‘Why don’t men look after themselves?’: Peter Dornan on what he’s learnt in 50 years
After more than 50 years working as a leading physiotherapist in Brisbane, Peter Dornan, author, sports medicine pioneer and cancer survivor reveals his thoughts on men’s health
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Is there an antidote to toxic masculinity?
Is there one man out there still embodying what might be termed “traditional masculine qualities’’ and offering a guide into adulthood for a generation of confused young males who believe kickboxing, gambling on crypto currencies, high-powered sports cars and sexual promiscuity provide the pathway to manliness?
In suburban Brisbane, light years removed from the world of Andrew Tate – the Romanian-based martial arts expert whose online “university’’ is tutoring millions of adolescent males across the globe on Tate’s version of how to live a meaningful life – a retiring Brisbane physiotherapist with powerful insight into the masculine psyche has fashioned an alternative view on manhood.
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Peter Dornan, 82, has lived (and gives every indication he will go on living) an extraordinary life.
Sculptor, author, one-time Queensland welterweight boxing champion and mountain climber, the physiotherapist who has seen more than 50,000 individual patients across his five decades of work at his Toowong practice, became a pioneer in sports medicine and the instigator of the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia now boasting 10,000 members, and has been thinking about the changing role of men for much of his life.
Ever since the raw farm boy from Kingaroy came to Brisbane Boys’ College at Toowong as a 13-year-old, and fought back after classmates tried to force him into an initiation ceremony, he’s been contemplating the nature of what might be an alternative label for toxic masculinity – “male belligerence’’.
The degrading initiation ceremony usually involved boys having their genitals smeared with toothpaste or shoe polish, and was widely accepted as a ritual in several Australian schools, the military and even among young apprentices in factories and mills who often had to confront the ordeal of being “greased’’. In Dornan’s own words he “resisted strongly’’.
He was soon in a full-blown fight with one of his antagonists, and Dornan flattened the boy in a flurry of fists, sending the unequivocal message that he would not be participating in the ritual.
In doing so, he learned two things.
Firstly, getting a “rep’’ (reputation) as being handy with your fists increases your status within male culture. Secondly, male culture can be utterly destructive to those who wither and submit to its violent baptisms.
“I didn’t enjoy the experience, but I did learn about the benefits of assertion,’’ he writes in his recently published book, In Search of Manhood.
“I realised youthful male culture appreciated the ‘have a go’ attitude. The incident immediately endowed me with respect.’’
Yet deeper down, he felt unsettled at how much damage was being done to those who could not fight back against the bullying involved in an initiation ceremony.
“I was quietly troubled because I realised a lot of boys could be broken by this experience.
“I made up my mind to never inflict this on anybody else.’’
He was several years ahead of the curve.
The school later outlawed the tradition known in America as “hazing’’ and in Australia as “bastardisation” – the forced humiliation, degradation or abuse of a new recruit into an institution or workplace – and today it would prompt expensive lawsuits if attempted.
Dornan went on to enjoy boxing as a sport to the point he became Queensland welterweight champion at aged 18.
But, even as he still pummels a punching bag each morning at his Bardon home to stay fit, the glamorous world of sporting superstardom (boxing was a very high-profile sport in Australia in the ’60s) was not to be his destiny.
His father gently steered him away from the ring, insisting the boy had too good a brain to have it compromised by years of head blows.
Dad had also sold the substantial farm the family owned outside Kingaroy, cutting off the potential for a career in primary industry.
So Dornan did what many men did – mucked about, bought a sports car, got girlfriends and tried alcohol along with a few different jobs including a stint as a clerk at Greenslopes Hospital where a friendly doctor instilled in him the idea of medicine as a career.
But he settled on physiotherapy.
“I don’t think I could have passed the exams to become a doctor, but I thought physiotherapy would be interesting,” Dornan says.
He discovered most of his classmates at the University of Queensland were women and he ended up being the only male to graduate in his class. By April 1967 his adult life was well underway. He had married Dimity Crist, a Queensland speech therapist who has built a celebrated career herself, kicked off his own private practice and joined the Sports Medicine Federation of Australia.
Queensland Rugby Union had suggested that he, rather than the traditional ambulance bearer, run on to the field at Ballymore when a player was injured and soon he was professionally involved with numerous sporting bodies as sports medicine grew in stature.
He became the inaugural physiotherapist for the Australian rugby union team, the Australian national rugby league team, the Queensland rugby union team, the Australian Cricket team as well as Australian Rules, basketball, and national surf life saving.
Dornan found about 90 per cent of his patients were males, largely because women did not then play many contact sports.
Along the way he contracted prostate cancer in 1996 at age 52, faced down his own depression and despair, and began the first meetings with fellow sufferers which morphed into the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia.
His professional life, where he learned of the inner thoughts of often high-profile sportsmen who engaged in contact sports, fused with his determination to confront and defeat cancer prompting perhaps his deepest bout of introspection on the entire notion of being a man.
“I started asking myself the question – why don’t men look after themselves, why did I know nothing about my condition?’’ he asks.
Society was not furnishing him with answers.
“At that stage, I could find no research on prostate cancer in Australia and no other men to talk to and no real help to deal with the side-effects of treatment.’’
For a healthy, athletic and self-reliant man such as himself, the diagnosis had become a nightmare.
“Cancer stripped me of my sense of control, essential to effective care. The question of how to restore it was seriously perplexing. As a man I lived the role of being averse to sympathy, wary of pity and in denial so that I knew almost nothing about cancer management.’’
Instead of giving in (and he did contemplate but dismiss the notion of suicide with the thought “you can do better than that!’’) he worked on his recuperation, wrote a book Conquering Incontinence – still used in prostate cancer support groups today – and then, just to celebrate life and victory, climbed Mt Kilimanjaro at age 60 in 2003.
His philosophy on maleness is by no means negative, and his hostility to the brand of masculinity promoted by Tate and fellow travellers is such that he refuses to use the man’s name.
“I don’t want to give people like that oxygen.’’ But he does believe evolution hardwired the male psyche to exhibit certain characteristics which once ensured the propagation of the species.
From humanity’s earliest days 200,000 years ago on the eastern African Savannah, men were raised to be risk takers, successful hunters and providers and protectors.
The job of men was to both sustain the tribe and protect it from the tribe just over the hill.
Those requirements seeped into the male DNA, still controlling men’s minds today in the form of the three Ps – “procreate, protect and provide’’.
“From the earliest days, boys were taught that they must have a career,’’ Dornan says.
“They must have a valid vocation, a means to survive and provide for themselves, their family, their tribe and extended community.
“They are taught it is a manly thing to spend long days in the field, hunting, ploughing, milking cows, mustering or choosing demanding careers in medicine, law, music, the arts, business, engineering or any of the trades.’’ Yet society no longer rewards the work-obsessed, taciturn male who suppresses his own emotions, nor tolerates the male who believes violence is an acceptable form of conflict resolution.
Instead, men, masculinity and even fatherhood have changed dramatically.
“Fathers can be straight or gay, married or single, adoptive or step, stay-at-home or working,’’ Dornan writes.
That means, in essence, gender equality. But for those determined to pursue gender equality, he has a somewhat pointed suggestion. “Try to support a gender equality education and promotion campaign with the emphasis on engaging men and boys because the best place to start is with educating young men.’’
He has been a great supporter of the “Merle Pledge.’’
Merle Thornton, who died last year, was an Australian feminist famous for her 1965 protest at Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel where she and Rosalie Bogner chained themselves to the bar rail to protest the exclusion of women from public bars in Queensland.
In 2020 the University of Queensland adopted and initiated the Merle Pledge, which increases the visibility and contribution of women in public and professional forums.
Gender equality, Dornan believes, makes sense in a modern world, and the term means freeing not only women from societal constraints and expectations, but men as well. As for how men negotiate the world of romance in an atmosphere of gender equality, well, he recognises it isn’t easy.
He notes his own generation was perhaps the last to inherit the concept of chivalry coming down from a largely unbroken line reaching back to knighthood and the days of the Crusades. “These ideals proclaim men should aspire to be perfect gentlemen, faithful, courteous to women, pure, brave, stoic and fearless, unsparing of self, bowing before God and womankind,’’ he says.
Those sentiments can now be greeted with disdain, if not outright contempt.
Any corporate executive pulling out a chair for a female colleague at a board meeting now takes a risk. The gesture might be interpreted as signalling the woman is weak and in need of assistance.
Similarly, flirting between the sexes is filled with peril.
“It can disadvantage either of the two people involved and be unsettling to other members witnessing the display,’’ he says.
“It is actually fraught everywhere and in many instances is deemed “inappropriate”.
It may be a fallout from the Me Too era, but he suspects we are giving up being spontaneous, unselfconscious or friendly.
“Being overly familiar now has inherent risk, perhaps a loss for both genders.’’
Yet he believes men should take the risk to establish romantic relationships with women, partly because the partnership may save his life.
“The data is pretty clear on this point – men who have a strong relationship with a partner, whether married or not, live longer and are happier.’’
His own relationship with Dimity has thrived for more than half a century and, regardless of their circumstances, they take time out most days for a cocktail hour where they discuss events and plans and challenges.
Dornan’s been showered with awards, as has Dimity, and they’re too numerous to fully catalogue but include a Member of the General Division of the Order of Australia (AM), the Commemorative 2000 Australian Sports Medal and Senior Australian of the Year for Queensland.
As for the years ahead, he sees blue skies and limitless opportunity.
Two adult children, Melissa and Roderick, are providing a growing tribe of grandkids, he will continue to do two days a week for the next couple of months in the Toowong physiotherapy practice which he recently sold, and which he has dedicated so much energy to over the past decades with the help of his executive assistant Carol Marchant, and he has a lot more painting, sculpting, writing and thinking to do in his ninth decade on Earth.
He readily recognises he won’t have as much influence on the changing nature of masculinity as will the generation of his grandsons – the millennials born between 1980 and 2000. And, despite the global angst over the impacts of toxic masculinity given such prominence in global media, he likes what he sees. The “digital natives’’ that he has become acquainted with are tolerant of gender diversity, challenge the hierarchal status-quo, and possess the strength to not only reject harmful stereotypes, but redefine and reimagine what it is to be a man.
“We may have some distance to go,
but I like where the modern young man
is going.’’ ■
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