SAEVA 2020 Speech | EQUINE
An increasing proportion of our recent graduates from Melbourne are giving up their time to volunteer for animal
and veterinary charities, they want to live ethically, sustainably and responsibly. Attitudinal change is happening
quickly, and I think we have to work fast to keep up.
I have been “flight shamed” for using aeroplanes to travel internationally and about the contribution of planes to the
global CO 2 emissions (l did point out to the “woke Millennial” concerned that it’s a bloody long swim to get to South
Africa otherwise - and perhaps they had heard of sharks...), but overall, I think that some of the things that people my
age see as normal are increasingly being questioned. I think the future will look very different to the norm of now:
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A future where cars are not powered by fossil fuels, but are electric.
A future where the power in my house is supplied by renewable sources.
A future where money and economic growth is less important to Government than the wellbeing and the
security of the people they govern.
A future where facts are verifiable and where “Fake News” is called out as lies and the people who peddle Fake
News are ridiculed as the liars that they are.
A future where the efficacy of medicine is based in evidence and determined by the scientific method and the
use of “Traditional” medicine no longer provides a pseudoscientific demand for the death and destruction of
wild animals across the planet.
Not all change is bad. ln the modern world, change is constant and it is fast-paced. I think we need to be open to
embracing change and not fearing change, but to do this we need to be resilient.
ln my work at the University of Melbourne we have been told by the profession that we need to do more to train the
students to be resilient so that they can better cope with the realities of professional life. But I think that resilience
is something that you can’t teach. lt’s an attitude, it is not a fact. We aren’t all cut from the same mould. We all have
different strengths, different limitations, different fears and drivers. We can’t do a research project and discover the
secret of resilience. What we can do, however, is to be more open about our challenges and what we are doing to
overcome them. We can model resilience for others to see and to learn from. As I said previously, we had a hard
Summer recently in Australia, with a pretty bad drought (the worst in living memory) affecting large parts of
NSW and Queensland, country towns and small regional cities running out of water. And then came the fires....
But throughout the Summer, I kept thinking about my mate Bennie, who has also been through some terrible fires
and a severe drought in recent years, not to mention some significant personal and professional challenges and the
tragic loss of several staff last year. But Bennie keeps going - to me he is the epitome of resilience. “You can always
re-build, you can always re-plant” he says. My favourite, for obvious reasons is “Every drought ends in rain”.
I thought of Bennie when I was talking with my mate at the farm down the road from us - who ran out of water on
his property and had to buy some troughs, hook them up to the house tanks and book the water carrier to make
sure his tanks were full and his cows were watered. I said to him, “Every drought ends in rain” and his reply was, “Yep.
we just have to make sure we are still here when it does”.
• Volume 22 Issue 01 | March 2020 •
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