slurs that have been levelled at me because of my name: so German-sounding, so like that of the philosopher Nietzsche, so suggestive of Nazism. I'd have avoided much of this if I'd been a Richardson like my mum.

As a result of starting school early and keeping pace with the older students, I was qualified to enter university when I was not yet sixteen. Under the old South Australian system—modelled, I think, on an aspect of English school arrangements (South Australia being a very Anglophile society then)—you could qualify for university entrance after your fourth year of high school. So I'd made it, made university, on the basis of my year at
Concordia, despite my problems with the boarding school. My year at
Henley High was the one called ‘Leaving Honours' and my earlier results stood, despite the disruption caused by killing the dog.

Quite early in my school career, it was obvious that maths and science subjects were where I performed best. My matriculation results—mostly As and a few more Bs—were good enough to get me a Commonwealth scholarship, which paid the university fees and included a small living allowance.

A little naïve perhaps, but not as green as some of those around me, I prepared for university in January 1964. I'd had to deal with a lot of dislocation and a trauma as I moved through adolescence. And, on the positive side, I'd had my first sexual experience with a girl named Trenna when I was thirteen and still at high school in the country and had, at least technically, lost my virginity. Farm girls knew a lot about sex. I felt I was ready for what university had to offer.

THREE

In Adelaide—stormy weather

I soon chose to study physics, the subject I was best at. I did not study hard …

Philip Nitschke, 2004

P
hotographs from the 1960s show me with very long hair and a hippie look, a typical left-leaning university student. In those days, my black beret gave me the highly fashionable Che Guevara look. I was never much of a general reader—images interested me more than the written word. As a kid, I was more likely to read comics than books, apart from ones about science. Just as some people have a knack for languages or music, I have a talent, or a knack, for maths and
physics, ­particularly of the more hands-on, ­experimental variety.

I passed science exams with ease, which is not to say that I found exams easy. I was always anxious, and those three-hour sit-ins when you have to perform under pressure, and your future depends on your performance, stressed me, causing me sleepless nights.

There were ups and downs in my
undergraduate years. I was living away from home most of the time, sharing flats and houses with other students. I had jobs in the holidays, of which more later, and I had a car. I also had a girlfriend named
Margaret, who was the sister of a friend from university, and I remember a torrid night at the
Murray Bridge drive-in watching Elvis in
Love Me Tender
,
when we weren't doing other things.

I'd go back to Murray Bridge every weekend and meet up with Margaret, and we'd go to coffee lounges and spend time in the back seat of the car, parked at her parents' house. We used to write to each other every second day. I was sixteen and she was fourteen, and her parents put a stop to things, saying she was not old enough for such a serious relationship. Suddenly I got a letter from her saying she couldn't have anything more to do with me because her parents said she was too young.

This was in the final term of that first year of university and I was terribly upset. I reacted by piling up all her ­letters and burning them in the incinerator at the back of the boarding house I was then living in. I threw myself into my studies, which was unusual, and with such enthusiasm that I did very well—I topped the year in mathematics and got distinctions in everything I sat for. Being dumped was part of that—it was the spur.

Then, in the holidays, I started to search furiously for a replacement for Margaret and I went to a dance at Norwood with a couple of friends. I met
Jenny there and was completely captivated by her. She was an apprentice hairdresser, and was very fashionably dressed and very beautiful. I'd never met anyone like her. This was not only because she was so good looking but because she was at ease in any company. I was shy—I still am, and have to push myself in social situations. Just being with her boosted my confidence and helped me to cope socially; she was so attractive, and her prestige rubbed off on me. We were together through the holidays and the following year, and stayed together for the best part of a decade.

I was never quite sure what attracted Jenny to me. She was gregarious and adventurous. I'd describe her as someone who would go to the moon, who was ready for anything, so, I suppose, there was a wild streak in me that must have appealed to her, at least for a time.

I attracted the attention of the media again in my second year at university. One night, my precious portable ­transistor radio was stolen from my car when it was parked outside the
St Clair Recreation Centre in Woodville. The thing to do every Saturday night was go there to a dance, to meet people—girls, in particular. I reported the theft to the police, and the officer at the desk—who was quite nice, in fact—told me bluntly that I'd be unlikely to see it again and said there was little the police would be able do about it. I ­carried on a bit, but he told me to be realistic, that it wasn't the greatest crime in the world.

I was angry and I wasn't accepting that, so I borrowed my father's car and put an imitation radio on its ­dashboard, leaving the window down slightly. I got my friend
Jim Thomson, a fellow physics student, to drive the car to much the same place it had been parked in before. I stayed in the boot with my
rifle, while Jim and Jenny went in to the dance. I had the boot not quite closed, so when I heard two people mumbling, and felt the car lurch, I threw open the lid. One ran, but I stuck the rifle in the other one's face and told him he was under a
citizen's arrest.

As this was well before mobile phones, I marched him, with his hands up, to the nearest house, knocked on the door and asked the man who answered to ring the police. There was a bit of pandemonium, because it must have looked like a hold-up to him, but he rang the police, and they showed up very quickly.

The guy I'd bailed up said, ‘Look, I was just walking down the street and this crazy jumps out of a car, with a gun.'

One of the police said to me, ‘What's your side of the story?'

I convinced them that I was telling the truth. They took the bloke across the road to where it was dark, pushed him over roughly, picked him up and then did it again. That was an eye-opener. One of them came back to where I was and told me the guy had confirmed my story.

‘By the way,' he said, ‘that gun isn't loaded, is it?'

I said it wasn't, but it was. He left and went on with the ‘interrogation' over the road, and I was sitting there, getting bullets out of the rifle as fast as I could and spilling them all over the place. The policeman returned, saw what was happening and chose not to notice, but told me I'd come close to being in very serious trouble and never to do anything like that again.

The police went to the suspect's place and found it stacked with stolen goods. I got my transistor back but it never worked as well as it had, and it was covered in Port Adelaide Football Club stickers—and I hated Port Adelaide.

Somehow, word got around about my
citizen's arrest and the story appeared on the front page of
The
Advertiser.
A ­television station asked me to give them an interview. I did (my first), and a picture of me holding the gun was shown. I gave them chapter and verse on how the police had said there was nothing they could do. Soon after that, a police inspector came visiting.

‘Look,' he said, ‘that constable you named on television is now in quite a bit of trouble. We're not supposed to tell the public there's nothing the police can do.'

He produced a statement for me to sign that, in more diplomatic language, had me admitting that what I'd said was bullshit. I remembered the desk constable as being a nice bloke and the inspector spoke well of him, so I thought,
What the hell
, and signed the statement. About two months later, I got a letter from the Commissioner of Police ­commending me as a model citizen. So for lying I got a ­commendation.
There was a lesson in that: organisations are not always what
they seem and don't always do what they say. The two newsworthy events I was involved in also taught me that solving your own problems can cast you as a hero or a villain, depending on the perspective.

The rifle itself was a Browning .22 automatic my father had given me. I liked it—it had an eight-round stock ­magazine, and broke in the middle and folded down to a very compact size. I waited until the very last day to surrender it under John Howard's gun buyback that was passed after the
Port Arthur massacre. I happened to be in Victoria, and Bendigo was the nearest place where guns could be handed in. I had tears in my eyes when I brought it in. I said I was planning to go sailing and it would be a good idea to have a gun. The sergeant said, ‘You can have a gun, but you can't have an automatic like this one.' But he took pity on me, saying something like, ‘Got sentimental value, has it, son?' I said it had been my father's, and he let me go in to where they had the guillotine, and I watched silently as it destroyed the rifle.

* * *

I always worked in the holidays. I did fruit picking at the end of my last school year and, after my first year at ­university, I got a job at the
James Hardie factory in Adelaide. I was dealing with tyres but there was the odd brush with asbestos, which I don't like thinking about. The next year I thought,
I'm not going back to that place
, because, god, it was hard work lugging tyres around. So, in 1966, I got a job at the
Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury. It was established, as I understand it, to facilitate the Woomera rocket program, and a lot of the peripheral scientific equipment needed was developed there, so, in the holidays, they were taking on ­university science students to assist with various projects. The first year I was with an electronic development unit, and things went well; in the second year I got a really ­interesting project in night vision. They were investigating whether the Australian Army should spend money on purchasing expensive new night-vision glasses that had been developed in America or whether they should just issue everyone with good binoculars. I found myself sitting in a totally dark room for the first three hours of the day, getting dark adapted, and then going into a test tunnel to look at low-illuminated targets at certain distances, and using image intensifiers and binoculars to see how they compared. I enjoyed the work. I had to be ­careful, though, wearing red goggles so that I didn't lose my dark adaption when I left the tunnel. I'd be sitting in the cafeteria at lunchtime with my bright red goggles on. People found that intriguing.

During my last year of university, I worked at the laboratories of the
Highways Department, with one of the pieces of nuclear equipment they'd just acquired. The device emitted ­radiation when placed on a newly made road, and the reflected signal gave information on the soil ­density and water content. I liked these holiday jobs; they were ­interesting and the money helped too.

In the 1960s, as was the case with so many of my ­generation—the baby boomers—my
politics moved steadily to the left. The
Vietnam War was raging and I was totally opposed to it. I was just the right age to be balloted in as a conscript, which I wanted no part of. One day I watched
sombrely as a gun carriage moved slowly down King William
Street in Adelaide. It carried the coffin of
Errol Novak, someone I'd known at boarding school, who was the first Australian conscript to be killed in Vietnam. He seemed to have missed out on many of the good things in life. At school he had often been targeted by the gangs that ruled the dormitories, and now here he was, a victim of an unjust war. Friends more courageous than me resisted the draft and spent years in hiding up in Queensland, avoiding the police. To my mind, they were the real heroes. I took the much easier course of joining the
University Air Squadron, which gave me exemption in return for minimal military involvement. These days I watch with growing alarm as ­society forgets the obscenity that was Vietnam.

Although I was excited by
physics and had thoughts of a career in the field, I did regret that I hadn't had wider ­horizons when I first enrolled at university. One day in ­first-year science, I persuaded a friend I'd met who was doing medicine to smuggle me into a dissecting session. I was intrigued, fascinated, even.
I made enquiries about changing from science to medicine but was told it just wasn't possible. Universities were rigid and inflexible, with strict protocols in place. But, there was a seed planted.

* * *

My childhood was littered with
practical jokes and I kept them up at university. One in particular I remember playing on my friend
Theo. For some reason, we had to have annual medical checks at university and you had to provide a urine sample. Theo's appointment was after mine.

He said, ‘How much do you have to give?'

I said, ‘Oh, I was told what I had wasn't enough and I had to give some more. You need a fair bit, say, a Coke-bottle full.'

He said, ‘I can't fill a bloody Coke bottle.'

I told him just to take his time and he'd be all right. He eventually managed to fill the bottle, and took it in while the others were there with little containers discreetly wrapped in tissue. He handed his bottle over and the nurse looked at him as if he were mad. That was pretty funny, so I ­continued. The following week I told him that there was a message on the noticeboard that everyone had to go back in and get their containers.

‘I've come to collect my container,' Theo announced at the desk. The nurse looked at him oddly then went off, returning with a shoe box containing many tiny ­containers, and the one large Coke bottle. Theo picked up the bottle and left. I have no idea what the nursing staff thought, but I found this very funny and still smile when I think back. My jokes weren't malicious, but you wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of them.

Another memory from undergraduate days is of an experience that, for a short time, shook my
atheism. I went into some detail about this in an interview with
Scott Stephens for the ABC program
Compass
. He asked me if I believed in God and I said I didn't because, as a physical scientist, I needed evidence to support my beliefs. But I admitted to having moments of questioning whether there might be a god.

The most bizarre of these was the experience that occurred when I was in my undergraduate years at Adelaide University. I woke up one morning and had really ­swollen feet. I couldn't stand on them; I was in a dreadful state. I couldn't get to university and I was sitting there thinking,
What the hell am I going to do?
Later that morning I opened a Bible that was there in the boarding house and the first words I read were ‘King Asa was diseased in his feet, and he cursed God'. And I thought,
How many references to feet are there in the Bible?
What is the statistical probability of opening the Bible and reading about feet when you've got a problem with your own?
A miracle, if you like, and I was shaken.