Dr Clare Ward: a country life

General practitioner Clare Ward has just taken a call. It’s her publisher, telling her that her first book, A Place to Stand: A Country Doctor’s Life in Hokianga, is being reprinted after being launched just six weeks earlier.

“Is that fast?” she asks. She’s uncertain, but it’s “very nice, affirming”.

For now, Clare sees herself as a writer; the label of ‘author’ is so fresh, it’s uneasy.

Clare’s first career was in zoology. She completed a long stint of study in the subject at the University of Auckland, but part-way through her doctoral thesis on the metamorphosis of the wax moth, she switched to medicine.

She recalls a charmed time of social awakening on campus, with the emergence of Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa; Germaine Greer’s controversial visit, which became a flashpoint of moral outrage; and the protest photographer John Miller working for Craccum.

“Women’s issues were coming to the fore then. I was intellectually aware of racial disconnect in New Zealand, but not spiritually aware.”

Clare held a raft of public roles at the University, elected AUSA woman vice-president in 1971 and president midway through 1974, with Michael Walker, son of Ranginui, serving as vice president. She also marched to Wellington, delivering an anti-nuclear protest letter to then prime minister Bill Rowling; ran a food co-op; and was later a University Council member.  

But by the time Clare reached the Hokianga as a locum, and later as a permanent GP, she remained completely unprepared for working in a predominantly Māori community.

“I would have had to have grown up in a Māori community,” she says. “Pākehā growing up here [in the Hokianga], depending on how much they want to embrace the Māori world, automatically know stuff that urban Pākehā don’t really know, and often don’t want to know either.”

A Place to Stand is a series of fictionalised vignettes and reflections seen through the lens of her 30-year engagement with communities in the North.

She describes it as her ‘book’. “I don’t call it a memoir,” she says. And neither is it a collection of medical stories.

“Sex, age, place – those details aren’t important. It’s the principle behind them – the overriding theme of being Pākehā in a Māori world. To make a difference as Pākehā, you must learn, discover something of that Māori world.”

She has always been attracted to writing. In 2006, she balanced work in the North with a Master of Creative Writing under the supervision of Mike Johnson, creating a portfolio of poetry.

“The sound of good writing, of poetry, has a way of conveying a feeling, an emotion, a truth, if you like.”

Writing a book was never in her plan, but she remembers John Berger’s A Fortunate Man sparking the idea of how a story could be told: “An essay of reflections and photographs following the rounds of an English GP. It poses the question, ‘Could you call the doctor a good man or a fortunate one to have done the work he enjoyed?’”

Another book to catch Clare’s interest was penned by author and medical doctor Mikhail Bulgakov. Called A Young Doctor’s Notebook, it is a fictionalised diary of an inexperienced doctor venturing into the outer reaches of Russia’s hinterlands “taking on work people would never usually do”.

“Isolation is an inherent part of rural doctoring,” says Clare. “You need to be prepared to take on almost anything. It is not a nine-to-five occupation.

“Time and distance affect decisions,” she says. “The base hospital 150km away, petrol prices rocketing. In Auckland, if you have a heart attack, a stroke, a car accident, you might be ten minutes from assistance or time-sensitive medication; up here, it would be two hours, even with the helicopter.”

Still, Clare encourages the next generation to consider a career beyond the city lights.

“Rural doctoring becomes part of you, and you become part of it. It has its own sort of delight and reward, satisfaction and fulfilment.”

A Place to Stand by Clare Ward is published by Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand. RRP $38

– Megan Fowlie