Historic Greenslopes
About This Site

This site was created by Chris Strakosch, an endocrinologist attached to Greenslopes Private Hospital.

Chris has a life long interest in history and is also chairman of the weekly medical ground rounds at the hospital. To mark the end of each year he gives a presentation to the hospital doctors and medical students on a historical rather than the usual medical theme. The "Discovery of Insulin" is pertinent to his line of work but Greenslopes still has a lot of patients who are veterans of the Second World War and subsequent engagements.

The other presentations are to provide the staff with a background to the conflicts which have involved their patients.

Discovery of Insulin

The discovery of Insulin, in Toronto, Canada in 1921-22, was one of the great medical breakthroughs of all time. Prior to this, Insulin Dependent Diabetes had been a universally fatal disease. In celebrating this discovery, we remind ourselves what life was like for patients before this time and we are encouraged to look to the future with hope that further breakthroughs will bring about the final defeat of this still potent and watchful enemy.

I have been involved in the treatment of diabetes for more than 20 years and have had the good fortune to have worked in the city where the discovery was made. This monograph is a tribute to the researchers past and present who have dedicated their lives to the understanding of diabetes and to the patients who have to contend with this disease daily.

Chris Strakosch
Associate Professor of Medicine
University Endocrine Department
Greenslopes Private Hospital
Brisbane Australia

Healing the Wounds of War

A History of the Greenslopes Hospital

The story of the Greenslopes hospital is a slice of Australian national history in the 20th century. Since it was opened in the darkest days of World War Two, the hospital has provided a special quality of care and convalescence for the serving and discharged military personnel. Its first patients were servicemen from battlefronts in the Pacific, Europe, and North Africa and the Middle East.

In 1946, the hospital had 900 staff and cared for up to 1,120 patients. Among those returning were men disfigured by the brutality and deprivations of Japanese POW and slave labour camps. The staff at Greenslopes helped to rekindle the faint sparks of life left in their bodies.

Here, many �Diggers� who served in the legendary World War One battles of Gallipoli, France, and the Holy Land came for treatment in their latter years and spent their final days.

Through Asian conflicts in Malaya, Korea, Vietnam, the Greenslopes hospital continued to expand the range of facilities and services to care for those who, literally, risked life and limb for their country.

Now a private hospital, Greenslopes continues to provide care to veteran service Australian men and women.

In this short history to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the hospital, Dr Chris Strakosch and Dr Carolyn de Wytt, tell how �Greenslopes�, as it is most commonly known to veterans, came to be and how it expanded to meet the demands of the day. The authors both work at Greenslopes and are keen military medicine historians.

Origins of The Great War

The First World War, initially known as the Great War, or as Churchill called it, the beginning of the Second 30 Years War, is slipping from living memory and soon the last survivors will be gone. This war, more than any other, is held in popular opinion to be the epitome of futility. In Australia, in particular, far removed from the battle lines, the war is thought to have seen Australian lives wasted in a senseless war on behalf of the British Empire. Essentially peace loving peoples are thought to have been goaded into war by cynical politicians with the aid of the most crude propaganda. Both the extreme left and extreme right wings of politics view the First World War as either being due to, or greatly influenced by, an international financial conspiracy.

This paper, which looks at the origins of the First World War, will outline a dissenting opinion. The major force driving international tensions, which led to war, was the pursuit of national prestige, or at least efforts to avoid, or take revenge for, national humiliation. Rather than being reluctantly dragged into war by their political leaders, the politicians of all the combatants were able to count on the enthusiastic support of their people.

Shogunate Strikes Back

Foreword

This presentation is one of a series given over the years by my colleague Dr Carolyn De Wytt and myself at Greenslopes Private Hospital. Greenslopes was founded as a military hospital and the patients are still mainly of service background. These talks are designed to acquaint staff with the background of some of the conflicts patients have been involved with.

Introduction

In World War II, the enemy Axis Powers consisted of three major nations. There were significant differences in the way they were perceived. Italy, the initial Fascist power, was not considered a serious adversary and changed sides in 1943, joining the Allies. Germany was in the power of the Nazis and Allied propaganda was aimed mainly at the Nazis themselves, rather than the German people. The attack was often condensed to the person of Hitler himself. Churchill, for example, when speaking on his support of Communism after Germany invaded Russia in 1941, said "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

The Japanese, however, came out of the war probably with the worst reputation of any of the powers since there was no sub-group to focus on and the enemy were simply known as �The Japs�. Any atrocities committed by the Japanese in the 1930�s and 40�s were thought to be due to cultural or even racial factors. President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, took serious scientific advice as to whether there were any biological reason for the Japanese being so different to Europeans. Wartime propaganda posters usually depicted the Japanese in caricature as a buck-toothed, cross-eyed, somewhat ape like Asian figure.

As far as Australia is concerned, it is almost as if Japan is populated by two separate peoples. Firstly there are the "Japs", our enemy in World War II, a fanatical and cruel race. Secondly there are the Japanese, an industrious, cultured and peaceful people, our allies in World War I and our major trading partner. In this paper, I present a personal view as to the cause of this dichotomy and what was different for the Japanese in the 1930�s and 40�s.

The Great War, a Personal View

The First World War, originally known as the "Great War" or as Churchill put it the beginning of the second Thirty Years War, has just slipped from living memory. This war, more than any others, is held to be the epitome of futility. It is often viewed from this distance in a rather patronizing way; gallant, but hopelessly naive soldiers, slaughtered by the tactics of generals, who, especially in the case of the British leaders, were thought to have been too stupid to think of any other way of conducting this titanic struggle.

This monograph gives a dissenting opinion and follows an earlier monograph published above, which looked into the origins of the struggle which left consequences which are still to be resolved.

Guiding the Healing Hand

In 2010 Greenslopes Hospital celebrates forty years since a a medical school was established on the campus. I have worked at Greenslopes Hospital for thirty of those years, initially as a registrar and finally as an Associate Professor and Head of the Discipline of Medicine at the University Clinical School so I was delighted to be asked to write a history of the Greenslopes Teaching Hospital.

Though not entirely without the problems associated with any human institution, Greenslopes has always been a very pleasant and inspirational place to work. In the earlier days of my time here, most of the patients were veterans of both the World Wars and I was ever moved by their fortitude and humor in the face of adversity. It has also been my great good fortune to have worked with some very gifted and dedicated doctors, initially as my teachers and later as my colleagues. It is to the patients whom we are privileged to serve and to the teachers who inspired me that this booklet is dedicated.

The US Medical Military Service

The year 2012 marks the 70th Anniversary of the arrival of the United States military forces in Australia to confront the Empire of Japan. I am a physician at what is now Greenslopes Private Hospital but which during World War II was 112 Australian General Hospital (Greenslopes). I have been very interested in the history of this hospital and had previously presented a lecture on it to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). I was thus delighted to be further invited to contribute to a seminar �General Douglas MacArthur-Agent of Change� organised by the MacArthur Museum Brisbane to mark the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the general in Brisbane. My part was a thirty minute presentation on the US military hospitals in South East Queensland during World War II.

As I researched the area further, I was fascinated to find the enormous extent of the US medical presence. By 1944, there were some 9000 US military hospital beds in the Brisbane area at a time when the population of Brisbane was only 350000. The focus of the research was on the large General Hospitals meaning that the several other smaller hospitals such as 153rd and 166th Station Hospitals, Southport and 172nd Station Hospital, Indooroopilly, as well as many small camp hospitals have not been included. I felt, however, that it would be unfortunate if the research on the hospitals I did concentrate on were to be lost after the seminar, and hoped that this booklet would serve as a reminder of the enormous role Brisbane played as the major base for US armed forces engaged in the Southwest Pacific Campaign during World War II.

A History of the Jews in the Ukraine

For someone, like myself, who grew up in the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust, (my father was a Jewish refugee from Vienna), the names Ukrainians and Jews are linked by the iron fetters of World War II in which �Ukrainian� guards gained a terrible reputation for cruelty. Now, however, the President of the Ukrainian Republic is a Jew, as was a recent Prime Minister, and Ukraine has one of the lowest levels of extremist voting in Europe. This monograph is an effort to understand the origins of the past antisemitism prevalent in the Ukraine and which was used by President Putin of the Russian Federation to justify the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, some 80 years after the German onslaught.

Ukraine holds a special place in European history, since this fertile land was the area in which the horse-based culture of the Yamnaya people developed some 6000 years ago. These people, who were to become ferocious horse warriors, surged through Europe and Northern India, introducing horses and wheeled wagons as well as their language, known as Proto-Indo European. It seems that it was mainly young male warriors who invaded and wherever they went the Y chromosome of the indigenous peoples disappeared. The local men were apparently killed or prevented from taking local females and these females may have preferred to be associated with the new dominant males. In Britain, about four and a half thousand years ago, these paler skinned and blue-eyed people seem to have almost completely replaced the darker complexioned farmers who had migrated from the Southern Mediterranean area. Proto-Indo European was to become the origin of most European languages as well as the Sanskrit based languages in India. The descendants of these horse warriors are traditionally known as Caucasians, though the Caucasus is a mountainous area and not likely to be the place where the steppe dwelling horses were first domesticated. Europeans should probably be known instead as Ukrainians.

The Jews in Central Europe were concentrated in Poland and the Western part of the Russian Empire known as the �Pale of Settlement�, which included Western Ukraine. Since these areas were under the jurisdiction of several different countries and the borders between them changed frequently, any history of the Jews in the Ukraine will involve the history of several different countries over long periods of time. In order to maintain a flow of history of each country and the Jews resident there, several events and places will be referred to on multiple occasions. For example, the history of the Jews in Lviv, previously known as Lemberg and then Lvov, would involve the story of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Russia and the Soviet Union as well as Ukraine.

This monograph aims to go back to the origins of both the Jews and the Ukrainians and follow their history together through the centuries to better understand the present situation.

A Tale of Two Jimnas

In 2018, my daughter and son-in-law bought an old worker�s cottage in Jimna, a small town in the hills about 50 kms west of Nambour on the Sunshine Coast, as a holiday retreat. My wife and myself had a small share in the purchase and enjoy spending time in the bushland, in this tranquil, out of the way setting.

The town seemed to have an interesting, if somewhat confusing, history. Though the present site had started as sawmilling town in the 1920s newspapers and historical documents referred to Jimna in the 1860s. Further research revealed that the initial name Jimna referred to a short lived gold mining township which had sprung up following the discovery of gold on Sunday and Jimna creeks about 10 kms southeast of the present Jimna. The Post Office elected to transfer the name of the now defunct gold mine to the new sawmilling township at the present site in the 1920s.

The following is a history of human habitation of the region and a history of gold mining and the timber industry in general and these activities in the two Jimnas in particular.

A History of Palestine

Australia presently has members of her armed forces engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is the continuing dispute between Israel and the Arabs over Palestine that is sending shock waves through the Middle East and directly and indirectly contributing to the continuing turbulence of the region. Knowledge of the background to this festering dispute will aid in understanding the continuing conflicts in the Holy Land. It is however, very difficult to give an even handed summary of the situation since by treating both sides equally a position supporting the existence of the state of Israel has already been taken. Israel offends by its very presence. Moreover, most of the academic history of the dispute has come from the Israeli side since Israel has a Westminster type cabinet system which releases cabinet papers after 30 to 50 years. These papers are available to academic historians who do not have access to similar documents from the Arab side which remain inaccessible even to Arab historians.