UQ Professor wins Dunlop Asia Medal
Surrounded by hostile troops in the wilds of Rwanda, University of Queensland paediatrician and Army medical officer John Pearn faced one of the stickiest situations of his long and colourful career.
With his life and the lives of his team in danger, he reached deep into his repertoire of skills and came up with . . . Aussie-accented French that was so unintentionally outlandish their captors dissolved into laughter.
It was the unlikeliest of the many successes that have marked more than three decades of service by the professor of child health. He has received more than 20 national and international awards, most recently the Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop Asia Medal.
"We were doing clinics in Rwanda in 1995 and I had a platoon of soldiers guarding me and my health section," Professor Pearn recalled in the wake of the medal presentation which took place at the University of Melbourne in December.
"Three hours' drive up in the mountains outside Kigali, the capital, we were surrounded by a platoon of the Rwandan People's Army.
"As the senior officer I was trying to negotiate our way out. The lingua franca was French, and the thing that defused the situation was my trying to speak French with my Australian accent."
While Africa was the setting for Professor Pearn's linguistic piece de resistance, much more of his medical and military involvement has been with Asia.
The Dunlop Asia Medal he received in December is awarded annually to an Australian citizen with a record of outstanding achievement in forging sustained relationships with people of the Asian region. It was established in 1993 as a lasting tribute to the late Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop and his vision for Australia-Asia relations.
Sir Edward is best-known as perhaps Australia's greatest wartime hero. His courage and leadership as doctor/surgeon and commanding officer to around 1000 allied prisoners on the notorious Burma-Thai railway during World War II became legendary. After the war he pioneered Australia-Asia relations.
Professor Pearn is deputy head (student affairs) of the University of Queensland's Graduate School of Medicine as well as professor of child health in the Paediatrics and Child Health Department. Along with his outreach to Asia through postgraduate medical education and teaching, the prevention and management of childhood accidents is a particular interest.
"The slow pace at which preventive measures are introduced is very distressing," he said. "It took more than 20 years of major advocacy to introduce seatbelts, for example; and it took 22 years of vigorous and bitter advocacy to get decent safety legislation into place for the prevention of childhood drownings. Child bicycle helmets were the same. It's all taken a lot of time."
He does not blame anyone in particular, saying "It's us as society". He cites a historical belief that children's lives and what happens in their lives are exclusively at the discretion of their parents.
"Society overruled that in the early 1910s when compulsory education was introduced. We haven't had the same change in philosophy about children's health and safety until the last decade. It was thought, for example, that if a child drowned, it was sufficient to say it was the parents' fault.
"The philosophy in this Department is that it doesn't matter whose fault it is, the important thing is to prevent it happening. We've had a large outreach to South-East Asia - and the rest of the world in fact - in that area."
Professor Pearn began "a second career" in the military ranks when he became regimental medical officer with the Queensland University Regiment in 1966. Since then, he has regularly taken holidays from the University to pursue this other career:
He was appointed Surgeon-General of the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) in mid-1998, subsequently leading ADF health teams to Papua New Guinea after a devastating tsunami and to Bougainville at the end of the island's secessionist war with the central PNG government.
Previously he had served as consultant physician with the ADF in PNG and Vietnam, initiating or becoming involved with many civil aid programs, running clinics for children and visiting remote villages to improve public health.
Professor Pearn also has performed international outreach work in his former role as National Director of Training for St John Ambulance Australia, acting as a consultant to St John Ambulance bodies in Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and Singapore.
He has undertaken missions on behalf of the World Health Organisation, UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), Rotary International and the Scout Association. He is widely recognised for his contributions to the medical profession and humanitarian causes.
In 1979 Professor Pearn was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 1993 he was awarded the Anniversary Independence Medal of H.M. Government of Papua New Guinea for services to medicine and health in PNG. He was decorated with a knighthood within the Order of St John in 1995.
For more information, contact Professor John Pearn (telephone 07 3365 5323).
