Two journeys. One destination.

Dr Tim Keenan (St Louis, Class 1959) grew up on a farm in York and boarded at the Jesuit school in Claremont. ‘It was a hard life for boarders, a very strict environment,’ he says. ‘But our year got on well. We still meet every year – about fifteen of us catch up regularly. The teaching was very good. Our mathematics course in Year 12 – we went through the whole course twice! By the time the exams came up, they were easy.’

After St Louis, he studied medicine at the University of Western Australia, completed internships at Royal Perth and Princess Margaret Hospitals, and set off for England before spending five years training in general surgery and orthopaedics in Boston, USA.

Back in Perth, Tim built a practice centred on sports injuries and hand surgery, looking after the West Coast Eagles for about 13 years. He valued the breadth of his university education – Wednesday afternoons spent playing sport alongside law and engineering students, mornings hearing talks from people outside medicine.

‘Doctors have to communicate and relate to different patients, real people,’ he says. ‘You have to know how to make people comfortable, how to read people.’

The humanitarian chapter opened through family connections. Tim’s mother had married an Afghan general, and visits to their home in Pakistan led Tim across the border into Jalalabad, where he first encountered the Red Cross.

‘A lot of these opportunities open up once you are over there,’ he says. ‘You meet people and they ask you to work with them.’ In the early 2000s, he closed his Perth practice to devote himself fully to overseas surgical work – from Palestine and Afghanistan to East Timor, Bali, Indonesia and Cambodia.

Kass took a different route to a similar destination.

Leaving John XXIII College, she was uncertain about her direction. ‘I knew having Dad as a doctor, I didn’t want to be a doctor,’ she says. ‘But I wanted a job where I worked with people, helped people, and a job where I could travel around the world.’

A combined science and nursing degree opened her eyes to the diversity of the profession, and she specialised in perioperative nursing – the highly technical work of the operating theatre. After living in Ireland, she returned to Perth and began joining her father on humanitarian missions.

The arrangement made practical sense. In between operations, Tim taught surgeons the arthroscopic techniques they had limited opportunity to learn, and Kass trained theatre nurses in the specialised equipment those operations require.

‘Going back to the same place was rewarding…seeing the progress’ she says. ‘The last time I went, I got to stand back quite a bit and watch the staff run the show. Which is exactly what you want. It’s their hospital, their program to run.’

Together they have navigated roadblocks, permit delays and the uncertainty of operating in conflict zones. Tim describes the conditions with characteristic understatement.

‘Even though it was a war injuries hospital, people would turn up with all sorts of medical issues and we couldn’t turn them away,’ he says of his time in Afghanistan.

Kass offers a daughter’s perspective on that composure.

‘He’s always very calm. I’ve never ever seen him get angry or panic. Ever,’ she says. ‘He never judges anyone and he makes friends with everybody – from colleagues and patients to soldiers at checkpoints.’

She recalls a hospital in Jenin where staff crawled along corridors to avoid gunfire through the windows. Her father was characteristically unfazed – in part, she admits, because his hearing meant he had not noticed the gunshots at all.

That time in Jenin also planted a quieter seed. Tim befriended a young man who used to visit the hospital to escape the surrounding violence. Years later, the man had children of his own, and Tim approached a local Perth school about educating one of the man’s sons.

‘The support for this young boy has been fantastic,’ Kass says. ‘He is staying with Mum and Dad while his English improves with language tuition, and the Palestinian community in Perth have been really involved as well.’

It is one of many commitments Tim does not mention himself. Kass notes he has quietly sponsored medical, nursing and physiotherapy students through their studies in developing countries over the years.

Cambodia has drawn the family’s sustained commitment, too. Tim and his wife Jenny Keenan (Loreto Class 1955) – a teacher of English as a second language, who created costumes for our College’s musical productions for years – first went there more than two decades ago. Jenny began teaching staff English at HOPE Hospital in Phnom Penh and proved so effective the couple stayed for two years.

Tim remembers a city of dirt roads and no streetlights – and doctors forced to treat patients lying on mats on the floor with antiquated equipment. That frustration led to a conversation over coffee with Pip Asphar, a fellow St Louis classmate from the Class of 1959 and a Rotarian. The gap between what Cambodian hospitals lacked and what Australian hospitals were discarding struck both as a problem worth solving. Through Rotary networks, Pip connected with hospitals across Perth, who donated surplus equipment. The project was funded by the Rotary Club of Osborne Park and several Western Australian hospitals.

In recognition of their service, His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia awarded Pip, Tim, Peter Lugg and Kareen Dunlop the Monisaraphon Medal, Grand Cross – Cambodia’s highest civilian honour.

Tim and his brother Christopher Keenan (St Louis, Class 1957) oversaw the final stages of renovating and extending the hospital to include new operating theatres, consulting rooms and an intensive care unit, all of which are now in use.

Kass has since forged her own record, undertaking independent missions with the Red Cross to South Sudan and Pakistan. She now works part-time at Royal Melbourne Hospital, specialising in liver and pancreatic surgery, while raising two young children.

Looking back on her years at John XXIII College, she remembers the friendship groups most fondly. ‘We had such a good year group,’ she says. ‘I’ve carried those friendships through my whole life.’

Asked for their advice to share with younger members of our College community, father and daughter speak with a shared instinct. Tim’s counsel is grounded in six decades of practice:

‘Do something basic first, such as being an orderly, to see firsthand what it is like on the ground. Go overseas – to experience medicine at a different level and in a global context.’

Kass’s advice is simpler and no less direct:

Tim reflects on the values behind it all. ‘I think seeking justice is important,’ he says. ‘These days I do think the meaning of justice has gone out the window for many people.’

For a father and daughter whose combined service spans decades and continents, that conviction has never been abstract.