Bob Marley, syphilis and the power of letters: Professor Robert Parker on a decade leading doctors in the NT

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The story that has stuck with Associate Professor Robert Parker was told by his former boss Dr Alan Walker in 1989.

Dr Walker said that when he arrived in the NT more than two decades earlier, Aboriginal patients did not trust the hospital.

“They thought it was somewhere people went to die,” Professor Parker recalls.

“Dr Walker remembered the case of a young man with peritonitis from his appendix whose family came and took him away again.

“He had to work very hard to get people confident to come to the hospital and be treated.”

The story has inspired Professor Parker throughout his 11 years as AMA NT president.

“Whenever I did interviews, I would always be careful to praise the hospital, even though it was under significant stress, to give people the confidence to keep coming,” the psychiatrist tells AusDoc.

Even with MPs and CEOs, his default stance was supportive.

“I tried to be positive with the view that, when I needed to criticise people, they would pay attention.

“I was not constantly harping about this and that.

“It is important to recognise the game that is being played. Making unrealistic demands of the government or CEOs was just going to put them offside.” 

Professor Parker, who handed the presidency to emergency physician Dr John Zorbas in May, says he did not step down earlier because there was “no-one else to do the job”. 

“I approached various people, but they got interested in other stuff, so I had to continue with the work until Dr Zorbas turned up. He was obviously quite keen to take over.

“He is a very talented and intelligent young man.”

However, Dr Zorbas faces a Country Liberal Government with “quite a different agenda”, Professor Parker says.

The agenda “of locking people up and no money”.

For example, Professor Parker says the previous territory Labor Government committed to a new morgue at Royal Darwin Hospital after he had written an open letter to former Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt in 2020.

However, he says the current government has cut the funding.

“We wanted to build a new morgue at Royal Darwin because the old morgue has not got an appropriate grieving area,” he says.

“You can walk down the side of the hospital, and you will find 20 Aboriginal people sitting on a footpath next to the car park because there is nowhere to grieve inside.”

Professor Parker first arrived in the territory in 1977, not as a doctor but on an archaeological dig. 

He spent three years on the Tiwi Islands working in Aboriginal arts, where he met his wife, an Aboriginal health worker, and became inspired to study medicine. 

“I went off and did medicine at the University of Newcastle; I had good fortune to get in.”

After working at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, he returned to Darwin to finish his psychiatry training and never left.

Politically, the NT provided an “interesting environment” because of its tiny population.

“It has always reminded me of the Bob Marley song Burnin’ and Lootin’ and the lyric, ‘How many rivers do you have to cross to talk to the boss?'” Professor Parker says.

“When I was working in NSW, I was aware of how many layers of bureaucracy there were between you and the person that mattered.

“But in the territory, there are only two layers: the person in charge of the hospital and the CEO.”

He says one of his most useful presidential acts was writing another letter to Greg Hunt, which “cobbled together” data illustrating the pressure on hospitals.

“The data showed that territory hospitals based on separation criteria were 2-3 times as busy as other hospitals in Australia.

“That letter did me good for four or five years. I constantly referred to it whenever I did talkback radio.”

But Mr Hunt was unhappy.

“He thought the NT Government had got me to write it.

“He went off and said they were the most incompetent government in Australia and ought to be sacked.

“It was quite amusing at the time.”

Meanwhile, a political act that infuriated Professor Parker was former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman cutting sexual health services.

Doctors believed the act had caused the syphilis epidemic to spiral out of control across Australia.

“It started in Western Queensland and quickly spread to the NT, WA, East Australia and the Pit Lands [APY Lands] in SA,” Professor Parker says.

“At one stage, there were 800 Aboriginal people with syphilis and no co-ordinated effort to try to deal with it.”

With the help of his colleague, Professor Bart Currie, Professor Parker developed a framework for the AMA about how a national centre for disease control might work.

They wanted the centre to address the syphilis epidemic, but it took COVID-19 for the Federal Government to commit.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control will launch on 1 January, 2026.

“I am proud to have been involved in that,” Professor Parker says.

Another critical Aboriginal health issue is rheumatic heart disease, which Aboriginal people are 20 times more likely to die from than non-Aboriginal people.

“It was very distressing to see Aboriginal kids as young as six with congestive heart failure because of rheumatic heart disease,” Professor Parker says.

He persuaded the AMA to do something. The result was the End Rheumatic Heart Disease Coalition, where researchers, doctors and policymakers looked for solutions.

“Then I heard about a potential vaccine for group A strep that was being discussed in London,” Professor Parker says.

“Through former AMA president Dr Tony Bartone, I managed to get Professor John Carapetis [the Telethon Kids Institute director] talking to Greg Hunt about this vaccine.

“I was not involved in the proposal, but I teed up the conversation.”

The Federal Government gave $35 million to vaccine development and tasked Professor Carapetis with leading the rheumatic heart disease vaccine initiative. 

“If that works, it could eradicate rheumatic heart disease within a generation,” Professor Parker says.

As the longest continuously serving president in AMA NT history, Professor Parker believes that, if you are in the job, “You do not just sit there looking important and going to dinner parties.

“Not that I got invited anyway,” he jokes.

“But you are there to advocate. I have been privileged to do that.”