'1000 babies can't be wrong': my 'alien' grandfather

My Jewish maternal grandparents – he a doctor, she a pharmacist – fled Europe in 1939, arriving in Australia by ship with two suitcases and my four-year-old mum. Thanks to wartime doctor shortages, my grandfather, Dr Arthur Deery, wasn’t interred as a suspect alien, but allowed to practice as a country GP, first in Gippsland and later in Healesville in Victoria. He brought with him some very enlightened European notions, especially to do with educating and empowering women in childbirth and pregnancy. His patients loved him, but conservative political forces were less enamoured. When police investigated a claim of spying, they noted:

Deery [is] the centre of a hotbed of small town gossip … [involving] the religious question, professional etiquette and medical ability, coupled with a certain amount of suspicion, which at these times is directed towards all foreigners.

He was sacked by the board of Healesville Hospital but after a public outcry and an inquiry, cleared of wrongdoing and reinstated. One of my favourite stories is about the good lady citizens of Healesville marching down the main street with their children in prams to protest at his dismissal, as this fantastic clip from The Sun from January 1961 shows. (The placards read: '1000 Babies Can't Be Wrong' and 'Doc Deery Forever'.)

There have been books and book chapters written about grandpa (as we called him when we were kids), and now I am really excited that he and other refugee and migrant doctors are the subject of new research by Dr Fallon Mody of Melbourne University.

On 15 October Dr Mody will give a public address entitled “1000 Babies Can’t Be Wrong”: Listening out for Arthur Deery, an Alien Doctor in Victoria. I’m looking forward to learning a bit more about his life and seeing recognition of my grandfather and his refugee peers, who went through so much to give so much.

The lecture is free and open to the public. You can book here.