“I said: God, you didn’t bring me here just to die on this mountain, please help,’” Bob told FMT yesterday, “and surely, this young man came along, helped me up and called my wife and emergency services.”
Having trekked up the mountain to capture one last photograph for his debut solo exhibition, Bob was rendered temporarily paralysed by a suspected cow tick bite and fell unconscious.
“I suppose I must have fallen backwards, because I woke up at the base of the rocks and could barely move.”
Bob was flown to John Hunter Hospital where doctors found he had suffered a spinal cord injury that required surgery and needed 69 days of physical rehabilitation, with doctors fearing he may never walk again.
That was over a year ago in September 2019. Now, as part of the hospital’s ‘Arts for Health’ programme, he is proudly showing his latest collection, ‘Vale of Gloucester’, displaying photos he feared he’d never be able to take when he was recovering from his injuries, and in the same place where he had survived them.
“This area is so beautiful for photography,” he said, “from the moment I arrived in Gloucester, I knew I wanted to spend my time taking photos.”
Despite the severity of his injuries, Bob still managed to hold his first solo exhibition, ‘Glen Below the Wind’, on Australia Day this year, featuring unedited, black and white snapshots of the sleepy country town he’s made home.
Bob has always had an interest in photography, but having moved to Gloucester for missionary work in 2018 after spending three years in West Kalimantan, he began to take his passion more seriously.
Before stepping behind the lens, he was a journalist for decades with The Star and Sin Chew Daily, and was general-secretary of National Union of Journalists Malaysia for two years from 1984.
It was his years with the union, fighting the press censorship implemented by then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, that led him to religion and the missionary work that took him to Australia.
“The union was on top of the world until Operasi Lalang in 1987, when Mahathir threw a bunch of people in jail and stripped the papers of their licences. After that, everything in the papers became ‘sensitive.’ Race, religion, corruption, all ‘sensitive.’
“You could be some hotshot reporter or a union leader, but you were nothing in Mahathir’s eyes. That’s when I started thinking about God. ‘If this guy could be so powerful, then God must be even more powerful’.”
Embracing his spirituality towards the second half of his media career before finally becoming a missionary in the last decade, Bob looks forward to spending his time taking more photos and training younger missionaries who are more equipped to travel than he is.
With a daughter and three grandchildren in Sydney, Bob has no plans to return to Malaysia any time soon.
“Not at the present moment, not with all the nonsense going on,” the veteran newsman chuckles, recalling how even though time has passed, little has changed in Malaysian politics.
“I could do with less of that. I had years of it, give me a break,” he laughed.