5. Do you ever talk people out of a procedure that they request?
Yes. With augmentations, I tend to be moderate in my views and I think big breasts produce big problems. I refuse to do liposuction on people who are significantly overweight. And I think unless people's expectations of facial surgery are realistic you shouldn't be doing it. You become attuned to recognise people who are fantasists and sometimes you can sense when someone believes having their face remodelled will convert them into a 19-year-old. If people go into facial surgery expecting it to do things for their self esteem, they'll often be gratified. But it doesn't fix marriages, it doesn't fix interpersonal conflict at work or personality problems.
6. When you're out socially, do you find yourself privately noting what people could do surgically to improve themselves?
Absolutely not. Never. Yes everybody asks [my opinion] but I tell them to ring my secretary and make an appointment. Dinner party consultations are not where I want to be.
7. What's your earliest memory?
The first is being carsick in my grandfather's car. The second is being in a train at the Edinburgh station. What I remember is the smell of the coal. I was 2 or 3 when we left Scotland and went to the south of England. My father was a chest physician and my mother was a nurse. We moved again to the States when I was 7. I arrived in North Carolina with a very received BBC sort of accent. This was the deep south, the south of Martin Luther King and black activism. It was all brewing, though I wasn't aware of it. Retrospectively you can see you were living in a segregated society - the schools, the bus. We had a woman called Lizzie Goldsmith who was our housemaid. Then I came to New Zealand when I was 8 or 9 sounding like Tennessee Williams which really made me feel like a Martian. People with American accents were pretty uncommon in Dunedin in 1960.
8. Were you interested in physical beauty from a young age?
No. The motivation of plastic surgery wasn't beautification. I find the idea of creating physical perfection totally nauseating and unobtainable for the vast number of people. The motivation was physical reconstruction. I was always interested in biology. At high school age I read pretty much the content of the Dunedin Public Library - Nature, Scientific American, various other magazines. There were some exciting stories that came out - the discovery of DNA, Banting and Best and their work with diabetes, the Mayo brothers. And I became interested in plastic surgery, reading about people like McIndoe and Gillies who were guys from Dunedin who really developed the whole specialty. In my 30s I spent five years in Canada, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and when I came back here there wasn't really any choice but to go into private practice and that meant most of what I was doing was cosmetic. So cosmetic surgery wasn't really my deliberate choice, that was the way it worked out.
9. Are you married?
No, I've been married. I have two sons who I'm very close to, a stepdaughter and six grandkids. I have a [5ha] property out east that I share with five alpacas. Why? I just thought it was a nice idea. I'd always been attracted to their looks as animals and they're very good lawnmowers. They're highly intelligent, very biddable, very curious. They kind of follow you around.
10. What would you be if you were not a plastic surgeon?
I seriously considered doing architecture. I liked form, I liked shape, I liked building things.
11. How do you relax at home after you've been at work cutting somebody's face open?
I don't find that particularly stressful, so I don't need to recover from it. But I swim a bit, I race yachts with my best mate Julian who I've known since we were 18. Being a surgeon also allowed me to own and drive in a motor racing team. We won four years out of five at the Nurburgring in Germany. Driving at that kind of speed is alright until the corners come up and then you've got to get the timing right. With high adrenalin activity, if you're going to get scared, you get scared afterwards. I supposed it is a bit like surgery in a way.
12. Have you had any cosmetic surgery yourself?
Yeah, I had a prominent ear done. It stuck out and I always tried to hide it, I'd sort of turn my head. I didn't have it done until I was about 50 but it made a huge difference to the way I felt about myself, it was quite astonishing. I don't know if it affected the way other people saw me, I don't think it did. People aren't very attuned to the changes in other people's appearance. How often have you changed your hairstyle and found no one notices? Often when people have a facelift and return to work people just think they look relaxed and have been to Fiji or something. And one week ago they virtually had their face off.
