John Rogers: Just off the top of my head, I think Victoria has about 49 dentists to 100,000 population. In metropolitan Melbourne, it’s over 60 per 100,000 and in rural areas it’s in the low 40s. Looking at public dental waiting lists, in some rural centres, for example Portland, it’s been very difficult to recruit and retain dentists so getting a public dental appointment can take more than five years. In these centres, private dental appointments are also hard to come by and there are very long waits.

Garry would know where there are pockets of poor distribution around the state.

Garry Pearson: It becomes difficult to access a dentist at and beyond a three-hour radius from Melbourne.

Ann Westmore: Is there a structure that allows the School to talk to the Department about these issues?

Mike Morgan: The School is represented on a lot of the major committees that the Department of Human Services has, and on Dental Health Services Victoria committees. So there are formal conduits for information.

What’s probably more interesting is the informal flow of information that occurs. I’d be interested to know what has occurred historically because currently we have good contact and friends in the Department and it works very well, as it does for the Australian Dental Association. But it seems that in the past there have been some quite big chasms between what the School was doing and what the Government wanted.

Henry Atkinson: The School’s not supposed to work with the Government.

Mike Morgan; No, but what the Government does has an impact on what the School does.

Henry Atkinson: We’re part of the University. We’re independent, though we may depend on Government for funding at times, which is unfortunate but necessary.

Peter Reade: I don’t know when the first peripheral clinic came into being, but I suspect it was in the 1970s.

John Hales: Wasn’t John Dawkins[81] involved in setting up those regional dental clinics?

Peter Reade: Before the mid-1970s, it was the Dental Hospital more or less, along with a few agencies having dental clinics in some industries. Myer Melbourne had a clinic.

John Harcourt: I think there were one or two outside clinics when I was a student. There may have been one at Sunshine.

Henry Atkinson: The Hospital didn’t have any outside clinics, it had a van. And there was the School Dental Service.

John Rogers: At one stage there were 24 or so local governments with pre-school dental clinics, and they were often staffed by Hospital dentists.

Henry Atkinson: As Peter was saying, when these first started, there was a dentist attached to base hospitals and they expanded from that.

Mike Morgan: And the students would go down to the School Dental Service in St. Kilda Road. When Clive Wright[82] became head of School in 1990, he arranged for students to go down to the School Dental Service to do their paediatric rotation. There were about 70 chairs not being used because the numbers of dental therapists in training had decreased. It was about the time that Louise Brearley[83] joined the staff. In fact, she had a contract with the Department of Human Services and with the University, and it was her job to look after that relationship.

Ann Westmore: Historically, as you’ve said Henry, the School was independent of Government. Yet there must have been ongoing interchange on many issues, exemplified by the introduction of fluoride. What was the nature of the formal and informal relationships in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s?

Henry Atkinson: I think it was mainly done through the Hospital and the Hospital would approach the Government. Occasionally, Tony Storey would decide to get a Minister along for some reason.

Mike Morgan: His brother was a Minister, too.

Henry Atkinson: Yes, his brother was in the [Victorian] Parliament at the time.[84] But it didn’t worry Tony which side of politics he had to deal with as long as he got them along and made his point.

In those happy days, also, the Dean was a member of the Hospital Council, and there were one or two other elected members. So the School always had a voice there, as did the University.

Peter Reade: I’m not sure, ‘Atki’, it was always as positive as that. I was Dean for a couple of years and I was given the title of ‘adviser’ to the Hospital Council. I wasn’t a voting member of it. That was one of the difficulties at the time. A lot of nonsense went on in Council meetings and there were a lot of power plays.

Henry Atkinson: ‘Pansy’ Wright[85] was the best University representative when I was on as an elected member of the Hospital Council. We generally spoke to ‘Pansy’ before the meetings to put our point of view. He was a very strong supporter of the University principles of research and learning. And because of his experience in other hospitals he was very sarcastic at times about the Dental Hospital’s approach to various things.

Peter Reade: He was a very important player. I can remember arriving in Melbourne in March 1968 and the first thing that happened was that ‘Atki’ took me by the hand to meet with ‘Pansy’ Wright. The first priority was to get the new youngster on the block to get the old man’s view of things.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine