CATEGORY AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST 131 REALITY BITES rode out. Then a quick breakfast, treatment for the school children, followed by the rest of the population. Late afternoons and early evenings were devoted to treating returning station hands. After completing treatments at one station or settlement we would pack up, tie down all the equipment to prevent it moving around and self-destructing, and journey on to the next property.” In 1979 John was posted to Darwin Dental Clinic as clinic superintendent. “We were able to design and get built – in Brisbane – a new mobile dental clinic based on a large tour bus chassis. It was fully self-contained with air conditioning, a good air compressor, large water tank, five comfortable seats, two fully equipped surgeries and a small dental laboratory and reception area – a luxurious replacement for the well-worn silver bullet.” John segued into forensics in 1977. Which brings us back to that knock at the door. “It was a Saturday afternoon,” he recalls. I opened the door to find a large policeman in a khaki uniform, large black gum boots and a barely recognizable cap on his head. “You the dentist?” “Yes – who wants to know?” “l’m head of the NT Police Forensic Section in Darwin. You’re needed to do identifications in the Katherine hospital mortuary.” “It was an invitation I couldn’t resist! And my first forensic case, with absolutely no training at all!” Forensic odontology is the science of applying dental knowledge to cases of law, mystery and intrigue – the kind of experiences most people binge watch these days on Netflix. You call the forensic odontologist when things have gone weird. Or tragically wrong – or both. FOs deal with crimes, accidents or mysteries involving teeth, bites, or identification. A reasonable job description for this part of Dr Plummer’s dental career would include identification of unknown human remains through dental records, including murders and missing persons cases, disaster scenarios, mystery deaths, accidents, crime scenes, archaeological digs, and scenarios involving decapitation by crocodile. When you set this kind of work against the backdrop of a remote, blistering and magically wild Northern Territory in the late 1970s, you get a very interesting career! In the case of the metre-long croc head, Dr Plummer tells the story backwards, which is how forensics work. A massive, fresh severed croc head was laid out on a surgical table in the mortuary. The decapitated corpse of a man with large bitemarks at the neck is part of the puzzle. A river bank. A hot afternoon. He was presented with the end of a story, and worked the pieces in reverse to uncover who lost their head on the river bank. Not all cases are as clear cut. There is the case in Darwin he recalls, of a gentleman terminated by a couple of his ‘friends’ and disposed of, along with a cargo of Besser blocks, off a bridge into a tidal river whose aquatic inhabitants were entrusted with devouring the evidence. Due to a miscalculation around the sink weight ratio of Besser blocks, the body didn’t quite touchdown, and was discovered, missing the vital mandible required for forensics, and dignity. “The Coroner’s constable invited me to assist in searching the river banks for the missing mandible. At low tide, a large, delicious-looking mud crab was observed, just waiting for a dinner invitation. By dint of wading knee deep through the amazingly gelatinous mud, and with the aid of a long piece of fencing wire, I was able to issue the appropriate dinner invitation and store the by now quite belligerent crab in a recently evacuated esky.” “We continued the search, and found the missing mandible someone and a half kms downstream. For many years the soubriquet of, “he’s the man that ate the critter that ate the evidence” stuck. With the mandible, the identification was pretty conclusive. “Many years after Cyclone Tracey we were able to identify a sailor who had disappeared during the cyclone. It was heartbreaking to receive thanks from his mother, who told me that she could, at last, let go of her son, finally knowing what had happened to him and that he wasn’t going to knock on the front door to tell her he was home,” John remembers. “The real satisfaction comes, in part, from the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ aspect of the job: being able to piece together a mystery. In this kind of work there are often people who need help, families who need to know that the people they love are safely passed away and identified. It’s a great privilege to be able to help end the horrendous pain of not knowing.” There’s something beautiful about John’s career – the story of a man who took his dental skills into the heart of a mysterious land, and often mysterious circumstances, with a dedication to bringing light and clarity. There was plenty of ‘doing it rough’, he says, and more than a fair share of ‘smelly situations’. But there’s a glow about John’s stories that you can feel as he tells them. There’s the flash of an Outback smile, the glitter of a fish on the line in virgin rivers of the great outback. There’s the scent of wood smoke at camps under the shade of Jurassic trees and raucous birds. There are cowboys, leaning on fence posts with their horses, waiting for the dentist to finish, and later, under a velvet night with a moon in full glow, “there are stars”, he says, “stars so close you could reach out and touch them”. u
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