Russel Pardoe

John Gillies has advised me that Russel Pardoe died in February 2011. Russel was the Mawson 1961 doctor and is legendary for drilling burr holes on mechanic Allan Newman who had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage.

A tribute in the Sydney Morning Herald can be accessed here and reads in part…

“Pardoe contacted a surgeon in Melbourne and, communicating by Morse code, got advice on what to do. He was required to fashion medical equipment out of dental tools and testing his techniques first on a seal, he set about his surgery using a cook and two geophysicists to assist.

Pardoe drilled through the skull twice to relieve the critical pressure, then kept the dangerously ill man alive for two months before enlisting the aid of Russian, US and commercial aircraft to take his patient the 9600 kilometres to Sydney. The trip was in stages in forbidding weather and Pardoe stayed with his patient throughout. Newman, who was carried off the aircraft on a stretcher at Sydney Airport in January, 1962, made a full recovery”. 

The Age newspaper also posted an obituary.