Val Lishman
Val Lishman AM
14 February 1930 - 21 April 2016
General Surgeon
Driving through an English snowstorm, on the way to board a ship and emigrate, Val Lishman's mind was on fresh horizons. An Australian summer beckoned for him, wife Jean and three children. Six weeks later glaring reality hit. "We had read all about the beautiful Wildflower State but ….everything seemed dried up and withered," he would recall of that "blistering" day in February 1965, in a memoir written long after they had all adjusted perfectly to life Down Under.
The Lishmans soon learnt to enjoy the sunshine. Bunbury liked them too. This was the town's first resident surgeon. Local surf lifesavers were delighted when Val became the club's honorary medical officer. And when new Oxy-Viva resuscitation equipment arrived, he was able to give an expert demonstration.
Memories of warm sand and balmy evenings by the Indian Ocean were particularly attractive during Val's later ventures into the cold and snow.
In the Himalayas in 1980 he spent four months as expedition doctor for 10 members of the Australian Army Alpine Association tackling a peak on the Nepal-Tibet border. Six years later he spent a year in Antarctica as medical officer at Mawson Station.
As for lifesaving, he had fond memories of his debut in Blackpool, which he described in an interview for A Watch on the Waves, the 2015 centenary history of the Bunbury club. The weather in this Lancashire resort is famously changeable, requiring fortitude on days when winds from the Irish Sea can test the hardiest holidaymaker. Val, then a newly graduated doctor, had become a strong swimmer through water polo while a student at the University of Liverpool. His parents, both doctors, would surely have smiled to hear he earned more by patrolling between the piers than he did walking the wards as a junior National Health Service employee.
Ian Valentine Lishman was born in Plymouth, Devon, on February 14, 1930, the second child of Eric and Dorothy Lishman, who already had a daughter, Beryl. Val was educated at Rydal, Colwyn Bay, in North Wales, and enrolled in medicine at Liverpool.
He was always one to try his luck. Between one medical post and two years' national service he had five months to fill in. Walking past a shipping office he called in on impulse to see if there was a temporary job. A ship's doctor had fallen sick so, three days later, it was Val who sailed with the Pyrrhus. In an era when international travel was usually a challenge, he saw four ports in Japan as well as half a dozen exotic locations on the way.
After obtaining a post in Jamaica, he proposed to his girlfriend, Jean Pennington, a nurse. She accepted and in 1956 they were married on the Caribbean island on April 25, a date they would later learn was Anzac Day.
Canada became an option but Australia got the nod because it was warmer. On arrival at Fremantle on the Northern Star the family were free to start their new life - after assuring customs officers they had brought no banned literature such as D.H. Lawrence's novel of adultery across class lines, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
A comfortable embrace of life in the South West was next. Every evening Jean could see the hospital's operating theatre lights go off so knew to put dinner on the table. Val soon learnt to bodysurf. The surf club was a wonderful entrée to social life with a serious purpose. His organizational and entrepreneurial skills were valuable in setting up Bunbury's first fun run. Family Christmas gatherings grew with the birth of another son and daughter and the arrival from England of Val's parents, after retiring, to settle in Bunbury.
Party politics was not a prime interest for Val but in 1969, having spoken out against sending recruits drawn by lottery to Vietnam, he volunteered to join a Royal Perth Hospital team there. "I could hardly refuse an opportunity to learn first-hand about the war," he wrote. His friend Rod Mason, a retired Bunbury doctor, recalls his colleague cultivated contacts with people of all parties and persuasions.
A eulogy by another retired doctor, Jim Leavesley, mentioned meeting Val at the University of Liverpool 68 years ago. "Throughout a rich life Val combined surgical dexterity with a caring nature," he said.
On retiring in 1997 he helped found the Val Lishman Health Research Foundation, based in Bunbury. Kindness and humility, as much as his expertise, impressed Jackie Ross, the foundation's chief executive. "He once has to tell a Bunbury man he couldn't fit him on to his local list, for a foot operation, but could do it during his duty visit to Manjimup," she recalls. "The patient said he couldn't get there, so Val gave him a lift and did the operation there," The foundation's projects have included suicide prevention and inherited cholesterol; two current investigations are on autism and diabetes.
Val was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to medicine, and was a stalwart of the Bunbury Rotary Club.
Val Lishman died on April 21. He is survived by Jean, daughters Jane, Jacky and Sarah, sons Micheal and John, 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
His legacy includes Bunbury Cathedral Grammar School, which he and Jean helped found and 1972. It was a fitting location for the launch in 2013 of a book about this life, The Man in the Surgical Mask.
Published in The West Australian 11 May 2016
Patrick Cornish
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