“What am I like?” he asked.

“You’re like an uncle,” she told him.

“You came to Forbes, you got to know me, you got to know my husband, you get on well with the kids and before long you’re part of the family.” 

As ‘Lakie’ retires after 34 years of medicine in Forbes, that is both the highest compliment he could receive, and the best expression of his life in this community. 

CHILDHOOD

Untung was born in a village on the outskirts of Madiun in Java, Indonesia, in 1944, just before the end of the second world war.

What is known as Indonesia now was then the Dutch East Indies. The Inlanders (Indonesian natives) did not have a proper birth registry then. His dad made up the date of birth when he enrolled him in primary school, known as public school then.  

His childhood was marked by war in Indonesia’s struggle to work out its independence from the Dutch. 

“The country was poor,” he remembers. 

“The streets in our village, which was on the outskirts of town, were dirt tracks.

“A lot of people had dirt floors, nobody had electricity or running water.”

Lakie was eight years old when word came around that children needed to enrol in school. 

“I remember when enrolment day came,” he said.

“Suddenly we were all rounded up with ‘Let’s go to school’.”

School was something of a shock to the system for a group of children whose older siblings hadn’t attended and whose parents had a literacy rate of about two per cent. 

Lakie, one of the few whose parents could read and write, quickly established himself as an excellent student, at the top of his class locally and enjoying success in national primary, junior high and high school exams topping the last two in his town and regency.

He was uncertain of his path when he finished school: he took the entrance exams for both medicine and the Institute of Technology.

His acceptance into medicine came first, so he took it.

While he says that “in those days you did whatever (course or job) you could get your hands on”, it’s clear that he found his niche when he started studying medicine in the provincial city of Surabaya.

Just one year into his studies he saw an ad on a university noticeboard offering scholarships from the Colombo plan, which was provided and organised by Australia during the Menzies era in an effort to improve the condition of third world countries by providing them with education. 

He won a place in the scheme, but his move to Australia was put on hold as he arrived in Jakarta in the wake of the alleged communist coup of 1965. 

With the nation in upheaval and his direction uncertain, Lakie was taken in by a friend for a number of months. 

“I was caught in the turmoil,” he reflects now. 

“I was very naive.

“The army held my passport because I had the same name as the alleged coup leader Colonel Untung and I came from Madiun where they had a Communist rebellion in 1948.

“I nearly didn’t make it to Sydney, but I didn’t know that until I got here.

“I learned later that the Minister of Education of that time intervened and secured the passport for me.

“If he hadn’t stepped in I could have ended up in jail or just simply disappeared.” 

OFF TO AUSTRALIA

Lakie eventually did get to Sydney - he had originally been allocated Poland as a destination - and his life changed dramatically again. 

“I had never been in a car until I was conveyed to the airport,” he said.

“My first experience of talking on the phone was in Sydney.” 

The English language proved a challenge in that first year. 

Lakie’s early schooling had been in Javanese and gradually Indonesian, the national language, was introduced and completed by the sixth grade.

English as a subject was introduced in junior high and none of his teachers actually spoke English. The English the teachers taught had been learned from the Dutch.

“I remember clearly doing an English test when I arrived in Sydney where they were talking about a sheep station, and I couldn’t distinguish between sheep and ship as it didn’t make any sense to me that sheep would need a station,” Lakie said. 

“At least a ship could do with a station or a port, so I thought they must be talking about a station or port for ships.

“I’d like to point out that the story we listened to was from a recording on the old bakelite disc!” 

Lakie can see a positive side to the language difficulty. 

“I used to translate in my head what people said to me, then had to construct an answer, mindful of the choice of words, grammar, nouns, verbs, adjectives, the subject, predicate, objects, prepositions, conjunction and so on,” he said.

With a laugh he reflects, “Unwittingly I learned to engage my brain carefully before letting out the clutch to open my mouth, which I still practice even these days.”

Although he’s aware now that he arrived in Australia when the “white Australia” policy still had strong influence and before Aboriginal people had been given citizenship rights, Lakie has always felt accepted here. 

“I had no world knowledge so my international social skills were non-existent, but it’s a good thing that I was naive because I had no preconceived ideas about people and how they were going to take me,” he said. 

A couple, Mr and Mrs Byrne, approached him when he and other students (from Laos, Thailand and Peru) happened to run into them while strolling in Glebe Point Park. 

Contact was made and Lakie started to visit them in Cabramatta and before long they became foster parents, Pa Joe and Ma Laura.

His way was smoothed by his second-year landlady who became his tutor in Australian English as well as social knowledge.

Lakie’s poor command in English and culturally different background proved a great barrier in making or establishing friendship with the mainstream Australian students, especially as they already had friends of their own. 

One of the other students was an exception and was very helpful.

“He approached me, started talking to me and taught me English,” Lake said. “He was very diligent and very patient - we have remained friends to this day.”

Challenges met, Lakie completed medical school in 1973 and went to Canberra Hospital for the first stage of his internship as a junior resident medical doctor. 

Canberra was a lonely place for a young man. Fortunately for Lakie, that was where he met a registered nurse named Mary, whom he married the following year. 

He had to choose a stream of study and settled on surgical, which after leaving Canberra at the end of 1976 took him and Mary to Wollongong (1977), Toowoomba Hospital (1979) and Royal Brisbane Hospital (1979 and 1980). 

A CAREER IN MEDICINE

Lakie passed his surgical exam in October 1980 and started looking for a place to launch his career. 

“That’s where Forbes came into the picture,” he said.

“Dr F J Kelleher was selling his practice - he was what was in those days called a GP surgeon - and I thought that would be a place to start.”

Untung and Mary moved here in March 1981 with two young children and very quickly became part of the community. 

“I learned general practice on the run and it turned out I did like it - I got on with people very well,” Lakie said. 

“I also learned psychiatry and because I didn’t know much, I listened. I found out later that’s what people wanted and needed.” 

He established the Cross Street Surgery with Dr Braganza and (his wife) Dr Lobo. 

“Life was really busy then,” Lakie said.

“When I started I was on call one week on, one week off.

“So you got one week off after 12 days straight, seven days of which you were on tap 24 hours a day - I don’t know how we survived.

“We did everything locally as far as casualty (emergency) was concerned.

“We didn’t have a retrieval team so we did a lot of the general surgical work like removing appendix or setting fractures.”

MEDICINE THEN AND NOW

The increasing transfer of patients to major centres is just one of the shifts Lakie has seen in medicine in his time in Forbes.

While it might have some benefits, he sees the need to leave town for small procedures increasingly disrupting family life. 

Another change is the increase in technology: more testing, less talking. 

“There seems to be less engagement and personal communication between doctors and patients,” Lakie said.

“Medicine is both art and science. 

“The changes that I see and feel give more and more weight to the science.” 

There is also a greater focus on lifestyle than ever and that includes the lifestyle of medical professionals. 

Many people would have noticed the changing language of medicine - you go to a medical centre rather than a doctor’s surgery.

You are a client, rather than a patient, your doctor is a healthcare provider.

They’re not just words, as far as Lakie is concerned.

“The terms they coin reflect the attitudinal changes,” he said.

It may be old-fashioned, but Lakie does still see a “doctor-patient” relationship as of a prime importance - like a father and family relationship - although others may see it as too paternalistic. 

He sees a doctor’s role as extending from the cradle to the grave and extending beyond.

“Your duty doesn’t end when the patient dies,” he said.

“I usually would like to get involved at the time of death and afterward, especially immediately after the death, that’s the critical time when the family needs the most support.”

A CHANGE OF PACE

It was his own rush trip to Orange hospital for emergency surgery in 2002 that prompted Lakie to think about scaling back his work commitments.

“That made me think, am I going to continue working the way I am working?” 

The answer was no.

“If that didn’t happen, I think I would have stopped from sheer exhaustion or burnout,” he reflects. 

“That was a blessing in disguise.” 

Lakie stopped practising general surgery and started to restrict his general practice patients.

He took courses in primary skin cancer medicine that would allow him to use his surgical skill and about 18 months ago started to focus singularly on skin cancers. 

RETIREMENT PLANS

Lakie has always kept in touch with family in Indonesia - first through letters at one shilling a stamp, more recently he and Mary have visited every couple of years. 

But he has no hesitation in describing Forbes as home as he makes his retirement plans. 

In retirement, Lakie hopes to give back to the community that has made Forbes a place he can confidently call home. 

As one of the founding members of the local Men’s Shed he looks forward to increasing involvement in what he sees as a very valuable organisation. 

“Men, notably farmers, often do not know what to do after they stop working,” he said.

Through the Men’s Shed he learned guitar, which prompted him to form a singing and guitar group called Lakie’s Larrikins. 

“We play almost any genre, we just enjoy the company and the music,” he said.

“We also entertain residents at the Mater and Jemalong Residential Village.” 

Now he’d like to try his hand at learning different instruments. 

With an interest in music and the arts, he is also involved in the Kalari River Arts Festival: he performed with the festival in 2011 and joined the drum band in 2013.

There’s also painting, community radio and relaxation classes to turn his attention to. 

THANK YOU

At this opportunity Lakie would like to thank people of Forbes for their support, loyalty and friendship extended to him during his 34 years of practice and most importantly for accepting him and his family with warmth and open arms.

He has no hesitation in saying he is happy to call Forbes home.

“Have no fear,” he said. “Lakie stays here!”