CATEGORY 130 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST REALITY BITES Jade Richardson Cowboys, corpses, crocs and a galaxy of stars ~ memoirs of an outback dentist Aussie dentist, Dr John Plummer, rode an interesting thread through history and adventure as an acci-dental outback forensic odontologist. By Jade Richardson Not every dentist has a croc roll up in surgery. Not even in Australia. When Dr John Plummer and his colleague, Dr Mark Leedham, came to work one day to find a huge set of prehistoric jaws attached to a reptilian skull large enough to pluck off a full-sized human head – and it was such a head, in fact, that they were looking for. “Crocs aren’t common in the mortuary situation,” John wrote, “especially reptilian ones.” But as a forensic odontologist in the Northern Territory, the bizarre, the macabre, the weird and magical were a regular part of his dental career. Dr Plummer was part of an extraordinary era in Australian history, with an inside view through Dentistry that put him at the pointy end of crimes, catastrophes, beauty, and the kind of adventures that movies are made of. Dentistry took him to Phuket with Australian recovery teams after the devastating Thailand Tsunami; to Victoria, as part of emergency care after the tragic Black Friday Victoria bushfires, and many other scenarios where his forensic skills brought the mercy of certainty and closure to people in the grip of tragedy. Now happily retired in the Territory, he has quite the tale about how a dental ticket and an appetite for the unexpected can lead to extraordinary career. The first question, and he’s already expecting it, is: What, exactly, is forensic odontology? “For me, it started with a knock at the door one Saturday afternoon,” he says. John joined the (then Commonwealth) Health Department in late 1974, with plans for Darwin blown apart when Cyclone Tracey hit that fateful Christmas day, and a sudden reroute to Tennant Creek, a thousand km south, then Katherine, where he set up once again – as the only dentist in town. “It was a big change from private practice in suburban Sydney,” he says. “Part of the duties of the dentist in Katherine was to travel a huge sparsely populated remote area providing dental treatment to local schools and cattle stations.” The outback dental team journeyed vast networks of unsealed roads through a landscape of tiny communities in wild country, through flash floods and breaching rivers in the wet season, scorching sun, chilly nights, and rare or non-existent phone service. GPS, laptops, mobiles were not yet invented – Wifi? What’s Wifi? Plenty of tires were shredded amid red mud, wild trails and boggings. There were encounters with cowboys and the legendary communities of the outback, along roads that can only be described as “appalling”. In a region almost 600,000 kms square, extending east to the Queensland border and west to the Western Australia frontier, the dental team travelled with support from a 5 tonne truck with a large generator on the back providing 240v power, towing a humble dental caravan affectionally nicknamed the silver bullet. “That monster rode on two axles about seven meters apart, the floor was a good metre and a half off the ground,” John recalls. “When I made my first trip, I could honestly say it had already seen better days – it had travelled a lot of km’s over some of the worst roads in Australia.” “Our team was always welcomed wherever we stopped, with that special warmth and hospitality that only inhabitants of the bush can provide. It was one of the few times in life as a dentist that I was actually popular,” he laughs. “It was often very difficult and expensive for people to get in to Katherine for dental treatment, or for our team to travel hundreds of kilometres to deliver services out there, and they really appreciated us.” “It was a wonderful time, and I am glad I did it even though, yes,” John reflects, “it’s probably not the logical career path, especially for a young dentist supporting a family, but you never know how long you’re going to live!” “Life out there didn’t run so tightly to clocks,” he remembers. “Often our teamwas hard at it at by 6am, before the stockmen
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