Abstract
DEAR SIR,
Table 1. I would like to dedicate the following poems to my psychiatrist, Dr Paul Gill. The tenth anniversary of Dr Gill's death occurs on 24 January 2002. The first poem sums up my situation when I first came into contact with him; I was a “prisoner behind black bars”. Over the years Dr Gill became my reliable friend and confidant. He helped me enormously.
The prisoner watches behind black bars; longing for humanity an ache.
Petrified, he rejects the wish to be free, warm, loved: reached.
Like a cancer longing grows for something, anything, to breathe life into the stillborn soul of his existence.
The price? omnipotent self shattering, falling as dust on the fleshless flesh of his feet.
In the empty cell.
a ghost calls.
Unheard.
I, and those many others self-imprisoned in a waste-land of non-being have felt the fellowship of your acceptance. Wary, watchful, moved tentatively to test the touch of your outstretched hand.
Opened slowly the locked floodgates of memory, shed un-shed tears, grieved, mourned loss of might-have-been, accepted a non-event.
Now, in a greener land, experiencing the warmth of proffered friendship, sharing man's fear and pain, rejoicing in another's joy, receiving your gift of each new day, I live.
Avril Smith
Merimbula, NSW
VALE
It is with sadness and regret that we advise College Fellows and colleagues of the recent death of Dr Colin Degotardi, Professor Wallace Ironside and Professor Julian Katz of New South Wales, Dr Terence Hardiker and Dr Gwendolyn Nash of Victoria, and Dr Bronte Pulsford of South Australia.