Status	Medical Missionary
Country	Australia

Transcript of interview with Anne (Reed) Stead conducted by Dr Jeanette Hyland, January 2005, in Perth, Western Australia

This morning I’m sitting opposite Anne Stead who used to be Anne Reed. She worked in Gemo, PNG in 1968-1969. She has agreed to tell me all about it and I am very happy to be able to talk to her. Anne, you tell me you went to Papua New Guinea with a Methodist Youth program called ‘Go New Guinea’. Tell me what preparation you had before you went on this trip.

Anne I had just qualified as a medical laboratory technologist which was a five year part time course done at Royal Perth Hospital, just qualified and although the references I received at that time were good my boss did say ‘She would probably benefit from at least a year post-graduate work before she went off somewhere.’

OK, so you promptly went off…

Anne Yes, I promptly went off and realized some time later that a year or two probably, probably another year at home might have been of help.

We can talk about your adventures getting to Gemo a little later, but tell me about when you arrived in Gemo, what was it like, what sort of place is it?

Anne Gemo is an island of about 123 Acres – very small – you can walk round it in about a hour and half or two hours and that two hours depends on the tide and whether you have got a bit a beach which makes it easier or whether you’ve got rocks you’ve got to clamber over. So it is quite small and we often did in the weekends walk round it. It was just a mound out of the ocean at the western side of the bay that Port Moresby sits on. You have a huge big harbour, not unlike Port Phillip Bay for Melbourne. Port Moresby sits on the eastern side of it – the bay goes right round with coastal villages on it. There is another island further over where the pastor responsible for Gemo is from. It came round to a Government, Naval-type settlement, further round, and then went back along the coast. There was a narrow channel between the coast and Gemo; Gemo sat on the eastern side of it.

What was there?

Anne Onlya leprosy and TB hospital, an isolation hospital, that’s all that was on the island.

Had it been there a long time?

Anne Yes, it had. It had a history to it, it wasn’t new. Constance Fairhall or Paul Fairhall from England was one of the original people on Gemo. Burt Brown who was a missionary down in Moru area – west along the coast, the lady who was to become his wife Anne, was one of the original nurses on there. They passed away quite some years ago, and they were in their eighties. They were in their thirties then, so that’s quite some time ago. So it goes back quite some time.

So when you arrived there how did you get there?

Anne It was a government hospital, but mission staffed so as far as equipment and things - we were allowed an amount from base Government stores, but apart from that, it appeared to be run by the mission for everything else. There was a Government launch that came across from Port Moresby, I think, three times a day, certainly early in the morning, I think there was a lunch time one, then later in the afternoon around 4 o’clock. So I came over on the launch. That was the only contact – about a 20-minute trip across the mouth of this huge bay from Moresby to Gemo on the launch. We also had our own staff launch on Gemo and later on we had two staff launches for use in emergency. The Government launches only operated during the week, so in the weekend if we had an emergency at the week end or wanted to go anywhere of an evening in Port Moresby or anything, we would have to take our own canoes across – big double-hulled canoes with out-board motors and sides high enough to sit on so, if it was a bit rough, you got wet. Laughter

So tell me the sight that greeted you when you arrived on Gemo…

Anne Well it is a little elliptical-shaped island and the northern end had the jetty on it. At the time I arrived, the only bit of flat land was around that northern end. There was the jetty and there were two old wards to one side of the jetty built out over the sea. One was leprosy and one was TB. The staff houses were on the land and there was another - ward, or like a ward - ‘cause it was quite a bit bigger that the house and all the single men were in that. They were starting to do some building at that stage, and it wasn’t long before the leprosy ward actually came down. Almost from the time I was there, they were starting to reclaim some of the side of the hill. They built a stone wall from the - where the jetty came from, it had gone in like a bit of a bay – they built a wall across this bit of a bay, and then reclaimed the bay taking down the hillside…

So they flattened the island…

Anne They did - they took a chunk out of the hill and spread it out and filled in this big flat area on which we then built the new leprosy and TB wards and treatment centre and everything all down on the flat there, and then removed the other old wards – there were no wards at the front at all – there were just the staff houses at the end of the jetty and the hospital was further back.

People who were on the island – who were patients – who came there – they had to be there did they?

Anne There was no other way of treating either of them (Leprosy and TB) to make sure they had their medication when they were supposed to have it, so it was an isolation hospital, just to maintain their regular medication…

And how were people who were discovered to have leprosy in other parts of the place - how were they transported there – were they transported forcibly?

Anne Umm – I don’t think so. There was a bit of reaction, but … the nursing staff would go out on patrol from time to time to the different villages and like lots of places back then, if someone suspected someone had leprosy – I’m not too sure of the TB ones – they would hide them so that you couldn’t find them

Why would they hide them?

Anne Because they didn’t want to go away from their village which is obvious. But once they were actually there most … on the island … we didn’t have a lot of problems … They were free to come and go – they could get passes to go back to their village for a weekend and things like that – that depended on where they were at with their medication, whether they were in reaction and their general health.

Were they allowed to have visitors?

Anne They could have visitors, Mmm, so people could come and go quite easily.

Recording stopped. Continued in next file.

Tell me how the leprosy patients got to the leprosy place at Gemo?

Anne I think I started to say that the nursing staff used to go out on patrol on the local villages round about. From that they would ask people to come in. Doctors further up and down the coast - patients came from quite a distance east and west along to coast – they would do their own surveys in their local areas and bring people in off the coastal boats which kept on going up and down the coast – so as far as whether they came willingly or not I don’t know, but they were sort of willing by the time they arrived at Gemo from the boat, but what actually happened at either end we weren’t sure of.

Once they got to Gemo and they were put on treatment and if they were reasonably well they had plenty of activities to keep them …

Anne There wasn’t a lot of activity – being such a small island, there wasn’t much to do – there wasn’t enough ground for any of them who were able to grow vegetables or anything like that, so they couldn’t do things like that. We did have a Government Occupational Therapist who came across once a week. She encouraged a lot of them to do the beadwork that was being sold back in Port Moresby. They got pocket money from that. Certainly, once we had done the re-building of the new wards, a lot of the women did sewing and they made covers for lockers out of calico and appliqué - things like that.

They went fishing sometimes?

Anne Yes, they did quite a bit of fishing when they were able to – they would borrow a canoe and go out a bit further. The channel was very deep between Gemo and that side of the mainland, and there used to be quite a bit of fish coming through there, so if they could get a canoe and go out in the middle of the channel, it was a lot more profitable.

Anne But if they were fit and well and had a pass from Myra (Kennedy now Macey) - passes all had to come basically from her – they were allowed to go over to Port Moresby for the day; they could go to the market for the day, buy some fresh fruit and stuff like that.

So you couldn’t grow much on the island?

Anne No. We had a big mango tree down by the boy’s house and a couple of Paw Paw trees outside the main mission house, but that’s about all – there were no vegetable gardens. It is just a little rocky, barren island. There weren’t any decent trees, there was just scrub on it

What capacity was the leprosy part of the hospital?

Anne There were about 100 patients when I first went there – fifty-fifty TB and leprosy, but as the new building extended, and we did more surgery programs on Gemo itself; instead of sending them over to Port Moresby general hospital – the leprosy numbers increased a bit and the TB numbers started to fall a bit…

So what did you do?

Anne I did the laboratory work. My first reaction when I went there was that there really wasn’t a laboratory, and my first reaction was ‘What am I going to do?’ There was very little equipment. There was a microscope with a monocular eyepiece on it and I thought, ‘This is going to be good for scanning the slides.’ We did eventually get a binocular head – it took a long time – and then, when it eventually did come, they had sent other lenses instead of eye pieces, so we had to wait then for that to be changed – but I got very adept at the beginning, looking down one eye piece and opening the other eye – I don’t know what it has done to my eyesight but, or my brain function – it was much easier when we got the binocular head.

So you were looking at the slides that had been taken from both the TB and the leprosy patients?

Anne Yes. And the little haemoglobinometer that they gave me there was something that had been a museum piece at the Royal Perth Hospital. I’d never ever used one before – we had used a couple of old ones in our training to see how it was done, but this was even older than that. Just on visual comparison of colour shade... Different people could see colour shades in different ways, but eventually the Red Cross used to send across a standard about once a month or something like that, and I just consistently read 2grams lower that they did, so we just made our thinking 2 grams lower.

So you calibrated it…

Anne I just couldn’t get their reading at all; I was consistently about 2 grams lower than the standard was.

So who made the slides?

Anne The nursing staff usually made the slides, and usually Myra, and then during the time I was there, she trained some of the orderlies to do them as well. But until that time she had done all the slides herself and sent them over to the general hospital to be read. But the problem was that in the general hospital they were short staffed, they didn’t have enough trained people and a lot of the slides would just came back positive or negative.

So you didn’t have the biological index or whatever?

Anne No – no… nothing.

So you had to produce that – one plus, two plus …

Anne Yes, and all I had had on leprosy were two lines in my lecture notes. So I said to Myra, ‘How do I go about finding out what I am supposed to do.’ She gave me two or three names to write to and find out – Grace Warren was actually one of them - I don’t know that I ever got a reply back from Grace Warren – she was probably miles away from where I’d sent the letter, knowing how Grace travels. I did get a letter back from somebody, and they gave me a rough idea and we just played it by ear from that.

Often a leprologist used to come over – Dr Russell – when he was in Port Moresby. He travelled round the country too and he gave me a little bit of information, but it was really just trying to find out myself. It wasn’t very easy at all.

Tell me, your reaction when you first saw leprosy patients – how did you feel?

Anne I can’t remember that I had any violent reactions. No, the worst thing probably was when the patients came in off the boats from right up the coast, who had been on the coastal boat say four of five days, their bandages hadn’t been changed, we didn’t know their names, we didn’t know who they were, and they really looked a sad and sorry sight when they came off the boat. But once we started to find a name and the bandages were changed and things like that. I can’t remember any violent reaction.

So those people who came off the boat, they would have had ulcers ?

Anne Quite likely, ulcers that weren’t healing up, they couldn’t have been done back in the clinic wherever they had come from. Some of them would have been candidates for surgery too because they had to get rid of all the ulcers and have assessments to be ready. For that reason, that’s why they were there for such a long time, some of them. Some of them were severe reaction cases who perhaps had had ongoing reaction, and they couldn’t do a lot for them back in the clinic, so they sent them to us. They came in for a whole variety of reasons and stayed varying lengths of time. There were some of them there who had been there five, six years and some of them, I don’t think would have done very well back in the village again, I don’t know what happened to some of them.

On the whole was it a happy place, or was it a miserable place, what sort of a place was it?

Anne Oh it was a happy place. There was lots of fun and laughing - a very happy place. Some of the young lads in the boy’s ward, some had got a couple of years high school education so there were a number of them a lot of single young chaps and that ward was a riot. They had so much fun. One chap who came from Orokolo up near the gulf region, he wasn’t all that old, as you know it is a bit hard to estimate how old some of them are at times – we did know he was married and had a little five-year-old daughter – he had a strange, amazing European sense of humour . You could joke with him and fly comments back and forth that you couldn’t do with others. I think he had only done about grade six education, I don’t think he ever got to high school, but he was just amazing. But they caught me beautifully the first April fool’s day I was there. The new wards were finished and the new treatment centre was finished by then, I think – no, not quite, it was still the old one, and I had gone – I was still down at the old laboratory and the old treatment centre. The new leprosy ward was up the other end and someone called out, ’Miss Anna, a phone call for you in ward six.’ OK. Now I knew that ward six, you had two little tiny rooms either side and one had been an office: it wasn’t at the new ward, it was at the old ward down at the other end, one had been an office and one had been the bedroom of a chap who was an assistant physio. But there was a leprosy patient who used to get terrible reactions from time to time. Because of his position, he had his own little room. I knew that had been an office, and I knew there was a phone sitting in there. So this phone call came, and I was busy doing something and I didn’t think too hard. OK. So I went running the whole way right round the island and kept thinking, ‘All the people, what are they all looking at?’ I got down there - as soon as I walked in and looked at – that phone had been disconnected for ages. They all burst out laughing, and Earl was the instigator behind that ‘cause he was the only one who would do that sort of thing. He had an amazing sense of humour . He caught me so well, and the fact that I responded so well - I was a friend for life.

You were telling me a while ago about a European chap – tell me his story?

Anne Bert Brown was a missionary with the LMS (London Missionary Society) down at Moru, down in the gulf district. He eventually married Anne, I can’t remember what her maiden name was, who was one of the original nurses on Gemo. They went back to Moru and lived there for many, many years. He used to do numerous patrols up in the mountains and the hills behind Moru and was away for weeks and weeks at a time. Somewhere around the late seventies or early eighties, it was discovered that he had contracted leprosy himself and it was decided that he wouldn’t come back to Australia, he was due to retire, he’d just come into Moresby and live out the rest of his days in Moresby. He was just absolutely part of the Territory – he‘d lived there for so long - was affectionately know by the local people as Malala Harorai. There was a local legend that Malala Harorai used to come down on a long cord and sort of float over all the people and all the villages and protect them and look after them. They regarded Bert Brown as Malala Harorai because he protected them. That was the affectionate name that he was known by.

Such an interesting story... He was treated from the hospital?

Anne Yes, the General Hospital.

And he didn’t have to be isolated?

Anne As far as I know, I think they just retired. He may have stayed out in Moru a little bit longer, but he was retiring age anyway. I think they just bought a little house in Moresby somewhere and retired there. He got any treatment that he needed there. I was back here by then, and I don’t really know a lot about it. Myra would be able to tell you more about Bert. Delightful chap.

And he stayed there and lived there and was well regarded…

Anne Oh yes, almost revered by the people, with the name Malala Harorai that is almost a reverence. He used to go out in the villages and stayed in the village homes and talked with them and ate with them.

And where he lived in Port Moresby was that with the people too, not in the European sector?

In Port Moresby, I have no idea where they actually bought a house, no idea. I can imagine it would be, but I have no idea.

Have you got any other stories that you want to tell me?

Anne Little things that happened; we had had a patient, an elderly fellow on Gemo who had gone across to the General Hospital because he needed extra treatment. He had been there for quite some time. We had had an absolutely dreadful weekend - storms – the government launch I don’t think went across – I’m just trying to recollect what I read the other day in my letters - and for some unknown reason, the General Hospital decided to send him back to us in the middle of all this storm. And he was a stretcher case. So they had somehow got him down to the launch at Port Moresby, somehow got him onto the launch. When the launch got to Gemo, the staff had to go down and get him and bring him back. They were absolutely drenched. It was while the building was going on and the bulldozers were trying to fill in this land behind the wall that had been built, and while they were working we used to run backwards and forwards across the wall because it was easier than getting into all the ditches and rough and if it had been raining, mud and everything else. They couldn’t carry him on a stretcher across there so they had to tramp all the way through this rounded muddy patch to get him back to the ward, and they were absolutely drenched at the end of the day. I had a comment in my letter that they were none too pleased at the end of that.

It was ridiculous. The general hospital did all sorts of ridiculous things at times.

We didn’t actually do surgery on Gemo. All our surgery was actually done in the general hospital, but we’d do all our physio first and send them over right at the last minute, just the day before surgery. They’d have their surgery and stay two or three days, and then they’d send them back to us again. But sometimes they’d not take much notice of the time the launches were actually leaving. So they would send them out of the hospital and that was it. They must have transported some of the, the ones with leg plasters on, but these patients could be sitting on the wharf for half a day, in the hot sun. You know, they could easily have arranged, you know we will transport you down half an hour before your launch is due to go, but didn’t. Very often they came back and we found they had been sitting on the wharf all day waiting for the launch.

Tell me about the staff; were there some ex-patients?

Anne There were some ex-patients on the island, both leprosy and Tb. Because we had a number of Papuan staff, we also had a little school on the island. A little two-teacher school actually, and both the head master and his assistant, who was a young lass, were ex-TB patients and did a wonderful job in the school.

A couple of the Orderlies were ex-TB and a couple of them were ex-leprosy as well. The physio assistant, Michael, was a delightful chap. He wasn’t a local chap; he was from right down the island’s end originally, and I suspect he had been brought in – I don’t really know why he had not been in hospital at Agruya at the island’s end ages ago. I don’t know how he finished up on Gemo, but he did anyway, and he was absolutely marvelous physio assistant. Audrey could just show him anything and he would do it right; he could keep an eye on the patients, make sure they did their exercises and have everything just right, recorded right, he was just wonderful. We had another one who was a physio assistant as well. He was not an ex-patient, a family, and I don’t know how they came to be Gemo staff in the first place. Most of them were from Boirua, which was just a local village. Whether, when one of them from there found work on Gemo others came too, I don’t know. They had been there for a number of years with their own families.

We had a little shoemaker. He was actually New Guinean. He was the only Pigeon speaker on the island. He very quickly had to learn Motu as well. As our patients came from such a wide area up and down to coast they still used Police Motu as the local language. Pure Motu was used for church services and things like that, but there was a Police Motu that was the trade language. So he was our little shoemaker who made our shoes.

So you were there eighteen months and it was a pretty significant part of your life. As you look back on it, how do you feel about it?

Anne Oh Yes, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I’ve looked back a number of times and thought if it had been the Solomon Islands that I had gone to, it might have been quite different because it was definitely an established laboratory over there and the whole working thing might have been different in a bigger hospital, and I think it was more a general hospital too. But, no I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It was wonderful. And actually, I look back too over what has happened over the years - marrying a Methodist Minister as he was then - we were sent anywhere, we were never near somewhere I could have worked with the technology in country hospitals with 24 beds and not a laboratory in sight. In some ways I get upset and think – all those years of study and I didn’t really do anything, ‘cause I enjoyed the work. You know I would really have liked to have gone further. But the years on Gemo and the contact that I now had with the Leprosy Mission somehow justifies it all, makes up for it all. So one thing has led to another over the years.

For the benefit of people listening to this tape I think we should mention that we are sitting in a Chinese Restaurant . We have enjoyed a meal and are sipping Chinese tea. The Take-Away are coming in too and ringing the bell so that is what the noise is about.

Thank you very much for talking to me. I am sure this will be a great addition to the whole history of leprosy. It is good to get the personal stories…

Anne Just while I am thinking about it, during that time that was the era too when they were starting to get Dapsone resistance. We had a little project going with B663 – Clofazamine – and we had a little project going with some of the patients who had severe reaction to the Dapsone, and it worked quite well for them. We had one little boy who came in, who had been diagnosed with leprosy in the village and they had put him on Dapsone and it hadn’t done anything, he’d just reacted to it and his mother had just looked after him so much, she waited on him hand and foot, so he wasn’t moving or anything, his legs were bent and he couldn’t straighten them. Beautiful little child, about 11 or 12 when he came in. We tried him immediately on this B663 and gradually with physio and everything else, he managed to straighten his legs out. I’ve got the most beautiful photograph of him marching along in the scouts - we had a little scout group on the island - and all in his uniform and everything. For him it was such a good luck story, it was just right for him.

The one who did wall hangings and was the joker, he was on it too and it made quite a difference to him – he had terrible reactions before that.

It has an anti-inflammatory effect as well…

Anne Yes. That was just a little sideline thing that was going on at the time. Lots of different places were trying different things for severe reaction.

So you came home in August 1969. I went to Nepal in March 1969. From the time point of view, we overlap.

Anne I also read one of the books the Leprosy Mission put out “Caring comes first.” At the time while I was up there I didn’t think to look back and find out how long it had been going on. It was all new to me, but everyone seemed to be so confident in what they were doing, I thought this had been going for ages. All the surgery and everything else. Because I had read books about Paul Brand and the surgery that had started way, way back and in PNG had been going on for a long time too. It was only 10 – 15 years ago that I read that book “Caring comes first” and they tell quite a lot of the background story of PNG and realized that they had started surgery about three years before I got there.

So certainly you were pioneering!

Anne Exactly. What I thought they all looked very competent and knew exactly what they were doing, they were probably struggling a bit and just playing it by ear as they went from one patient to another and still finding it that might work with that one, but it might not work with somebody else.

As you say, a lot of caring…

Anne Yes, the little chapel we had the words across the front of the church Laloka Haduru Bialani and that’s Love, Joy, Helpfulness and that was across the front of the church every time we walked into it and when I came back I used to tell the story that they were the different aspects of Gemo. Joy on the faces after surgery and after a bit of physio – I used to love watching the plasters come off – you know the lab work used to be forgotten then – and love and the helpfulness of the staff towards the patients, the actual Gemo atmosphere and the joy was the patients in the middle. It was a happy place generally. Till you got some of the patients who wanted to run off and go back to the village and trouble …

Anyway thank you again. I’m sure everyone who listens will be most interested.

Interview ends