While visiting home in Lismore, I have had the opportunity to record a series of insightful interviews with local amputees and the people who support them. For this conversation, my niece and I travelled to nearby Kyogle to sit down and have a beer at the local bowling club with Geoff Fowler, whose journey spans decades of resilience, competitive swimming, and community spirit.
On a hot day in the early 1970s in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, Geoff Fowler set out on an eighteen-kilometre walkathon organized by the local scouts. He was moving at a strong pace, leaving his housemate far behind, before deciding to backtrack along the course:
“For some reason I went back along where the checkpoints were… to try and find him… And that’s when I had the accident.”
The impact of the vehicle was catastrophic:
“Because the car has come in and hit me there, I tore all the lateral ligaments here. And that nerve that lifts your foot severed, that took twelve months for that to regrow… So I was on crutches… This leg in plaster. This leg was gone anyway.”
Geoff spent three months in Port Moresby Hospital, an un-airconditioned facility where he kept himself occupied by wheeling around taking lunch orders for other patients. His amputation was performed using an older surgical technique:
“I’ve still got my knee cap and they call that a Gritti-Stokes… in other words, there’s no joint, but the end of my stump is the kneecap, right? They don’t do it today… and this is no good when being on an aircraft. My leg sticks out terribly far.”
He was eventually sent to Lae to be fitted with his first prosthetic by a Perth maker named Ken Jones, who was an amputee himself:
“The first leg I think was made out of wood.”
That early prosthesis, locked rigid at the knee, presented unique physical challenges in the tropical heat:
“Right from day one, it was a locked knee and it was a cable release. And I used to wear singlets and a strap over here… strap that held your leg on. But oh, it hot weather, I used to perspire, you know.”
Geoff returned home to Australia, working for Australia Post (formerly the PMG) on the counter at the Lismore Post Office, a role that kept him on his feet all day.
In 1979, he joined the Diggers Swimming Club in Lismore. It was a turning point. At a carnival in Gosford, he met Peter Carroll, a fellow veteran and amputee, who encouraged him to enter the national games:
“That was the start for me… Back then I went in table tennis, I went in weightlifting, I brought home a heap of medals. But swimming was my main.”
Moving around the pool deck meant adapting to his new reality:
“In the early days, around the pool, I never had crutches. I’d go from one end of the pool hopping.”
In the water, he learned that propulsion came almost entirely from his upper body:
“In 1984, we went down to the Institute of Sport and… the training down there, they had me on a kick board. Nearly took me all day to get across the pool… using my feet was… They always said, ‘Oh, you got to kick?’ Yeah, not for me.”
His dedication in the pool paid off. During his lunch breaks from the post office, Geoff would squeeze in training sessions:
“I used to try and swim in training one metre per second… in other words, if you did four hundred metres you should be doing it in four hundred seconds… but you know, that was where I got a bit of fitness.”
In 1981, he won gold in both the 100m and 400m events at the national level, earning a spot on the Australian team for the 1982 FESPIC Games in Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong, Geoff won a gold medal as part of the 4x100m freestyle relay, along with two silvers and a bronze:
“The Japanese guy beat me in the one hundred and the four hundred by sort of that much because I never learnt to tumble turn.”
Two years later, he qualified for the 1984 International Games for the Disabled in New York.
Over the decades, Geoff continued swimming recreationally and competitively, including completing the open-water Byron Bay Ocean Swim in 2000 alongside a training partner who had cerebral palsy:
“Ocean swim. It’s totally different to being in, in the pool. And you look at things in the water and you look—shark, shark!… The tide goes against you and it makes that hard. That’s hard work when the tide’s not on your side.”
Now facing some the challenges of aging with limb loss, Geoff copes with changing balance on his property and plays lawn bowls. Reflecting on the path his life took after the accident in Papua New Guinea, his outlook remains pragmatic:
“You’ve got to try and… yeah, it’s not the end of the world. That’s that. And of course, one door closed and another one opened for me with going overseas and all that. It was great.”
