Helen Caldicott's strong long anti-nuclear stand forged in Adelaide in 1970s; starts city's first cystic fibrosis clinic
Dr Helen Caldicott, at left as a 23-year-old graduate from Adelaide University medical school, and as an international anti-nuclear campaigner.
Helen Caldicott, one of the world’s most vocal anti-nuclear campaigners and founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility, began her medical career in Adelaide, added to its healthcare armoury, and had her strong anti-nuclear views forged and first voiced widely in South Australia.
Caldicott was inducted into South Australia's environment hall of fame in 2019. Caldicott's many prizes and awards,included 21 honorary doctoral degrees. She was personally nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 and the Smithsonian Institute named her as one of the most influential women of the 20th Century. She was president of the Helen Caldicott Foundation, whose mission was to promote a renewable energy-powered world free of nuclear-energy and weapons.
Melbourne-born and -educated, Caldicott (then Helen Broinowski) came to Adelaide University medical school where she graduated in 1961 with bachelor of medicine and surgery degrees.
Next year, she married paediatric radiologist William Caldicott and they moved to Boston, in the UnitedStates of America in 1966 and she entered a three-year fellowship in nutrition at Harvard Medical School. Returning to Adelaide in 1969, Calidcott accepted a position in the renal unit of Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
In the early 1970s, she completed a year's residency and a two-year internship in paediatrics at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital to qualify as a paediatric physician so she could pursue her vision of starting the first Australian clinic for cystic fibrosis at the Adelaide Children’s (now Women’s and Children’s) Hospital. The clinic achieved the best survival rates in Australia.
In 1977, Caldicott joined the staff of the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston as an instructor in paediatrics. She taught paediatrics at Harvard Medical School 1977-80. In the early 1980s, Caldicott became a leader in the United States anti-nuclear movement through reviving Physicians for Social Responsibility and joining Randall Forsberg as a leader of the nuclear freeze movement.
But Caldicott's strong anti-nuclear view had been formed in Adelaide in the early 1970s as the mother of three children and working as a paediatric intern at Adelaide Children’s Hospital.
Caldicott's concerns about nuclear dangers were first sparked by Neville Shute’s 1957 novel On The Beach. These were revived in the early 1970s by French nuclear tests on Muroroa in the Pacific Ocean, with winds blowing radioactive fallout over Australian cities. When Caldicott saw a leaked government document showing Adelaide, with its high use of tank rainwater, was particularly exposed, she wrote a letter to the editor of The Advertiser. That set off a media attention including an interview with a sceptical Clive Hale on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) South Australia television's This Day Tonight. Caldicott’s exposure went nationwide with more French tests.
She was attacked, in a Stewart Cockburn article in The Advertiser, by Dr Peter Ronai, the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s head of nuclear medicine, as being hysterical and incorrect in some information.
But Caldicott’s most intimidating moment was being told by Adelaide Children’s Hospital medical superintendent Bill McCoy that she risked losing her tenure if she didn’t stop her public campaigning: “He told me that the (hospital's medical) consultants’ wives had complained about the amount of publicity I was receiving”.
