Biopsies : Stories of Struggle and Hope in South Auckland

In a diverse community in South Auckland, a Serbian refugee struggles with post-natal depression, a Vietnamese boy with a deformed hand is asked to interpret for his grandmother and becomes burdened with a tragic secret, and a doctor becomes reluctantly entangled with a menacing but injured gang leader. Tension within families hovers over many of these gritty stories, but power often proves to be in the hands of those who at first appear weak.

Caring for this community, an idealistic young doctor, her increasingly jaded boss and their astute nurse are compassionate but flawed.

The medical centre provides a hub to these loosely inter-connected fictional stories, the scope of which pans across a slew of people living and dying with disability, social isolation, humour, conflict, hope and uncertainty.

Greg Judkins has worked as a general practitioner in multi-cultural South Auckland for over thirty years.

His life-long love of poetry and fiction led him to start creating short stories, inspired by glimpses of the extraordinary lives of the people he encounters in his medical work. All the characters appearing in these stories are fictional composites, however, and do not represent actual patients, past or present.

Makalofi was published in the University of Auckland's magazine, Ingenio, in 2014. The Canary was published in 2018 in The Australasian Journal on Ageing. Twelve of these stories have also been published separately over recent years in the New Zealand Medical Journal Digest.