‘We didn’t know if they’d shoot us’: When Brett Sutton faced the Taliban

Brett Sutton was sitting on top of a pyramid gazing at the stars and listening to the calls of spider monkeys when he realised he’d been left behind.

It was a pitch-black Guatemala night. Everyone else who’d climbed the rope ladders with him that afternoon – up to watch the sun set on top of the old Mayan ruins of Tikal “where Star Wars was filmed” – had already scrambled back down for camp by now, torches in hand.

Suddenly, it was just Sutton, alone in a dark tangle of jungle, with no clue how to get back. And no torch.

Of course, this was long-haired med student Sutton – 21, travelling the world solo and prone to losing track of time stargazing – not the calm, silver-haired chief health officer who Victorians came to know so well during the pandemic.

Brett Sutton in Zanzibar in 1991.

Somehow, Sutton made it down that swaying ladder alive. “But I had to stomp my feet just to feel the stones of the trail,” he recalls. “I was holding my hands out in front of me, wandering in circles, and shouting out to people in Spanish for help.”

At last, lights and voices welcomed him back. And they said: “You know there were tarantulas everywhere, right?”

Sutton, now 54, grins in the telling. “Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t have my torch.”

This, it turns out, is a very Sutton story: an exotic locale, a sudden turn of fate, and a kind of accidental fearlessness he sometimes calls stupidity.

”But I never forgot that night,” he says. “What was I doing?“

We’re sitting in Sutton’s favourite local haunt, Kallista Deli Cafe, surrounded by another forest in the Dandenong ranges but a world away from pyramids and spider monkeys and tarantulas.

“I was caught up in the hamster wheel of response,” says Brett Sutton of those early months of the pandemic when he neglected his own health.Credit: Simon Schluter

Still, as metaphors go, stumbling home through a dark jungle probably isn’t the worst way of describing the mammoth task that faced Sutton as chief health officer when a new virus jumped into humans and shut down life as we knew it in 2020. The science was still crystallising and the right direction unclear.

Sutton was at times a dissenting voice among the state’s health officers, calling early for fast action to stop the spread before vaccines could be rolled out, frustrated by the World Health Organisation’s delay in recognising the virus was airborne, and known to be calm – but blunt – in his advice to government.

This cafe is where he came every Thursday (COVID restrictions permitting) when, after six months helming Victoria’s pandemic response, he decided to start taking a single day off each week. “It’d been a non-stop sprint of 16-hour days until then.”

Victoria’s former chief health officer Brett Sutton briefs the media in 2020.Credit: Eddie Jim

Sutton may have resigned as chief health officer in June to take up a national post at the CSIRO as head of health and biosecurity, but he’s no keener to dish on his relationship with the man he weathered the pandemic beside, Daniel Andrews. While the then-premier followed Sutton’s advice, he also fuelled pages of speculation for apparently freezing him out at times.

Inside their pandemic war room, caught up on the frenzied “hamster wheel of response”, you felt the weight of each decision, Sutton says. Not every call turned out to be the right one.

But did he relax on Thursdays? “No,” he sighs. “But I’d have a coffee. And talk to the [cafe] staff.”

That includes owner Richard Harrop, who pops his head up to tell Sutton a table of 10 women will be sitting behind us soon.

Sutton laughs. He’s already been recognised on his way through the door to our table. At the height of the pandemic, when he was appearing daily at press conferences with Andrews, his face was emblazoned on mugs and doona covers. Fan groups of “Suttonettes” formed.

“I still get asked for selfies,” Sutton says. “It’s still bizarre.”

Our photographer Simon, busy scoping out the best lighting, adds helpfully: “This picture will be downloaded thousands of times by the women of Melbourne, Brett. I’ve got to get it right.”

But our waitress isn’t sure why Sutton looks so familiar. Did you use to work at the Northern Hospital?

“Yes,” he says, amused. And, it seems, a little relieved.

Brett Sutton with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Herat province, Afghanistan, in 2003. Credit: Courtesy of Brett Sutton

Being the calm, recognisable centre of Victoria’s COVID storm has attracted plenty of vitriol too, from death threats to conspiracy theories. (“No, my brother is not named Trevor or married to a woman working for WHO and [Bill Gates].” )

But then being a doctor for Sutton, who has worked in emergency medicine at refugee camps and conflict zones across the Middle East and Africa, has often brought dangerous attention.

He recalls “negotiating [his] way through the Taliban’s frontline” in 1997 during war in Afghanistan, to staff a hospital in the middle of the fighting. Then rushing back to help contain a cholera outbreak in Kabul in 2003. And a strange encounter with an armed man he now suspects was looking for Americans to kill who asked him point-blank, against local custom: “Where are you from?”

At one Taliban checkpoint, men with Kalashnikovs pulled over Sutton’s car and suddenly dragged his Afghani translator out of the car. They’d encountered the Taliban’s feared Ministry for Virtue. “We hadn’t done anything wrong, but they whipped him in front of us,” says Sutton. “Then they took him and the female translator away. We didn’t know if they’d shoot them. Or us.”

Brett Sutton at the Great Wall of China in 1990.Credit: Courtesy of Brett Sutton

Sutton made it through and his colleagues were returned home alive. But the Taliban had rules on who he could treat, too. “We couldn’t get to the Hazara people [a persecuted ethnic minority],” he says, his eyes suddenly dark.

Seeing suffering eats at Sutton; it’s why he became an emergency doctor, why he stayed in Afghanistan so long, and why he has been a “bad student of Buddhism” much of his life.

He knew it early as a boy of nine, when his funny “larrikin” father died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage, leaving his mum to support two boys.

And at 18, when he and fellow med students, including Damien Holdaway, travelled through India, Nepal and Thailand, “off the usual tourist trails”, into places like Kashmir before the civil war, where children with broken bones begged on the streets.

People who know Sutton well often speak of his integrity and his seriousness. (“Mum says I was a very shy kid.“)

Brett “was born old,” Holdaway has said. But Sutton shrugs: “You can’t see poverty like that and not think about the big philosophical things. And it’s not just about access to hospitals, it’s fundamentals like housing and water.

“We couldn’t just get drunk and smoke ganja.”

As the food arrives – the vegan burrito for Sutton and some scrumptious lemon passionfruit pancakes for me – he concedes he grew up decidedly better behaved than his father. “He’d tell us a different story every night about what he got up to,” Sutton grins. “Eating the Christmas cake the night before, throwing acorns at people from a tree in the park.

Brett Sutton at the Mekong River in Laos in 1996.Credit: Courtesy of Brett Sutton

“I didn’t drink. I looked wilder than I was. I think that [the hair] was about not wanting to be pigeonholed as the med student.”

He knew he hadn’t taken the usual private school route there that his friends had. “I was raised out in Croydon by a widow whose dad was a farmer.

“As a kid, I was away with the fairies. Watching ants crawling, reading, just totally absorbed by things.”

Sutton’s mum even took him for hearing tests only to be told: “Oh his hearing is fine, he’s just ignoring you.”

But he loved maths and he loved animals, and eventually decided to become a vet, imagining exotic work at zoos.

That dream died during year 10 work experience at a local vet, which Sutton realised was largely trundling through animals for euthanasia. “It’d be: ‘Another one for the green bin, Sutton’.”

Brett Sutton with his father, Terry Sutton, pictured in 1970.

Medicine was high stakes. “But I loved it,” he says. “I love stitching, putting arms straight. And the Sherlock Holmes nature of diagnosing.”

He recalls the case of a little girl with persistently bad breath. “Her mother would brush and brush her teeth, and it didn’t improve.” Until Sutton found a weeks-old pea stuck up her nose.

His time in emergency departments even led to him becoming a regular on a Channel Seven reality show Medical Emergency, in his 30s with one large earring, while his disaster relief work took him to places such as Fiji after Cyclone Winston, when Nick Coatsworth was running the response.

“You’re still my favourite chief health officer,” I assure him.

“Did you get that?” He says into the recorder.

Brett Sutton featured on Channel 7’s reality series Medical Emergency, as an emergency doctor in Melbourne in the 2000s.Credit: Channel Seven

Now at the CSIRO, Sutton oversees everything from the Get Smart-style bunker of the dangerous pathogens lab to the mosquito traps watching for the next wave of tropical diseases.

So, as Melbourne weathers a new uptick in COVID cases, have we learnt the lessons of the pandemic? Sutton isn’t sure yet, though he’s pleased by the creation of a US-style Centre for Disease Control in Australia at last, where states can share data.

“We always underestimate the threats,” says Sutton, “whether it’s the next pandemic, or another animal disease in [livestock]. These are all multibillion-dollar problems and climate change is making it worse. ”

The lemon and passionfruit pancake at Kallista Deli & Cafe.Credit: Simon Schluter

Plenty to keep him busy then. Still, if he ever wants a career change, Sutton could easily write a travel book. He’s visited about 90 countries and nearly died on the sides of two different mountains.

He’s a great storyteller too, describing nights hitchhiking in trucks to Mexico, escaping a charging rhino, and the year he let his hair grow long travelling overland from Hong Kong to the Netherlands, through Moscow as the Soviet Union broke apart, then onto Berlin just as the wall had come down. (“There was this buzz of barriers breaking open.” )

And there’s the time he shared a bus seat with a goat for one harrowing 26-hour journey “winding through death-drop cliffs” to see the Dalai Lama at a monastery on the Tibetan border. (“Harrison Ford was choppered in. I got conjunctivitis.” )

Brett Sutton at lunch with The Age.Credit: Simon Schluter

But it was his first big trip – and the sight of Buddhist monks walking calmly through India and Nepal, even in the face of clear suffering – that left a particular impression on Sutton.

“They were still deeply engaged in the world, they weren’t turning away.”

Sutton was drawn to that philosophy – and meditation – rather than the rituals of Buddhism, though he recalls a 10-day silent retreat as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life”.

These days, “beaten but not broken” by 2020, he’s enjoying the shorter hours. Taking his kids on holiday to see his father’s family in the UK. Tending to a garden guarded by “territorial kookaburras” and the odd echidna. And “nerding out” with the clever scientists at the CSIRO.

He owes a lot to his mum, he says, as the plates are cleared away. “Dad was too restless to stay in work all the time. She’s 82 and only just stopped teaching yoga classes. She’s unstoppable.”

The vegan Buffalo burrito (with halloumi) at Kallista Deli & Cafe.Credit: Simon Schluter

Most of what he remembers of his father are in those stories he told at bedtime. Like the scar on his forehead – from crash-landing a plane during World War II, his dad would say. “It took me a while to realise he was only a teenager in World War II. He was cheeky like that.

“I always wanted to outlive Dad. For my kids.

“Now, I have I think … if I died tomorrow what if all they’re left with are just those same vague memories?”

But Sutton’s kids already have plenty of stories of their father, too. Whether of the young wanderer hiking mountains and climbing up pyramids to stargaze. Or the doctor showing up every day to guide a terrified city through a global catastrophe.

“At least [they’ll] have 200 hours of press conference footage,” Sutton quips.

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