RIGHTEOUS SON I've been involved in a lot of issues where there's been conflict; lots of protests in the days of [the] Vietnam [war], when I was a student. Then I got involved with [Australian] aboriginal land rights in a very high-profile case; a group of stockmen from the Gurindji people went on strike for the first time. Large cattle bases were owned by foreign interests and these people had been basically working for nothing. Finally, they just decided that they wanted their land back. They sent people to the southern universities to try and get support and were desperate for someone who could read and write to work there, so I went up [to Australia's Northern Territory].
MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD I was there for two years and it was hard going; living in a tin lean-to shed; the weather was impossible; diseases I'd never seen; lots of people had leprosy. It was a grim third-world environment which I'd not seen before. The mail plane would come in, I would read letters to the tribe leaders and they would dictate them back to federal parliament in Canberra. I discovered a few things: one is that you get into a position of incredible power when you can read and write. It was too much power perhaps for a young kid; I read some of my letters from that time and I think, 'Oh my god, this is a 20-year-old who thinks he's bloody running the show'. But then my partner walked off with a drifting American recovering from Vietnam, so that brought me back down. I fell apart and that was the end of it.
PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE There was only one pub there and it was about 200 kilometres away - but when you'd go, you couldn't get out of the place without having a fight with the stockmen. Nowhere since has it become that physical.
People get nasty at a more civilised level with [euthanasia]. I put up with the nickname [Dr Death]; there's about seven of us in Wikipedia and some of them, like [Nazi physician] Josef Mengele and [British doctor/serial killer] Harold Shipman, are not the best of company. But, if you get upset about name calling, you don't go far.
In Australian politics you can't attract the ire of the church. I've had my book [The Peaceful Pill Handbook] banned in Australia and have been detained by British immigration. They're about to introduce mandatory website filtering in Australia and the government said it's to stop child pornography, but the names of the 1,000 or so blocked sites were leaked; all are porn sites except ours [Exit International; www.exitinternational.net].
There's a lot of support, though. I won the Humanist of the Year award [from the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, in 1998]; I guess this issue is considered by many to be a fundamental rights issue. To say you've got this gift of life but you can't give it away in a way that you determine strikes me as being a little quaint. It's a rare day when someone doesn't come up and say something nice. It's very sustaining.
THE ESCAPE KEY I've always been keen on inventions and have a background in science and technology. After our legislation passed for a short time in 1999 [it was later repealed] it was crunch time because I'd worked very hard to get it through and then found myself faced with the job of going around on Sunday and helping someone die. That's quite a hard ask. So I built a machine. It was partly a laptop that presented three very direct questions on the screen. The last one was, 'If you press this button you will die. Would you like to go ahead?' It was grim but [the man] was able to hold his wife and die in her arms, with me on the other side of the room.
That machine is now sitting in the British Science Museum; that's a bizarre thing. It was first bought by Australia's biggest museum and there was a huge outcry in the senate, one senator leaping up saying that he didn't want the children of the nation traumatised by this obscenity. Now it's got George Stephenson's first steam engine on one side and Logie Baird's television on the other. I sat there a little while ago watching British schoolchildren filing past, seemingly untraumatised by the obscenity.
TOUGH LOVE [The Hong Kong Society of Palliative Medicine] decided, much to my surprise, that they didn't want to appear on the same platform as me, arguing that the position I take is too extreme, one that they don't even want to debate. I don't know why; I'm advising that while we wait for legislation to pass - which it will - go off to Mexico, get the drugs, put them in the cupboard and you'll feel a whole lot happier because you know that even if things go wrong ... you've got those options stitched up. You won't be begging someone you love to do something which can have them imprisoned for a decade.
We had the dramatic case of a pilot who got seriously ill, who begged his wife, who in turn begged her best friend, who happened to work for us [at Exit International] and was terminally ill. The friend went over to Mexico and bought two bottles of Nembutal and gave one to him. He took it and had the peaceful death that he wanted - and left behind a complete mess. Both women were charged with assisted suicide. Our staff member took the other bottle before the sentencing and the wife is now in prison. The man could have nipped over to Mexico himself, as a pilot, and spared everyone the trauma.
THE BRIGHT SIDE The idea of dying being a sad issue isn't that accurate and as they get older, people become more pragmatic, philosophical, even a bit humorous about it all. Our largest number of supporters are elderly and in good health, and when we hold gatherings, everyone laughs and jokes; they just want to get things in place for when 'things go bad', as they describe it. It's a much more balanced perspective compared with those of us who walk around in mortal fear of the fact we're going to die.
I think you become more balanced when you hit 70.