An expatriate former Australian carpenter is on a quest to save women’s lives in Papua New Guinea, reports ABC foreign correspondent Liam Cochrane from Papua New Guinea’s s remote D’Entrecasteaux islands.

Our 15-metre blue island trader was dragging anchor in strong winds, pushing us towards a nearby reef. The captain tried to back it up but caught the anchor rope on the propeller shaft and the boat shuddered to a stop.

With barely a moment’s thought, 64-year-old carpenter Barry Kirby stripped down to his jocks, grabbed a diving mask and jumped overboard, untangling the rope in four dives.

This is the sort of thing that happens quite a bit when you are travelling with the man known as ‘Cyclone Barry’, delivering life-saving gifts, medicine and training to remote health posts in Papua New Guinea’s D’Entrecasteaux islands.

Dr Kirby first travelled to PNG in 1986 to take on a job building schools in remote Menyamya.

“I was given a stone club as a gift when I arrived with human teeth in the end of it and I thought, ‘hell, what have I walked into here!” he recalled.

It was in Menyamya where Dr Kirby saw people suffering for lack of basic health care. He began thinking about a career change.

“You’d think, ‘oh well it’d be great to be a medico, it’d be great to be a doctor or a nurse and to be in a place like this and have a little clinic’,” he said.

“And then I thought, ‘oh, that’s a stupid idea’, you know I was 40 years of age.”

But the idea lodged stubbornly in the back of his mind, until a shadow he spotted on the side of the road changed everything.

Dr Kirby slammed his car into reverse and discovered a young woman, desperately ill and abandoned by villagers, who suspected she was cursed.

“She sort of just looked at me and smiled. She had the most beautiful smile,” he remembered.

He took her to a nearby clinic but returned the next day to the smell of bleach and the news that she had died.

“That was the final straw,” he said.

He packed in his job and returned to Australia to study medicine, despite having barely scrapped through high school in New South Wales.

“When I graduated I had $50 in my pocket and I was going to earn the equivalent of $250 a week, but I was the happiest man on the planet,” he said.

Dr Kirby’s life is now dedicated to the women of PNG, an island-hopping quest driven by the memory of that abandoned woman on the roadside.

“There’s a cultural practice in Papua New Guinea of mothers delivering in villages – now that’s unfortunately where it all goes wrong,” he said.

Barry studied 31 maternal deaths in Milne Bay, off the eastern tip of PNG, and concluded it was isolation that was killing these women.

He developed a simple intervention in the form of a ‘baby bundle’ – a gift of nappies, clothes and soap in a plastic bath tub – to encourage pregnant women out of their village and into the clinic.

The results have been staggering. “We’ve gone from 18 deaths to four, if you want the real numbers,” he said.

“I don’t know anywhere in the world they’ve done that.”

Part of the success is due to Dr Kirby’s ease across cultural barriers, despite being a “dim dim”, the local term for Europeans.

“He’s able to sit down and listen to them, as if he’s from Papua New Guinea. He just earns that respect and I think it’s because people have seen what he’s doing and that’s touched their lives,” an emergency nurse who joined Barry on his most recent mission, Kila Koupere, said

The baby bundles are funded by Australian donors but all the other costs – the boats, fuel and wages – come from Dr Kirby’s locum work.

He may have devoted his life to helping women but Dr Kirby says there is no special woman to share his rugged life with at present.

“You know, it’s not a big priority. When I go out there I get hugs from]the women I helped in their most vulnerable time,” he said.

“I love what I do – that’s enough.”