Clive Backhouse was a distinguished authority on medical parasitology, who inherited the mantle of the founding father of parasitology in Australia, the late George Heydon FRACP (qv I). He independently earned a high international reputation from his 20 years in New Guinea. His long life was marked not only by professional achievement, but also by diverse personal and social skills and integrity of behaviour best described as that of a gentle gentleman. Aequanimitas! His successor as leading medical parasitologist in Australia, the late Professor Bruce McMillan FRACP (qv), described him as hiding his genius beneath a cloak of modesty.
Backhouse was born in Chiltern, Victoria, to an English migrant, Thomas Backhouse, from Lincolnshire, who was a state school teacher and later a solicitor. His mother Ethel (née Williamson), who was born in Chiltern, died when he was aged only 6 years. His early education was at a state school in northeast Victoria, and later at Melbourne Grammar School. His lifelong interest in nature was developed early by his uncle, HB Williamson, a naturalist. He wanted to study arts and literature, having a remarkable affinity for languages, but his father put him to medicine. In 1917 Backhouse graduated near the top of the honours list from the University of Melbourne in a course shortened by war. After 6 months' residency at the Melbourne Hospital, he entered the Australian Army Medical Corps, Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in May 1918, and embarked for the Middle East on 9 November 1918.
On 1 July 1919 he transferred to the Royal Air Force and after service in Mesopotamia was repatriated through England where he undertook the Diploma of Public Health course at the University of Oxford in 1920. On return to Australia in 1921, his appointment to the Adelaide Children's Hospital was never completed because he was approached by the Commonwealth Director-General of Health, Dr D G Robertson, and the Prime Minister, Mr W M Hughes, to be Medical Officer to the Administrator of the Trust Territory of New Guinea, then not long handed over by Germany. In 1928 he was put in charge of the Commonwealth Health Laboratory in Rabaul in preparation for which he undertook the course for the Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1929, he was designated as government pathologist. In 1938, he was Australian representative to a League of Nations group of experts and was admitted as a foundation fellow of the College.
Backhouse left New Guinea in mid-1940 to enlist in the AIF once more, this time having to fight his way in at the age of 45 years, after initially being rejected as unfit. He was appointed as pathologist to the 2/7 Australian General Hospital and served in the Middle East and New Guinea, being mentioned in dispatches in 1945. After hostilities ceased, he was posted to 2/14 Australian General Hospital (AGH) in Singapore. He was discharged to the Reserve of Officers in February 1946, with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
From 1946, till his retirement in 1960, Clive Backhouse carried on Dr Heydon's role as head of the department of parasitology in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine within the University of Sydney. In this distinguished phase of his career he extended his international recognition through consultancies to the New Guinea Administration, the South-Pacific Commission, the World Health Organisation Advisory Panel on Parasite Diseases, and the Conference of Experts on Filariasis in Fiji; and in Australia to the Northern Territory Administration and Australian Government. Clive advanced to senior lectureship and undertook much research which appeared in some 34 publications. The titles covered such parasitological subjects as filariasis, malaria, ancylostomiasis, cercariasis, ascariasis, amoebiasis, paragonomiasis, tapeworm, hydatid and scabies. They extended also to studies of tuberculosis, neoplasm, pneumonia and influenza in Melanesians. His naturalist interests were exhibited in studies of transmission of parasitic diseases, such as Chaga's disease and kala azar in the koala and echidna. In all this work he maintained technical correspondence and friendship with such world figures as Sir Philip Manson-Bahr, Sir Rupert Willis, Sir Thomas Cameron and Sir John Boyd, and in bacteriology with Sir Macfarlane Burnet FRACP (qv I); and was in contact with famous institutes in Britain and North America. He was elected a foundation fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia in 1956.
Backhouse took on consultant pathology after retirement from the School, being appointed in 1960 to the honorary medical staff at St Vincent's Hospital on the invitation of the late Dr Bruce Hall FRACP (qv I) with whom he had shared a tent in the 2/7 AGH. He was associated with Dr J Murray Moyes and Dr Jean Collier at the Women's Hospital, Crown Street, in cancer detection, and did some private pathology work with Dr Basil Jones and Dr WEL Davies in Burwood. He retired from active practice in December 1976, aged 81 years. At his death in 1985, he had been a Fellow of our College for 48 years, and a member of the British Medical Association for sixty-eight years.
On 8 November 1923, Clive married Mary Walstab, sister of the Chief of Police in Papua New Guinea, a greatly respected woman whose long service with the Red Cross during and after the war was later recognised. They had no children. She died in February 1961. In November 1962, Clive married Lorna May Silvester, a biochemist whom he and Mary had met first at an Australian & New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) Conference in 1951, and subsequently at St Vincent's Hospital whither Lorna had transferred from the Royal Perth Hospital. Despite some disparity in their ages, Lorna and Clive had a happy 23 years of marriage, associated first with an attenuating involvement in medicine, and later with an increasing interest in her property 'Brunaye les Arbres' at Mount Tomah, where they moved full time in the late 1970s. Lorna was ever and still is a gardener; Clive who earlier in his life thought gardening a fool's labour, from 1962 on enjoyed developing the beautiful retreat at Mt Tomah. I recall vividly finding him in his 80s, cheerfully at work with a chain saw on a fallen dead tree down a steep slope. The abundant plant, insect and bird life in his cold climate exotic garden within a native rain forest afforded him indulgence in his lifelong naturalist interest. With Lorna he was a delightful host.
Clive Backhouse pursued his passion for languages and literature throughout his life. He attained competence in French, German, Italian, Arabic, Malaysian and Chinese. His diaries of 1919 (he was a lifelong meticulous diarist) had some entries in Arabic script. In the late 1940s, he was pressed into service to set the NSW matriculation examinations in Chinese, having become an expert calligraphist in that tongue. In 1972, he was awarded life membership of the Oriental Society. On his long periods of leave from New Guinea in the 1920s and 1930s, he lived in Britain and the Continent, and would return via Siberia, Japan or China. On other occasions he visited his sister in Malaya. Whether as resident or tourist or at meetings, he believed in speaking the language of the host country. He used to go to evening language classes with his old friend, Sir Kempson Maddox FRACP (qv I).
Backhouse was a wide reader. He scanned all his journals on receipt and had an excellent memory for what he read. He was a keen photographer and an expert sketcher, a skill he used to illustrate his travels. He was a great correspondent with family and friends. Long into his retirement he maintained a correspondence with the Manson-Bahr family and with Sir John (later Lord) Boyd. The latter's long philosophic, naturalist, professional and personal replies, which he carefully kept, reflect the friendly, thoughtful, able, interested correspondent that Clive was. Backhouse enjoyed stimulating conversation. At the School he joined the luncheon group of Professor Oliver Lancaster and the late Professors Robert Black FRACP (qv) and James Lawrence among others. To quote Lancaster, 'In this atmosphere Backhouse was at his best, with his wide knowledge, good manners and interest in many topics'. These descriptions of a long life indicate the professional distinction and the rich and diverse knowledge and personal talents of the man as naturalist, linguist, illustrator and correspondent. They yet fail fully to indicate his great warmth and humanity, his gentleness, humility and wisdom, his quiet wit and humour. It may help to illustrate the last with a quotation from his letter in reply to Manson-Bahr's request to him in 1954 for advice on any corrections for a forthcoming revision of the famous textbook on tropical diseases. After detailing half a dozen corrections, Clive finished with:
'Since in olden days it was the custom to put to death messengers bearing unpleasant tidings I shall leave any further corrections to others and hope to escape with a mere flogging.'