Behind the Badge - Gordon Cheyne

We settled back to hear Gordon reveal all the secret and not-so-secret stories of his life.

He was born in Scotland and spent his teenage years in South America, before returning to Scotland to finish his schooling at Aberdeen Grammar School. He graduated in Medicine at the University of Aberdeen; and then spent most of his working life in Anaesthesia in Melbourne, Australia.  Married since 1963 to Sheila, with 3 sons and 4 grandchildren, they now all live in Melbourne. His lifelong sport is Rugby Union, initially as a player and referee, and now as a referee coach.

At that point of his talk he felt that going on to describe what he did in that field would not be as interesting as a discussion on an aspect of Rotary that has taken his full attention.

He joined Rotary in 1973, has been a Club President 3½  times, and currently edits the District 9800 weekly Bulletin, “The Networker”. He is Assistant Governor for District 9800’s Beachside Cluster, and is a Paul Harris Fellow, supporting The Rotary Foundation as a member of the Paul Harris Society of District 9800.

He spoke of some of his heroes in the field of human population control and human development.

-   Dr Thomas Malthus 1766-1834 was a demographer and political economist who wrote that despite the great wealth brought by trade, poor houses and workhouses were rife and that population would have to be controlled to avoid further situations of poverty and poor health.

-   Then Arch Klumph, the R.I President who declared that Rotary should “Do Good in the World” that led to the creation of the Rotary Foundation which then gave Rotarians an instrument to address the problems that had resulted from the predictions of Dr Malthus.

-   He also spoke of the actress Audrey Hepburn who, as United Nations Ambassador in 1988, did so much good in the poorest of poor countries that she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Gordon’s interests lie with the Rotarian Initiative for Population and Development (http://www.rifpd.org/index.shtml) which promotes education on the issue of population, access to family health care, adequate nutrition and enable individuals to make informed and responsible decisions about issues such as child spacing in a way that is in keeping with their personal values and cultural and religious considerations.

Gordon then asked us to consider some horrifying facts:

Each day over 25,000 children age five and below die from starvation - that's 9 million children every year. (Starvation due to internal wars accounts for less than 10%)

350,000 mothers die every year, or one mother every minute, from Abortion, Childbirth, and Complications of Pregnancy.  "Nearly all these maternal deaths could be prevented" says the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Similarly, UNICEF says "Believe it or not: Family Planning could bring more benefits at less cost than any other single technology now available to the Human Race."

World population has increased fourfold in a hundred years.

We have lost 27,000 species of wildlife every year, as agricultural land is swallowed up in the urban spread and human encroachment.

46,000 people die every day of hunger and over 2.8 billion of the world’s population live below the poverty line of US$2 per day.

Rotary International is now moving to address these human tragedies through its programs of Humanitarian Service.  So, finally, Gordon urged us to take part in the Rotary projects that were addressing these problems, and to aim for a better world as Arch Klumph would have wished us to do.

By Lawrence Reddaway, drawing on texts by Gordon Cheyne and Jack Ings