Robert Stunden is Casey Hospital’s head of paediatric surgery and has worked and volunteered in countries all over the world. 74820 Picture: Kim Cartmell
Robert Stunden has some amazing stories to tell and even after 45 minutes with him, there was a feeling that there were still many to hear.
The 63-year-old is Casey Hospital’s head of paediatric surgery and has worked and volunteered in five countries, on four continents, since he started working in medicine over 40 years ago.
Having originally trained as a general practitioner anaesthetist in Scotland, Robert’s focus changed when he was hit by a car, leaving him with serious injuries.
“I had a lot of injuries – I broke an arm and two legs and had to learn to walk again,” he said.
“I started learning to walk again in the lagoon at Mombassa (Kenya) where you can walk with your body supported by the water.
“And while I was there (with a friend), we started volunteering because you could see that they needed help – we had skills that were very useful and there was a desperate shortage of doctors in the countryside.”
Robert and his friend volunteered in Kenya with the help of local churches and convents for two years but during the 1970s, it was a fine balance working with local witchdoctors and herbalists.
“We had to be very careful because we had to not upset the local witchdoctors and herbalists because they played a very important part of the local community and it was disastrous to tread on their toes or make it look like they were unskilled or unhelpful – even though their methods were sometimes brutal and inconsistent.”
“It was certainly challenging but people were very helpful.”
Robert’s focus changed again when he became a surgeon and moved between Australia, North America and South Africa.
He went through more training to become a children’s surgeon.
“I think I probably wanted to help people more than anything else,” he said.
“I find it most rewarding in children because they get sick very quickly but they get better very quickly when you point them in the right direction.
“Nature is very good at helping us – we don’t do everything – we just take out the bad bits and then the patient has to heal themselves, only children do it very quickly.”
In the 1980s, Robert flew to South Africa when the apartheid rioting reached boiling point and a state of emergency was called.
He stayed for two and a half years, at a time when there were 20,000 political murders a year.
“It was the kind of place where you knew you were somewhere where history was in the making. You were part of history.”
While working for the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town, Robert put his own stamp on history – he was appointed the warden of the first mixed-sex university residence in the country and after one year was summoned to the university court.
“I thought I must have committed some dreadful misdemeanour and was about to be fired but they asked me to be the warden of the first mixed-race, mixed-sex residence in South Africa.
“The university wanted to break down apartheid and by asking me to be a warden of the first mixed-race, mixed-sex residence, they were asking me to challenge the law of the land and I was delighted,” Robert said with a touch of pride.
The university was on the main road of Rondebosch in Cape Town and only a few hundred metres from the Defence Force barracks so it was rife with students rioting.
Anyone involved in treating students with bullet wounds at the local hospitals was arrested so Robert took the responsibility into his own very capable hands.
With the permission of students, Robert set up a secret first-aid station within the university residence and the Red Cross donated medical supplies.
“There were only two conditions – we only took their first name and they had to have a beer in their hand,” Robert said with a chuckle.
“We used to treat the injured students incognito in the residence just five metres back from the main road where they were rioting.
“We were never caught by the South African Defence Force and were never dobbed in.”
These days, Robert’s volunteering efforts in the Pacific region do not carry as much drama but he still admits he sees some challenging but rewarding cases.
When asked if any cases had stayed close to his heart, Robert quickly replied: “Lots of them. When you have been working for more than 40 years, you see many cases and some of them are tragic”.
Recently Robert volunteered in Nauru where he was staggered by families so embarrassed by their child’s deformity that they were not allowed out of the house.
“The parents feel it is an act of God or it was pay back for one of their ancestor’s misdeeds but the child suffers because they’re too embarrassed for them to go to school.
“When you work on that child, it’s a very significant milestone in their life.
“It will be nice to go back to Nauru and follow up on the cases we’ve been involved in.”
With no plans to retire, Robert is now focusing his efforts on the Pacific Island region, and has volunteer trips in the works for Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
But that is only half his life.
“For the other half of my life, I am a farmer.”
Robert and his wife run two commercial farms – a goat farm at Tooradin and a chicken farm at Iona.
“I was brought up in a farming community in the country and have always felt comfortable being a primary producer,” he said.
“It was a lifestyle thing that has progressed into something that will be interesting and useful in so-called retirement – if I ever retire – and I don’t know that I will, to be honest.”
