Fiona Wood: ‘When I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, I don’t give up’

The lauded burns pioneer and plastic surgeon on a ‘paradigm shifting’ project, coping with tragedy and the patients she will never forget

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When Fiona Wood moved to Perth from the UK in 1987, she was drawn to its wildlife. “Intrinsically, it’s the most beautiful place,” she says, as we wander along Matilda Bay beneath a canopy of foliage, the gnarled trunks of moreton bay figs and cape lilacs with their bursts of yellow berries. “When I first came here, I thought, ‘I can see myself sitting under these trees with my thinking cap on’.”

Almost 40 years later, she’s certainly done her share of thinking on these grounds. Just across the road from Matilda Bay is the University of Western Australia, where Wood has worked since in the early ‘90s, first as a senior lecturer, then a professor in the school of surgery and director of the Burn Injury Research Unit. “I’m part of the furniture there,” she tells me in her warm, lilting Yorkshire-cum-Australian accent.

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