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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-05-15 Daily Xml
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Skillicorn, Mr E.K.

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:23): Today, I grieve the death of E. Keith Skillicorn AM, a longstanding former Florey constituent, who passed away on 13 April this year, aged 94, at Gaynes Park Manor, Joslin. Keith was a truly selfless, humble, compassionate and loving man with a deep desire to help others, especially the most marginalised, poor and needy. Keith was a noted Australian who spent 31 years in India and Bangladesh with, and strongly supported by, his wife, the equally remarkable Ruth who passed on 12 May 2008. They were both cited with an Order of Australia on their return to Adelaide in 1988 for service to agriculture and the management of leprosy in India and Bangladesh—an abridged statement of their selfless work for others.

Keith was born on 13 June 1923 in Sydney and grew up in Melbourne. His family were not well off, and they struggled to see him through high school, so university was out of the question. During World War II, he was an aeronautical electrician posted to Charters Towers to replace wiring in aeroplanes damaged in war sorties.

During this time, he saw films of actual war events. These hit him hard, particularly images of native grass huts being bombed and burned, with people on fire running out of them. He felt very keenly that he was in part responsible for their torment, even though he was not serving on the front line, because by fixing the planes he had made it possible. Consequently, he determined to be trained to become a missionary at the Churches of Christ, College of the Bible in Glen Iris, Melbourne, so he could compensate for his contribution to the suffering during the war.

Fast-forward to the 1950s, which saw Keith posted to the forgotten region in India, an area where there were few services and which had a high population of native-born Indians and others of the lowest caste. The people in the region numbered about 150,000. Keith's home base, his clinic and mobile clinic provided the only assistance available through his organisation, the ACDP, which provided education and training in agriculture, animal husbandry, rural education, transport and public health.

For today's information I am indebted to Carole-Anne Fooks from the Modbury Church of Christ, and Paul Skillicorn, Keith's middle son. Both gave a wonderful tribute at the memorial service. Keith's innovative use of his resources achieved close to universal immunisation coverage, unheard of in India. He also built common infrastructure—dams, irrigation works and roads—that worked to bring communities closer together.

The infrastructure ACDP provided covered the full region. During famines, Keith pioneered search algorithms designed to identify, save and serve the most at risk members of the larger community: the elderly, the bereft, the outcasts, the chronically ill, female infants and the female infant twin child.

It was health care and medicine, however, where Keith truly excelled. Presented with all manner of maladies, he simply fixed or cured them. He prodigiously read medical and healthcare-related textbooks, probably 10 times what any top-ranked doctor might ever have managed to study, and he covered a greater spectrum of cases. Few knew more about medicine and public health than Keith, and no-one has done more with the knowledge they possessed.

Unconstrained by allopathic medicine, institutional and peer constraints, Keith was free to venture into homeopathic as well as Ayurvedic and Yunani medicine. He extracted and blended the very best from all four legitimate forms of medicine. He performed appendectomies, flesh and skin grafts, and even reconstructed faces. He extracted thousands of teeth and dealt with many cases involving cancer, particularly of the mouth and larynx. He built an entire TB ward, treating and curing hundreds of TB patients.

Over the years, he and his immediate team immunised hundreds of thousands of patients, notably against smallpox and DPT. Keith ushered in nutritional care for pregnant women and modern midwifery while also dramatically lowering the prevalence of the postpartum shun inflicted on new mothers. Keith pioneered nutrition as a critical element of treatment and public health long before hospitals and doctors even began thinking of doing so. Over the years, he treated and rendered functional literally thousands of people and became famous for this with whole extended families coming from hundreds of miles away through jungles just to be treated by him.

It was leprosy, however, where he truly excelled and where the foundation of his legacy lies. Over the years, it is estimated that Keith and his immediately supervised teams treated and cured 30,000 patients. This transcends by a full decimal point what any other person or immediate group or team has ever treated and cured.

Keith's lifetime of selfless work led to stunning achievements, all across the very broadest of spectra and all done with a personal posture of absolute humility. Other tributes at Keith's funeral were given by family and friends, including a heartfelt acknowledgement of Keith's compassion and inclusiveness from the Hindu community of Adelaide.

E. Keith Skillicorn was a man of exceptional talent, generosity of spirit and intelligent development in agricultural methods and in medicine, especially in the treatment of leprosy, but above all he was a loving and compassionate human being who aimed to be an ambassador for Christ through his actions and love for others. He and Ruth will always be remembered and truly missed.

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