WOMAN TO WATCH:
unsung hero, RAAF Group Captain Annette Holian
RAAF Group Captain Annette Holian has mended bones in the wake of the Boxing Day tsunami and come under fire from the Taliban. Sue Smethurst meets a trailblazing orthopaedic surgeon who has travelled to hell and back to save lives.
The clock had ticked past
2am when Dr Annette
Holian finally emerged into the warm night air. The trauma surgeon had spent the previous hours hunched over in an operating theatre deep inside the multinational military base at
Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, saving the life of a Dutch soldier seriously injured after an improvised explosive device exploded under his vehicle.
Having successfully sent him to intensive care, she stepped outside the pressure cooker ER to catch her breath. While gathering her thoughts in the inky darkness, she noticed fireworks in the sky.
“I wondered what the celebration was,” Annette recalls. “Then I got my bearings and realised I was facing north, towards the Baluchi Pass, known as the valley of the shadow of death, where our troops patrolled against the
Taliban. What I thought were fireworks were in fact Apache helicopter tracer fire, rockets and flares. In that split second I remembered I wasn’t in Australia any more, and I pretty quickly went back inside.”
RAAF Group Captain Annette Holian is one of Australia’s unsung heroes, an orthopaedic surgeon who is as at home in a war zone, saving the lives of wounded troops, as she is mending bones in Australia’s best hospitals.
The revered doctor is one of Australia’s most distinguished women and yet, chances are you’ve never heard her name – until now.
“I just really like helping people,” she says humbly of her extraordinary career. “No one plans to be a trauma victim, but if you provide good care and follow up, you can get a patient back to being the best they can be, which is very satisfying. You can make a big difference to someone’s life.”
The disaster zone
Annette Holian was barely 10 years old when her fate was sealed.
Growing up in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, the dedicated schoolgirl found her future in the pages of Australian author Ivan Southall’s classic novel, Hills End. The book tells the story of a group of school children who go off exploring a cave with their teacher when disaster strikes. A flood washes away their home town and the children battle to survive.
“That book had a profound impact on me,” the softly spoken surgeon explains. “One of the children longs to be a doctor and help his friends. As soon as I began reading it, I desperately wanted to be a doctor too and it stayed with me forever. That book determined my path.”
Fast forward a few decades and life spectacularly imitated art when the
medico found herself in the midst of a natural disaster in Papua
New Guinea in a makeshift hospital treating thousands of injured and displaced victims from a tsunami. There, surrounded by mud, chaos and the stench of death, she found her calling.
“The very first PNG child I operated on at Monash Hospital had brittle bone disease and faced huge challenges in his village environment. Inspired by him, I volunteered to visit in 1997 and help with some medical work in remote villages. These people had very little access to medical care. Less than a year later, a tsunami struck the region right between the two hospitals I’d been working in, so I knew the area and I knew I could be of help. The tsunami struck on a Friday. When we arrived on the Wednesday, we found hundreds of patients and only one poor doctor trying to treat them all. We immediately knew we could be of assistance.”
Then 41, the mother of three had enjoyed a stellar medical career and had in fact made history. She was the first female orthopaedic surgeon in Victoria and is believed to be the first mother admitted to surgical training in Australia.
Working in a disaster zone was a world away from her family and the comforts of Australia’s world-class hospitals where she’d trained and operated every day, but she relished the challenge and was so impressed by the impact of the military’s work that she didn’t hesitate to put her hand up again when the call came for surgeons to assist Australian soldiers on deployment to East Timor in 1999.
It was her first official deployment in uniform and unwittingly sparked a stellar new career in Defence.
Since then, she has been deployed to war zones five times, including three stints in Afghanistan, and has been a first responder at several humanitarian disasters, such as the Boxing Day tsunami in Banda Aceh in 2004.
“That was a huge challenge.
The area was devastated and the aftershocks continued. We were trying to operate on people with the earth moving under our feet. The streets and rivers were choked with debris and thousands of bodies – it was horrific.”
Annette and her colleagues worked around the clock in the makeshift operating theatre, catching a few precious minutes’ sleep whenever they could on stretcher beds in the corner of the clinic.
“Aceh had been totally wiped out,” she recalls. “At the river there were bodies floating everywhere and huge
“I did not take the well-trodden path but made my own.”
industrial dump trucks were filled to the brim with bodies. The bodies would be pulled out of the rubble or wherever they were found, wrapped in black plastic and left on the side of the road for the trucks to pick up and take them to landfill for mass burials. It was shocking. I was away from home for 10 days, but it felt like a lifetime.”
In 2008, Annette was deployed to the Uruzgan province in Afghanistan during Operation Slipper. She was the Clinical Director of the multinational medical facility when Australian forces came under attack from the Taliban.
A convoy of troops was ambushed and sustained several hours of unrelenting attack by machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Nine soldiers were seriously injured.
During the ambush, Trooper Mark Donaldson VC intentionally subjected himself to enemy fire to draw attention to himself and away from the wounded soldiers, buying time for them to be moved to safety. His
bravery earned him a VC citation, the first Australian to be awarded a VC in 40 years.
Annette still clearly recalls the events of that day. “All of my experience working in developing countries, trauma orthopaedics and the prior military service came together over there – it was a highlight of my career.”
She remains in awe of the soldiers’ courage.
“In Afghanistan, where the roads are blowing up around them and rockets arriving constantly, these men and women will bravely grab their gear and head out into it, no second thoughts. I was always in the relative comfort of a hospital base. Sure, the walls and the ground shook and there were mortars flying over us but
I wasn’t out on the front line.
“I couldn’t imagine hopping into a Humvee and heading off to the front line knowing that this could be it – yet that’s how these Australians function every day. They are so deserving of support and recognition. They put their lives on the line for us every day. Supporting them is the least I can do.”
Of course, being called to serve your country, often at a moment’s notice, isn’t easy. In Annette’s case, her partner juggled life at home while she was away. By the time of her first deployment, her son was an adult and had left home for university, but her girls were much younger and she acknowledges that having a parent so far away, particularly in a war zone, is very hard.
“The girls were always keen to see me come home. You miss birthdays, you miss those special school moments, and not really being able to contact them very much is very hard. Everyone makes sacrifices, but Defence were amazingly supportive. It was always challenging to go from that sort of environment and slip back into motherhood at home. But the kids were fantastic and my partner was very tolerant. I couldn’t have done it without him.”
A gentler life
Annette’s last deployment was to Kandahar in 2012, and although she can be called upon at any time to serve, for the moment she is focused on her work away from the front line. She is now the Clinical Director for Surgery at the RAAF, while still operating on our most vulnerable at the Monash Children’s Hospital, and in her ‘spare’ time she is Chair of External Affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and a Governor of Victoria’s Shrine of Remembrance.
On a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne in 2018, Annette Holian made history again. She was the first woman still serving in the Australian Defence Force to address the dawn service at the Shrine of Remembrance.
Those gathered to pay homage to our fallen wiped away tears as she reflected on her career, noting how in uniform she embraced opportunities she never could have dreamed of.
“My medals remind me of the people I cared for on deployment,” she said, “a baby whose future I changed by correcting foot deformities; broken, injured children; an eight-year-old who was shot as he slept. They reflect my efforts to save a soldier’s hands, lost when his grenade went off – enough to allow his home country to restore his ability to hold his baby … ”
She called upon the community to support our veterans and implored the thousands gathered before dawn to step out of their comfort zones and make sacrifices for the betterment of the community.
“I did not take the well-trodden path,” she said, “but made my own.”
While she’d still volunteer “in a heartbeat” to head to any disaster zone where help is required, for the moment she is enjoying taking a breath; making up for lost time with her now-adult children and immersing herself in her garden. When her talented fingers aren’t sewing back together the broken and bruised, they are in soil, cultivating crops of organic spinach and tomatoes. Every inch of her inner-Melbourne home is lovingly planted out.
Gardening allows time to contemplate and strategise life’s missions ahead. She’s passionate about encouraging more women into the defence forces, and drafting more women to follow in her medical footsteps. Currently less than 5 per cent of orthopaedic surgeons are women, the lowest of all medical specialities.
“There are many battles still to be won,” she says, sipping tea, “but they don’t all have to be mine.
“I could never have imagined experiences I’ve had and I want to encourage women of any age to step out of their comfort zone and be brave, to embrace every opportunity; you never know where it might lead you.” AWW