Dr Tony Stewart's medical training and passion for solving an aviation mystery took him to Antarctica, and to all that lies beneath the ice.
With a history of travel adventures, Dr Tony Stewart (MBBS 1981) couldn't help signing up this year for an Antarctic mission as the medical officer for a team travelling to undertake conservation work on Douglas Mawson's Hut in Commonwealth Bay. He also managed satellite communications for the team.
"One of my interests in going to Mawson's Hut is the first aircraft that was taken to the Antarctic [in 1911]: a Vickers REP Monoplane, Vickers Number 1, which never actually flew due to wing damage and was last seen in 1976," says Dr Stewart, an assistant surgeon and public health specialist at the Centre for International Health in the Macfarlane Burnet Institute.
A keen pilot and member of The Aviation Medical Society of Australia and New Zealand, Dr Stewart hoped to locate Vickers Number 1 during his stay on the continent.
Confident of its location now, he plans to return to Mawson's Hut in December to excavate the airplane, braving freezing conditions in one of the windiest places on earth, Cape Denison, where wind speeds can average up to 100 km/h.
"As the ice is really thick, we cannot use standard drills. This will damage the plane which I believe is intact underneath all that ice", he says.
To safely recover the plane, Dr Stewart plans to melt the ice enclosing the airplane using equipment resembling giant hair dryers so the archeologists can excavate through the remaining ice.
Dr Stewart's international medical adventures began soon after he graduated from medicine at Monash in 1981.
After a particularly intense month working in the Accident and Emergency Center at The Dandenong Valley Hospital, he decided to holiday in Sydney which became a turning point in his career.
"I met someone in a lift, who had just come back from working in Vanuatu and she said that the surgeons there all worked in shorts and t-shirts and walked around in thongs," he says.
Envisioning a relaxed lifestyle, Dr Stewart left for Vanuatu and during his three years he realized that most of the health problems in the country were due to socioeconomic status and lack of access to healthcare.
Upon his return, Dr Stewart undertook a Masters degree in Applied Epidemiology at The Australian National University. His life since then can be deemed anything but relaxed.
Apart from his work as a surgeon, Dr Stewart has also worked as an epidemiologist and a medical practitioner in the Pacific, Indonesia, East Timor, the Republic of Congo and Southeast Asia.
Dr Stewart also headed a maternal and child health project in Nusa Tenggara Barat Province in Indonesia during the mid 1990s. This project successfully developed strategies for safe home deliveries enabling health care provision to newborn and mothers alike, by the traditional midwives, called Dukuns.
Between 1997 and 2001, he led the team behind the Pacific Regional Vector Borne Diseases Project, which supported malaria, dengue and filariasis control programs in several Pacific Islands, including Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Caledonia.
But his attention is now fixed on colder climates.
"All of my interests are really coming together, my love of the Antarctic and aviation history, and the only reason I am able to do this is because of my medical degree," he says.
