Angel of mercy, doctor of death

By MICHELE HEWITSON

In the British Museum, displayed between the first television set and the first steam locomotive, is a machine in a glass case. The label reads: Darwin Euthanasia Machine. The schoolkids wander past in ragged crocodiles and say, "freaky".

This machine represents both hope and failure to Dr Philip Nitschke, the face of Australia's pro-euthanasia movement.

Now here is Nitschke in a hotel room in Parnell, fresh off a flight from Melbourne where he was, he says "interrogated" at the airport. "Fresh" because such treatment only makes him friskier. As he well knows, a little controversy makes for a big entrance.

In this motel room, on a single bed, is a large plastic bag, a saline drip and and small plastic object that could and does come from any hardware store.

These are the props Nitschke will use in the series of workshops he will give in four centres around Auckland - in which he will preach to the converted.

Despite his having said, in every sound bite, that he brought his dirty washing to New Zealand in the plastic bag to point out how ludicrous it is to search a man who travels with a plastic bag, this is a bag designed to help people kill themselves.

So, no matter that you know this is ridiculous, you find yourself looking at that bag, a lot. And thinking ... Well, do people also think him "freaky" or, perhaps, creepy?

He couldn't care less. He's learned that "you can't afford to get precious". He long ago became used to being called Dr Death.

Having seen Nitschke the day after his arrival, once the cameras have gone, putting the bag over his head at his first workshop, the effect is more comic than anything. He is a good showman, and in the manner of good showmen he knows how to make his audience relax.

Although he is not quite as slick as some of those involved in the voluntary euthanasia movement might hope. Look, he's from the Northern Territory, mate. He's a grizzled-looking bloke. Blunt springs to mind as the best way to describe his manner of engagement.

"What'dya mean by blunt?" he growls (mildly) over a beer, before conceding that he can't think of anything much wrong with saying that speaking his mind is a predominant personality trait.

Foremost in everyone's mind when speaking to, or about Nitschke, is the fact that when his beloved Northern Territory legalised voluntary, assisted euthanasia the good doctor (or bad, depending on your sympathies) helped four patients to die using the machine now in the British Museum.

The law was overturned in 1997 after mere months.

But not before Nitschke's inherent inability to do anything other than call a spade a spade, a death a death (you will not hear him use "passed away"), got him - and the movement - into hot water.

Nitschke told the waiting "maelstrom of media" exactly what it felt like to help someone die. It felt like being an executioner.

He says he was asked: "Why the hell did you say that?"

"Come on," he says, "I pick my little case up and I go off to this motel room and I know when I knock on that door ... and I've got vivid memories of knocking on those motel room doors knowing that when I left in an hour's time that person would be dead.

"How could you not feel like an executioner, for Christ's sake?"

Afterwards he would find "some trusted person" to provide a haven of sorts; a place where he could self-prescribe alcohol in more than medicinal quantities.

His life felt like it was "on a bloody rollercoaster", but he kept going by thinking, "this is making the law work", that "someone has to do this until every doctor has to do this. It will be a rare event in a doctor's life, but it won't be just one person doing it all the time".

It turned out to be no doctor doing it any of the time.

This doctor is spending all of his time spreading the word, lobbying, holding workshops like the one on a Thursday morning in Parnell where he puts that plastic bag over his head and walks the fine line between the law and his desire to share information on how to die.

How he got like this - he rejects obsessive as a "not very flattering" term - stems from his rejection of his conservative Lutheran father's values.

The young Nitschke got involved in anti-Vietnam protests during his Adelaide university days. He got his PhD in physics, chucked physics for medicine, once he had found out that a boy from the sticks could actually be a doctor, graduated from medical school at the age of 42 and quickly became disillusioned with mainstream medicine.

He gravitated towards doctoring the homeless and started a long-running fight with the Territory Government over providing a methadone programme for drug users.

HE SEEMS uncomfortable with comfort. He lives in a tin shed - although he exclaims that he has air conditioning, "telephones and televisions" - and draws a $2000-a-month salary from donations to his Exit Australia charitable association.

"This idea that I'm a stoic living a miserable hard life, I don't think so."

If he'd stuck with conventional medicine, he says, he would have died of boredom. He actually seems to loathe medicine and most of its practitioners.

He is scathing about "the class aspects of medicine". The Australian Medical Association returns the favour: it has sought to have him deregistered four times.

Still, he smirks, he was invited to speak at the AMA annual conference last year. He describes the response as cool.

A secret ballot revealed that only 30 per cent of doctors present were willing to adopt a neutral position on euthanasia.

But Nitschke reserves his special venom for the Church, "the forces of darkness", and Liberal MP Kevin Andrews, the family-values MP whose private member's bill shut down the Northern Territory law.

People like Andrews, he says, try to "push views down my neck". He is not trying to impose his views. People like Andrews can "die the most miserable deaths they want to. He can die suffering and it'll prise open the gates of heaven further for him and I don't care. I don't want him telling me how I can die".

He still gets angry, too, when he tells the story of a bloke called Max, who drove to Darwin in his own taxi in an attempt to become the first person to use the NT euthanasia bill.

Nitschke couldn't persuade the four doctors needed to sign the necessary papers to "even see him". The writing was on the wall for the bill.

As for Max, he drove back home to Broken Hill, to an empty flat. Nitschke and supporters bought him a knife and fork and a bed and waited for him to die of stomach cancer.

It's a terrible story that has been turned into an award-winning Australian play: Last Cab to Darwin.

Nitschke tells it straight; he is not a sentimental man.

Max left Nitschke his cab. He drives around in it. "It's just a Commodore and it works".

Or it could be a public relations opportunity: he has offered it to the Sydney Opera House for use as publicity during the play's run.

Talking of cars, I have earlier asked him whether, by any chance, he drives a Volkswagen. Because there is a disturbing little story from his troubled teenage years which amounts to a very bad look for a man who purveys death.

At 15, Nitschke, boarding in Adelaide with a man he says was subjecting him to "low-level sexual abuse", cut the throat of his landlord's dog.

He knows what the FBI profilers say about people who start out with animals and drive VWs.

Dr Death has a thick skin - and a survivor's sense of humour.