While acknowledging that rural medicine wasn’t for everyone, Dr Shepherd said he considered himself “very lucky”.

“You make your own luck a bit – but I’ve still been very lucky,” he said.

Dr Shepherd arrived in Moruya in a Kombi van with his pregnant wife in 1983 – and they never looked back.

“I grew up in Melbourne, I was very much a city boy,” he said.

He attended Monash University to study medicine. After two years practicing in Melbourne, he and his wife decided to travel through Asia and on to England, where he worked in hospitals, including in obstetrics and anaesthetics.

They spent some time in America and Hawaii, before returning home in need of a job. A locum position was available in Moruya, and that was it.

“I’d been coming up the coast surfing since I was about 17,” he said.

“I met the guys at the surgery and they were all young and dynamic. They asked if I wanted to stay, and I did.

“We were loving it.”

He said one of the best parts of working in the region was “brilliant” colleagues and visiting specialists.

“It was a peak time for procedural GPs,” he said.

“Steve Murray and Chris Fenn were incredible mentors through my whole career – they’re the two people who had the most influence on me.

“When you’re a young doctor you’re frightened you’re going to do the wrong thing – that’s why I loved it here.

“If I ever didn’t know what I was doing, which is quite often when you start off, you could just ask the guys, and you’d learn quickly how to put things in perspective.”

He described working in obstetrics as “frightening, at times”.

“You needed someone who could do good anaesthetics and a good surgeon. One year I did almost 100 deliveries – with girls who are delivering their first babies you have a high chance of obstructions and needing ceasars,” he said.

“You need three or four doctors for a delivery.

“There’s a whole gamut of kids, who grew up with mine and are friends of theirs, that I delivered. 

“If I’m ever introduced to them, I say I remember their delivery – and I’m terribly sorry, but we dropped you on the ground.”

Dr Shepherd said volunteering in Samoa had also been a challenging, but rewarding, experience.

“I did some volunteer work in Samoa in 2000,” he said.

“At one stage I was the only doctor on the island for about 60,000 people.

“I was terrified. You have girls having these huge babies, you know they’re going to get obstructed. 

“You’re on this remote island, trying to call it early so they can get on a car, to a ferry, to the other island, to deliver their baby.

“I spoke to the Minister for Health when I was done and said they had to sort it out. 

“I was a country GP from Australia, I had nothing to win or lose. 

“And it’s a basic capability for a hospital, to be able to deliver babies so that mum doesn’t bleed to death and at the end you have a live baby.

“After I went back to Australia, I heard there were big changes, which was great. That was a real achievement. I’d like to go back and visit soon.”

He said a core part of general practice was advocacy.

“Being able to connect people to the right services is a big part of it,” he said.

“You spend a lot of your time being an advocate … I think our practice (Queen Street Medical Centre) has been instrumental in getting the X-ray up and running, and getting detailed CT scans and ultrasound, MRI, which was driven by people within this practice in cahoots with the radiology people. Hopefully it will be Medicare rebated soon. It doesn’t make any sense not to.”

These achievements were some of his proudest – but not all.

“I’ve seen two new surgeries built in my time,” he said.

“That’s probably what I’m most proud of.

“That, and that I still enjoy what I do. And I really enjoy it. I enjoy my patients, my colleagues.

“You don’t stay somewhere this long if you don’t enjoy it – and the lifestyle.”

Dr Shepherd said he was looking forward to an active retirement.

“I’m fortunate I’m fit and healthy – I may come back and do a bit of work but at the moment, travelling, surfing, kayaking, bush walking, I’ll keep doing that,” he said.

He nominated his four children, two grandchildren and gardening as the passions which round out his life.

He has also taken up foiling – and despite a helmet-cracking incident, has not yet killed himself in attempts to learn the sport.

Foiling is surfing with a hydrofoil attached to the board, lifting it out of the water.

“When I knew I was going to retire, I’ve always liked learning new stuff, and I didn’t want to pick something easy,” he said.

“Foiling is a steep learning curve. I copped it in the head once, and if I didn’t have  a helmet we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion.

“But I did have a helmet, and I’ve always been a lucky person, so I didn’t give it a second thought.”

He said another lucky break was a quick police response when a patient assaulted him.

“He was having some mental issues, and he came to my surgery – before I had a chance to say anything I was on the desk bleeding from the mouth,” he said.

“He got dragged out, police, ambulance, the whole bit.

“That was an interesting point in my career – but I just had a couple of stitches in my lip, went home, put on a clean shirt and went back to work.”

His biggest concern for the region’s future health was the effect of parochialism.

“There’s always been this divide (between Batemans Bay and Moruya),” he said. 

“Pollies are quite happy to say, if they’re fighting amongst themselves, we don’t need to throw any money down there

“I think that’s why it’s been slow to develop, medically. Hopefully that’s going to change.

“We need to entice specialists to come into an environment where they have the potential to make a good income, with good public and private facilities.”