Andrew Miller: Safety in numbers of us who accept need to grow

'Your life will be easier if you learn to think before you speak,' was a repeated theme in the 'I'm not just disappointed, but also angry' lectures from my Wesley school headmaster. Carefully considered conversations are important for lawyers I guess, but where's the fun in that? As I entered the lift at work last Friday, I noticed one of the nurses was still wearing her Freo Dockers scarf, less than twelve hours after their crushing defeat under the talons of the marauding Hawks. 'Sorry for your loss, but good to see you still wearing the colours' I said. 'I suppose you're very familiar with disappointed women, doctor?' she said with narrowed eyes. The rest of the lift passengers smiled and nodded at her in admiration. 'Harsh but fair,' I acknowledged. 'Those players have given me more happiness this year than any other man ever did,' she proclaimed as she stalked off to look after the sickest patients in the hospital. People feel strongly about football; comment at your own risk. I have never sought out the AFL, but it manages to find me, being a dominant and intriguing social force in these parts. They do admirable work promoting awareness of indigenous, LGBTQI and gender rights in elite sport, to a population that does not universally welcome those conversations. For a voracious business machine this means that they either see advertising dollars in it, or they have a moral compass that transcends profit, or want a bet each way. As a young country adrift among the odd convoy of contemporary western democracy, where seismic Brexit and MAGA are mainstream, while China funds our lifestyle and we regard them as an expanding security risk, perhaps the AFL is a metaphor for our confused national aspirations. We want this cake with a side of that cake. Less than a week earlier I was accidentally in the bar of the Pullman East Melbourne hotel with some WA doctors, wearing our inappropriate tuxedos and gowns in the midst of hundreds of raucous Carlton fans celebrating their win over Melbourne. I had foolishly suggested that we retreat there at the end of the AMA's Annual Awards night, which had transitioned into the 'strike up the band' phase upstairs. However, soon after we sat down about half the MCG arrived, so it became physically impossible to talk or leave, so we mutely venerated Carlton's triumph. That same hotel was recently the epicentre of the Sydney Swans' scandal, which resulted in five players being suspended for breaching club and AFL behavioural standards. I imagine they breached more than that domestically, given four of them were in official social media relationships more binding than marriage, at the time they reportedly chose an adult entertainment option. Whether there were subsequently much worse choices committed, we may hear later. 'The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn,' said Gloria Steinem, who passed away aged 92 last week, leaving an extraordinary legacy of feminism. The awards evening had culminated in the presentation of the AMA Gold Medal to Professor Cassandra Szoeke, a neurologist and researcher in women's health. She has spent decades re-writing medical textbooks, helping the profession unlearn dogma about disease built on ideas that fail to properly contemplate female biology. For example, the Women's Healthy Ageing Project which began collecting data in 1990, revealed that women have higher rates of dementia at every age, exposing the need for female specific therapies. Men who support the reality of women as equals can't speak for them, but we can listen, be fans, promote their views and try not to add to their list of problems. I like the stoic idea that a society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in. As we left the bar, a female colleague in her golden gown was heading off alone to the tram, to find her hotel among the dregs of the footy crowd. It made us uneasy enough to ask if there were other arrangements we could make. Consider how different that would have seemed if it was a man heading off into the night, and why. In his recent viral speech to St Josephs' school boys in Sydney, headmaster Michael Blake told said that girls should 'not merely be safe from you, but safer because of you.' The line between a truly good bloke and a destructive one is well short of criminal responsibility, as AFL behaviour codes make explicit because boys will emulate players, not headmasters' speeches. I rang the Pullman reception at 2am to ask if they could do anything about the post-match party in my neighbour's room. Positive change in life, as in medicine, takes decades of persistence, and then some. Andrew Miller is an anaesthetist and director of the Federal AMA