John Kille

John Kille
22 December 1927 - 9 March 2015
Urologist

John Kille was born in Surrey, spent some time in Gloucestershire and then in Bristol in the UK.

He joined the army, the Coldstream Guards, and trained in the tank corps, was commissioned into the 4/7 Dragoon Guards Regiment and saw active service in Palestine till the end of the British Mandate in 1948.

He studied at the medical school in Birmingham, and did his postgraduate work in Surgery getting the Fellowships of the Royal Colleges of London and Edinburgh, following which he was appointed Consultant Urologist to the Royal Infirmary at Hull.

While on holiday in Australia in 1973 he and his family fell in love with Tasmania packed their belongings and migrated to Burnie as a General Surgeon, later on reverting to his professional love of urology as Urologist to the NW Coast, became a member of the Urological Society and a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. I was proud to be a referee for him for this latter event.

When I came for the interview for my own job 40 years ago come November, I was shown around the hospital and one of the first people I met was John who was conducting an Outpatient Clinic in the old Reeve Clinic. He was friendly and welcoming and on taking up my post next June, I was delighted to be sharing a ward with John. One of the first things John said to me was that as I was interested in GI tract Surgery and he was a Urologist, could we deal with the Emergencies but hand over the care of our primary interest respectively. In fact the first operation I carried out in Burnie was on a middle aged woman, the mother of a second year nurse that John asked me to see. I resected some gangrenous small bowel. I saw the same lady many years later at my rooms for an unrelated problem.

John and I worked independently but well enough together that we left each other in charge of our patients when we were away on Holiday. Otherwise we saw our Public Patients everyday including a ward round on the weekends.

John and his wife Mary were wonderful hosts; they made available their farm at Somerset where John, Mary, Marie my wife and I had a BBQ each year around February for the ward andtheatre staff.

I believe everyone had a fun day.

John served on the Umina Park Board for 16 years. He was awarded the Paul Harris Fellowship by Rotary and he indulged his love of painting and inventing things by creating scenes for Rotary Balls, and a 7/8 model of Captain Cook's Endeavour for the Bicentennial Ball.

In 1995 he gained a Private Pilot's Licence and built his own X-Air Ultra-light in his own backyard. John was a stickler for doing things right. There were no half-measures with him. He earned the loyalty of the Staff by being always calm but standing no nonsense. The hospital was a happy place in those days without the burgeoning Bureaucracy that is developing. I miss John and my other colleagues.

Later on he and Mary built a house on Table Cape in Wynyard and though both legs had to be amputated, he still devised plenty of things to keep him busy and mobile, strapped on to a quad bike with his old army belt and helped in his workshop by his beloved dog Kirsty, who regularly picked up tools he may have dropped and even found his gloves for him when he thought he had lost them.

He passed away peacefully at home on 9 March 2015 leaving a wife and two children and six grandchildren. In the words of the Mary Hopkins song "Those were the days my friend, I thought they'd never end"

Vale John

Carl Castellino, FRACS