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No Turning Back
Roger Rees
Roger J Rees is Emeritus Professor of Disability Research in the School of Medicine at Flinders University, Adelaide. He was educated at the London School of Economics, Monash University and the University of New England. He has taught in Australia at the University of Canberra and Flinders University.
He has held teaching fellowship positions at Arizona State University, the Bureau of Child Research University of Kansas, the brain trauma unit at New York University and at the Medical Research Centre (MRC) Cambridge University.
His principal research interests have been in the neurosciences with a focus on rehabilitation from brain injury. He has run a trauma rehabilitation program for people with brain injury, neurological disorders and those diagnosed with HIV.
He travelled in Ethiopia and walked with the Hamar tribe as part of his preparation for No Turning Back. This is his first book of fiction.
Also by Roger Rees
Parents as Language Therapists
DELSC (Developmental Language Skills Curriculum) Volumes: 1 Orientation Skills 2. Receptive Language 3. Expressive Language
Plateaus and Summits Transition to Employment for People with Brain Injury
Locked In State, in; Science at its Sharpest (edited by Robyn Williams)
Re-writing the Script – Influence of Context on Behaviour (including rewriting the script video for television)
The Art of the Possible Review of the Royal Rehabilitation Centre
Sydney Interrupted Lives: Rehabilitation and Learning following Brain Injury
Out of Calamity – Stories of Trauma Survivors (Preface by Dr Norman Swan)
Roger Rees has also written a number of broadcast scripts for the ABC Science Show and published many articles in journals and newspapers.
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
Roger Rees © 2017
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use
as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced
by any process without prior written permission from the publisher.
Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to
the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers,
PO Box 52, Ormond, Victoria, Australia 3204.
First published 2017
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry (pbk)
Creator: Rees, Roger J., author.
Title: No Turning Back / Roger Rees.
ISBN: 9781925272802 (paperback)
9781925282528 (ebook)
Subjects: Anthropologists – Australia – Fiction
Physicians – Ethiopia – Fiction
HIV-positive persons – Fiction.
Cover design: Gittus Graphics
In childhood you own little more than your secret places, the thoughts in your head.
Tim Winton, Island Home
… once a choice has been made it cannot be reversed; every event has its inevitable consequence; the clock goes on ticking.
David Malouf, The Writing Life
And here, in Age, I feel the need
Of some Divining Colander
To hold the best of all since done
And let the rest slip through.
Rosemary Dobson, Rosemary Dobson Collected
for Max Kemp
1: Travelling
Map of Ethiopia
Addis Ababa, 1985
IT WAS A TIME of tumult. The second great Ethiopian famine of the twentieth century was ending. Detritus of human and animal corpses were everywhere, and in the countryside death’s pallor was on every face.
Slowly, very slowly, food distribution was beginning to reach isolated villages, but only after a million people had died. Unrest and anger, accompanied by a sense of hopelessness, was felt in every village and small town.
Spend a few weeks with me and you will learn what famine does to people and how we can make sure this never happens again, wrote the Ethiopian anthropologist Zeno Wolde to his visiting students, among whom were the young Australian anthropologist Louise Davitt and her British colleague Carmen Smith. They had just flown into Addis Ababa from Heathrow Airport to begin a month’s fieldwork with Zeno.
Louise, originally from country South Australia, was twenty-three: confident, blonde, tall, slim and adventurous. Carmen, a twenty-four-year-old Lancastrian, was short, dark-haired and rather plump. As an independent, working-class girl, she was well read and had a passion for fun and travel. They were both writers … Louise was a poet and brilliantly observant; Carmen was a chronicler of travel and history with, like Louise, impeccable research talents. They had met nine months before at London University, where both were enrolled in a postgraduate doctoral program. Within a week of introducing themselves they were friends.
They were picked up at the airport by Abebe, Zeno’s Addis University driver, in an old diesel Nissan Patrol 4WD. He greeted them with smiles and enthusiasm. ‘Selam (Hello), selam, merhaba, welcome!’ he exclaimed as he shook hands with Louise and Carmen.
Abebe drove from the airport along hectic, crumbling roads. They saw beggars in rags alongside smart, brightly dressed men and women; lone barefoot children skipping through the dust and gravel thrown up by heavy trucks; well-groomed children walking hand in hand with parents; laden donkey carts alongside chauffeur-driven Mercedes; men driving scrawny goats beside six-axle trucks carrying cattle and produce to the city market. AK47-armed Derg soldiers were
