BDS (Adel), MDS (Adel), FRACDS, MRACDS (Orth), Specialist Orthodontist
Dr Donald R Gilchrist is a male Specialist Orthodontist.
Don Gilchrist, orthodontist at Beaches Orthodontics in Smithfield, the Northern Beaches near Cairns, and Port Douglas is a registered specialist in orthodontics, a member of the Australian Society of Orthodontists and a member of the Australian Dental Association.
Don did his dental training in South Australia and served in the Army in Victoria during the Vietnam War. His initial specialisation was toward Oral Surgery but before completing it transferred to Orthodontics.
At the end of the 1980’s, Don Gilchrist and his wife Robyn Boase, also a dentist, walked away from their booming professional careers and dropped out on the 46 foot yacht, Stylopora.
For Don it was a case of necessity. After ten frantic years of specialist orthodontics he was burned out before his time. Robyn’s approach was more methodical. Born into a sailing family and with a love of the sea herself, she decided to take a few years early retirement a bit out of sequence and go along for the ride.
For ten years they went wherever whim took them with a few provisos: it had to be down-wind and as close to the equator as possible. Seven of those ten years were spent circumnavigating the world via the Suez and Panama canals. During this time Don spent a few months every year on family stuff and doing locums around Australia and at the time must have been the most registered specialist orthodontist in Australia.
Cruising made better people of both of them. Their politics and attitudes have shifted and these changes persist. Rejoining society, they can never again be the people they were before they left and now they don’t want to be. Don and Robyn have both fully re-engaged their careers and have never felt better about the professional and personal journey of their lives so far.
They went cruising in the middle life and for them that choice has been vindicated. Cruising needn’t come at the end of economically productive life; perhaps better that it does not because the insights revealed about humanity have enduring practical value.
At the end of it cruising attitudes and mainstream life are not mutually exclusive concepts. According to Don, cruising is like Hotel California: “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.”
