IAN GAWLER

IAN GAWLER

The Dragon’s Blessing

Guy Allenby

First published in 2008

Copyright © Guy Allenby 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Allenby, Guy.

Ian Gawler : the dragon’s blessing / Guy Allenby.

978 1 74175 608 1 (pbk.)

Gawler, Ian, 1950- Gawler Foundation. Cancer—Patients--Attitudes.

Cancer—Patients--Australia--Biography.

362.1969940092

Set in 12/14.4 pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Australia

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Foreword

To be the subject of a biography is to challenge the ego. A biography presents the opportunity for the ego to run wild. What will be said? Who will read it? What will they think? What will it lead to?

There are two witnesses to our life: our self and others. In Richard Bach’s wonderful book Illusions, there is a statement . . . Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world—even if what is published is not true.

What is that all about? Perhaps it is speaking of being content with what you have done in your life, and being unaffected by what others say of you. That what is most important is how you see yourself—which would be helped if you were not too ego-driven, too neurotic, too emotional!

Of course, emotions and thoughts can be quite valuable and they can seem quite real at times. However, His Holiness the Dalai Lama tells us that even an emotion as simple and common as anger can distort our perception of reality by 90 per cent. That is, anger distorts what we see, believe we have heard, or witnessed; what we believe to have happened.

When we examine our thoughts, we soon realise they come and go very quickly. There is nothing permanent about a thought.

So when it comes to telling a story, that story will be based upon what really happened, and then it will be filtered, modifie, overlayed and adapted, according to the participants’ and witnesses’ perceptions, states of mind and emotions. And as time goes on, memories fade, merge, metamorphose, and become something new.

Stories encompass fact and creatively work a version of truth into something that aims to be entertaining and instructive. So the fact is that all that is written here may not be true in the strictest sense of the word.

Guy may not be too happy about me pointing this out as I know he has earnestly and conscientiously aimed to recount a version of the truth concerning a story that in a way actually did take place. But even my personal diaries—some involving very detailed accounts of events recorded on the day they happened—only present my experience, my recollection, my perspective of what occurred. There is a famous story of a group of blind men coming across an elephant each one bumping into a part of the elephant and then being asked what it was. Some described a trunk, another a tail, another a leg and yet another a huge tummy. All true. All parts of the truth. All a version of the truth.

So my own wish, in agreeing to this story being told by Guy, was twofold. The first, as already explained, was to confront my ego yet again. My approach to the story has been to respond to Guy’s prompting as openly and fully as possible and to trust in his ability to do something useful with what was said. The people with whom I did speak directly about the possibility of being interviewed for the book were all encouraged by me to take the same approach.

My second and more important motivation was in fact to explore the truth. Looking back over the events of this life described, I have found it extraordinary to be the one living the story. Many of the events depicted in these pages go beyond what can be characterised as ‘ordinary’. Some seem even a little incredible to me—and I was the one experiencing them at the time!

So why bother to record it? Well, for many years it has been felt that there was almost a duty to tell it. This story, particularly the early part to do with my healing journey through cancer, was so remarkable, so extraordinary, that it did feel at the time that it was guided by a higher purpose. As fortuitous coincidence followed on more and more fortuitous coincidences, it felt natural to believe there was a need to share with others what I was learning and what was helping my particular recovery.

Yet when I did begin to run groups in the early 1980s, mind–body medicine was in its infancy. For the average person, meditation was more likely to be associated with a risky cult than a valuable therapy. And psychic phenomena, Filipino faith healing, subtle energy healing: all that was tainted as mumbo-jumbo.

And there was more than this. As well as wanting to be taken seriously as a participant in those pioneering days of mind–body medicine, I felt an urge to empower people to use their own healing resources. To draw on inner healing, in a way that complemented the medicine of the day. In a way that added to what was possible.

So why would you bother to read this book? Well, hopefully it is at least entertaining. And a little mind-blowing in parts! If it does serve to shake up some concepts about how life is, what is real and what healing really is made of, it may be useful.

But I have greater hope: that the real purpose of the book will be fulfilled to some degree. It is intended as a teaching story.

If it is a teaching story, what are the lessons, you may well ask? Well that clearly is the point of the book! Read it and find out if there are any, and if so, how they might be helpful.

Perhaps a hint: the stories of the life that is herein described—how real do they seem? How do they resonate with your own sensibilities? What do they spark in you? Contemplation? Feelings? Emotions? And what do they point to? Is there anything relevant that you might take usefully into your own life?

Finally, for me—two wishes. Firstly, that the book serves as another nail in the coffin of my ego; then perhaps I can be of more use to others.

Secondly, the wish that something here inspires and serves you to focus upon finding the Truth in your own life. The story concerns a relative truth—something that happened and people’s versions of how it can be recounted. But perhaps there is a deeper, more fundamental Truth. Not the truth of our daily lives—what we did, where we went and what happened; but the Truth of who we really are.

So the fundamental wish is that you do come to experience directly the Truth of your innermost nature, and find a way of living in the light of that experience.

Many thanks to Guy Allenby for initiating this project and pursuing the story with enthusiasm, professionalism and such a good heart. Thanks to all who gave their time and contributed in many ways. And of course a special thanks to the love of my life Ruth, and the light of my life, Sogyal Rinpoche, and all the members of family, friends and spiritual teachers who have helped and supported me in so many ways.

Ian Gawler
Yarra Junction, Victoria
February 2008

Contents

Foreword

Resources

Permissions

Acknowledgements

Index

To everyone who devotes their lives to the service of others

1

The Edge

It was a familiar dance on country roads. Tight corners. Braking. Accelerating. Dodging potholes. No time, no bounds, only the thin ribbon of bitumen ahead.

‘It was one of those perfect Australian days when the sky is not content to be blue and cloudless; but vibrates with its purity,’ wrote Ian Gawler in his journal. ‘The air was still and warm and did little to slow our progress, as Gail and I sped to the Rock on the MV.’

Ian was savouring the big sky, the rushing wind and a potent trust in his fortunes as he pushed his beloved new MV Agusta 750 motorcycle—and his girlfriend—to the limit.

The speedo edged 160km/h in the straight.

Gail Kerr, on her first ever ride on a motorbike, attached to Ian’s back as tight a rock climber’s rucksack, felt little more than the thump of her heart in her throat. Her hair whipped out in long auburn strands from beneath her helmet.

The country was flat—a collage of yellows and ochres. The dry paddocks were scattered with fresh hay bales. At the end of the road was the Rock—Hanging Rock—the plug of an ancient volcano, poking impressively out of Victoria’s Hesket plains as Ian, young veterinarian, athlete and lapsed Anglican with an unrepentant passion for going fast, swept towards it with the then terrified, but usually unflappable, Gail.

It was New Year’s Day, 1975.

The couple motored up to the racecourse on the Italian superbike to find a mile-long queue of cars outside. Police were turning cars away at the entrance gates as they eased to the top of the line—Gail, eyes wide and face flushed from the full-throttled turns along the narrow roads. Fortunately there was room at the races for just two more on a motorbike. It had become a yearly habit for Ian to attend the event ever since Frank, the Clerk of the Course, a lean, greying and dignified man and member of the older generation of Australian stockmen, had taught him to ride.

Ian patently preferred the power and speed of two and four wheels to four hoofs but seeing Frank and attending the races every year ‘was a delight, and it rapidly became a matter of honour to front each year, regardless of the hour New Year’s Eve celebrations ended’.

More than that though, Ian had come to love the magic of nearby Hanging Rock, rising 100 metres above the surrounding plain. While working as a stockman at a farm at nearby Woodend during university holidays he would often run the steep path that winds its way to the top, seeking the stillness and majesty he found there. ‘Up there is a central, relatively clear area ringed by huge rock sentinels,’ he wrote. Set in clusters, these sentinels rise up 6 or more metres each from an oval base.

Once, I had crouched under the shelter that the megaliths offered as a rainstorm vented its fury on the rock. Nature in all its awe. More frequently, however, I delighted in running through those dark corridors, blocked off from light and sound with the feeling of space and time suspended and not knowing what the next turn might bring. Often I would round a corner and pull up sharply, breath cut short. In front would be the panorama of the outstretched Australian bush. At my feet would be the precipice and the drop to the plain below.

And it was the profound stillness and magic of the rocks and the mind-arresting sweep of this panorama—more than the races—that would draw Ian once again this particular morning. The following day, 2 January, he was booked in to St Vincents Hospital in Melbourne for tests on his sore and swollen right leg. He had said little to Gail about the soreness until the previous week when, after Christmas lunch, he had taken aside his elder sister Susan, a physiotherapist, to take a look at the leg.

She had not liked what she had seen.

Ian had first met Gail, a veterinary nurse, the previous year while he was filling in at a fellow veterinarian’s practice in Geelong. At that time he was only a few months out of university and was busy running his own practice in the small neighbouring community of Bacchus Marsh—an attractive rural town nestled in a fertile valley midway between Melbourne and the gold-rush town of Ballarat.

Ian’s first impression of Gail was that she was pretty, intent on her work and a little aloof. Her long reddish-brown hair was drawn back in a ponytail and she had an angular face with high cheekbones, silver-rimmed glasses and ‘a penetrating gaze that added to her efficient air and gave a hint of severity’. In those first few days, Ian discovered that this look was, in fact, determination. Perhaps there was also a hint of something else, as Ian noted in his journal at the time: ‘The glasses couldn’t hide the spark that the eyes contained and I sometimes found myself wondering what would happen if they were to come off and the hair was let down.’

Ian ran his Bacchus Marsh practice with a friend and fellow recent graduate, Kathy Humphrey; they had taken over the lease for the small practice together in January, 1973. The owners, committed Christians, had headed to Korea for two years to work on a mission development farm. The plan was that upon their return, the four would go into partnership together.

As part of the deal Ian would do occasional locum work at the Geelong practice where, it turned out, Gail worked. This practice was owned and run by Daryl Sefton and his wife Nini, who were also re-establishing vineyards in the area. At harvest time, Ian was asked to step in for a couple of weeks to keep the veterinary practice running.

Back at Bacchus Marsh, Ian’s real passions in veterinary science were surgery and horses. One of the main reasons he had been drawn to the town was because he knew there was not a vet in the immediate area working specifically with horses. The only problem was that he was fresh out of vet school. He had a lot to learn about the subject. Not that that was anything to put off the then eager young vet.

At first, business was slow. And then on 25 February—Ian’s twenty-third birthday—he had his father and stepmother over for lunch. Kathy and Ian had decided to take turns to be on call during the weekends and this particular weekend, despite the birthday, it was Ian’s turn to be on duty. The surgery itself was attached to the little house shared by the two young vets. It was not long after Ian and his parents had sat down to the birthday lunch that the doorbell rang.

Ian opened the door to two concerned-looking men and instantly recognised one of them. It was Alex Katranski, proprietor of a large Australia-wide rental car company and owner of Underbank, the biggest horse stud in Bacchus Marsh. Ian masked his excitement, secretly thrilled that Katranski was maybe, just maybe, about to ask for help with one of his horses.

‘Do you know anything about horses?’ challenged Katranski, more than a tad unsure of the likely experience of the tall, longhaired and youthful vet standing before him.

Ian looked him straight in the eye, smiled, and said: ‘That’s my main interest’.

Apparently satisfied, Katranski explained that he had two horses that he was concerned about and asked Ian to look at them.

‘I didn’t want to appear too eager. So I told him I would finish lunch with my parents first. My sense was that he would respect this too. In fact, I was keen to get out there as fast as I could go.’

One horse had an injury and the other had an illness. After Ian examined them he was not entirely sure what was wrong with either of them. He told Katranski that he did not have the things he needed with him to treat the horses and that he would need to go back to the surgery and return the following day with what was required.

Ian went straight home and rang Dr Geoff Hazard, a friend, fellow veterinarian and mentor from his school and university days. He described the symptoms of the two horses to Hazard, who told him exactly what he thought was wrong with them and, if so, what to do.

Ian went back to Underbank the next day to treat them. The treatments worked.

Katranski was delighted. Unbeknown to Ian, he had already had his usual vet out to treat the horses—but to no avail. Katranski transferred all his work to Ian.

Horse people have their own network and soon, through word of mouth, other studs and horse owners in the area began calling him in rapid succession. If things got really tricky, Ian continued to seek out Geoff Hazard’s advice as he needed it.

‘I also worked out that it was best if I didn’t say too much [when treating animals] because the farmers loved talking,’ says Ian. ‘As a young graduate, a lot of those old horse guys knew heaps more than I did. They’d tell me what was wrong most times. What they wanted was reassurance—someone to say that what they were doing was okay.’

Ian soon found himself learning invaluable folk medicine—techniques and remedies—from the old-timers; sound knowledge that had been tried and tested and passed down through the generations. He began to develop a deep respect for these elders who knew things that veterinary school simply had not taught.

‘What they helped me to realise was that animals had an innate ability to heal themselves,’ he says, ‘and that, as a vet, half the time your job was not to do too much to interfere with this process and to let nature take its course and help it along its way.’

Ian relished getting out and working with horses, but he loved working in the surgery just as much. ‘With both the horses and the dogs and cats I was able to do a wide range of challenging and interesting things,’ he says. ‘The technical side was wonderful.’

Soon he recognised that although the vet school had taught a particular methodology, there were in fact other ways of treating illness that were often ‘cheaper, easier and had less side effects’. Clearly in many situations the modern techniques worked really well, but it was exciting to learn of other possibilities.

Ian was soon a sought-after and effective vet working long hours every week. He was loving it, particularly the horse work. And then, in the middle of 1973, the emerging practice suffered its first real setback. Ian and Kathy’s veterinary nurse suddenly gave two weeks’ notice one Friday.

‘It was really bad news because we were working flat out,’ says Ian. ‘A veterinary practice can’t practise without a good vet nurse and they are hard to train. You can’t conjure one up overnight.’

The following Sunday morning, Ian was catching up on a little much-needed rest when he was awoken by a knock on the front door. It was Gail.

Ian, rubbing his leaden eyes as he opened the door, was taken aback. Gail’s hair was down and she was wearing an old fur coat and faded denim jeans. ‘She looked really attractive,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘Gone were the hard lines of uniform and clinical manner. The glasses were still there but they only added to the feminine appeal.’

According to Gail, the young vet had lent her money when he was last in Geelong and she had dropped in to return it. Also, for reasons she put down to Ian’s quietness and complacency, Gail had assumed that he was married.

At the time Ian was sharing the house with Kathy, but the pair were merely business partners and friends—nothing more—and it was convenient for them to live at the place where they worked.

Straight away it was clear that there was chemistry between Gail and Ian. He thanked her for returning the loan, hesitated for an awkward moment, and then invited her in for a lunch he had cooked of steak and boiled vegetables.

What the twenty-year-old Gail did not bother to tell him was that she had been a vegetarian since she was five years old. Ian, on the other hand, a lean and muscular athlete, with a 6-foot 2, 12-stone frame and an appetite to match, ‘ate anything that moved’. Gail, it turns out, had sworn off eating living things ever since she had come home from school one day to discover that the pet sheep that she kept in the backyard had inexplicably vanished. That night the Kerr family had lamb chops for dinner. Gail was heartbroken and resisted all attempts to eat meat from that day forth—at least until this Sunday fifteen years later, when she chose not to reveal her strongly-held dietary preferences. What she did mention casually though, between mouthfuls of steak, was that she had quit her job at the veterinary practice in Geelong.

Gail had strained her back while drumming in the Geelong Scottish pipe band. Her boss, Daryl Sefton, took a dim view of this injury as it meant that Gail now found it too difficult to lift heavy animals onto the table. Daryl could not lift either because of arthritic knees, so they had taken to bickering over which of them would do it. She told Ian they could not sort it out and had reached an impasse. Gail had subsequently resigned and was looking for a new job.

Giving up her job was particularly devastating for Gail as her schoolgirl ambition had been to go to university and study to become a veterinarian. There was no doubt she had the requisite intelligence and application, having topped her class year after year. When Daryl Sefton had offered her the job as a vet nurse in her final year of school, she had wanted to refuse the work and continue her studies. But Gail’s parents, Bob and Olive Kerr, who were old-fashioned working people, saw little value in a higher education and pressed her into taking the job.

Once in the position, Gail actually enjoyed the work tremendously. In her own words, the Seftons ‘were really good people and they were like parents to me’. So while she had been sad to leave them, fate had now seemed to smile on her with a new appointment. She started at Ian and Kathy’s practice two weeks later.

In her new job it was soon very apparent that Gail was well trained, enthusiastic and efficient. ‘She set about organising the practice procedures, freeing us to concentrate on our cases,’ says Ian. ‘Also she had an almost photographic memory and clients loved the fact that she remembered them, their animals’ names and most of their details as well.’

The relationship between Ian and Gail was simply professional at first. However, Ian had no steady girlfriend and, at the end of 1973, he asked her out to join Kathy and her boyfriend to celebrate the first anniversary of the new practice.

Gail remembers how they returned to Ian’s home afterwards and he asked her, very tentatively, if she wanted to spend the night. ‘I said no,’ she says, ‘and I stayed in Kathy’s room, because she was away with her fellow for the night.’

At that time the young nurse was sharing a house with a group of teachers in Bacchus Marsh. This had made it a lot easier than living with her parents in Geelong and commuting to work, 45 minutes away by road. It had also given her the opportunity to gain more personal freedom.

During the course of 1973, Kathy, who was really interested in working with cattle, became increasingly frustrated with the region’s extremely patriarchal old farmers who were reluctant to have a woman veterinarian tend their animals. She moved to northern New South Wales, leaving Ian on his own. The workload at the practice, now run by a solitary vet rather than the original two, was even more hectic.

As 1974 began it was another hot and dry summer. By now Ian and Gail’s work day would typically start with Ian leaving at 6 am with horse stud work, followed by a small animal clinic back at the Bacchus Marsh surgery from 9 am, until mid-morning. Then there would be surgery to complete on the dogs and cats who needed it, before he would jump in the car with Gail for a quick dash to the other small animal surgery he conducted at Melton, 16 kilometres away.

‘My record for getting there was five minutes,’ he says, ‘which is an average of about 120 miles [190 km/h] an hour. I had a rotary [engine] Mazda then and I could get it up to 130 miles an hour [210 km/h]. It barely touched the ground. It probably was fairly dangerous but I always felt quite bullet-proof.’

In the afternoon Ian would do more horse work, returning to the surgery later to check on the animals he had operated on that day. Then there was an evening clinic. Meals were usually on the run and there were often emergencies late at night. The Saturday morning clinic completed, Ian would then be on call all weekend because now there was no-one else to share the workload.

Eighty-hour working weeks were typical.

‘That was the pace I was tearing around at and I loved it,’ he says, adding that he found time to fit in a couple of hours of training most afternoons.

‘He used to get tired. Really tired,’ says Gail.

Ian, it turns out, had made time to play centre half-back in the local Australian Rules Football team during the winter of 1973 and did so again in 1974. Still, his real passion since early schooldays had been for athletics and he represented Victoria in the decathlon in three national championships. He was hoping to be in the state team again in 1975.

It was a busy life, to say the least, and one with little room for a developing romance. And in matters of the heart, he had been burnt before. In his university days there had been a love affair with a girl named Liz. After three years she left him suddenly for another man. Ian admits to have taken away from this first serious romantic involvement the pain ‘that attachment can bring’ and a determination to become less involved and give less of himself in the future. When he met Gail he recognised her inherent strength and accordingly presumed she might be able to handle a no-commitment type of relationship.

And so in December 1973, very early in their new relationship, Ian invited Gail to visit his land overlooking Bacchus Marsh. The vet had bought the 40 acres early in his working life. The entire amount, including the deposit, was financed by a bank loan arranged by friend and financial adviser, Tony Bongiorno.

Lying back on the grass, gazing out over the plains below, in a rare moment of stillness and tranquillity in their hectic lives, Ian decided it was a good time to set out his intentions directly.

Ian told Gail that he was interested in the possibility of a relationship with her but that he did not want to have ‘any sense of permanence or attachment or anything like that. I did one of those things that probably never works: I said if you are interested in a relationship with no conditions, no sort of commitment—then I am happy. If not, let’s stop now.

‘One of the reasons I was attached to her was that she was a really, really strong woman. I felt quite screwed up emotionally, so I thought she could handle me. I thought she was emotionally tough.’

‘He was a very cautious and a very quiet guy,’ says Gail. ‘He didn’t say a lot in those days.’

One of the things that Ian kept to himself was the fact that he had never been able to imagine himself beyond the age of 27. He also had a vague awareness that life was going to serve up a major change; that life was going to take a totally different direction to the one he was currently headed in. ‘I even had vague notions that this involved heading off to some type of spiritual retreat, or becoming a hermit or something,’ he explains. ‘It was a peculiar feeling which was strong without being defined.’

For all these reasons Ian felt he could not commit and he felt it best to lay it all out to Gail. ‘I did not want to offer any sense of permanence or security.’

‘It was fine,’ says Gail, ‘because neither did I.’

It was, nevertheless, a naïve view of the nature of serious relationships, particularly as they were soon living together. Very quickly it became clear, at least to Ian, that Gail had fallen deeply in love, while he tried to keep his ‘side of the bargain by remaining somewhat detached’ he says. ‘It was lopsided at the start.’

Gail agrees that she thought she had fallen in love with Ian, but adds that she had a ‘funny thing’ with love in those early days. ‘I had what they call agape. It’s a sort of unconditional love which is given freely to people. It has a high rate of conscience and heart in it and I think I mistook that, in my tender years, for love,’ she says. ‘There’s love and being in love and I don’t think we were ever in love.’

Besides, from Gail’s point of view her new boyfriend ‘just seemed a very silent person about emotional things. I don’t think he ever actually held my hand in our relationship.’ To complicate matters, Ian was also still quite attached to the memory of Liz. ‘He was having a lot of trouble letting go,’ Gail maintains. ‘I think he found that very difficult.’

This created real problems for Gail and she reacted to it quite strongly. Liz dropped in to say hello at their Bacchus Marsh home a couple of times in the early days and the two of them kept in touch by phone, much to Gail’s displeasure. Ian remembers her pulling the connection out at the wall one day when Liz rang.

Throughout 1974 work became busier and ever more hectic. Living together and working side by side, the bond between Ian and Gail steadily strengthened. Yet, as Ian remembers it, the uneven nature of their relationship in that first year together was an occasional source of background conflict and, along with other issues, difficulties were starting to emerge.

‘It was a very unusual relationship at the beginning,’ says Gail. ‘You can look back with a great deal of introspection but it seems like we were thrown together.’ It was almost as if it had more to do with fate than real romance.

By the end of 1974 the couple who owned the veterinary practice, Kevin and Jo Bell, were due to return from Korea. The plan was that Kevin and Jo would move back into their house, Ian would go into partnership in the business as agreed, and Gail and he would have to find somewhere else to live.

They settled on an old—if somewhat neglected—pioneer settler’s home. ‘Kippen Ross’ was halfway between Bacchus Marsh and the neighbouring town of Melton.

Set on a flat plain, it was huge and of solid brick, thick with creepers and surrounded by verandas. It was at the end of a 400-metre driveway flanked by gum trees. It had many large rooms, each with its own fireplace, leading off a wide central corridor. The timber floors sagged a little. ‘The lounge room was immense,’ says Ian, ‘with a fireplace you could almost stand up in.’ Outside was a rose garden, overgrown lawns and paddock where Gail could keep her horse, Tabooka. In the chook shed meanwhile they installed ducks and bantams, two rabbits and a guinea pig. The couple also kept a cat and two dogs—Ian’s Saluki and Gail’s Afghan.

And then Christmas rolled around.

The Gawler family always celebrated the festive season with all the trimmings. There were presents under a tree dripping with tinsel and a roast turkey lunch was served on a large table outdoors.

However, Christmas 1974, unlike previous years, was held at Ian’s sister Susan’s and her husband Ross Macaw’s house in Melbourne instead of the Gawler family home. This was because Alan, Ian’s father, had just flown to Canada with second wife Glenyss and Ian’s younger sister Helen, to take up a two-year posting.

While it was a happy day, Ian was carrying a niggling concern. His right thigh had been getting bigger and increasingly sore for most of the previous month; something he had not really considered to be a serious problem up until then. He had assumed it was a pulled muscle. Now he was not entirely sure.

He quietly took Susan aside for her opinion. Ian and Susan, as the only offspring from their father’s first marriage, had grown close by Ian’s early adulthood. Susan, an experienced physiotherapist, remembers her brother dropping his trousers to reveal a right thigh that was quite noticeably bigger than the other. She was deeply shocked, although she kept the full extent of her concern to herself.

‘I took him into my little treatment room so that I could examine it more clearly.’ She palpated it, pushing the skin down over the swelling on Ian’s thigh with her finger to see how it responded. ‘Normally if you palpate the skin like this, you make a dent and then, as you take your finger off, the skin changes colour and it bounces back,’ she says. ‘But this was solid. I could hardly push my finger into it at all!’ Susan remembers that she did not actually know what it was but she knew there was something seriously wrong and that Ian needed to do something about it as soon as possible. ‘I told him you had better go and see a doctor.’

The two rejoined the family at the table and the festivities continued late into the evening. When Ian and Gail finally arrived back home at Bacchus Marsh, a 40-minute drive away, they were tired and ready for sleep. However Ian was called out immediately to assist a dog that was having trouble giving birth. He performed a successful caesarean section and finally fell into bed at 4 am.

The next morning, Boxing Day, was another clear blue summer’s day. Ian decided to try and shake off the previous long day’s weariness and overindulgence, with a training run around the Bacchus Marsh oval with his dog, Sara.

Sara nearly always trained with Ian; training that usually consisted of a three-mile warm-up run followed by countless laps of interval work—jogging, sprinting, jogging, sprinting, jogging, sprinting.

Ian’s chosen event was decathlon—ten events competed over two days. Athletics was his summer sport and during the winters at Bacchus Marsh Australian Rules Football kept him fit. Running long distances was a daily habit.

When Kathy Humphrey had left the practice earlier that year the demands of work had left him less time to train as he had liked. So when the 1974 football season had finished in September Ian had decided to take a two-month rest from training. It was the first time he had taken a real break from training in about eight years.

During the break, Gail remembers he confided in her that he had felt something about the ‘size of a walnut’ in his right thigh. He had assumed it was scar tissue from a previous pulled muscle and thought little of it.

Curiously though, earlier that year another warning note had sounded. Ian and Gail had called in to browse around a shop that sold antiques and old wares while visiting friends in Adelaide. ‘It was a very unusual shop,’ says Gail. After the pair had been looking around for a little while, the proprietor approached them and, out of the blue, enquired of Ian if he was ‘well’. Then she said that she felt sure there was something ‘going on’, explaining that she was an iridologist and could see from his eyes that he had problems. In those days neither of them even knew what an iridologist was. ‘Ian thought she was a crackpot,’ says Gail. And then the shopkeeper mentioned that her husband was a therapist who performed his ‘diagnoses and treatment using a little black box and a piece of hair’. Apparently, he was next door and Ian was asked if he minded if he had a look at him too? Rather bemused, and a little curious, Ian agreed.

The woman went off and returned a short time later with her spouse. He examined him (without the aid of his little black box) and agreed there were possible problems. ‘The poor bloke was a bit embarrassed by my obvious scepticism,’ says Ian. And then, just before they left, the woman turned to Gail and said: ‘Promise me one thing, young woman . . . go and get him a total all-over checkup; something is going on.’

When they got home, Gail suggested he book himself in with a doctor, but Ian was adamant there was nothing wrong with him. Gail kept nagging and eventually he agreed. Ian spoke with some of his medical friends and discovered that an organisation called the Shepherd Foundation was just what he needed. It had been established recently with the express purpose of carrying out exhaustive health checks intended to diagnose and prevent illnesses before they arose. Ian booked in and completed a full medical late in October of 1974. The results found nothing wrong and he was told he was a ‘fit and healthy young man’.

Gail was not so sure. ‘He was sallow, he was jaundiced-looking, he was tired, he did not look good,’ she says. ‘All those sorts of things were going on for the last months of ’74.’ Gail kept at him for further tests, but now he would not discuss it, citing his recent clean bill of health. And then when Ian had returned to training in November he had noticed that a soreness had developed in his right thigh during the down time. ‘Perhaps it was related to the walnut lump, but really I thought it was a strained muscle and that it would clear up as I ran more,’ he says. But instead the pain grew steadily worse and the leg began to swell up. By mid-December he could hardly get over the hurdles and running became increasingly difficult.

And so on Boxing Day, with the weariness of the previous day and night adding to things, Ian struggled to complete even a single lap of the Bacchus Marsh oval.

‘Now I was sure it had to be something more than a mere pulled muscle,’ he wrote at the time. ‘Dejected, I stopped and walked back to the car. Sara followed reluctantly.’

The very next day Ian sought help from his local doctor and friend, David Stewart. The GP scrutinised his leg closely and very quickly recommended he see a specialist in Melbourne at the earliest possible opportunity. Ian remembers asking him what he thought it was. Stewart avoided his gaze and then mumbled—without looking up—‘There’s definitely some new growth there. Perhaps it is lipoma [a benign fatty growth and the most innocuous of tumours].’ The comment filled Ian with dismay. ‘I didn’t know what the lump was, but one thing I did know for sure was that it was not a lipoma. Also I knew that David would have to know that it was not a lipoma. Therefore, it seemed obvious that he was trying to reassure me in a way that was quite ineffective. It hit me that this had to be something serious. It had to be some sort of cancer.’

Until this moment Ian had somehow managed to avoid facing the possibility that the growth on his leg might be a benign tumour, let alone a full-blown cancer. After all, he was young, he was super-fit, he felt invincible. The notion of serious illness seemed an utter impossibility to him. Coming out of Dr Stewart’s surgery a completely new feeling enveloped him. It was a deep sense of dread. No panic. No real sense of fear, but a powerful sense of apprehension. And a numbness.

The following day Ian had an appointment to see Mr John Doyle, a surgeon in Melbourne and he motored off there on the MV. He parked it on the kerb outside the surgeon’s Collins Street rooms.

Ian describes Doyle as a gentle soul and a strong Catholic. Doyle, for his part, remembers Ian as extraordinarily calm.

That day Doyle reviewed his history and gave him a physical examination. According to his notes, Doyle asked Ian how long the swelling in his right thigh had been present and he replied ‘eight to ten weeks’ and that he could not remember any recent trauma to that region.

‘I thought it was a very nasty swelling,’ says Doyle, ‘and was suspicious of it from the beginning.’ No malignancy could be formally confirmed that day—and Doyle, like Stewart before him, did not reveal the true depth of his suspicions.

He sent Ian around the corner to be x-rayed immediately and said that he would not be drawn on what he thought might be wrong with the leg until the x-rays were assessed. Even then he suggested further tests would have to be undertaken to diagnose anything conclusively.

However, once the x-rays were taken, Ian pressured the radiologist into allowing him to have a look at them. What he saw, as he explained it at the time, was that in the middle of his thigh there was a mass of new bone growth spreading out from the main bone like fragments of a grenade caught at an early stage of explosion. ‘If the leg can be saved, I would say it will make interesting reading.’

With the sense of dread deepening and still feeling numb, Ian climbed on the MV and roared off down Collins Street. Instead of returning to Gail, he swept off in the other direction; down the coast to visit his old friend Tom Barrett, who was staying at his grandmother’s beach house at Sorrento.

It was a beautiful day, with a surreal edge to it. The sky was clear, the air warm and it was a good road with gentle curves—near perfect conditions for a big new bike. And there was this throbbing in the right leg. As the trip flowed on it became increasingly difficult to even use the leg.

‘He rode down on his bike to have his Will signed,’ Barrett remembers, adding that his friend appeared to be maintaining his natural calmness, despite the extraordinary gravity of the situation. Barrett did not share his best friend’s serenity. ‘It was a shocking day. It was just so unexpected that it could happen to someone so fit.’

The next day, Mr Doyle phoned Ian with the results of the x-rays.

‘I said I was very worried about it,’ says Doyle. ‘I thought that it was a malignant tumour and I wanted him to come into hospital as soon as possible.’

Not at all surprised by the news or the instructions, Ian booked into hospital straight away. Further tests, with a biopsy on the swollen thigh and lymph nodes in the groin, were planned for Saturday 4 January 1975.

The subsequent days passed in quiet apprehension, although Ian and Gail did not dwell on the impending investigations or likely outcomes—in fact they did not talk of the leg at all.

They spent New Year’s Eve at the Maddingley Football Club’s fancy dress ball. The couple turned up in their ordinary clothes and left early.

New Year’s Day dawned. It was a sharp, still and cloudless summer’s day. One to fully embrace the annual tradition of attending the Hanging Rock Picnic Races—not to mention the opportunity to really open the bike up, to push it to its limits and to challenge fate at a time that seemed more relevant now than ever before. Gail was coerced into being the reluctant passenger, under the guise of ‘a nice day at the races’.

Ian says he had come to feel over the years that the race day was partly his own. Nonetheless, 1975 boasted a bigger crowd than he had ever remembered attending before.

Once inside the gates, the couple parked the heavy bike, pushed through the massive crowd and found Frank. Ian made his annual reacquaintance with the old horseman—and then proceeded to back three losing horses, before deciding he and Gail would be better served taking off up The Rock.

Ian trudged up the narrow path to the top with a pronounced limp—such a contrast to the times only a few short months before, when he would bound up to the peak in a matter of minutes.

The view from the top was familiar, with the added colour and movement of the horse races below. It was familiar but breathtaking nonetheless. Also it offered a comforting sense of the wider, open scale of things, as Ian himself teetered on the edge of a very immediate, personal unknown. As Ian wrote in a later journal,

Looking over the precipice onto the spectacle below is one of those floating images that comes before me now and then. Muted memories of the hazy forms of horses, careering before the colourful crowd. A tableau that lacked both clarity and sound. The silence, particularly I remember the silence . . .

2

Checking in

On the way to hospital in Melbourne from their home in rural Melton, Ian Gawler stopped his car on the side of the road, dropped his trousers and insisted that his girlfriend take a photograph of his legs.

Passing cars honked their horns as they went past, Ian standing by the side of the road in his y-fronts, trousers around his ankles. It was a surreal scene in what must have been one of the most anxious days of his life, but it bore the mark of Ian’s particular brand of humour and determination. He was also keen to have what already he was sensing might be a last record of his two legs.

As the young couple laughed and the photo was taken, nobody passing by would have guessed what menacing shadows must have been sweeping through his mind that day.

Ian was an intelligent, intense and driven young man, full of confidence and ambition. Then again, like many people who have taken some serious knocks in early life, he was more comfortable playing up to a sense of the ridiculous than peeling open the darker corners of his mind.

Walking into St Vincents Private Hospital, a crisp and shiny new building with granite steps, a carpeted foyer and large reception desk, only underlined an air of absurdity for Ian. He remembers feeling more like he was checking into a five-star hotel than a facility for tending the wounded and infirm.

But this was no ordinary hotel. Soon he was handing over his wallet, his keys, all the personal belongings he had with him. He struggled with an overwhelming sense of disempowerment, as the numbness crept ever deeper.

He was taken to room 725. It had a heavy door and more of the clinical air he was expecting. The bed was stainless steel, the blanket white and the walls finished in patterned and shiny off-white wallpaper. There were cupboards, benches, telephone, an air-conditioner, radio and an oval TV—all in white. Opposite the end of his bed was a simple chrome crucifix. Christ appearing as a stylised moulded form; again in white.

After he was settled in, Gail headed home and left him alone with his journal.

Since he was fifteen, Ian had kept a journal off and on because it provided him a way of airing feelings and observations he could not, or did not want to, express to others. Now it gave him a chance to cope with the yawning depth and brutal suddenness of what was happening to him. In those days there was no offer of professional support and counselling to cope with the emotional or psychological trauma that so commonly attends major surgery and life-threatening illness.

Ian’s first journal was burnt in a ‘fit of embarrassment’ at the age of sixteen and he did not keep another until he was ninteen. From then his thoughts were self-consciously locked away in an old army munitions box he had bought and carefully restored.

And then someone fiddled with the lock while the young vet was on an extended trip away working in country New South Wales.

‘What a betrayal of trust. Perhaps I make too much of nothing,’ he would write in a later journal. ‘At the time I felt like a knife had been passed midline below my chest and twisted around my diaphragm.’

Hurt and ‘disenchanted’, he did not log his private feelings for another couple of years and it ‘was only when I became sick that I started writing again,’ he says, declining to suggest who might have taken an uninvited stroll through his psyche.

His musings in hospital flow between thoughts on meditation, karma, reincarnation, the levels of consciousness, parapsychology and the work of pioneering quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Ian had also taken two books with him into hospital. Both had been sitting on his shelves for many months, waiting to be read. The first was Meditation in Action by the Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa. It was the first specific book on meditation Ian would read and now he started dipping into it, hoping to gain some ease and comfort through improving his very basic experiences of meditation.

The second book was the Bhagavad Gita, a key volume in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata and it had an immediate and powerful effect on the young man. It crystallised for him a deep unease, a growing sense that he had, until now, been lost in the outer world of experience and utterly ignored his inner one.

As he wrote about his early discoveries in the Bhagavad Gita,

It says it so clearly: ‘Thinking of sense objects, man becomes attached thereto. From attachment arises longing and from longing anger is born. From anger arises delusion; from delusion, loss of memory is caused. From loss of memory, the discrimination faculty is ruined and from the ruin of discrimination, he perishes . . .’

Ian had always been a contemplative person by nature, but it seems his unlimited energy and taste for hard work had also left the young vet with little time for reading or introspection. The enforced hospital rest soon left him feeling, in a way that seems quite extraordinary, ‘truly relaxed’ and deeply contemplative.

‘How long and pleasant these two days have been,’ he writes of those first days in hospital while tests were run on his swollen thigh. ‘When the future is so uncertain, one can concentrate fully on the present.’

Now his mood was buoyant and curious—the tone tinged with a little of the pomposity of youth. It seems that his earlier dread and melancholy was rapidly transformed. After just a few days in hospital resting, reading and reflecting, he seemed less given to wallowing in anxiety and apprehension, rather observing with detached and clinical interest what might happen next to his body. Despite his predicament, the time and circumstances to ponder spiritual things were clearly both comforting and nourishing. That said, his darker thoughts were now of an existential, rather than physical, flavour.