Patients had a tumour, lump or growth and they waited – usually at the end of long queues – to see specialists, who would dance around the disease to avoid telling patients they had cancer.

At St George Hospital, where Clingan was a registrar, two young and dying leukaemia patients changed his life path.

‘‘Despite the fact they both died, I had a good rapport with them,’’ says Clingan. ‘‘I helped them through and I felt I’d made a difference. I didn’t think cancer patients were very well looked after at the time and it concerned me that sometimes, when people were diagnosed, they would be shoved to the back of casualty. Nobody wanted to see them, nobody wanted to talk about cancer. 

‘‘It was then I realised there was a huge need, and that being an oncologist would be a good calling.’’

Clingan took the challenge to not just change the attitude of his profession but also improve treatment options.

He accepted a two-year clinical fellowship at the Princess Margaret Hospital, one of the most respected cancer-research centres in the world.

His wife Margaret, whom he’d married in his fourth year at medical school, and his four girls all under the age of five, went with him. He was still on a student’s salary, so the transition was tough on the young family.

‘‘It was terrible – I remember when we arrived in Canada I thought I’d lost my marbles,’’ he says.

 ‘‘I nearly got back on the plane and came home. It was freezing cold. We had nowhere to go. I couldn’t find any accommodation. Then luckily I saw a guy nailing down a ‘to let’ sign and I asked him if I could rent his property. He said sure, but you have to pay a month in advance.

‘‘I gave him all my cash in one go and then the bank lost our money and I couldn’t access my savings for another three weeks. So there we were in a strange country, with no money at all, living off Vegemite sandwiches. It was a traumatic time for all of us.’’

The knowledge Clingan acquired in those two years were to shape his career.

On his return to Australia he took up a position with the then Illawarra Area Health Service, aiming to set up a world-class cancer care centre.

‘‘I came back from Toronto with modern ideas and plans to establish a cancer centre, and that meant having medical oncology and radiation services working together,’’ he says. 

‘‘A job became available in Wollongong and I told them at the interview that I didn’t want to work in a second-rate cancer facility, that I wanted to work in one of the best. There was no equipment here at all. So I started setting up the service and raising money through an ‘appealathon’ for a linear accelerator.’’

Dr Laurie Noonan, who was on the interview panel, says many people in Wollongong thought Clingan would fail.

‘‘Phil has a persistent desire to promote Wollongong against the odds,’’ he says. 

‘‘He has achieved things that others thought would never happen down here. It was a hard slog for him and he made many enemies along the way. 

‘‘It’s not that he’s openly aggressive, he doesn’t shout and carry on. But he holds his views, he’ll head off from those meetings with administrators and form his own strategy, he’ll come up with his own plan to get what he thinks Wollongong deserves.’’

Clingan, who received an OAM last year for his services to medicine, says that in 27 years as the Illawarra’s leading medical oncologist, he has established a cancer service he is now proud of.

He believes his centre does everything – except thoracic surgery – better than in Sydney.  ‘‘We have better records in clinical trials and we offer patients a more personalised service.’’

Professor Don Iverson, executive dean of the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Wollongong, says Clingan is determined that all Illawarra residents have access to quality cancer treatment.

‘‘He is driven by the data,’’ says Iverson.

‘‘When we looked at the numbers 10 years ago in terms of survival, the Illawarra had exactly the same survival rates as Sydney and that was with vastly fewer services. What motivates Phil is that he believes that everyone has the right to the best treatment possible. 

‘‘He’s not into the money – don’t get me wrong, I think he does very well – but it’s not what drives him. He’s in it to make a difference in the lives of his patients.’’

Clingan and his wife established the Southern Medical Day Care Centre 14 years ago. While it is owned and operated by Margaret, it was set up so Clingan could run clinical trials – something the public health system refused to fund. 

Though he remains the director of medical oncology at Wollongong Hospital, he runs between 12 to 14 clinical trials a year at the private clinic, with open access to both public and private patients.

Iverson says: ‘‘If I ever developed cancer I would have no qualms, not one at all, in having Phil treat me. It wouldn’t even enter my mind that I would need to go to Sydney – not when we have Phil here in Wollongong.

‘‘I’ve sent four of my friends to him. He really cares and is concerned about the welfare of his patients. I’ve seen him cry when patients die. His heart and soul is in it. Sometimes people think he’s a bit crusty because he speaks out. He upsets the administrators because he doesn’t always follow protocol, but in the end he’s made a better health service for the community.’’

Clingan says he is fed up with health bureaucrats in Sydney who impose their views and restrict health resources for the people of the Illawarra.

‘‘There have been times throughout my career when I’ve felt I’m constantly building things up in the hospital, but all I’ve ever got from them was criticism,’’ he says.

‘‘Life would have been easier for me if I’d moved somewhere else. But I’ve achieved what I set out to. When I die I hope to leave a service behind that doesn’t need me any more. I think that’s the sign of success. Whenever we’ve got the facilities we’ve needed, we’ve done a fantastic job.’’

Clingan grew up in Sans Souci. While his childhood was a happy one, he still remembers the almost daily canings from the Marist brothers at the local school.

‘‘They used to bash it into you in those days. We got caned every day – everyone did. My father was Protestant and my mother a Catholic, so each Friday I’d be caned because I didn’t go to church. I think in the end the Catholics gave me a bit of an inferiority complex because I never felt as good as the boys whose parents were both Catholics.’’

After high school Clingan won a Commonwealth scholarship to attend medical school at the NSW University.

‘‘I worked bloody hard at uni because I thought I was lucky to get in,’’ he says. 

‘‘I’d study till 3am because I thought I was going to fail. I never did, I got a credit average and in my first-year internship at St George Hospital I won the Keith Harrison Memorial Award for Proficiency in Medicine.’’

Clingan has been involved in more than 50 clinical trials and has published more than 100 articles. Some of the trials have been world-leading. A career highlight was when, as the chief investigator of a team from 120 centres worldwide, he was involved in a ground-breaking study in 2004 that changed the way bowel cancer was treated. 

He was also a key player in the fight against breast cancer – Illawarra patients were some of the first in the world to trial the drug Herceptin, which reduces the risk of the cancer returning by 50per cent more than chemotherapy alone does.

He is currently in the middle of about eight clinical trials, and is getting patents in Europe for his study, in conjunction with two UOW biochemists, on a new drug for treating colon and breast cancers.

‘‘I think clinical trials are really important to advancing the treatment of cancer,’’ says Clingan.

 ‘‘But my job is not to save everybody’s life but to make sure that if people are going to die they die with dignity and love and they don’t get inappropriate treatment. It’s hard because you get attached to people, but I remind myself that I didn’t give anybody cancer. 

‘‘One of the worst parts of my job is having to tell people bad news, and sometimes you just don’t want to do it. You’re hoping it doesn’t happen to them of course and sometimes they get lucky. I have patients who’ve survived who I thought would die.’’

The most common question patients ask, he says, is: ‘‘How long do I have to live?’’

‘‘I’ve thought really hard about this but do I really want to know when I’m going to die?’’ he says.

 ‘‘Because if you had to live your life with a stamp on it that you’re going to die on this particular day it would be terrible, its horrible. It’s better to live in uncertainty and hope – it’s horrible, but it’s better than certainty and fear. None of us has control. None of us can predict anybody’s future. I can give patients guidance as to what might happen, but what will happen is completely different. Life is unpredictable. My own personal philosophy is ‘it could be me, it could be any of us’. I don’t judge anybody.’’

He has seen more than 15,000 patients since coming to the Illawarra and his clinical load is twice the size of any Sydney oncologist’s.

‘‘We’ve seen the cure rates for cancer accelerate and Australia has one of the best survival rates in the world and that’s because our specialists are world trained. They’ve gone overseas, they’ve done research and they’ve applied that research when they’ve come back home. I feel like I was part of that.’’