CATEGORY AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST103 COLUMNISTS day,” he laughs. “I felt that horrible pang when you wonder if you’ve just the done the totally wrong thing.” But it didn’t last for long. e war was on. Conscription was harvesting young men out of every corner of Australian life into the devastation of Vietnam. “ ere were only a few of our graduating class who weren’t committed to the military or other government departments via scholarship, cadetship or enlistment. I chose to live in relative poverty and take my chances on the conscription ‘lottery’, but then, with no marble dropped, “I thought; ‘what on earth am I going to do now?’ One of the greatest things about dentistry at the time, he tells me, was how it was taught. “General dentistry was an absolutely brilliant foundation. We were raised to deeply value the skills, to have the con dence and courage to take on the challenge we saw, instead of passing everything on to specialists. It gave us qualities that made us value what we could do for people and communities, and it certainly gave me the foundation I needed to take on life as an optimistic adventure.” A few images of the Northern Territory: polaroids of dentists with basic hand tools hopping on and o small planes in the Outback – these were to shape his fate. “I’ve got to get to the Territory,” he thought. And he did. Dr Eupene grew a practice in the budding town of Darwin, which had less than 30,000 people and a reputation. It was a time when the talented, intrepid and altruistic of Aussie history were building a world alongside the cowboys, criminals and crazies that cluster at fringes. ere was Mango Madness – the wet – when ts of insanity, murder and mayhem could strike the melting pioneers. ere was the crisis birth of the Land Rights movement out of Wave Hill Station. ere were Aboriginal people in abandoned pockets, recovering from colonisation and dispossession. ere were indigenous coming out of country who had never seen a white man. ere was a world to create, to repair and discover. “In the 70s there were still people out in the desert living their own culture – who didn’t have these new rituals we were bringing about work, money, development,” he says. ese were the descendants of the world’s most ancient surviving cultural lineage, people whose culture was intact when the Pyramids were built. People who knew a way of being human that was being destroyed violently across the earth – and who were fast being undermined by what white culture brought: sugar, processed food, alcohol, soft drink. People who urgently needed what dentists could give. “You know what I learned through all this?” Dr Eupene asks. “Good people matter.” And that’s what he says general dentists were raised to be. “We were able to work without sophisticated tech, with zero communications, barest tools, primitive sterilization, with ies in our eyes and dogs licking our legs. We worked anywhere we could set up a wonky chair, with a kind woman as a headrest, and we saw things too, and we did things for others that made our hearts come alive.” Even though the circumstances were often dire, or just plain bewildering – like when Canberra sent out custom-built dental caravans staggeringly unequipped for dentistry, but complete with safes. “Safes?” we wondered. “Why safes? Turns out the 70s Canberra experts thought dentists were doing pure gold llings in the outback. True story.” Dr Eupene dug in to the soil up north, building a practice, shaping the foundations of Top End dentistry, volunteering on country, and becoming inaugural president of the NT branch of the Australian Dental Association, President of Dental Board of the NT, and receiving the Service Medallion. It’s a true story too, Kerry promises that his ‘side hustle’ as a tropical fruit entrepreneur came out of a three bottle night. “One night, over the rst bottle, a mate said he’d found some really interesting trees on a block he’d bought up north. By the second bottle we decided to get into growing it. By the third we had a business plan for getting in to exotic tropical fruit.” And so began the doctor’s successful innovations with rambutan – a di cult fruit to grow anyway, clinging to the very edge of its habitat out in the Territory. “You need a good job to get away with fruit growing,” he laughs. And good science too. It was Dr Eupene who peered one day into the mouth of a ower, and using the chemistry he’d learned in dentistry, explored a way to engineer pollination that brought the world ‘Viagra for rambutan’, an Order of Australia, and a successful threebottle vision. “ ere have been some big mistakes along the way, I can tell you!” he laughs. “But being a dentist gave me the skills for business, the head for problem solving, and the heart for doing things ethically.” “It’s becoming di erent today. We’re heading away from these solid grounds in general skills, and knowing how to walk that narrow path of ethically taking on the issues in front of us, and really valuing the good we can do. But at the heart of this profession is a basic responsibility, that’s to provide the best care we can, right there where it’s actually happening, and with that intact, and with a spirit for a work/ life balance that’s about getting a good job done, and then having a good time after that – well, there’s still a world of good living on o er for dentists in Australia, and that I rmly believe.” u
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTc3NDk3Mw==