I was recently driving some friends to a bar when I became aware of a fairly inane conversation taking place in my backseat.

Friend #1: Which do you think is worse – a pedophile, or a rapist?

Friend #2: I think they’re both pretty bad.

Friend #1: See, I think a pedophile is much worse.

Friend #2: How come?

Friend #1: Well a pedophile is, like, twisted and fucked in the head. Whereas a rapist is just Lebanese.

When I was twenty years old, and able to ingest large amounts of alcohol, I went to Europe and participated in two Contiki tours. I thought it would be great to see some of the world, broaden my horizons, experience other cultures, meet new kinds of people, etc, etc. Instead, I wound up on a bus with 49 other Aussies who were hell-bent on getting shit-faced and exchanging bodily fluids. It was awesome.

But I digress. What I want to do here is EXPOSE the Contiki Rep. Not the Tour Guide, for she is educated, holds her liquor well, and does not sleep with anybody until the very last night when it doesn’t matter anymore. But her site-based lesser counterparts exhibit no such control.

Contiki Reps are basically over-enthusiastic twenty-somethings from New Zealand and Australia, along with some Brits, attempting to avoid angry ex-girlfriends and boring university degrees by spending 6 months washing dishes in European campsites and shagging whoever happens to stay there.

During our London to Athens tour, I spent a great deal of time observing the Contiki Reps. They were paid badly, had to clean toilets and stayed in terribly isolated areas, yet they were all so chirpy I nearly lost my breakfast on the first few mornings. I studied their eyes carefully as they dished up my spaghetti, and questioned them closely while scraping my plates into the bin. So how many hours of sleep do you usually get in a night? Uh huh.. And when did you last speak to your family? Riiiight.. How often do you get time off? Oh.

It was not unusual to have a quiet meal or a serious conversation interrupted by one of the Reps bursting into the room, bouncing up and down and shouting, “Can I get a WOOOOOO???!!!”
I tossed and turned at night, dreaming uncomfortably of childhood church camps. These people had to be on something. Anything. However, after six weeks of intense study, I was forced to conclude that their perpetual cheer was due only to an excess of free alcohol and casual sex.

In Venice, I was forced to interact closely with one of the Reps, as I was rostered on for “dishie duty” on our second day there. And so, after several rounds of a cocktail known as an “Attitude Adjustment”, kissing somebody called Giancarlo, and vomiting long strings of spaghetti into a public toilet, I grabbed a few hours sleep, woke up early and reported to the campsite kitchen. I told the Contiki Rep on charge that I was experiencing my first hangover of the tour. His eyes misted over as he handed me a tea towel. “I remember my first time,” he reminisced, “You want a shot?”

It was at that moment that I realised all Contiki staff are alcoholics. They are not worldly travellers at all, but seasoned pisskops seeking employment where they can drink on the job. I’ve got no beef with that, but I think everyone should know. Well now you have no excuse – Contiki Reps have been EXPOSED. You heard it here first.

My earliest memory is of lying naked next to my brother on the burnt orange carpet of our hallway in Candowie Crescent. I sucked on black jelly beans and cried silently while my parents rubbed a foul-smelling ointment into my skin. Holding my nose, I tried to ignore the revolting cream that was applied to my entire body from the neck down, but these things are hard for a three-year-old. This entire process was repeated for four consecutive nights, and then I was allowed to bathe as normal.

Years later, I realised my parents had been treating us with sulfur. Dad brought lots of things home from work, but scabies was the best – microscopic bugs that burrow under the skin, lay eggs, and create a red rash that resembles an allergic reaction in appearance. As the eggs hatch and the mites crawl around underneath the skin surface, the infected person develops a terrible itch, scratches the shit out of hisself, and often develops a secondary infection. My father had been working as a GP in a local nursing home in 1989 when they experienced an outbreak among the old folks. They treated the residents and doctors but didn’t think about the doctors’ families, even though scabies is extremely contagious and transmitted readily through skin-to-skin contact. For the remainder of my childhood, I would have an intense fear of insects. When I found out about bed bugs, I slept in the bathtub for a week.

My second earliest memory is of my father forcing me to solemnly swear to never practise medicine. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, for years I replied, “Not a doctor.” Teachers and creche workers were fascinated by my inclination to define myself by what I was not, or would not do, rather than the opposite, but that ended up being the professional direction I would take as an adult. It’s as if I have a giant list of every career possible and am slowly crossing them off one by one after each failed attempt to make a living. (Eventually, I assume I will be left with my dream job and a string of bad references.)

Dad only worked one job, but he had a hard life. He spent years building his practice and getting patients, and then the rest of his life trying to get rid of them. Admittedly, our number was never listed in the phone book, but do all other forms of advertising go completely unnoticed? An entire generation of Australian adults simply lived without medical care until they met my father at a dinner party in the eighties. Whenever I was dragged along with my parents, I would watch the other guests’ faces light up as they chatted to Dad. “Oh! You’re a DOCTOR? That’s so interesting, because I have this pain juuust heeere…” and they would reveal the body part that grieved them. Even as a child, I was always amazed at the rudeness of these people. If you met a hairdresser at a party, would you hand them a pair of scissors and request a trim? If you met an accountant, would you ask them to do your tax before dessert? If you met a cleaner, would you ask them to pop into the kitchen and tidy things up a bit? Fuck no. But people thought nothing of pulling my father aside at tupperware parties, trivia nights and bible study groups and making him inspect their genitals. Over the years, almost every family friend, relative and member of my parents’ church has adopted my father as their GP. Dad has dirt on everyone in the Hills.

My next earliest memories are of late-night trips to nursing homes to certify bodies. Mum was out a few evenings during the week and Dad couldn’t leave me at home by myself when one of his patients died, so he took me with him. The first time, I waited patiently in the home’s common area. I sat quietly and pulled leaves off a pot plant, but within minutes I was surrounded by gnarled geriatrics with glossy eyes. They shoved pieces of fruit into my pockets and tugged at my hair. One woman proudly introduced me as her granddaughter, then smacked away the hands of anybody else who tried to touch me. They drooled and moaned and hacked and couldn’t hear a damn word I said, which was probably a good thing as I was pretty feisty for a five-year-old. After that night, I chose to wait for Dad in the same room as the corpse.

Not only North-West Sydney’s preferred medical health professional, my father was also the go-to guy for household injuries and neighbourhood emergencies. I probably set the precedent when, one night in the early nineties, I jumped out of the bathtub and ran naked through the house. Still wet, I slipped and cracked my forehead open on the cement step in our kitchen. Instructing my brother to clean the pools of blood off the floor, Dad made me lie on a beach towel in the back room and calmly stitched my face back together. Years later, getting up to pee during the night, I would see the exact same scene happening in the kitchen after one of my brother’s friends fell off his motorbike. People regularly arrived at our door with sprains, burns, grazes, cuts, dog bites, stuffed backs and split lips. Friends seemed to bring to Dad what they were embarrassed to take to the medical centre. He once dug a small bug out of a girl’s eye with a Q-tip, flushed a bead out of a boy’s nostril after he intentionally inhaled it, and sedated a friend’s son after he had tried to scrape their mashed kitten off the road outside their house. Dad was brilliant during emergencies and could treat his own children without batting an eyelid, but when it came to general illness or ailment, my brother and I always went to our mother. Mum had cool hands and stroked your hair; she made you honey tea and prepared hot packs or cold packs or steamy rooms; she rubbed Vicks on your chest and dabbed calamine lotion on your mossie bites. My father, on the other hand, only ever had one piece of medicinal advice for us: “Take two panadol and lie down for half an hour.” Nevermind the fact that I couldn’t swallow tablets until I was ten – lying down for half an hour is practically impossible when you’re a kid. No matter what symptoms we had, Dad’s advice was always the same. It was as if he couldn’t take us seriously unless we were bleeding or bruised or broken. I spent seven years complaining of headaches before Dad sent me to a specialist. Mum received even more useless advice than me – whenever she complained about an ache or pain, Dad simply said, “Aww that’s no good.” One day, Mum snapped. “Eight years of medical school and that’s what they teach you? THAT’S NO FUCKING GOOD?” After that, Mum started seeing a female GP at one of the surgeries Dad owned.

Through eavesdropping on my father’s phone conversations over the past twenty-two years, I like to think I’ve gleaned quite a bit of medical expertise. (Although I once overheard him tell a patient to “take two panadol and get a divorce.”) Dad was always stupidly giving patients his home number, and they’d ring every night the minute we sat down to dinner. I listened attentively as Dad rattled off medications, dosages, statistics and warnings. I also disgusted myself thoroughly by reading his medical journals and learning far more than a child should about the body. At school, I showed off my drug-company pens and notepads (Zoloft was way cooler than Mambo!) and surveyed the playground carefully at lunch time. Whenever a student fell or injured themselves on the monkey bars, I dashed over. “Don’t worry,” I would reassure the growing crowd of spectators, “My father is a doctor.” And they would make room for me accordingly. Then I would inspect my classmate, poke them in various places and ask if each one hurt, nod gravely, and escort them up to sick bay. There I briefed the school nurse on the incident and offered my diagnosis before she rolled her eyes and kicked me out.

The problem with my Dad is that he’s too nice. He treats all our friends and family for free, even though he would never dream of using their accounting, consulting, plumbing or basket-weaving services without paying them. Even when he does things through the books, Dad accepts “alternative forms of payment.” One of his patients, a greengrocer, gives us boxes of fruit after each appointment. An elderly Philippine lady with no medical insurance pays Dad in bizarre desserts (green things with jelly and spaghetti and mousse.) Most of the time, he just bulk bills everybody, even the “struggling” retired couples who request vaccinations before their overseas holidays and then drive away in their sports cars. Dad genuinely cares about his patients though, and he always puts their safety and wellbeing before his own. One day his most annoying patient, a recovering alcoholic, showed up to an appointment blind drunk and twirling his car keys. Rather than letting him put other road-users in danger, my father drove the patient home, stopping on the way to buy him KFC because the lush hadn’t eaten in days. After dropping him home, locking up his car and tucking him into bed, my father then walked the 6 kilometers back to the surgery. In January.

As a side project to general practitioning, my father regularly taught sexual education at a local highschool. This meant that while he usually sidestepped awkward father-daughter chats by cutting a relevant article out of the newspaper and leaving it on my desk, he thought nothing of sitting me at the kitchen table and placing a condom and a carrot in front of me. “Practice makes perfect!” he declared, while I looked up at my mother pleadingly. I was thirteen.

Despite the scabies, career limitations, dead bodies, phallic objects and constant interruptions to daily life, having a father who is a GP has its perks. I can get scripts for anything, we have enough medication in the house to kill a rhino, there’s some great gear on hand whenever I have an emergency fancy-dress occasion, and people assume I’m rich. Unfortunately, I also have an unusually high tolerance to panadol…