Some time before she passed away on 18 January, Dr Gwen Fleming reacted to a get well wish with a quotation from Don Quixote: ‘To get well when you are dying is a terrible waste of good health.’

This wry, pithy humour characterised her remarkable life which began in Taree on 9 June 1916 as the third eldest of John and Caroline Lusby’s six children. Her surviving sibling, Sr Elizabeth Lusby OP, recalls that as a young girl Gwen took charge of the family when Caroline was ill. During the Depression, the children shared shoes, they ‘went without’, and if a visitor was seen approaching, each of the family scraped some of their modest dinner onto a spare plate for their guest.

The innate altruism that adorned her long life was further fuelled by a firm Christian belief that God travelled through human action. Regularly attending Mass, she was not ostentatiously holy (‘God save me from the Pious Carrrthlic’), and some of her dearest friends held no beliefs. Nor was her Catholic devotion entirely devoid of heresy (‘God has His favourites’).

Her father, a schoolmaster in the Classics, insisted his three daughters be educated to the full reach of their potential. Gwen was a fine Latin scholar, another asset for a career in medicine, where, as she quipped, everything was expressed in Latin, except ‘sore throat’. She was one of the first wave of women doctors to pass through Sydney University and Sancta Sophia College, graduating with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1939, just in time to answer the call of war service. Appointed to the rank of Captain, then promoted to Major Gwen Lusby at Concord Military Hospital ('They called me Sir, during the war'), she was the first woman major in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corp (RAAMC). Legend has it that when the Governor-General visited and asked to see the doctor, Gwen replied: 'I am the doctor'.


Among the gifts she brought to medicine were clarity of judgement, patience of manner and accuracy of diagnosis. The trust of the patient was part of the healing.

The War challenged her in every way: the returning soldiers, cringing in foetal spasms of shellshock, some disfigured and limbless, were joined by their wounded Japanese counterparts. While Gwen was treating both with the equal care demanded by her Hippocratic oath, her own brother, Bobby, of the 2/30 Australian Infantry Battalion, was dying at the hands of the Japanese as a prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma railroad.

The flame in her life, a brilliant young surgeon, Justin Fleming, serving as part of the Flying Doctor Service, called her late one night from Broome, insisting it was urgent. Sounding a little tipsy, he said: ‘I’m sorry to call at this hour but I was wondering if you would marry me?’

After their wedding in Sydney on 4 May 1946, Justin was awarded a Nuffield Fellowship to Oxford, where they took up residence at the Radcliffe Infirmary. With Gwen pregnant, and England subject to rations, war damage and Cold War politics, they returned to Sydney in 1950 to raise what would be a family of six children, five of whom were delivered by another of Gwen’s fellow medical graduates, Dr Gwen Kennedy.

The family settled in Wollstonecraft, in a home of character, where a love of cricket, theatre, art, music and literature was encouraged. The walls were hung with the works of living artists, the Boyds and Dobells sharing the space with family portraits by Louise Cornwell.

The family motto was animo toto laborate—which was translated as ‘no half jobs’. Apart from the expectation that the children attend to their studies and behave decently, discipline was by osmosis.

Though her medical career was suspended, the home sometimes resembled a dormitory where her expertise was invaluable.

Gwen was one of the first women admitted as a Member (1945) and subsequently as a Fellow (1973) of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians.

In 1974, aged 57, Justin suffered a fatal heart attack. Gwen and all the young family were shattered. Becoming the breadwinner, Gwen joined a cancer practice run by Dr Brian McEwen in Macquarie Street, and took a post teaching medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital, a demanding regime she continued until she was 77. Both her patients and her students were struck by her calm, inductive method, elucidating upon both the detail and the big picture.

In 1999, Gwen’s son, James, aged 43, died after a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving a wife and young children. No mother wishes a child to predecease her, yet in tragedy, Gwen was the rock. To her five children, her 17 grandchildren and three great grandchildren, she has been the still point of the turning world; to her children’s spouses, Leigh, Janet, Frank, Fay, Sue, Tess and Jim, she was guide, philosopher, friend and physician.

She especially cherished two mentors, Dr Tim David and the Jesuit, Father Bob Walsh, with whom she had graduated in medicine. Recently, when he came to visit her, she advised him not to drive himself but ‘to catch an ambulance’.

Maintaining that crosswords and bananas were the secret to enduring health, Gwen regularly did the Times cryptic with her daughter, Margaret, and son, Justin. She had a voracious appetite for knowledge, with a leaning tower of books beside her favourite chair. She loved the cutting edge of science — Hawking, Penrose, Dawkins, Denton, Davies — and she rejoiced in Les Murray along with Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth. She read The Lancet and The Tablet. Her taste in music was eclectic, everything from Sondheim to Wagner.

Whether making bread sauce for Christmas or diagnosing a transitory ischemic attack, Gwen did everything well. Embracing so many dimensions, she lived for others and she gave her whole heart and mind to the country she loved. She was, to the end, civilised and beautiful.