Learning to ride horses led Dr Ivan Wilden-Constantin into breeding quarter horses and entering them in competitions. Photo: Wilden-Constantin collection.
In the early 1990s, a young doctor slumped in his smashed Nissan Patrol on the treacherous unsealed road near Tuena, struggling to stay conscious.
He had been on his way to play tennis in the Bathurst Open when a wallaby bounded out in front of him coming down a steep and winding road, near the gold-mining village 100 kilometres north of Goulburn.
Swerving sharply to avoid a collision, the vehicle almost plunged down a ravine.
“I started to brake and the car started to tail and lose grip,” Dr Ivan Wilden-Constantin recalled.
“If I applied the brakes I might have been in a worse situation. I had missed the ravine by about that much,” the Goulburn GP said, indicating a narrow gap with his hands.
His automatic Nissan continued accelerating. “I thought, I’m going to die here, and I crashed into the side of a hill. My car was a write-off.
“I lost consciousness for a short while,” he said. “I had a lot of patients’ records in my bag, because after tennis I would sit down and do my paperwork. I had my tennis gear and clothes in the car as well.”
A woman found him still strapped into the car and got help.
Off work for about four or five weeks, his short-term memory was gone. He had lost some of his coordination, a perilous position for someone trying to establish a medical practice and pay off his home. Then an idea struck him.
“I knew horse riding – riding for the disabled – was being used to rehabilitate people, so I thought I would take some riding lessons,” he said.
Learning to ride from Neville Cockburn, he was on a horse two mornings a week and recovered quickly. He fell in love with the quarter horse he was riding and bought it from Neville. Its name was Dokeita. “We called him Doc, so it was Doc riding Doc,” he said with a chuckle.
In his younger years, Dr Ivan was a keen tennis player in Goulburn and a regular on the country tennis circuit. He also coached soccer. Photo: Wilden-Constantin collection.
He began breeding quarter horses and showing them successfully, winning in the halter and western pleasure division in NSW, Victoria, the ACT and nationally. They were judged on movement, conformation, conditioning, and manners. In time he developed a good eye for a champion, and against advice from more experienced hands, entered a small filly he had bred, ‘Just a Glamour’ . The mare won in NSW and at the Great Western Spectacular in Victoria, including the coveted supreme champion, defeating a champion stallion in the process.
Before the accident he and his wife Judith had bought a 40-acre farm with scarce fencing, abundance of tussocks and one-snake-to-the-acre.
The views were magnificent and in time they enlarged the single-bedroom, one study home into a five-bedroom place with three bathrooms, enabling his parents-in-law to share the accommodation.
In the early stages of his medical career, he thought law may have offered a more promising future. Obtaining his law degree at the University of NSW with high distinctions and a masters specialising in professional liability and contract law, he then concluded medicine was more preferable after all.
Dr Ivan loved sport. He trained at the Australian Tennis Academy in Sydney, played on the country circuit and coached soccer for Goulburn schools and at a national premier league level, for Canberra FC.
In his early years in Goulburn in the 1990s working part-time at Kenmore Hospital and Taralga, he was on call two nights a week for Kenmore, two nights a week for Goulburn Base Hospital and one night for St John of God Hospital.
When asked if he could work on weekends at Kenmore he agreed in return for accommodation there. His cleaning and laundry was done and he had free breakfast. “I was as happy as Larry,” he said.
When gynaecological endocrinologist and author Professor Barry Wren founded the Australian Menopause Society in 1989 he included Dr Ivan as a foundation member in recognition of his foresight, vision and research into hormone replacement therapy.
Dr Ivan with his son Mark and one of his thoroughbreds, Laird Louis. He and his wife Judith have three sons, David and twins Andrew and Mark. Photo: Wilden-Constantin collection.
He was the first to graduate in women’s health from the Royal College of General Practitioners. In the 1990s he received a fellowship from the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine.
He has delivered many lectures and helped train doctors, earning an award from the Australian National University for excellence in teaching.
“I wanted to be master of my own destiny,” he said. “I wanted to practise a certain type of medicine.”
