We were the only Arabic speaking female doctors - we attracted people from all over Melbourne because we were bilingual - in Arabic, the way you describe some ailments, you can't translate them. It's not translatable...So it makes a big difference - people felt really understood, but also listened to. Because the most important skill in medicine is to know how to listen.Hadia Haikal-Mukhtar
Hosted by Yumi Stynes, SEEN is a podcast series about the trailblazers who persist and succeed without positive role models in mainstream culture. In this season you'll meet trailblazers like pro surfer Pauline Menczer, renowned artist Lindy Lee, community chef Duang Tengritrat, Tiwi Island Sistagirl Crystal Love Johnson, and more. Hear how these women defy convention as they grow older.
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LISTEN TO
Hadia Haikal-Mukhtar: From Lebanese migrant kid to respected doctor
SBS Audio
26:24
Credits
Host: Yumi Stynes
Producers: Laura Brierley Newton, Olivia O'Flynn
Sound Design and Mix: Ravi Gupta
Executive Producer: Kate Montague and Lorna Clarkson
Theme Music: Yeo
Art: Evi O Studios
SBS Team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford and special thanks to Caroline Gates
Original concept by: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Transcript
HADIA HAIKAL-MUKHTAR: The best hormone replacement therapy was to do tango. You don't have to have sex. It's like you have the same exhilarating feeling in that very strong, passionate embrace with the most beautiful music.
STYNES: Oh wow.
MUKHTAR: Do you know what I mean? Like there are other ways of dealing with menopausal symptoms.
STYNES: I did not expect that answer!
MUKHTAR: When you're post menopausal, learn it from me. Take up tango.
(Theme music)
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): I'm Yumi Stynes and in this season of SEEN, I'm talking to trailblazing women who are in their third act. Women who have lived full lives, done amazing things, and found a fresh sense of purpose in their older years.
Aging is happening to me! And as I near my 50s I'm looking for guidance from these women.
What's the secret sauce to a fulfilling later age?
We start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we record... the Gamaragal [Cammeraygal] people and Gadigal people, and their elders past and present.
Getting older can feel scary. But it's coming for all of us. And I mean you!
(Music)
As I age, I don’t want to invisibilising older women. I want to shine a light on them! I want to know - what's the best attitude I can bring to my third act?
Today's guest has the kind of can-do attitude that can inspire us all, no matter what age we are.
Dr Hadia Haikal-Mukhtar has lived a full and exciting life. In her 70 years she's kept a calm curious attitude, and never lost her interest in learning new things.
Hadia grew up in Lebanon until her family moved when she was 18 years old
MUKHTAR: When we left Lebanon in 1969, Lebanon was at its peak.It used to be called Beirut, Paris of the Middle East.
You know, it was at its peak in terms of culture, music, social, language, culture, trade, you name it.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Hadia's father heard whisperings that a crisis was coming to their part of the Middle East. He was so concerned that he decided to move the family to Australia while he still could.
Those rumours turned out to be true. A few years later the Lebanese Civil War broke out.
The move was a huge upheaval for Hadia and her family.
MUKHTAR: my father had to sell our land in the village to pay for our fares because we came on a ship. It was my mother, five children and my grandmother.
My father had come a year before, and we followed a year later.
(Music)
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): For Hadia and her siblings, the idea of sunny Australia captured their imagination.
MUKHTAR: We had dreams. You know, we're coming to this free country with these sun-beaten boys surfing on the beach and these amazing birds, you know, flying around. So we were very excited because we had grown up in a protected type of schooling. You know, it was a Jesuit school, it was Catholic and it was very conservative nuns. And we girls, we weren't allowed even to look through the windows in case boys would see us.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): So Hadia and her family set off on their adventure to the unknown. This journey took six weeks.
(Sound of a ship horn and rough ocean)
MUKHTAR: And part of the very difficult experience was the seas were so rough that we'll be sitting on the deck and your chair will go from one side of the deck to the other. And my lovely grandma ended up fracturing her leg on the ship. It was shocking, shocking.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): But it wasn’t all bad for Hadia onboard the ship.
MUKHTAR: I had another very interesting experience on the ship because it was my first encounter with boys, because we didn't have boyfriends in Lebanon. And I didn't have one on the ship, but I had an admirer. And he was a Dutch young man who was an orientalist, you know, was studying Arabic and very interested. And he used to recite love poems to me in Arabic from the 7th century, where men, you know, part of their love letters to their women, would compare her eyes to the eyes of a black cow or a black deer.
So to me, I could not relate to that sort of courting, let alone, you know, having a you know, someone, a male interested in me. So that was my first encounter with boyfriends. I mean, he wasn't really a boyfriend, but every day he'd wait for me to recite poetry for me in Arabic, which was lovely.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Hadia and her family landed in Port Melbourne Australia in September 1969. What followed required a huge adjustment.
MUKHTAR: We had a very strong identity, a very strong cultural identity. And we came from a position of superiority. You know that, you know, we had this amazing upbringing, you know, like we were musical, you know, I played piano. My sister danced ballet. We were well versed in different languages. We were brought up learning French literature, you know, as well as Arabic literature, French philosophy, Greek philosophy, as well as Arabic philosophy, like an amazingly, nurturing type of, mindful environment. And we felt we were the ambassadors of our country.
MUKHTAR: And then when we came, and you know, I realised the big gap between the society we were in and the society we arrived. And what struck me is the sad ignorance. And you know, it wasn't long ago in the early 70s, like I remember at school, people straight away would ask us, Oh, did you live in a tent in a desert? You know, in Lebanon, Lebanon, excuse me, it's Switzerland, you know, it has the highest mountains, it must be in half an hour, you'll go from the mountain to the sea, we were skiing in one day and swimming in the other. And people would say, Did you have toilets? Did you have a bath? Did you have television? Did you have a car? How did you manage in the tent? No, and I'm relaying to you exactly. But what was really sad is that people weren't interested to learn either. You know, where is, where is that curiosity of learning?
I mean, and the fact that when we first came at five o'clock, people went home and would only go to the pubs and there were no cafes and the language, monolingual, monocultural, you know what I mean? Mono cuisine, you know? Everything mono, mono, mono. So it's a little bit suffocating.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Even though Hadia and her sister had graduated school with their baccalaureate in Lebanon, they needed to repeat their final year of school in Australia.
It was hard for these sophisticated Arab girls to find their people.
MUKHTAR: So when we went to school, you know, we were very excited, you know, to meet new people, new audience and so on. Then when I would be sitting in recess with them and, you know, I wanted to talk philosophy, literature, politics, the politics of the Middle East, and, and then guess what they'd be talking about? Boyfriends, drinks.
STYNES: Oh dear.
MUKHTAR: And footy.
STYNES: Footy.
MUKHTAR: Right? So I didn't have a boyfriend. So they'd ask me about my boyfriend. And I say, yeah, I've got three. One in France. One in Belgium and one in the UK. I didn't have any, but I wanted to fit in. So I had to make it up. You know what I mean, I had to make things up to conform. You can see, I felt I had to change to become visible, to avoid being cast into the invisibility space.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Hadia was super bright. She enrolled in a science degree at university and kept trying to find ways to fit in socially.
MUKHTAR: In the early 70s it was still hippie time. And what was very popular at the time is to look like a hippie. So I had the Afro hair, like I really wanted to fit in.
So I had created this Afro hair. I’d wear Kaftans all the time. And then you had to go and try marijuana in a joint session.
Something that I didn't believe in, but I wanted to be part of it. So I remember once going, my initiation to this joint session where, you know, they were passing the joint among all the kids there. And when it came to me, I pretended I was smoking it, but didn't smoke it. But the others realised what I was doing and I was told off and I was chucked out from the session.
STYNES: Oh no!
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Trying, and failing to fit in with the boy-obsessed teens and then the pot-smoking hippies was a lesson for Hadia.
MUKHTAR: What I have learned very quickly later on that I didn't need to change. What would make our society and myself better is to change the change to an exchange where you contribute who you really are, not having to change. You contribute to the society and the society will contribute back by, it’s now becoming a learning and teaching exchange, which has been the best modus operandi and the most effective one.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): To translate: Faking it didn’t work.
It’s so interesting because the reason this podcast is called SEEN is because we understand the importance of BEING seen. In Hadia’s case, she didn’t really get that!
MUKHTAR: Visibility is also very much connected to what I call being witnessed. We all have this need to be visible so we are witnessed, and I feel sometimes a life that is not witnessed is a life that hasn't been lived. And then there is a curiosity, you know, about pigeonholing you. And once people realise, yes, oh, yes, you know, you are, let's say, a Lebanese young woman, then it doesn't really matter anymore because you're so different, that then you get cast in the invisible space. So, and I have had lots of experiences, you know, in that space, which really enhanced my anthropological understanding of the society.
STYNES: Wow. Because you were newly invisible, so you could observe.
MUKHTAR: Yeah. We could observe, you know, as an outsider, how this society functions.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): This double edged sword of being visible, only to be typecast by your identity, is a constant challenge for women like Hadia.
But I love how she braces herself with a genuine curiosity about how humans behave, as a way to move through a world that often struggles to place her.
MUKHTAR: Can I give you other examples?
STYNES: I love your examples, please do.
MUKHTAR: Just my own learned experiences. I was once representing an organisation and I was at a cocktail party. And basically most of the people there were older, gray haired, waspish men. I'm not saying that in a derogatory way. And I was the only woman who was a wog. So they were all dressed in black suits, and I thought I'd dress in a black suit, you know, to fit the occasion.
And there were young women who were waitressing, and they were also dressed in black suits. And then the gentleman who was standing next to me turned to me and told me I will have a glass of champagne, please. The assumption was that I was a waitress. But that didn't fuss me. That's part of my anthropological, you know, study.
STYNES: What I'm getting from you already, you can receive the affront and the insult and the misunderstandings with calm if you treat it like an anthropological lesson.
MUKHTAR: It's not just that, it's your attitude to adversity, isn't it? And I don’t know if you have read Viktor Frankl, who was a very famous physician who had survived the Holocaust, and he said ‘That's what helps people survive, is your attitude, how you can see hope, how you can turn things into something positive’. And you know, that's what I like to share, you know, with my family, with my students, how important your attitude is to life.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): With her ability to always see the positive, Hadia completed her science degree and then got into medicine.
Around this time, she’d also married and started a family.
MUKHTAR: When I got into medicine, I had my son and I was already pregnant with my daughter. But I didn't tell the registrar who interviewed me that at the time because at the time, you know, now we've got pregnant women in medicine all the time, but at the time it was very unusual. Because I got a lecture straight away that, you know, as a woman, you know, being married, I'm not going to be able to basically contribute to medicine because I'll have time to take off to look after children and be pregnant. So I got this big lecture, but that didn't fuss me.
I said, that's part of my anthropological study.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): When they say “it takes a village” - the rest of the sentence is “it takes a village… to Raise A Child.”
Hadia’s village raised not just a child, they also raised… a doctor. Listen to this:
MUKHTAR: I had a meeting, my husband and I had a meeting with my mom, with my dad, with my auntie who had come recently from Lebanon, to see whether it was feasible for me to do medicine, because I needed the support. So can you imagine, it was a family reunion to, to decide whether Hadia can do medicine.
STYNES: Gosh.
MUKHTAR: You see, that's, that's how I could do it. Otherwise, I couldn't. And I give you an example. I would be in the lecture theater. You know, I had my daughter, like, a couple of days before my anatomy exams, right? And when I was at uni, I breastfed her for a couple of years. I'd be sitting in the lecture theater, and I would feel milk pouring out of, you know, my clothes. But my husband and my auntie will be waiting in the car outside the university and I will dash out during the break, feed my daughter and come back.
Without extended family, without a very understanding, supportive husband, you could never do it. And yet, another type of ignorant mindset is that people that I admired in medicine, men and women would assume that being Lebanese and Arab and married, my husband was from Iraq, was Armenian from Iraq, that I would be the subdued woman, that I would do exactly what my husband tells me.
Well, I have this amazingly supportive husband that - can you tell me what Aussie man will be bringing his daughter with my auntie to be fed during the break? You know, like, I mean, he was an amazing man. He was a man ahead of his times.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Hadia and her entire family were ahead of their time.
When Hadia graduated as a doctor, she and her sister - who had also studied medicine - set up a general practice in Northern Melbourne.
MUKHTAR: And that was a big plus, you know, to have your sister, my sister as partner. And we were on the same page, like we didn't want to make money. We just wanted to after our community. And, you know, in those times, about 40 years ago, we were the only Arabic speaking female doctors, basically, you know, we attracted people from all over Melbourne because, you know, we were bilingual. And we also had French speaking patients because we were bilingual. So we attracted a wonderful community to be looked after. And it was very satisfying. Really satisfying.
And we felt, you know, I tell you what, it was satisfying because we were looking after multiple generations, you know, like you would look after the babies and follow them up and then they get married. You follow them up and follow their children. And it was such a privilege. And to me it was an eye opener into different, religious backgrounds.
STYNES: It must have been amazing for your patients to, especially the first time they came to see you, to look at you and realize and believe that they could speak their own language.
MUKHTAR: Absolutely, I can't tell you what a huge difference it makes. Huge. Because also, in Arabic, the way you describe some ailments, you can't translate them. It's not translatable. Like I have sat on interpreters translating from Arabic, and sometimes I say, No, no, that's not the full history.
So it makes a big difference people felt really understood, but also listened to. Because the most important skill in medicine is to know how to listen. And that people feel they have been listening, listened to. And I think that's one of the pitfalls when things go wrong in medicine is that people haven't been listened to, or haven't felt they have been listened to.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Hadia's passion for learning, and advocating for the people in the communities she works with, inspired her to go back to university in her late 30s to study law.
She has brought these super powers - medicine and law - together in recent decades, sitting on medical council tribunals to help steer policies in the right direction.
When she moved to Sydney, to be closer to her children and grandchildren, she found a new job running a clinical school at Notre Dame University.
In that time she also became a fierce defender of human rights - most recently speaking out about the protection of health care workers in Gaza and other areas under attack.
I wanted to know how Hadia feels as a woman, in her 70s, stepping into her power in this way, and what it feels like to be so visible.
STYNES: Who is it important for you to be seen by?
MUKHTAR: I don't want anyone to see it's not within my radar whether I'm invisible or visible.
No, this sort of mindset, this sort of terminology is only in communities who are focused on the individual. So it doesn't matter if I'm visible or not.
What matters is what can be done to make things better. That's what matters. If I do it or Yumi does it or anyone else, it doesn't matter. That's how I see it.
Whether you are an old person, a young person, a teenager, a woman, a man, you are visible. You are in a society that is communal, that is connected and interconnected together. And it's not, never the kids by themselves, the old people by themselves. It's always multigenerational. Do you know what I mean? Where there is huge respect for the older people. For example, you know, in Lebanon, all the people are, they're, they're looked at as oracles, you know, as wise people, you know. The other thing, for example, when we were at uni and before we moved to college, my sister and I, and we were still living at home, you know our friends would look down at it, you know, like, what's wrong with you? You're living at home. You know, you're not independent. Excuse me. What's happening now?
Now we realise that young people, different stages of their lives, they need the support of not only their parents, the extended family. You know what I mean? So I suppose that's what inspired me. That's what drew my path, that I'm not Hadia just for me, I’m interconnected. You know, I’ve got strong ties.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Hadia brings these community values to her work with young doctors at the university where she teaches.
MUKHTAR: When I talk to my students at the beginning of each year, so they are our future doctors. So what I tell them, I tell them three things. I tell them first, it's very important that you give yourself the opportunity to reach your potential and express it. Two, that every day of your life you make a small contribution, doesn't matter how small, to someone else, to anyone in any way. For example, if you're in the hospital and you see the cleaner, go and introduce yourself, say hello to the cleaner and thank them. Because without a cleaner, we can't have a sterile operating theater. We're all interconnected. And the third thing, the importance of relationships, that we need each other, whether it's professional or personal.
Without this supportive relationship, we're not getting anywhere. So you see, it's all about this visibility, interconnectedness that I'm talking about.
(Music)
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): This podcast is really focusing on women in leadership positions who can show us what growing older successfully can look like - you know, doing it with power and purpose.
STYNES: So what can women do to ensure that as they sort of coast towards old age, they retain their health, their sense of purpose and their vigor?
MUKHTAR: I think the most important thing is to focus on who you are. Not to be defined by the phase of life. I don't want to be defined as a menopausal, premenopausal, post menopausal woman. I don't want to be defined as a 70 year old. You know what I mean? I am who I am, and I define who I am, not the phase of life I go through. And the purpose I have is my purpose, and I'm not going to lose it because of the phase of life I'm through.
STYNES: That's really interesting because, you know, I see new mums or young mums and that’s the phase. That's not who they are.
MUKHTAR: Yeah, exactly, that’s a phase. And you work with the phase. The phase has to fit with you, with what you want to do. And yes, you have to adjust, you have to do things, but, but don't lose your identity. You know what I mean? I see that all the time, you know, like if I'm premenstrual, I don't want to be defined by the fact that I'm premenstrual and I'm irritable. Excuse me?
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): I asked Hadia if she could, as both a wise older woman and a doctor, give us some advice on aging brilliantly.
MUKHTAR: We need to look after our health, you need, you need to eat properly. You need to, to have time to, to do your walks. You need to have time to spend with your friends. You need. To have time with your children, no matter how busy we are, we need to do that.
You know, like I later on in life, my husband and I took up Argentinian tango because I went to basically a show and I saw Argentinian tango and I said, Wow, I want to do that. You know what I mean?
And the music, I can't tell you, it's so passionate and so sensual. And you know, that suited me, you know, as you get older, let's say, talking about postmenopausal symptoms, you know, where basically, it's a new phase of life, it's a beginning aging, you can call it, where you might have a whole lot of symptoms, hot flushes, night sweats, mood swings, whatever. But also part of that is when you get vaginal dryness and itching and perhaps sexual dysfunction if you don't get and your sexual libido, your libido may not be the same. So the best hormone replacement therapy was to do tango. You don't have to have sex. It's like you have the same exhilarating feeling in that very strong, passionate embrace with the most beautiful music.
STYNES: Oh wow.
MUKHTAR: Do you know what I mean? Like the other ways of dealing with menopausal symptoms.
STYNES: I did not expect that answer!
MUKHTAR: When you're post menopausal, learn it from me - take up tango.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): I love this so much. We are not defined by our age, rather we bring our true selves to a new phase of life and we can choose however we want to show up for that phase. And I want to dance like Hadia.
MUKHTAR: I think aging well is feeling empowered and believing that we can continue doing what you want to. That's aging well.
And that's what has helped me along. It's our attitude.
(Theme music)
This has been SEEN, hosted by me, Yumi Stynes, and produced by Audiocraft in collaboration with SBS.
From Audiocraft, Season 3 of SEEN was produced by Laura Brierley Newton and Olivia O'Flynn.
Sound design and mix is done by Ravi Gupta and Executive Producer is Lorna Clarkson and Kate Montague.
The SBS team are Joel Supple and Max Gosford with special thanks to Caroline Gates.
Our podcast artwork is created by Evi-O Studios.
And music is by Yeo.
SEEN’s original concept was by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn.
