Caption: The Banksia. The flower that started a seventeen year photography habit.
Standing where Captain Cook fell
In October 2023 I found myself standing at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island of Hawaii, looking at the white obelisk that marks the spot where Captain James Cook was killed in 1779.
We weren't there for the history. We were there because Lauren was racing the Ironman World Championship in Kona (a story for another blog). While she was tapering, I drove down the coast to see the bay, because over the previous seventeen years Cook's story had become a bit of a personal one.
It all started with a flower and a fellowship.
Rewind: Sydney, 2009
Seventeen years ago (I'm slightly ashamed to admit the fifteen year milestone sailed straight past me), we packed up our lives and moved to Sydney for my paediatric orthopaedic fellowship at The Children's Hospital at Westmead.
If you're a UK orthopaedic trainee thinking about fellowships, Westmead needs to be on your radar. It's one of the great paediatric orthopaedic units of the world, and the fellowship flexes to whatever your interests are, clinical or research. The list of UK fellows who've been through is impressive. It runs from Fergal Monsell, the very first, who is now President of the British Orthopaedic Association, right through to Rob Whitham, who is out there now. A special mention too for Joan Torquist, who ran the fellows programme for many years and helped generations of jet-lagged British surgeons (and their other halves) settle in.
One of the simplest but most effective features of the programme is the overlap. Fellows run in twelve month blocks but staggered, so you spend your first six months alongside the fellow ahead of you and your last six months alongside the one behind. I overlapped with Oliver Birke from Basel (far too good looking for me to stand next to in clinic) and with Sally Hobson, a great girl who is now a consultant in Hull.
Caption: Younger, more hair and considerably less grey. Sydney, 2009.
Caption: The Children's Hospital at Westmead today — caption/credit to confirm with Nev.
The people who shaped me
Dave Little has a brain the size of a bus. A genuine multitasking guru who could run a research meeting, plan a complex deformity correction and decipher a registrar's handwriting (proper hieroglyphics reading) all at the same time. Top bloke.
Paul Gibbons taught me never to be phased by a supracondylar fracture. Watching someone so completely in control of their practice stuck with me from that year on. When a scared eight year old arrives in my resus room in Reading with a bent elbow, a little bit of Paul Gibbons walks in with me.
Michael Bellemore is the godfather of Australian paediatric orthopaedics, and the best I have ever seen with parents and children. Watching him settle a worried family in a ten minute consultation was a masterclass, and I've been trying to copy it ever since. Much of what I now write in my “Worried Parents” series traces straight back to his clinics. A true Aussie Gent.
And Quang Dow, then just starting out as a knee specialist. A solid chap on exactly my wavelength, which probably tells you something about where my own practice was heading, one eye on children's bones and one eye on knees.
Two incomes, no kids, one enormous country
Outside the hospital we were what the Aussies call TINKs: two incomes, no kids. Which, in a country the size of Australia, is a dangerous combination.
Lauren and I travelled to every corner, nook and cranny of the place. Broome and the Kimberley coast. Perth. Melbourne. Darwin and the Top End. The Gold Coast. Uluru at sunrise. By the end of the year we were better travelled than most of the locals we worked with (and yes, we told them so, regularly).
We loved it. The outdoor life, the sport obsession, the directness of the people, the sense that the weekend actually belonged to you. It's still the year we compare all others to.
The Banksia twist
Somewhere in all that travelling, I fell for a flower.
Caption: Hundreds of tiny flowers, one perfect cone. What's not to love?
The Banksia is unlike anything that grows in a Berkshire garden. Big architectural spikes and cones made up of hundreds of tiny flowers, packed in perfect spirals, in burnt oranges, golds and reds. I started photographing them (and then flowers in general) everywhere we went, and I have never really stopped.
There's a reason, I think. Orthopaedic surgeons spend their working lives assessing symmetry and alignment. A child's legs, a knee replacement, a healing fracture: it's all pattern, balance and proportion. Point that same eye at a flower and you see the same thing: radial symmetry, spirals, repeating units. Flower photography became my off-duty version of the day job, and my camera roll has never recovered.
Caption: Not a Banksia, but the same symmetry obsession at work - a seed pod that stopped me in my tracks years later.
Caption: Seventeen years of photographing symmetry.
Caption: Echinacea seed heads: nature's perfect geometry.
Joseph Banks, and the penny drops
Years later, back in the UK, I was randomly given a biography of Captain Cook, having already worked my way through the history of the First Fleet and the early settlement of Sydney. I wanted to understand the place that had given us such a year.
That's when the penny dropped. The Banksia, the flower that had started my slightly odd obsession back in 2009, is named after Joseph Banks, the young botanist who sailed with Cook on the Endeavour in 1770 and collected the first specimens at Botany Bay (named after his haul). The flower and the history turned out to be part of the same story.
So when Lauren's Ironman took us to Hawaii in 2023, standing at Kealakekua Bay, where Cook's extraordinary life ended, felt like a fitting full stop. Full circle, via a flower.
One last coincidence
Rob Whitham, the current UK fellow at Westmead, emailed me recently with a photo of the hospital's shiny new Wattle building: twelve floors, opened last month, Harbour Bridge visible from the top floor ward.
But the orthopaedic ward hasn't moved. It's still where it was in my day, in the old building next to the clinics.
The building's name? Banksia.
Some things are just meant to be.
And one final full circle
There's actually one more full circle to this story. While we were living in Australia, Lauren and I became godparents to Hugo.
I found an old photo of the two of us from that year recently. He's tiny. I'm considerably younger, with a good deal more hair and, frankly, dressed like a student.
Caption: Hugo and me in Australia. Neither of us looking quite like this anymore.
This summer Hugo came over from Australia and stayed with us. Naturally, we recreated the photo.
Seventeen years later. Hugo has done rather more growing than I have.
We went to Sydney as two people with no children and no idea what the next seventeen years would hold. We came home with friendships, mentors, a godson, a love of Australia and, rather unexpectedly, an obsession with photographing Banksias.
Not bad for one fellowship. And one flower.
